Michael Batson

My first visit to Egypt was to the Sinai Peninsula a journey down the coast as far as Sharm El Shiekh. The second trip a couple of years later was across the Suez Canal to the largest city by population in Africa, Cairo (if you count its neighbour Giza) and from there south to Luxor one of the oldest most continuously inhabited cities in the world. In Cairo I met a George world famous in the city, and in Luxor I bumped into another bloke with the same name, even more famous. Later I went to Aswan to see one of the greatest engineering feats on earth, the great Aswan High Dam, which was the former Soviet Union’s largest and most famous foreign aid project. At Luxor is the Valley of the Kings, a royal burial ground for pharaohs in a country it’s been said “where the living are subordinate to the dead” and a magnet for visitors over hundreds of years. While there suffering from a bout of the “Fire in Cairo” I was caught in a desert by the vice president of the United States with my pants down, literally.

Trains from Cairo to Upper Egypt and most anywhere in the country go from Ramesses Railway Station. The station is named after Ramesses II (Ramesses the Great as he was known or the Great Ancestor) widely regarded as the greatest, most celebrated, and most powerful pharaoh in all of the 500 years of the New Kingdom, which itself was the most powerful period of ancient Egypt. The modern building dates from the nineteenth century and was upgraded in 1955, and again in 2001. In 2011 following the Egyptian Uprising they installed air-conditioning, marble floors, and escalators; an upgrade of facilities to go with upheaval in government and a toppling of the old order. When I went to Ramesses Station to catch the train south, the first renovation was at that time showing signs of serious wear. Back when I visited, they were building the Cairo metro, then the first underground to be built in Africa and in the Middle East. The cheapest way of building the metro system is still to dig up the roads, lay the tracks and insert the infrastructure before covering it all up again. This method while cheaper and easier, also causes the most disruption as Cairo’s chaotic road traffic became even more unmanageable and the city’s air even dustier with all the earthworks going on.

Egypt’s rail network dates back to 1833 when Muhammad Ali Pasha, the country’s Ottoman Albanian military ruler and governor thought about connecting Egypt with India. The entire network is run by Egyptian National Railways, and back then on my journey their rolling stock needed an upgrade. My journey south took several hours with fans failing to keep the carriage cool. There was a hole in the toilet floor through which progress could be measured by the speed and sound of the carriage over the tracks. The plumbing for the toilet sat next to the water supply for the kitchen which gave me pause for thought. A man across the aisle struck up conversation keen to hear where I was from and where I was going. He spoke good English and the conversation ranged across a variety of topics falling silent when the subject of religion came up. He was Muslim and asked me about my Christian faith assuming I had one. English author Martin Amis said of religion that “agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is so vast" and that atheism is "premature". It seems being a non-believer will guarantee a stony silence and in a devout country possibly worse - accusations of blasphemy.

Luxor sits on the site of the ancient city of Thebes in the area known as Upper Egypt. Confusingly, Lower Egypt is the part on the map that sits at the top near the Mediterranean Sea while “Upper” Egypt is at the bottom – south, near Sudan. Luxor has over 1.3 million inhabitants and has often been described as the “world’s greatest open-air museum”. Luxor is one of the oldest continued inhabited cities in the world. Aside from the temple complexes at Karnak and around Luxor itself, across the Nile River are the temples and tombs of the Theban necropolis which includes the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. Thousands of tourists pour into the city every year though you will find less of them about in high summer, given the heat is like a furnace bleaching the landscape and making any kind of physical effort difficult.

Thebes in Egypt was built on a plain near a bend in the Nile on a trading route to the Red Sea, a kind of economic and cultural crossroads. The name comes from the Egyptian “City of Amun” chief of the Theban Triad (triad in religious terms meaning a group of three gods) for which many temples and shrines are found at the vast complex of Karnak. Egyptian Thebes is not to be confused with its namesake in Greece. Thebes in Greece was the capital of Boeotia, a rival of ancient Athens and like Luxor also one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth despite having been destroyed by various conquerors throughout history. Egyptian Thebes was known as the “city of the 100 Gates” and Southern Heliopolis to distinguish it from Heliopolis near modern Cairo, which was the main place of worship for the god Ra in the north.

