Had a fun journey down from Dahab (on red sea coast) to Luxor (on the Nile in the south). It was meant to be a 14 hour night bus but with various stops for food, drinks, picking up passengers, arguing with passers-by and fixing engines it turned into a rather unpleasant 18 hour trip. It wouldn’t even have been so bad if we hadn’t been subjected to a poor quality pirate copy of ‘Double Impact’, a Van Damme film where he plays identical twins and gets to fight himself. When that was all over they just played it again. And when we’d sat through it for the second time? Yep. They played it again. Went to the Valley of the Kings today which was interesting. We hired bicycles which was a great way of getting around not least because all the taxi, camel, donkey and felluca (boat) touts leave you alone though we did still get offered a donkey ride ("can we take our bikes?").

I didn’t really uinderstand the policy on cameras in tombs: the lp says no flash photography which I understand as it deteriorates the paint but they confiscate all video equipment at the entrance to the site and there are signs saying "No video, no flash, no touch". At the first tomb we went in I started taking photos (no flash) and the guy wrestled my camera off me and started walking away. I chased after him and got it back but not without some raised voices. Some of the larger tombs had unofficial looking signs saying "No touch, no photo" but I saw several people taking sneaky shots inside (some with flash - tut tut). Trouble is it’s quite hard to take sneaky shots with a camera the size of a small childs head that makes an echoing ‘catchunk’ noise when you take a photo. However some well timed coughs and turned backs afforded me a few opportunities.

In the end though the most interesting tombs were not in the Valley of the Kings but in amongst the houses of a local village. It’s a little trickier to navigate as there are no maps and we were followed by hoards of kids trying to sell us various things (some of which I had to laugh at: a small rock being sold as an ‘antiquity’ by a 5 year old for "1 pound" wich went up to "5 pounds" when I showed no interest and then back to "1 pound"!) but definitely worth the effort.