10 Day Egypt Tour: Siwa Oasis, Abydos & the Nile

The plateau comes first, early, while the light is still flat and the coaches are still in the city. After the three pyramids and the Sphinx the day turns north to Abu Rawash, which almost nobody visits. Djedefre built there instead of at Giza, on higher ground, and what survives is a quarried out base and a deep passage cut down into the rock. Stone was carried away from it for centuries, so the ruin records what happened afterwards as much as what was built. From the top you can see the Giza pyramids on the horizon, which is the whole argument for the detour.

Coptic Cairo sits inside the walls of a Roman fortress. The churches were built on top of it rather than beside it. The Hanging Church is suspended over a gatehouse, and a glass panel in the floor lets you see the drop. Ben Ezra Synagogue is a short walk from it, and three faiths sharing one small quarter is the point of the morning. The afternoon goes to the Egyptian Museum on Tahrir, which still holds the bulk of the collection even after the Tutankhamun material moved out to Giza. It is crowded and unevenly labelled and still better than almost any museum anywhere, and a guide is the difference between a good afternoon and a tiring one.

Today is a road day and nothing else. Siwa is roughly ten hours from Cairo by car and there is no civil airport, so this is the only way in. The route runs up to the coast at Marsa Matruh and then turns south into the desert, and the second half is emptier than the first. There are stops for food and for standing up, and because the car is yours they happen when you want them rather than on a schedule. You arrive in the evening, tired, and see nothing today. A day like this is what Siwa costs, and it is better said before you book than after.

The Temple of the Oracle stands on the rock at Aghurmi, above the palm groves. Alexander came here to be told he was the son of Amun, and whatever he was told was never written down; the ruins themselves are modest, and the position is the reason to climb up to them. Shali follows, the old town built from salt and mud, which partly dissolved when the rain came hard enough, and seeing a dissolved building still standing is a strange half hour. The spring, stone lined and fed from below, is where the day finishes, and swimming in it is an ordinary thing to do rather than an arrangement anyone has to make.

The Great Sand Sea starts a short drive from the town and runs west into Libya. You go in by four wheel drive with a local driver, because the dunes move and the route is read rather than mapped. There are fossil beds out there from when all of this was seabed, and the shells lie on the surface where the wind has stripped the sand off them. The salt lakes on the way back are the colour they are because of what is dissolved in them, and they are shallow enough to stand in. Sunset in the dunes is the reason people come to Siwa and then stay longer than they planned.

The same ten hours, in reverse. You leave early so the long middle stretch is behind you before the afternoon, and the desert looks different heading east, which is a small mercy but a real one. Lunch is on the coast at Marsa Matruh, and after that the road fills up as you come back down into the delta. You check in at the Four Seasons in Cairo and the evening is deliberately empty, because tomorrow starts with a flight.

Karnak was built and rebuilt over roughly two thousand years. No single pharaoh is responsible for what you walk through. The hypostyle hall is the part everyone remembers, its columns carrying a roof that is mostly gone, and it is worth arriving before the hall fills up and the scale stops registering. Luxor Temple is better at the end of the day, when the lights come on and the avenue of sphinxes running north out of it is picked out. The two temples were joined by that avenue, and now that it has been cleared along its whole length the connection between them is something you can see rather than be told. A private guide earns their place here more than anywhere else on this trip, because Karnak without one is a very large pile of stone.

This is a long day by road and it earns itself. Abydos is about three hours north of Luxor, and the temple Seti I built there holds the finest raised relief carving in Egypt, with pigment still on it in places. The king list cut into one wall names his predecessors in order, with the ones he preferred to forget left out of it. Dendera comes on the way back, and its cleaned ceiling is the other half of the reason anyone makes this drive. You return to Luxor for an evening flight to Cairo, which is the right way round: the driving happens in daylight and the moving happens after dark.

There is no itinerary today beyond the one you make. Cairo rewards a slow morning if your flight allows it, and the transfer is built around the time you actually need to leave rather than a default check out. The same assistance meets you at the terminal and takes you through. Ten days that included twenty hours in a car is an unusual shape for a trip, and it is the only shape in which Siwa and Karnak fit into the same fortnight.