The importance of the city goes back to the 11th Dynasty over 4000 years BCE when the pharaohs of the New Kingdom began their expeditions to present day Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, and to Syria. Thebes was for a long time the religious capital and foremost city of Egypt. The city grew rich as a thriving market town and military post attracting people from across the region including the: Hittites, Minoans, Canaanites, Babylonians, Phoenicians, and eventually the Assyrians from Mesopotamia, who attacked the city. Then came the Christians, the Romans, and the Muslims following their conquest of Egypt. In the 1700s came the Europeans publishing their travels and documenting the surroundings and by the 20th century Luxor was a major tourist destination, and still is. So complex is Luxor’s archaeological history that discoveries are still being made this century one as recently as 2019.

Today’s attractions of Luxor are all about the past. The local economy is heavily dependent on tourism, principally foreign tourists. After my visit tourism around Luxor and across Egypt in general dropped off significantly following the Luxor massacre in 1997 when 62 people, mostly tourists, were shot and stabbed at Deir el-Bahari or Dayr al-Bahri, a monastery complex near Luxor by gunmen dressed as members of the security forces. The gunmen were all members of Al-Jamāʻah al-islāmīya, a Sunni extremist movement group that was dedicated to the overthrow of the Egyptian government and replacing it with an Islamic state. Further blows to tourism came about following the turmoil of the Arab Spring and the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s government. More lately there have been a series of financial crises to deal with. By 2023 Egypt’s debt with the International Monetary Fund was second only to that of Argentina’s. Efforts to increase tourist numbers since include grandiose and somewhat controversial plans to transform the city with flash hotels and expensive shops. There’s s an international airport and now a bridge across the Nile where previously the journey was made by a collection of car ferries, far less efficient but with heaps more character.

Around on the city side of the river is the Karnak complex. Karnak gets its name from the nearby, and partly surrounded, modern village of El-Karnak, which means “the fortified village” 2.5kms north of Luxor. Karnak comprises a vast complex of buildings and was known as "The Most Selected of Places". The Karnak Open Air Museum is the second most visited historical site in Egypt after the Pyramids of Giza. The museum consists of four main parts, some of which are usually undergoing renovation so are often off limits to the public. The museum contains reconstructions of structures that have been dismantled and buried or hidden inside the massive “pylons” or monumental gates like pyramidal towers in the complex.

The key difference between Karnak and most of the other temples and historical sites in Egypt is the length of time over which it was developed and used with over thirty pharaohs having contributed to this from the beginnings in the Middle Kingdon (approximately 4040 to 3782 BCE) through to Ptolemaic times from 2300 BCE. While few of the individual features of Karnak are unique, their size and number of features are vast. One of the key features worth seeing is the Great Hypostyle Hall with 134 columns measuring 10m to 21m high arranged in 16 rows supporting architraves weighing an astonishing 70 tonnes. The whole complex is divided into different precincts and you could wander about for days and still not see everything.

You can catch a lot of things in Egypt and the risk of contracting diarrhoea (or diarrhea, spell it how you like), can be high. The symptoms are generally understood and if you get it badly, it can feel like you’re coming down with the ‘flu. So not only is your stomach upset and you can be violently ill, but you also have aches, pains, shivers, as well as a fever. In advanced cases with the malnourished death can follow. You can feel cold even in a country where the temperatures in mid-summer can hit the high forties. The best course of action if afflicted is to keep your fluids up and should your symptoms persist beyond a couple of days for acute diarrhoea, seek medical attention. It's best to restrict physical activity which helps and avoid prolonged exposure to heat and direct sunlight, so find somewhere shady, preferably well-ventilated and quiet. Best then not to go on a long bicycle ride into the desert without shelter, adequate drinking water and cover from the sun, which given my time was tight, and with travel plans looming, I did exactly that. I guess I figured being young and that needs must, off you go because I didn’t know if I’d ever be back and given my experiences in Egypt to that point, I wasn't sure I wanted to come back.

