Tuesday, 17 April. The ship sailed south from Esna at first light, heading for Edfu which it reached at 9:00. That allowed us to sleep in until 7:30 and still finish breakfast before our arrival.

Our bus left at 9:30 for the Temple of Horus. This is the second largest temple in Egypt (after Karnack), and the best preserved. That's may be because it's one of "newest," begun by Ptolemy III in 237 B.C. with construction continuing until the time of Cleopatra, the last pharaoh. (She, like all the Ptolomy pharaohs before her, was Greek, not Egyptian.)

The weather was beastly hot and this area swarmed with both people and flies. We persevered through Salah's lecture as he guided us through the first courtyard and into the hypostyle hall (with relatively few columns, nowhere near the scale of the grand hall at Karnak, but this one still had its roof).

When he turned us loose, we literally fought our way through the pressing crowd to see the Horus Boat in the sanctuary. (Even the normally easy-going Italian tourists were aggressive and rude.) By the time we fought our way back out, Jane was feeling very ill.

Horus Boat in the sanctuary

Darrell at Horus statue

Elaborate scenes carved in wall

We walked to the air conditioned Visitor Center and found it deserted except for a very pleasant young attendant. After Jane used the bathroom, he guided us to front row seats in a huge, but empty, theater, gave us cold bottled water, and proceeded to turn on a very interesting slide show about the temple, complete with English narration. He even reran those slides I tried to photograph (with dismal results). When it was over and we had to leave to catch our bus, he made no request for baksheesh, and in fact declined my first offer of a few pounds (but not the second). He left us with a most favorable impression of what until then had been a very unpleasant experience.

Jane felt much better after that. Our bus left at 11:30 to take us back to the ship. The ship sailed south for Kom Ombe about 12:30. After lunch we rested and read until time for the Inner Circle (frequent GCT traveler) cocktail reception at 16:00. The Tour Directors solicited comments on the tour, sparking some heated discussion, especially about the luggage handling and long delay at the Cairo airport when we first arrived. We were still hot at it when the other passengers arrived for the 17:30 port talk.

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