LUXOR TEMPLE & VALLEY OF THE KINGS | Egypt Travel Vlog

It is our first morning here in Luxor. If you missed yesterday's video, we just got off an overnight train where we did very little sleeping.

It's supposed to be 116 degrees today, so even though we're super tired and it's only 6:45, we're making ourselves get out there because we know later we're gonna melt.

And it is Egypt. And there's always somebody wanting to sell you something. Hey, like this guy.

No, thank you. This is awesome. Our hotel sits like five minutes from the Luxor Temple, which is one of the biggest attractions here in the city. We showed up, it is almost 7 o', clock, and the guy that sits in the ticket booth literally had to wake up to give us our tickets. We were the very first ones here.

We have the whole Luxor temple to ourselves.

You need to take like a million pictures of videos as fast as we can with no people in them.

I cannot believe that I'm about to walk through this grand entrance all by myself.

Yes.

No running, ma'. Am. I can do whatever I want.

This is seriously insane.

Clean.

No one around.

This is insane.

No one. Okay, we're not going to say that.

1945, the first tour group has shown up. We don't have the place all to ourselves anymore, so we thought this would be a good time to just give you a little bit of a history lesson. We're on our own today because for the next six days we're going to be out on a group tour learning a ton about ancient Egypt. So we just thought it'd be fun just to kind of like run around independently.

Today we learned that this temple was built in the 1400s BC and it is the most well preserved temple in all of Egypt.

Also, they build temples on the east bank of the river and they build like pyramids and tombs and stuff associated with death on the west side of the river because they associate the sun setting with death. So west is death and east is where they like, lived and built their temples and stuff. So we're on the east bank of Luxor right now, full of life. I feel like that was quite historical for being on our own.

Look at all these people. I got a picture here by myself.

Now we are on the avenue of the Sphinx. It's basically this one really long road lined with a bunch of sphinxes.

And it goes from this temple to another temple that's about three kilometers away. And back in ancient Egyptian times, they would do a parade once a year from this temple to that temple carrying these two statues of these two gods that I think were married. And that's really all I know. So sorry. This is what you get when we don't have a guide. But the cool thing is they're still excavating stuff so they're still finding sphinxes underground and putting them up on these concrete things. So there you go. Seriously, an hour made all of the difference. We are leaving all the tourists behind. It's only 8:30 and our hotel is still serving free breakfast. Which means I might get another cup.

Of coffee and then we're probably going to take a nap. Thank you. Thank you. We gave you a very lovely trip here in Egypt.

Thank you.

There are so many people trying to sell you stuff. Like more than any place we've ever been. I think not a bad spot for breakfast. This is the rooftop of our hotel. That is the Luxor temple that we were just at. And that's the Nile. I can't wait to get on our boat tomorrow. Breakfast of champions.

Hey, you gotta go see some dooms. It's gotta wake up. Gonna turn into a mummy. The Valley of the Kings.

Oh, I thought you're getting.

We've pulled ourselves out of bed from our nap and we come up here to grab a quick bite to eat before we head out for the afternoon. I have never ever felt heat like this. According to karisphone it is 113 degrees right now. This is like an air conditioned fan. Even with this still so hot.

Thank you.

I don't think there's any way you could possibly drink enough water today. I just before we napped I drank a whole one of these and I'm already thirsty again.

We just made a new friend. His name is Mahmoud. Mahmoud. Do you remember my name?

Ah, you forgot already.

Yes.

So far he's told me he's 10 years old, he sleeps for three hours.

And he's showing us how to get to the boat. Right.

We're trying to go to the Valley of the Kings which is on the west bank of the river. So we're currently trying to find the ferry. Also like my body has just never extended experienced heat like this before.

Yeah, it's nuts.

It's odd to have a new like physical experience.

Money.

Good boy.

Goodbye. Thank you very much.

Even though about 50 people tried to put us in their own private boat, we finally made it to the ferry thanks to our friend. I have this like really hard time with kids who are helpful because I don't want to give them money and like encourage them to constantly be begging. But I felt really Bad because he had been with us for like an hour. So I tried to give him a little bit of money when he was leaving and he wouldn't even take it. And that just like made my day. Like, he was just doing that out of the goodness of his heart.

