Luxor

We arrived in Luxor this morning on a flight from Cairo which was under an hour and going great... until they lost our bags! Feeling a bit stressed and very hot we negotiated (as always) a taxi to the Sheraton who then told us that without a taxi license or a flight to catch we wouldn't be allowed back to the airport to collect our bags! All very stressful but thankfully sorted and bags are with us this evening!

Luxor is beautiful and quite a change from Cairo. It's so much more green and the cars, although they beep their horns for something to do, are a *bit* quieter. This may also be because the number of donkey and cart greatly outnumbered the now BLUE and white taxis! Ours was being held together with cellotape and proudly had painted onto the side "air conditioning". This consisted of the driver giving me the handle (Which had fallen off the door) to attach to the screw to roll down my window!

The temperature is a good 5 degrees hotter here hitting 46 today in the afternoon and as its surrounded by desert the air is just so stifling. Fortunatley our hotel is really beautiful and right beside the nile. Literally you walk down a set of steps and you could put your toes in it! We didnt achieve much today what with the whole bag debacle but we made full use of the air conditioning and this evening took a felucca ride. Felucca is a wind powered sail boat used all down the nile between Luxor and Aswan mainly. We went out for an hour at sunset which was so beautiful. It really reminded us that we are on the continent of Africa, the sun was just so powerful. The Egyptian men sailing our boat must haev thought I was crazy the amount of pictures I took but I couldn't resist! They were lovely as well a father, who has saield feluccas to Sudan on the nile before and done it since he was a teen and his son who he is training. Their boat was called Baraka which means good luck in Arabic.

We hope to get out very early in the morning (as its so hot!) and go to either the Karnak and then the Luxor temple or the Valley of the Kings and then make use of another felucca or horse and cart around the town. Very glad we are here and very relaxing after the mania that was Cairo but we had a lovely evening there last night. We went for dinner with Sara and Andrew (a fellow irish man) in a restaurant called La Bodega. We hope to go back there too! I had shredded chicken in filo pastry with pomegranate and yoghurt sauce - no illness this far touch wood. We were very grateful for the evening and the company and strolled back to our room well after 1 in the morning!

Over and out

Susan and Leo x