By a riverside cafe in Luxor, Liyana and I watch the feluccas drift on the dark blue water. There are reddish-yellow sand and rock dunes on the West Bank of Luxor, verdant green palm trees and tiny dark figures of farmers and their donkeys working the land. I could never tire of this view. At sunset the colours stain away into pure gold and black silhouettes - all except the white winged feluccas, which gleam translucently silver, fluttering down the Nile.

In the evening we take a walk along the river promenade and find Gaddis & Co., a wonderful little shop near the Winter Palace Hotel. Shelves of books, parts of old cameras, prints and photographs form the nexus of the offerings here, but there is also the requisite stock of tourist items. The walls are painted teal green and a fan swings lazily overhead. The staff are friendly and do not hassle you at all. I bought an old black and white print of the pyramids taken by Gaddis, an Egyptian photographer who worked in the 19th century.

The facade of Gaddis and Co., Luxor (Photo credit: Liyana)

That night we go to Luxor Temple, splendidly lit up at night. Colossi of Ramses II sit at the first pylons, a single obelisk guards the way. It's twin sits at the Place du Concorde in Paris, brought over by a victorious, marauding Napolean. Inside, a 12th century mosque sits incongruously amongst the ancient ruins, and further still, Amenhotep III's magnificent Hypostyle Hall, rows of papyrus capitalled columns lit up by golden light. The inner sanctum boasts carvings of Hep, the one legged god of fertility, depicted with his phallus, rubbed shiny by women hoping to get pregnant - a myth that has stayed well into modern times.

 
The Hypostyle Hall, Luxor Temple

The main gate of Luxor Temple; minaret of a mosque and a full moon

We have a dastardly early wake up call the next morning, off for a hot air balloon ride over the Valley of the Queens and the Valley of the Nobles on the West Bank. It is a large, sturdy basket and there are no steps, so Yan and I are manhandled, literally, into it. As we ascend there is a silence across the landscape, a quiet punctuated only by the sporadic roar of the flames, the sudden heat and fire casting a reddish glow on everyone's faces.

Sunrise over Luxor

We rise with the sun over Luxor. Close to the horizon the river gleams like mercury, a glittering ribbon cuttingi across the landscape. A low, dreamlike mist hangs over Egypt in the early hours, dissipated only by the warmth of Ra's rays. Farmland, settlements and houses border the Nile, lush with vegetation and life. There is a sudden and firm demarcation where this meets the desolate desert, a cut off between greenery and dry, dusty earth. We see nothing but rock, sand and mountains, shimmering into the far distance. The stony, barren wastelands of the Theban Necropolis is stark, forbidding and desolate.

Hot air ballooning

The wind directs us. Far far below we see villagers going about their morning routines. Donkeys and cows and goats stand in courtyards, tethered to their food. Children wave at the brightly coloured balloons. We see the shadow of our balloon against the sand, thrown out of proportion, a tiny round imprint against a vast desert. From the air we see the dark entrances that lead to the tombs in the Valley of the Queens. Nefertari's tomb is down there somewhere, the most glorious of all of them. We float by Hatshepsut's mortuary temple, quiet and dignified, cast in sharp relief by the low sun.

A view of Hatshepsut's Temple from the air

Our landing is gentle and perfect and as we clamber out, a full score and more of men flatten our wayward, airy balloon into long lengths of canvas and rope. Dusty children ring us, asking for food, money, pens. The sun has just about fully risen as we drive towards the Valley of the Kings. There are donkeys tied to lamp posts, yellow stone and sand, a sky blue beyond belief.

The shadow of our balloon

There are over 60 tombs in the Valley of the Kings, some grander than others. Some are mere rooms rough hewn into rock, others vividly decorated in carvings, plaster and paint. Some contained treasures the like the world had never seen before, or will again - Tutankhamun's tomb was found here. There is nothing much to see from the outside - dry dusty earth and black entrances like the maw of the Underworld. Excavations are still going on and it is hot, blindingly hot as the day approaches noon. There is dust everywhere. No cameras are allowed.

We descend into three tombs - there are people a plenty in the Valley of the Kings. My favourite is Horemheb's, an unfinished tomb belonging to an Egyptian general who rose to become Pharaoh. His tomb utilises two shafts near the entrance to deter tomb raiders. The walls of these are covered in beautifully painted bas-reliefs, the colours as fresh and bright as if they were only applied yesterday, not 2,000 years ago. My favourite is Anubis, the jackal god, his visage in sharp relief, his mantle painstakingly made out in brilliant aquamarine and white stripes, the Pharaoh in a bright white, translucent robe, the bright red of the sun god's disc.  

