For a New Perspective on Luxor’s West Bank, Hop on a Bike

A coach rumbles previous and, for a fleeting second, I really feel a pang of envy for the air-conditioned cocoon its passengers are virtually definitely having fun with. Then I go searching. From behind tinted home windows, they’re lacking the road theatre taking part in out round us. “Cycling is the best way to really see Luxor,” Sayed Setouhy calls over his shoulder, his crown of cropped black curls silhouetted towards the solar. “You have the freedom to stop, take pictures and discover things that people in cars and coaches don’t.”

It’s morning in Luxor and town on the banks of the Nile is limbering up for the day. Gaggles of schoolchildren in matching uniforms chat on the roadside as a donkey cart clip-clops previous. Laundry flaps from balconies, whereas canines lie sprawled in scraps of shade, untroubled by the day’s gathering tempo.

I’m on Luxor’s West Bank, a stretch of farmland, village streets and historical monuments that’s good for exploring on two wheels. Many of its star points of interest lie surprisingly shut collectively, making it potential to pedal between tombs and on a regular basis life in a matter of minutes. Sayed, who skilled as a lawyer, now helps run his father’s bike-hire enterprise and leads rides via his residence metropolis.

With my cherry-red push bike, we pedal previous fields thick with banana timber till the Colossi of Memnon loom up forward. We brake earlier than them as Sayed explains what we’re taking a look at. “These are the gateway to the tombs,” he says, gesturing to the statues, “originally built to guard the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Amenhotep III.” It’s exhausting to think about now, however they as soon as marked the doorway to considered one of historical Egypt’s most lavish temple complexes, most of which has since been misplaced to the ravages of time. 

The statues depict seated kings, their once-proud faces weathered into little greater than flat smudges, nonetheless turned in the direction of the rising solar. We tip our heads again to absorb the hulking figures, every 18 metres excessive, now simply steps from the commotion of the street. Visitors have been gazing up at them for the reason that Greco-Roman interval.

The Colossi are merely a curtain-raiser for the West Bank’s riches: the Valley of the Kings, the place pharaohs have been buried in elaborately adorned tombs; the Tombs of the Nobles; Queen Hatshepsut’s dramatic temple, chiselled into cliffs that rise virtually vertically; and Deir el-Medina, the village of the artisans who adorned the royal tombs.

We cycle on, passing neighbourhood cafes gearing up for the noon rush, then go away our bikes outdoors Medinet Habu. This huge mortuary temple was constructed for Ramesses III and later enclosed inside a bigger walled advanced. “What I like about this place is that you can see how it kept changing,” Sayed says. “Instead of one temple frozen in time, it feels like you’re walking through several different temples in a single visit.” We step inside to absorb the towering gateway pylons and weathered reliefs, fragments of color nonetheless clinging to the stone in locations.

A number of streets away lies Old Qurna, an deserted village constructed immediately over historical burial grounds courting again 3,500 years. For a lot of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was additionally residence to households who constructed newer dwellings among the many ruins of Thebes. “People were living here up until the early 2000s,” Sayed remembers. “Then, as more tombs were discovered beneath the houses, residents were gradually relocated by the government to a new settlement.” Today, roofless rooms rise above gaping holes within the floor, the place the doorways to a handful of tombs are simply seen, just like the opened home windows of an Advent calendar.

We pedal nearer to the bottom of the mountain, which is honeycombed with tombs and dotted with cube-like homes. A workforce of round 10 archaeologists is sifting via the dust at an energetic dig metres from the roadside. Sayed shrugs. “New things are being discovered all the time here,” he says.