Karnak's hypostyle hall
One hundred and thirty-four columns, each one a forest trunk in stone — walk it before the tour buses arrive.
Port of call I
Luxor
Where the journey begins.
Day 1 · Collected from your hotelOn the four-night journey
0 kmFrom Luxor
Half day ashoreTime ashore
Early morningWhen we visit
Karnak Temple · Valley of the Kings · Hatshepsut Temple · Luxor Temple at dusk
Ancient Thebes — the greatest open-air museum on earth. Before we cast off, a morning among the colossi of Karnak and the painted tombs of the West Bank sets the scale of everything the river will show you.
What you'll see
Worth the mooring.
The Valley of the Kings
Painted burial chambers whose colours have not faded in three thousand years.
Hatshepsut's terraces
The mortuary temple of Egypt's great female pharaoh, set against a wall of golden cliff.
Thebes, and what the New Kingdom left behind.
For five hundred years Luxor was Thebes, and Thebes was Egypt. The capital of the New Kingdom sat on both banks: the living on the east, where the sun rose over Karnak and the Luxor temple, and the dead on the west, where the kings cut their tombs into a valley chosen because a natural pyramid of rock stands above it. That division is not a metaphor the guidebooks invented. It is how the city was planned.
Karnak was built, demolished and rebuilt by about thirty pharaohs across two thousand years, which is why nothing about it is consistent and everything about it is enormous. The hypostyle hall alone holds one hundred and thirty-four columns; the tallest are twenty-one metres and were once painted. Walking it is less like visiting a building than standing in a stone forest that someone has carved from floor to capital.
A short way south, the Luxor temple was joined to Karnak by an avenue of sphinxes nearly three kilometres long — now largely excavated, so you can see where the processions ran. The temple was later a Roman fort, then a church, then a mosque, which still stands inside the courtyard, its door opening several metres above the ancient floor level because the sand had risen that far before anyone dug it out.
Across the river, the Valley of the Kings holds sixty-three tombs. Not all are open on any given day — the rotation protects the paint — but the ones that are open are the reason the colour on a three-thousand-year-old ceiling still reads as blue. Nearby, Hatshepsut built her mortuary temple into the cliff at Deir el-Bahari in three terraces, a building so modern in line that it looks misplaced by millennia.
In pictures
Luxor, as we find it.
Before you go ashore at Luxor.
- How long ashore
- A full day on the west bank for the tombs and Hatshepsut, and a separate morning for Karnak. The four-night journey takes one of the two; the longer journeys take both.
- The walking
- The Valley of the Kings is level but open and bright, with a short climb into each tomb and steps inside. Karnak is flat and long — roughly a kilometre of walking if you see all of it.
- Shade
- Little, in either place. Hats and water matter more here than anywhere else on the river.
- Photography
- No flash in the tombs, and some require a separate ticket to photograph at all. Everywhere else is open.
- When we go
- Early. The west bank is at its coolest and emptiest before nine, and the colour in the tombs is better without a crowd in the corridor.
- Worth adding
- A balloon over the west bank at dawn, which lifts before the tombs open and lands in time for them.
How the Nile Spirit visits
We meet you in Luxor, tour the West Bank with your Egyptologist in the cool of the morning, and board the Nile Spirit at Esna in the early afternoon — the crowds behind you, the river ahead.