It is here that Yan and I share a precious, silent, magical moment of contemplation alone, just the two of us, in the still air of a centuries-old tomb, breathing in the colours and shapes of artwork meant for a royal eternal afterlife. The silence hammered home the great age, beauty and mystery of the tomb - a missing ingredient at the far-grander but too overcrowded Abu Simbel.

Horemheb's tomb is unfinished and in the lower rooms the process of how the tombs were decorated are obvious. The plain rock is first covered in plaster. Hieroglyphs and drawings are then applied in black ink by apprentice artists. A Master Artist comes along and corrects this in red ink, tying in a line here, fixing a hieroglyph there, tidying up Anubis' ears there. Then, a carver painstakingly works away the plaster around the drawings, throwing them into relief. Lastly vivid, bright colours obtained from minerals like crushed lapiz lazuli (blue), malachite (green), ochre (red), chalk (white), charcoal (black), and orpiment (yellow) were applied.

The magnificently painted walls of Horemheb's tomb (Source: http://www.squidoo.com/horemheb)

After the Valley of the Kings we drive to Hatshepsut's Temple, Egypt's most famous female Pharaoh. The lines of columns and the three tiered construction look very modern, but are centuries old. Back in the day a garden stood in front of the first tier, a garden of fragrant myrrh trees that Hatshepsut brought back from present-day Somaliam a journey she undertook personally to create trade ties with that far flung region. There are carvings aplenty here, but most of her cartouches and representations have been erased by her successor, Tuthmosis III, convinced that his aunt had usurped the power that should have been his by right.

 
At Hatshepsut's Temple

Along the second tier of pillars, statues of Hatshepsut would have stood in front of each one, coloured red and dressed in white, resplendent in the double crown and scepter of both Upper and Lower Egypt, her arms crossed in the Osiris pose and depicted with the requisite beard that male Pharaohs sported - the better to convince her subjects that she was male enough for the task of leadership. In a grand PR coup, Hatshepsut convinced the populace that she was a direct descendent of the god Amun, and had the story of her divine conception plastered across the walls of her funerary temple. This little story was supported by the High Priest of Amun, believed to be Hatshepsut's lover, and led to her people accepting her rule.

Contemplating Karnak's Hypostyle Hall

Our next stop is Karnak Temple Complex and by this time my hamstrings are well sore. It is no easy business traipsing up and down hot air balloons, descending into pharaoh's tombs and climbing up temple stairs. The size of Karnak is inchoate, unbelievable, incomprehensible. It is from here that the god Amun sets sail on his river barge once a year, during the festival of Opet, down towards Luxor Temple to meet his consort Mut. After the golden effigies are given some time to themselves, during which the populace of Thebes caroused and debauched, Amun was then escorted back to Karnak along the processional way, a 3km long road lined with ram headed statues representing Khonsu, the son of Amun and Mut. These three divinities represent the Theban Triad.

A model replica of Karnak; the real thing

In Karnak's Hypostyle Hall, which is large enough to fit both St Paul's and St Peter's dome, Yan and I walk through alternating light and shadow, take pictures and pick out Ramses II's cartouche. Built by his father, Seti I, the Hypostyle Hall was appropriated by Ramses - he ordered his cartouche carved over his father's. High up on the lintels over the papyrus capitals, however, some of Seti's cartouches have survived, the paint as bright and brilliant as ever.

We head back to our hotel and sit by the Nile some more, drink more kakaday tea, soak in the pleasures of just being in Egypt. The sun sets in golds and reds - another perfect Egyptian sunset. Our overnight train back to Cairo will end our adventures amongst Egypt's temples and tombs - the next part of our travels will take us to the sun, surf and sea of the Gulf of Aqaba.

Felucca and sunset, Luxor; Chilling, just chillin'.

The Giza Pyramids

It is an early plane that takes me into Cairo, Egypt, Land of the Pharaohs. As we circle the landing strip, the view out my window is all dusty browns, as far as the eye can see. Cairo is a dirty, polluted city, and my sinuses seize up as soon as we get in. Known as Umm al-Dounia, or Mother of the World, there are 23 million Cairenes who live, work, play and dream in this tightly packed, traffic choked city of old crumbling Renaissance buildings, dirty dusty 1930s apartment blocks and elegant Moorish facades. Five times a day the call of the azan rings out from the many slender spires of mosques that dot Cairo's winding streets. The city is a chaotic contradiction of old and new, ancient and modern.

