FLOATING HOTELS MAKE NILE CRUISE AN ECONOMICAL TRIP
VALLEY OF THE KINGS
Imagine teams of Egyptian laborers working in 10-day shifts, cutting into solid rock. After six years or, in one case, 20 years, they complete a long tunnel into the earth, the walls massively decorated with reliefs of gods and kings, messages to the gods and instructions from the Book of the Dead to the king to be interned there.
To create a little mischief, a trap was chiseled into the tunnel so that grave robbers would fall to their deaths as they tried to reach the inner sanctum where the king was buried with all the paraphernalia he would need in the afterlife.
The movable objects were long gone, but the wall reliefs and the stone mummy cases were still in place.
This preoccupation with burial existed in a culture where the king spent most of his reign collecting the riches of his kingdom so that much of it could be buried with him. How great the riches could be is shown by the wealth found with a minor king who only ruled for six years. Tutankhamen’s objects, many of them gold, fill a large part of the second floor of the Cairo Museum.
The solution to this misuse of Egypt’s riches turned out to be simple. The workers knew where the treasure was hidden and where the traps were. They created new entrances out of which the gold and silver could be toted. They kept the economy going for thousands of years by making sure the wealth of the nation was recirculated.
There are 62 of these tombs stripped of their wealth in the Valley of the Kings outside Luxor. Eleven are open to the public. The colorful work of master artists is on the walls and ceilings in hieroglyphics and bas-relief. In the tomb of Ramses III, there were only drawings, often in black and white, but they were in excellent condition. All that remains of the great wealth once stored there are the stone sarcophagi.
These tombs still help keep the Egyptian economy going: About 20 percent of the country’s income comes from the tourist industry.
The boats plying the Nile were like four star hotels with all of the amenities.
FLOATING HOTELS
My wife, Carla, and I were on a Nile River cruise between Aswan and Luxor. The flight we took from Cairo to Aswan followed the Nile, and we could see it as a strip of green surrounded by desert. Few people live far from the river, which is truly the source of life for the country.
The 320 boats plying the river are actually four- and five-star floating hotels; ours even had a small swimming pool and hot tub on the upper deck. The babble of languages in the dining room included Italian, Spanish, Chinese, German and Irish. Many of the summer tourists are from Spain and the largest number in the winter are from Germany and France. Guides speak a variety of languages, and most seemed to know at least two beyond Arabic.
Part of the reason there are so many visitors is because these floating hotels provide cheap luxury — great meals and air-conditioned rooms with large windows to watch the life of Egypt pass by. Out our window was an ever-changing scene of palm groves, small-village life, water buffalo, and small boats with one man standing and an occasional factory.
Prices are right, salaries are low and there are lots of knickknacks to buy.
Along the Nile we passed many unfinished houses. The practice in Cairo appears to be common everywhere.
