Our first excursion was flying to Luxor for the day. In Luxor I got to go into King Tut's tomb and see his mummy! Unfortunately they wouldn't let us take pictures there, so I can only tell you about it.
When we arrived in Sharm el Sheikh, this was the first Egyptian sunset we saw, over the Red Sea!
After we visited Valley of the Kings (where King Tut's tomb was) we went to Valley of the Queens and saw Queen Hatshepsut's Temple, which is at the base of those cliffs behind me. Everything we saw in Egypt was between 3 and 4 THOUSAND years old, including this temple!
This is when we walked up closer to the temple and had gone up the ramp to the first level.
Queen Hatshepsut was the only female to ever rule Egypt as a Pharaoh. Pharaohs usually had to be men, but she posed as a man and ruled for almost 20 years! These statues portray Hatshepsut as Pharaoh. You can't tell she was a lady can you!
And here's me in front of one of her statues
We crossed over the Nile river, and our next stop in Luxor was the temple of Karnak, what an amazing place! Leading up to the entry is this row of sphinxes- they have lions' bodies with rams' heads.
This temple was SO HUGE! Everything made me feel very tiny... there's a statue of Ramses standing inside the entrance.
Here I am in the huge hall of Karnak. See the top of the column behind me? They are shaped to look like flowers from the papyrus plant- papyrus is very common in Egypt and is used to make scrolls and artwork.
Every part of this hall is carved with hieroglyphics- the ancient Egyptian writing. I couldn't read any of it, it just looked like a lot of pictures to me! When the temple was first built, the entire thing used to be painted in bright colors also, it must have looked amazing!
Here I am in the hall again- see the hieroglyphics behind me?
The columns were all SO BIG! It was like being in a stone forest.
Here I am sitting at the base of one of the columns...I felt pretty small...the symbol straight above my head is the Ankh, the symbol meaning "life."
Here I am outside the wall, looking back toward the hall of columns we were just in.
Karnak is a very big place, I had to sit and take a rest before we moved on...
Our last stop of the day was Luxor Temple. It was getting dark outside and the lights made everything look even more impressive!
These columns are also shaped like papyrus plants, but shaped as the closed buds instead of the open flowers.
Here's another of the main area of Luxor Temple.
here's another of the Luxor Temple columns. I'm not in these pictures because it was too dark outside, I didn't show up very well!
Here are some pharaoh statues in Luxor Temple. Quite an amazing place! I was very tired at the end of our day in Luxor.
We left Egypt for a day and travelled to Jordan to see the ruins of the city of Petra. Petra was begun around 300 BC by people called the Nabateans. We hiked down a long canyon and then got our first view of the most amazing building in Petra...
This building is called the Treasury, but it actually used to be a royal tomb. Everything in Petra is carved straight out of the cliffs- I wonder how they did that?? You might recognize this building, some movies have been filmed here, like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as well as the more recent Transformers 2.
Petra made me feel very tiny also, all the buildings and cliffs around us were SO big!
Here I am in front of the Treasury again
I got to see some camels here also! I didn't ride one but it was fun to see them anyway.
Here's one of the camels up close. Strange looking animals!
Here is another part of the city of Petra. The Nabateans lived in caves- some were natural and some were man-made. Most of these caves look man-made and were probably used as tombs.
There is another big royal tomb that we hiked up to...
This was when we had finally hiked up all the stone steps and arrived at the tomb's main entrance.
Can you find me in this picture? I was so tiny compared to the buildings that I almost blended into the background!
This is me sitting inside the tomb's main doorway, it was nice and cool inside, compared to the desert heat outside.
This is what the inside of that tomb looked like. The natural sandstone patterns were really pretty!
Here's another of the inside of the tomb. It looked like someone had painted the ceiling, but it was all natural rock patterns!
There I am in the main doorway again, before we hiked back down.
After all that travelling around, it was nice to spend the rest of the trip relaxing by the pool and at the beach. It was REALLY warm there, considering it was January!
I even got to go snorkelling in the Red Sea, there were SO many amazing fish to see!
Here's a bright yellow fish, one of my favorites. Well that's all the pictures I have from this trip. It sure was an adventure, I hope I get to go back there someday!