Cairo by night; The Great and Second Pyramids

 The first night we take a bus tour of Cairo and Ahmed, our tour guide, brings us to a local fateer place. Egypt in many ways remind me of an older Malaysia. The shop is dirty, lit by neon bulbs, the chairs cracking plastic, the tables a cheap linoleum. There is little sign of the artificial sanitation of the Western world. The fateer, an unleavened kind of bread filled with a choice of mushroom, cheese, meat or vegetables, is delicious.

Our first real day in Cairo is spent exploring the noisy halls of the Egyptian Museum. It is a marketplace, filled to bursting with tour groups and their shouting guides (walkie talkies should be mandatory!), Egyptology students sitting in corners sketching one or two of the many ancient Egyptian treasures. The artefacts are beautiful, rich, varied. The museum is a hum of humanity, a waterfall of noise, heat and humidity. No photos are allowed in the Museum, but suffice to say that Tut's treasures are really all that they are hyped up to be. Tutankahamun was a relatively unimportant pharaoh, a boy king who ruled for just nine years. What would the treasure trove of great pharaohs like Seti I and Ramses II have been like? The imagination staggers, fails, to envisage it.

Tut's death mask is undoubtedly the highlight of the entire collection, all 14 kilograms of it, resplendent in lapis lazuli and pure gold. There are also the four gold gilded wooden sarcophagi, nestled one in the other like giant babushka dolls. It was in the innermost sarcophagus that Tutankhamen's solid gold coffin was found, and inside, the boy king himself. there are other treasures in the Egyptian Museum - scarab beetles carved from all sorts of material, burial beds, canopic jars with the heads of the gods carved as stoppers. Awesome statuary line the lower halls of the Museum, Pharaohs in red granite, black granite and sphinxes in limestone, engraved with royal cartouches.

The Sphinx 

We head to the Giza Plateau for the Pyramids and the Sphinx. The Great Pyramid, owned by Cheops, is so big and breathtaking that up close, its sheer mass and height render it almost one-dimensional. Yan and I clamber up a few steps up on the great stones. Bereft of their limestone covering save the cap that survives on the Second Pyramid, the Giza Pyramids would been wondrous in their day, glittering a brilliant white in the desert heat. We clamber into the musty depths of the Second Pyramid, pay our respects to the Sphinx, carved out of one giant piece of limestone and depicting Khafren, owner of the Second Pyramid. Napolean knocked off his nose when he came a-conquering, to prove to the locals that the Sphinx was not, as believed, a god.

The Pyramids render me speechless. Their size confounds the imagination - to think that mere humanity erected such a monument to the gods and to their king, still standing after 5,000 years, is a humbling reminder of the greatness that belief and willpower can attain. Contrary to popular opinion, the pyramids were not erected by slaves; they were built by the fellaheen, the farmers of Ancient Egypt. During the Inundation, when the Nile flooded its banks, they flocked to the West Bank of the Nile and were paid by the pharaoh in food for their labour. Pharaohs started their pyramids early, as soon as they ascended the throne. More than just a tomb, their pyramids were to give them shelter for the rest of their eternal life, and it was imperative that they completed it before their death in this world.

Chilling in a cafe in Aswan; shops in the bazaar

Bound for Aswan that night, we cosy down in our 5 star, Egyptian style, sleeper train. We have: flat beds big enough (for us) to stretch out in, our own sink, lockable doors and access to (relatively) clean toilets. The train lurches, jerks and jolts through the night. I wake up early enough to see sunrise and watch as platforms whiz by. We pass fields of sugarcane, donkeys carrying produce and people, the slender spires of minarets,; we pass turbaned, wizened old men and running, laughing children. Aswan is the southernmost town of Egypt and extremely Nubian in character. The town is laidback, with a wide, modernised bazaar. The heat, in the afternoon, is unbearable and the dust chokes us. We seek refuge in a cafe and order Cokes for the sugar rush and to cool us both down.

