Up very early for a 5:30 pickup and our 7:30 AM flight to Luxor.  Then our new guide drove us out to the Valley of the Kings.  The valley originally looked like one of many gorges in the hills on the West side of the Nile and was selected by Tutmose I when he decided not to be buried in a monument that was easily identified and robbed.  He liked the pyramid shaped hill at the end of the this gorge since it would allow his soul to go to heaven if he was buried under it.  The valley was remote, uninhabited and the tomb could be easily hidden.  Nothing grows here and teh temperature when we visited was 104 °F.  Famous tombs here are King Tut, Ramses I thru IX and the new tomb just called KV63 that was just discovered in 2005.  We went into three tombs but were unable to photograph the inside of the tombs.  We had to walk past a long row of souvenir-trinket shops to get to our van.  We next went to Deir El-Bahari to see the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut who ruled Egypt as a pharaoh.  She designed her Temple to have the gods bless her reign and to protect her from her son as he grew up.  The conception of her monument was quite different and has beautiful reliefs depicting her childhood and an expedition to Africa she organized.  However the gods did not bless her.  When her son gained control, he had her face on all walls and statues all over Egypt defaced.  Again down past the souvenir shops and on to the Worker’s village.

Later pharaohs like Ramses II created a village in an adjacent gorge for 70 worker families so they would be a captive workforce and not go home and tell everyone where the latest tomb they worked on was located.  They created two small tombs for their chief and Sennedjen, the pharaoh’s assistant.  The burial chambers have the best preserved and most vivid decorations we had seen.  In Sennedjen’s tomb they show various events in his daily family life.  The doorman at the Shennedjen’s tomb let us take photos of them.  Then a stop at the Colossus of Memnon for a quick photo and on to our hotel.  

Later that evening when it was cooler, we went to the Luxor Museum.  It is a great little museum.  We saw a lot of King Tut’s treasures and the Rameses I mummy that was recently returned to Luxor by the City of Atlanta.  This was a lucky accident for us since we both thought it was in Cairo.  Afterwards we took an open air horse carriage back to the hotel.