Luxor - Valey of the Kings OMG - Gobsmacking, Unbelievably amazing. The Venus brochure says "Just when you think you have seen enough temples and tombs to last you a lifetime, we visit the West Bank of the Nile in Luxor and the infamaous Valley of the Kings. See where the Kings of Egypt were mummified and laid to rest with all their treasures. Amazing." And it was. There are 63 tombs on this site and we visited just three of them. Carved into th...

We pulled back the curtains this morning at 5.30am to see hot air balloons floating by - so Leader Linda and I went up on to the deck to take photos. It was rather chilly up there - and because our room is air-conditioned I was expecting it to be warm outside and had just thrown my gelabaya on over top of my nightie- aha big mistake . The balloon ride had been an optional extra, but at $125 US we gave it a miss. I wasn't too worried as I did a balloon ride ...

You must be joking - 2.30am wake-up call. We have to be across the river by 3.00am to meet Mervat and our drivers for the long drive to Abu Simbel. We stumble out of bed, and down the elevator, collect our breakfast parcels from reception, down the long drive to the boat, and make it across on time to find them waiting for us. We drive to a meeting point were all the tourists are taken in a convoy with police guard to the site. We were expecting to ge...

Time to chill out and relax this afternoon before heading across the water to visit the Nubian Museum. We decided we would walk as Leader Linda said it was about a ten minute walk. Well she can obviously walk faster than us because it took a lot longer than that, and by the time we wandered around the museum for a couple of hours, my feet were killing me. But what an amazing museum. We spent a long time in the part of the museum dedicated to the relo...