 

View from a bus; Horus at the feet of Ramses II

Our next wake up call is at 2am for Abu Simbel the next morning. Travelling in military convoy, we watch a desert sunrise and the long, dark grey ribbon of tarmac unravel through an ochre desert. The two temples at Abu Simbel is a wonder of architecture, both ancient and modern. Carved out from a mountain side on the orders of Ramses II, this is a temple to the sun and on two days each year, the rising sun reaches far into the holy of holies to touch the gold gilt and painted statues of 3 out of 4 seated gods - Ra-Horakhty, Amun Ra, and Ramses himself. The fourth statue, Ptah, sits always in darkness as the god is associated with the underworld. The entire temple (as well as Nefertari's temple next door) was relocated upwards away from Lake Nasser when the High Dam was built, cost a cool USD$40m and relied on an international cast of thousands of engineers and archaeologists.

The Great Temple, Abu Simbel

IM Pei's pyramid & the Louvre

Over cupcakes at Hummingbird at Notting Hill, Debs and I hatched a dastardly plan. We would, we decided, skip over the Channel for a cheeky lunch in the City of Light. Perhaps go shopping. Perhaps eat pastries. Be back by dinner time, with no one the wiser. The world was ours, or Paris, at least, was.

With tickets bought we met at St Pancras at an unholy time in the morning and within hours were walking south from the Gare du Nord towards the Marais. Prior discussion had resulted in a plan of attack that included exploring the shops of this quarter, then having lunch at a local brasserie. The day was cloudy as we set off towards the Seine, but it cleared up soon after. Paris was just waking up as we threaded our way to our destination. Our journey was long and arduous - only because of the constant pit stops we were making to patisseries and boulangeries on the way for croissants, pain aux chocolats and pain aux raisins - it's a hard life breakfasting in Paris!

Cafe culture; autumn leaves & postcards; The Eiffel Tower; shops in the Marais

We made for the Place des Vosges first, an oasis of trees and empty space. Finally at the Marais, we stopped for some people watching and tourist guessing at a cafe on rue de Turenne (the street of the tureen, perhaps?). There were warm braziers at our backs and the theatre of a Parisien side street on display and we had first row seats. The Marais is the Jewish quarter of Paris and we saw a few very well dressed couples head off to the synagogue. It is a quaint, old area, filled with designer (and very expensive!) shops, traditional Jewish bakeries and here and there, bead shops, vintage clothing, bookshops and restaurants.

The facade of the Pompidou Centre

The prices and the decidedly lacklustre sterling at the moment were completely prohibitive, so aside from a few crumbs on our shirts neither Debs nor I had anything to show for our purchases in the Marais. We headed down towards the river, passing the Pompidou Centre on our way. I'd wanted to see this building on my first visit to Paris so it feels utterly divine and pre-ordained to literally stumble on it, all unawares, on this trip. As we head down we finally see the Ille St Louis and glimpse, in the far distance, the tiny silhouette of the Eiffel. Along the quai we walk past the petshops and flower shops, past the postcard sellers and the vendors with their mountains of kitsch Eiffel keychains.

At the Louvre; cafe au lait in Paris; the Seine and the Ille St Louis; Marais streets

At the Louvre we pause for breath and photographs. The sky is a rich, happy blue and we search for the orange awning of Le Fumoir, where artists, writers and the glitterati gather to partake in nourishment. Grey and earth tones dominant inside, casual and chic at the same time. In the far back is a dining room lined with books where happy diners sit and chat. We plump for a sun filled spot by the window, only to be told the table is reserved for others more important than us. Unwilling to cause a scene in a foreign language (less of an ability to argue well) we resit ourselves in the main area.

The insides of Le Fumoir; looking down the Champs towards the Arc du Triomphe

The prix fixe menu has salmon and salad and delicious sounding desserts. I order mushroom ravioli in beef consomme to start and the salmon as my main. The food is perfectly nuanced and after a hard day's tramp, much appreciated. Service is quick, quiet and calm and all around us are friends catching up, families lunching and business busily in the process of being conducted.

At Laduree and Fauchon

Feeling happy and expansive, Debs and I roll our way back down through the Louvre and scuff our shoes through the sunny Tuileries, then hang a right towards the Pantheon. At Laduree I point at the long, ridiculous line and ask "a emporter?" incredulously. The host says "yes, to take away" and Debs and I slink away to Fauchon instead where the line is shorter and the macarons just as good. It is difficult to say no to the beautiful concoctions of sugar and spice and all things nice and we end up with a few bags each of delicious nommable delights, then a quick hop back to the Seine and on the Metro to catch our train back to London. 

Au revoir, Paris, I'll see you at Christmas.