Safaga Port to Luxor
Destined
We are at Safaga Port, and we have no plans. After our experience at Port Said, we are more than a little concerned about our safety. But our cruise friends have booked a minivan for six, and two of their group have withdrawn. Could we go with them? Why not? And so, we do.
As soon as we disembark, the person in our group who arranged the private transport manages, with some difficulty, to contact our driver. We are soon guided into an air-conditioned vehicle, and our journey to Luxor begins—approximately three hours from Safaga.
In retrospect, how easy it would have been had we stayed on the ship, played it safe, only to miss what was to become one of the most memorable experiences of our trip. Taking a chance and more led to a rewarding experience.
We were destined to make this journey.
Upper is not north. It is south.
That small geographical conundrum tickles me as we begin our almost three-hour drive south through Egypt. We are travelling upstream, following the Nile toward its source, and into what is hence known as Upper Egypt. Somehow, the farther south we go, the more the ancient geography begins to make sense.
At first, there is little but desert—vast, barren, and almost unearthly. Then, almost imperceptibly, the landscape begins to shift. Patches of green appear. Fields stretch along the river. The desert gives way to swatches of cultivated land, and suddenly there is life everywhere.
We pass through small villages with mud-brick homes. Cows graze, chickens wander across the roadside, and people go about the ordinary business of daily life. After the immense silence of the desert, these simple scenes feel almost miraculous.
The contrast is astonishing: endless desert on the one hand, a remarkably fertile landscape on the other. It is easy to understand why this narrow valley has sustained communities for thousands of years. Looking out the window, I find myself marveling at how such a slender strip of green could give rise to one of the world’s great civilizations.
We are now in the ancient region of Thebes, the Greek name for the area around modern-day Luxor. The road continues south toward Aswan and the Aswan High Dam, but that is not our Itinerary today.
For now, the journey itself feels like part of the discovery. Desert, fields, villages and the Nile river unfold beside us in a landscape where the ancient and the everyday astonishingly exist side by side.
The reveal
As we near Luxor, modern buildings begin to appear alongside an excavation site, where a seemingly endless row of sphinxes stretches into the distance. This evocative first glimpse affirms our expectations: coexistence of the everyday and the ancient.
Once the capital of ancient Egypt, Luxor is today a lively market town serving the surrounding agricultural region. The farmland and villages we passed along the Nile had already suggested what lay ahead: a city at the heart of this fertile valley. Yet I am struck by how completely modern life has grown around the ancient temples. Churches, mosques, restaurants, hotels, and bustling markets all share the landscape with monuments thousands of years old.
I had expected to encounter the remnants of an ancient civilization; I had not quite expected to find modern life unfolding so naturally around them.
Layers of time
We finally catch sight of the ruins of Luxor Temple. It is time to leave the comfort of air-conditioning and step into the afternoon heat.
Our first surprise is a domed, active mosque standing within the ancient temple complex, beside and partly above the massive stone pylon—the original Egyptian gateway. The mosque is obviously a later Islamic structure, while the pylon belongs to the much older temple. Roman alterations to the ancient stonework are visible as well. Standing here, I am even more struck by the extraordinary layering of history: ancient Egyptian, Roman, Islamic, and modern life occupying the same space.
Passing through the pylon, a massive gateway, we discover a narrow, remarkably steep staircase said to lead through hollow rooms and corridors to the upper levels and roof—spaces once used by priests, guards, and workers. Do we hear the muffled tones of people moving through these same passages thousands of years ago?
Beyond the gateway, the purpose of the temple begins to emerge. Despite being called a temple, Luxor Temple was not dedicated to a single god. It was the focal point of the annual Opet Festival, when divine statues were carried from Karnak to Luxor in a ceremony symbolizing the renewal of the pharaoh’s right to rule.
Before the pylon once stood two obelisks. One remains here; the other was presented to France in 1831, in honour of the French man who helped decipher the hieroglyphs, and now stands in Paris’s Place de la Concorde. It is strange to think of these two monuments, once standing together at this entrance, now separated by thousands of kilometres.
From here, we move deeper into the temple and emerge into the great peristyle court, surrounded on three sides by elegant papyrus-cluster columns. Their capitals imitate the spreading umbels, fanlike flower clusters, of the papyrus plant. After seeing photographs and drawings of ancient Egypt for so many years, standing among these immense columns is something else entirely. The scale and craftsmanship are overwhelming..
The Pharaohs’ echoes via ‘Sphinx Avenue’
We walk beneath the vast Egyptian sky along the Avenue of Ram-Headed Sphinxes, their weathered faces silently watching as we approach the Karnak Temple Complex. Then the Great Hypostyle Hall comes into view—a breathtaking forest of 134 colossal columns, their surfaces alive with ancient inscriptions and reliefs. Standing among them feels less like entering a temple than stepping into another age.
At the entrance, the remains of the monumental pylon of Ramesses II are flanked by colossal statues of the pharaoh. One restored black-granite colossus stands 11 meters high. Discovered in 57 fragments only 70 years ago, it was painstakingly reassembled and unveiled in 2017. At his feet, a five-foot figure of Queen Nefertari offers a striking contrast.
Surrounded by these ancient giants, it is easy to imagine Karnak not as ruins, but as a world still alive with echoes of the past.
The huge closely placed columns did offer much needed shade from the merciless sun
Reaching for the heavens
Standing within the Karnak Temple Complex in Luxor, I was awestruck by Hatshepsut’s magnificent pink granite obelisk, rising nearly 30 meters into the sky. Carved from a single block of granite quarried at Aswan, it weighs an astonishing 323 tons.
Nearby, the obelisk of Thutmose I rises about 21.7 meters and weighs roughly 143 tons.
These were far more than feats of engineering. Rising toward the heavens, the obelisks symbolized the sun and were dedicated to the gods. Standing beside them, I found myself wondering how people more than 3,000 years ago could quarry, transport, and raise stones of such immense size. The sheer scale left me humbled—and reminded me how much of the ingenuity of the ancient world still lies beyond our imagination.
Quiet Reflection at the Sacred Lake
Within the vast Precinct of Amun-Re at Karnak, the Sacred Lake rests peacefully among towering columns and ancient temples.
Created under Pharaoh Thutmose III, it served as a place of ritual purification, where priests prepared themselves before entering the sacred presence of the gods.
Today, its still waters offer a rare moment of quiet within the grandeur of Karnak. Standing at its edge, I felt a deep sense of respect for the countless generations who gathered here. For a moment, it was easy to imagine the priests walking these same shores thousands of years ago—and to feel the enduring presence of a world long gone, yet not forgotten.
Dung Beetle Charm
And then there is the irresistible pink granite scarab—a giant at 1.9 metres long and weighing five tons—perched at one corner of the lake.
So why are people walking around it? Folklore has the answer:
Three laps bring general good fortune.
Seven laps bring luck in marriage.
And nine laps—the maximum(?)—are for fertility.
The tradition has a fascinating connection to ancient Egypt. The scarab was associated with Khepri, the god of the rising sun and rebirth. Egyptians saw the dung beetle rolling its ball across the ground as a reflection of the sun being rolled across the sky.
Local folklore has given that ancient symbol a wonderfully practical twist: a good-luck charm.
A link to the next blog on the West Bank of Luxor.
This scarab was originally made during the reign of Amenhotep III for his mortuary temple on Luxor’s west bank, before being moved to Karnak. The ball rolls!