The road from Luxor to the Valley of the Kings has a name, Kings Valley Road. It’s not very original but it leaves little confusion as to which route to take. The road is 17kms long and takes about 25 minutes to drive but on a creaking bicycle with no brakes and in need of maintenance takes considerably longer. I crossed the Nile by car ferry. Along each side of the river there is fertile strip two to three kilometres deep and then lush greenery gives way to sandy brown rock. This is the start of the Western Desert, an area of the Sahara that lies west of the river Nile and runs all the way to the Libyan border and then beyond as far as the Atlantic coast in Morrocco, a distance of 4100kms. The desert that extends from the other side of Luxor is the Eastern Desert, which runs to the Red Sea, The city of Luxor and its environs being squeezed between the two expanses. This desert pavement, also called reg (in the western Sahara) and serir (eastern Sahara), is a desert surface covered with closely packed, interlocking angular or rounded rock fragments of pebble of cobble size. The Western Desert also includes the Great Sand Sea which stretches about 650kms from north to south and 300kms from east to west; a desert of long sand ridges and of mega dunes.No place for the uninitiated or the ill-prepared.

Beyond the farms of the fertile green zone there are no houses, no trees, no people, no shops, no water, no shelter., and as I discovered no facilities of any kind until you get to the Valley of the Kings temple complex itself. There’s the land, the sky, the sun, and you. On a bicycle you can generate some breeze. On an incline the cadence slowed with progress hard going my precious energy sapped with every rotation. On the decline you can free wheel for a bit, and on the flat it was possible to make headway at a leisurely pace. The great thing about going there in the middle of summer is, at least when I went, there are no crowds, and back then prices were affordable even for backpackers.

The Valley of the Kings (also the Valley of the Gates of the Kings) is where for 500 years Egyptian pharaohs and the most powerful nobles along with their families were buried (the powerful women were buried down the road at the Valley of the Queens). There are 65 tombs some of which contain multiple chambers. The tomb for the sons of Ramesses II (Ramesses the Great) for example, contains over 120 chambers. The area received worldwide fame following the discovery in 1922 of the tombs of Tutankhamun, which aside from putting Luxor on the map spurned a whole genre of horror films. The whole area surprisingly only become a World Heritage Site in 1979. The tombs are carved into limestone in a valley prone to flash flooding. In the late 1990s ground penetrating radar identified layers of natural shelving underneath the structures. Major exploration of the tombs has gone on for over 200 years but only a few are extensively mapped. For centuries the tombs were visited during festival-goers, some of whom left behind graffiti scrawled in everything from ancient Greek and Latin to Phoenician and loads of other languages besides - multi-generational scribble. These days it's called social media. Grave robbers over the centuries looted much of what they found.

On the day I visited unbeknownst to me a foreign dignitary arrived at the site at about the same time. I've had visits disrupted by US leaders before - more recently much of central Phnom Penh was locked down for Joe Biden when I was there, though he thought at the time he was in Colombia.  George HW Bush, once a member of the Yale cheerleading squad, former head of the CIA, and the first vice president to ever serve as president when he stepped in for an incapacitated Reagan in 1985 (though some commentators thought Reagan incapacitated more often than that). Between them, their administration, among other things, was trading arms illegally, funding the Contras, and arming one Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction. George was on a whistle-stop tour in the region of friend and foe alike and taking it some history to broaden his worldview and experience some local culture (though probably without success) albeit from behind bulletproof glass and surrounded by an army of bodyguards.

Upon leaving the complex and cycling off back the way I’d come the heat, dehydration, sun, and my stomach caught up with me. When you have diarrhoea as bad as I did, when you have to go you have to go you have to go very quickly. This meant jumping off the bike and heading for cover, only there wasn’t any. When I’d gone as far as I could from the road there was nothing for it but to down trousers and let nature take its course. What a relief I felt – an accident avoided! Only once I was trapped on my haunches a large black car appeared around the corner followed by another and yet more black cars – a whole line of them. There were police vehicles, and military vehicles as well, some with machine guns and there were outriders. Al up there were about two dozen of vehicles. It was a convoy one iwth a full entourage and all for one person. And there I was in full view, if they cared to look and given the landscape was barren unless they were looking to the other side, or engaged in deep conversation, those on the left-hand side couldn’t help but be looking at the foreigner squatting not far from the roadside. Oh dear. George probably thought to himself at that moment and later commented later to Barbara back in Texas, “You know, the things you see in the Third World!”

Following my introduction to the diplomatic world stage the next day was one where I had no energy so spent my time sitting about in cafes trying to summon enough energy to survive the train trip back to the crowds and cacophony of Cairo.