Luxor and the Valley of the Kings

After the transit of the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea with Saudi Arabia on our starboard side and Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, and Egypt on our Port we arrived at Safaga, Egypt and headed out for our 13 hour journey to Luxor and the Valley of the Kings which turned out to be more like 14 hours and we made the ship wait past it's appointed time to leave. We traveled in a caravan of four buses all with stocked with a Tour Guide, and armed guard, and water with a spare bus following behind all day just in case one should break down in the middle of the desert. Egypt is a police state and that is very clear because of all the check points we drove through with mounted machine guns and police and army armed with guns. It becomes routine after a while but even bus stops have armed guards. Luxor is worth seeing and the Valley of the Kings we could not even take a camera into but was full of tombs and was spectacular. Each tomb you walked down and the hall was covered in Egyptian lettering and pictures but everything else was either stolen in the past or is in the museum in Cairo. We had a nice lunch in Luxor before being off to the the Valley of the Kings and the hotel was right on the Nile River. We all touched the Nile and it was a great river although there are hundreds of tourist boats sitting idle because Egypt has no more tourists because of the unrest. We were about the only group at the Valley of the Kings which is good for us but not for Egypt.