Luxor lacks Cairo's hectic pace, but expands on its ancient roots.

Today Toby & I visited the two primary religious sites for ancient Egyptians: The Karnak and Luxor Temples.

We reached Karnak via horse carriage, which is common here in Luxor. The temple there is said to be the largest religious structure ever built and honors the Sun God, Moon God, and War Goddess. It contains several separate smaller temples, and for hundreds of years Pharaohs would expand the space by adding other gateways and galleries. Both sites have been reconstructed from the disrepair and rubble born from thousands of years of flood, earthquakes and general neglect, but the impact of seeing these fetes of engineering (both ancient and, via restoration, modern) can leave you slack-jawed.

The Temples are separated by 3 kilometers, and the roadway between the two was lined on both sides with sphinxes, about 10 meters apart from one another. If you do the math, you can see that amounts to scads of sphinxes, and they have unearthed remnants of many of them. The plan is to restore this ancient roadway (sadly, by displacing many modern day Luxorites), reconnect the two temples, and make both into a large, open-air museum.

We visited the Luxor Temple after sunset, when electric lighting places the ruins in special relief. The tourist crowds distracted for a bit, but they subsided and allowed us some time to look upon these hieroglyphic-clad structures without the drone of voices ... well, except the calls to prayer.

Blog to you later!