Personal Views

Prior to this holiday I had read about all sorts of nasty things happening in Luxor so was very wary about walking about as normal and for the first few nights kept a good hold of my handbag and kept my camera out of sight.  However, after that, although I did still keep an extra tight hold of my handbag, I took my camera out with me to take some photos of the fascinating streets that are just teeming with local people and found no problem at all.  You need to bear in mind though, that this was in the local back streets and not in the more 'touristy' areas.

One thing I didn't like too much was the large amount of motor cycles speeding around with no obvious respect for anyone walking on the road - and that's where everyone walks, including the locals and their children!  They sometimes also had two or three or more people on them, and some were showing off doing 'wheelies' and suchlike.  I didn't see this myself, but our friend saw a driver of a motor cycle change seats with his pillion passenger on the move!!  At the head of one wedding parade we saw a number of motor cycles 'escorting' the cars, then they stopped, made a circle and one chap started whizzing his motor cycle round and round in circles, with the engine still running, surrounded by locals.  It was quite scary as I thought it would only take one little slip and that motor cycle was going to crash into the crowd - as it happened, he did make a slip but the bike crashed into another bike and didn't injure anyone.  On a few nights however, a few days into the holiday, we did notice a larger Police presence, some on motor cycles themselves, and there was a new tow-truck on show.  On those nights, there was a marked difference in the amount of motor cycles being used in the streets. One of the locals did tell us that the hospital has had to cope with a large increase in the number of people being injured in motor cycle related accidents.

I did not see or hear of any thefts of handbags by motor cyclists during my stay.  I did however overhear a conversation between a tourist and a local felucca captain stating that someone had tried to pickpocket him near Luxor Temple.

I did find that the vendors, some of the children and some guardians were a little more persistent than on previous visits and it was a bit more difficult to get them to take 'no' for an answer.  I saw many under-nourished horses - more than on previous visits.  I found that the local cafes seemed to be short of supplies and only went out for them when they had customers to serve, which made service a lot slower than normal and some of the food was not really up to usual standards.  I did not walk anywhere on my own but on one short distance where I did, I was shouted at and laughed at by local youths but, of course, I had no idea what they were saying, so just ignored them and kept on walking, but I have never experienced that kind of attitude in the past.  We were chased along Medina Street one night by a youth wanting money but, when he saw nothing was forthcoming, he soon left us alone.

On the whole, I got the impression that the local people were pleased to see us, and things weren't really that much different from previous years.

And, lastly, we were all quite careful handling money and used the wet wipes and anti-bacterial spray lots, but there were one or two occasions where 'Antinal' was called for!!  The tummy upsets weren't too severe, but as we had lots of trips arranged, I did use a few tablets to make sure I wasn't going to be troubled while on my trips, particularly up in the balloon!!  These tablets are available at the local pharmacies and are cheap to buy.  You just need to be aware however that this is an antibiotic so you need to be careful if you are taking other medication that might react badly to it.  This is what the packaging and tablets look like