That little kid practicing his English. He was the cutest little thing.

Now we are on the ferry that cost us one Egyptian pound, which is less than 10 cents a piece. It's gonna take us over to the West Bank. I'm also just realizing that we are on the ferry on the way to the Valley of the King and I forgot the good lens for our camera.

I have lots of wide angle shots of the Valley of the Kings.

It closes in two hours, so we definitely don't have time to go back. I'm so mad at myself.

The heat's just getting to your brain.

We're on the west bank.

Hello. We found a taxi. It is very hard to do anything on your own here in Egypt without getting hassled by like a hundred people. We finally gave in to this guy. He was relentless. We're paying 120 round trips, so he's going to take us there. He's going to wait on us. 130. We agreed on 130. 130 round trip. He's going to wait on us and then bring us back. Still don't know if that's a good deal or not, but it's less than $10.

You see all the bhas, they come from Aswan, from Cairo, everywhere. Because this real alabaster.

Not shame, and make it for a blessing. Okay, see you later.

We are officially in the Valley of the Kings, which is basically this massive rock area. I've done very little research, but from what I understand, after the pyramid era, which was 2000 BC ish, the kings and pharaohs started getting buried here. Because if you saw a huge pyramid, you knew that somebody really important and rich was buried underneath it. And so everybody was getting robbed. And this is a little more low key. And King Tut was buried here at the pyramids.

They took our mic here, they took our stabilizer. So if all the footage looks a little shakier, that's why.

But we do have a mic also.

We're here like an hour and a half before this place closes. And except for the few people that we saw walking in, once again, we pretty much have this place all to ourselves. The entire Valley of Bikinis.

This here to Horus. Horus the son of Earth. This the queen here, is here.

The queen the queen.

Queen. The priest is here. The king. Yeah.

Why are there two heads?

The king.

The king entered this here.

These are Horus. The crown. This Hosir is again the anubis. Here it.

Wow, there's a sandstorm.

He seems unconcerned.

We came out of the tomb and now it is pouring rain in the middle of the desert and there is sand blowing everywhere. That is not at all what I expected.

Not at all. Feels kind of nice, though. Felt like an oven in here a minute ago.

So the way that the Valley of the Kings works is when you buy a ticket, you can enter three different tombs.

There's 64 total. They're not all open, but there's little signs in front of them all that tell you whose tomb it is, so you can pick which one you want to go in.

So that guy kind of picked that one for us. He was super nice. The way this seems to kind of work is that there's guys that sit outside of the tomb to check tickets, but then if you walk in, they want to be your tour guide, take you around, show it to you, and then after you leave, you just give them like a dollar or two and they're more than happy.

We just came in our second tomb. The guy at the entrance of this one was having his lunch and shared with me me a piece of his bread that his wife made back at his house.

The k. The COVID of the sapas is not all the sacrifice.

Oh, cool. I'm in another sarcophagus to protect the mommy. Yeah. So this one is huge and nice and has the goddess of something on the ceiling. And they have a mirror here so you can see the reflection off the top of it. But the mummy of this king actually wasn't in here. It was a trick. Everybody thought it was in here, but it was actually in this secret room in the back so that nobody would steal his mummy.

This is the real tomb. He actually built a secret wall so that nobody would be able to come back here and find it. That was tomb number eight. We have one more to choose.

Extra paint.

Original. Original, original, Original.

Really?

Yeah.

Nobody's.

No, no, no.

Thank you for waiting on us. We closed the place down. They let us ride the tram back for free with the guides and the guards. I think we got the last guys in trouble going in the tomb. There was a lot of yelling when we came out. They reopened it for us so we could go in even though they were already close.

Today has been such a good day. We did so little planning coming into today. And yet somehow we managed to have both of the big sites that we went to pretty much all to ourselves.

Yeah, it was a really smooth day, too.

I'm pretty sure that I've said no over 500 times today. But we've had it really cushy, like, the past month, at least. And there's a little part of me that's kind of missed that, like, the negotiation aspect of travel.

And that's a wrap in Luxor. Tomorrow we're getting on a boat.

A boat bigger than this one? Yeah, but not as big as.

That one.

We're going back from the east side to the west.

I may or may not hear an espresso machine. My mood just got so much better.

I was wrong.