We arrived in Luxor at about 5am after a night on the sleeping train. I (bec) had been quite apprehensive about taking the train because although it was called a "luxury" train, I had heard some horror stories, especially regarding the toilets. But I was pleasantly surprised, it really wasn't that bad - mind you after what we had been staying in it probably made it look a whole lot better! The toilets weren't too bad either though not user friendly if you need to sit down, the seat was extremely wide, so much so that you really could only get one cheek on it, they must have big bottomed people in Egypt!

Unfortunately we really didn't get much sleep at all on the train and as we weren't able to check into our hotel so early in the morning we had arranged to do a tour of the west bank seeing the tombs in the valley of the kings, queen hatshepsuts mortuary temple and the temple medinat by Rameses III. We started with the tombs and as it was only about 7am it was hot but not too bad, but as soon as we entered one of them we were hit with this immense heat, it would have had to have been 40-50 degrees inside and extremely humid - it was quite horrible really. Apparently the heat is generated by the large number of people that go inside. The tombs themselves were really impressive, most still had the original paint and they are close to 5000 years old! However by the time it got to 9am the heat outside was almost as bad as the tombs and as we were both so tired and Kane was still really sick it was very hard going and we were quite happy to move on. The other temples we saw were amazing but it was about 45 degrees so we absolutely wilted. Our guide was trying to explain all about the history of the site which usually I love to hear but standing outside in that heat it was just going in one ear and out the other.

We finally got back to our new hotel which we had splurged on, 5 star, much more us and pretty much slept the rest of the day cause we were b*****ed! We soon got used to the luxury and the pool and decided that we weren't going to go back to Cairo as planned but would rather stay here for the rest of the week and then fly from Luxor back to Zurich. After a month of travelling we both just needed to stop and relax for a bit and what better place to do that than in a 5 star resort - yeah!

I did one more tour while in Luxor to see Karnak and Luxor temples (AMAZING) but Kane was too sick and couldn't come, or so he said why would you want to leave a comfy airconditioned room for 45 degree heat! The rest of our time was spent lying around the pool - so tough - we really didn't want to leave but by our last day we had rested enough and were now ready to move on to the final half of our trip.