Today we mounted our horses for a lovely ride to one of the most stunning temples on the West Bank – Habu Temple.
We took a generous route through fields with lots of sandy paths to canter on.
Farmers were busy tilling their fields, little white egrets were busy picking the worms after tilling, donkeys were dozing in the sun, waiting for their carts to be filled with a days harvest in the afternoon. Very peaceful scenery indeed. After an hour the landscape changed into a desert with rocky and sandy patches and a long stretch for galloping fast.
Lula our dog always at our heels, deftly ducking and navigating the dangerous world of the other dogs territories. Those were not amused at all to have an intruder passing by and often would ferociously bark, threaten and sometimes charge at Lula. The horses and we were ignored totally. Lula always kept close to our mounts and tried to keep them in between her and her enemies. That mostly worked well. One feisty dog came too close to Jazeera, Esthers mounts hind legs and Jazeera expertly tried to kick that dog away. Lula was safe once again.
After a long gallop and some cool down walk, we saw a huge balloon that had just landed in front of us, right next to Habu temple. We were lucky that the balloon was still up, while the basket had just landed on the ground. We were able to snap some nice pictures in front of it.
Once the balloon started to deflate Our horses got a bit nervous. They are totally OK with the balloons being blown up, but hardly see them come down, so this was new to them and made them side step a bit in order to navigate around the balloon to the temple entrance.
We took the bridles off our horses, loosened the girths and tethered them to a stone wall while we went to buy the tickets for Habu.
For our liking, there were far too many people at Habu at that moment—several school groups, numerous large buses with Asian tourists, in short, many more people than we had expected. The schoolgirls, feeling bold, decided to ask Esther for a selfie. Once again, Esther was the star with her blonde hair.
Our guide Saʽid had arrived by car and led us through the temple, explaining many of the scenes and carvings we could see there.
We decided then to return to this temple early morning on one of the next days and look at it in peace and quiet. Hence more about Habu temple in the Day 11 blog entry.
After an hour we joined our horses again and rode back to our stables. Happy and hungry, Agnes and Mohammed invited us for a special lunch. We changed back at the hotel, donned some nicer clothes and were happy that we did when we saw that our hosts also had changed into some finer garb.
They were waiting for us at the hotel with two morotcycles, the normal mode of transport here whenever possible. Chris and I hopped onto the motorcycle that Mohammed drove and Agnes joined Mohameds friend.
Driving three or four on a single motorcycle, is totally common here. Up to five is allowed and we did see some families riding with five people on it. Nowadays all the motorcycles are Chinese made. Helmets are nowhere to be seen and are not mandatory. Luckily we did not see a single road accident so far, but it seems to happen quite often in the countryside. But the roads are generally in OK condition. Only the main roads are paved. All other roads are dirt tracks, with dust flying everywhere, and air pollution is quite high in and around the roads. Most cars don’t have catalytic converters, and their exhausts create a visible and noticeable (smellable) mist. On any of the main roads many sleeping policemen slow down the traffic significantly, so people are forced to drive slower in general. That system works quite well.
The ride was short, only to the harbour of the West Bank. We boarded a private little ferry boat to bring us quickly to the other side, directly in front of the Winter Palace.
The Winter Palace is a wonderful old and charming colonial style building built in 1886 under British Colonial Rule. It always was designed as a hotel and used to be meeting place of the British nobles when traveling to Egypt.
It is now owned by the Sofitel group and room nights cosy upwards of 500 EUR a night. The Winter Palace has five restaurants on the grounds. We enjoyed a drink at the bar first before heading to one of the Restaurants overlooing a beautiful garden and pool, complete with peacocks and flamingoes. We had a very good lunch and certainly felt a bit like royalty ourselves.
After lunch we boarded the same boat back to the West Bank side of Luxor and walked back to our hotel for only a short rest, as by four PM we were picked up again for our sailing trip on the Nile with a little Felucca sail boat.
The bigger sailing boats are called Dahabeiyas, those take up to 30-40 passengers and can do overnight trips. Feluccas are small and nimble sailing boats used to ferry goods from one side of the river to the other. Wide bellied and shallow, they can take a large load, but most have been converted to Tourist boats sailing into the sunste on the river Nile.
We had a boat to ourselves and our crew of two set sails upriver. It was slow going at first. Some boats have loud party music on board, others none at all, just some fresh fruit and tea. We got asked to have our playlist on the boats loud speaker. Chris, not able to control the playlist on his phone, amused us all with the random selection and renditions of Abba, German Rap, French Arabian hits of the 80s, Western and Country music from Montana, Hubert von Goisern and LaBrass Banda as well as the latest Egypt top 10 hits. Our captain and crew of one liked it. It certainly was not what they had expected.
After enjoying a beautiful sunset on the river, we returned to our hotel and skipped dinner, as we were still stuffed from our late lunch.
Tomorrow, Inshallah, we will go on a balloon ride early morning, Esther trying to ditch her fear of heights, Chris his grumpiness of having to get up at 4.15 AM for it.
