Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Salaams from Valley of the Kings, Egypt

Our tour likes to do things early. It's quite nice actually as we usually beat the rush of tourists at monuments and finish before the heat of the day kicks in. Today we visited the Valley of the Kings, famous for being the final resting place of the Pharoahs. The only way to get there is by donkey. Actually, that's a lie, lots of people just take a bus. But we choose to ride donkeys. This is why I'm hot.

I name my donkey Owen Nolan and call him Cap'n for short. An names hers Sweetie. Tim names his Donkey (from Shrek). My mom rides Shadowfax. Oanh's donkey is too far ahead so we never learn his name. A donkey riding tip: if you see the tail of a donkey ahead of you suddenly rise, get your feet out of the way because something bad is about to happen. Also, if you're wondering, yes those are hot air balloons off in the distance.


The valley of the Kings is basically a small valley of limestone that was easy to dig into. They stopped the whole pyramid thing because it was just begging graverobbers to ransack your final resting place. Tomb size is directly proportional to a king's reign. Basically, soon as you become King, workers start digging your tomb and don't stop until you die. Then they throw your mummy in there and seal it up but good and try to make it look like nothing was ever there. As a result, current kings had no idea where past kings were buried. They just dug, sometimes hitting each other's tombs. Here's a picture of what it looks like underground (reverse topo map).



We visited the Boy King's tomb, King Tut. Dude was famous only because his tomb wasn't plundered by pirates. They think it was because it was built directly underneath another tomb that was ransacked and so graverobbers didn't think another large cache of treasures was so near at hand. Inside his tomb they've left his mummy lying in state in a dehumidified, temperature controlled environment. He's got a little blankie and everything. Looks reeeal comfortable. He was a pretty short kid for 19. I'd say something like 4'10" or so. Apparently he died of gangrene after getting a gash to the leg. That sucks. Sorry no pictures - apparently taking pictures in these tombs will get your camera confiscated and your memory card wiped so we didn't even try.


I wish I could post a picture of the hieroglyphics inside the tombs though. Being sealed up all this time, the colors are still very vibrant despite thousands of years. As if they were painted yesterday says our guide. More tombs I think exist undiscovered in these rocks. Hopefully behind trapdoors and secret walls of existing tombs.

On our drive out, we stop by the Collosi of Memnon which is a very cool name. Apparently all that's left of an old temple, the statue on the left back in the day used to hum as the wind blew through its cracks. Later, the statue was restored and stopped doing that. Boooo restoration. Booooo.



6 comments:

ranyee said...

Hey, if people aren't allowed to take pictures of insides of the tombs, how are we supposed to know how cool it was and whether we want to go ourselves!

anhtuan said...

I guess by shoddy accounts from eye witnesses like myself. Oh and by buying the $5 color pictures from this guy out front. How convenient for that guy.

marvin said...

"reverse topo map" What the heck man?!?! You should know that a reverse topo map would look just like a topo but it would just have negative numbers for the iso lines. That looks more like a cutaway map to me.

anhtuan said...

I realized when I wrote reverse topo map that it didn't make sense since a topo map is a 2D representation of elevation whereas this model conveys the 3D information quite clearly. I guess I wanted to stress that you're looking underground at the underside of the valley. Reverse topo was the best I could come up with.

meish said...

When I think "Egypt," I do not think "hot air balloons." Can you travel by donkey IN hot air balloons? Although I guess I wouldn't want to be stuck when that something bad happens...

anhtuan said...

Maybe the hot air balloons were simply there to make the backgrounds of our shots more picturesque. To add some charm to our donkey ridin.