Two Kilometres of “No Thank You”: Walking to Karnak Temple

On our last morning with the cruise, we checked out just after breakfast, said our goodbyes to the crew who’d fed and entertained us for the past few days, and hauled our suitcases into a car Waleed had already arranged to take us to the Pavillon Winter Luxor — our home base for the next two nights in Luxor.

The weather was still pleasantly cool that morning, so once we’d dropped our bags in the room, we decided to walk to Karnak Temple rather than take a taxi. It was only 2.9km away, and there was a lovely pedestrian path right along the Nile Corniche, practically starting from our hotel’s front door. How hard could it be?

The Walk Nobody Warns You About

Reader, it was not a peaceful stroll. From more or less the moment we stepped onto the Corniche, we were a walking target: touts offering horse carriage rides, “official” guide services, ferry trips to the West Bank, you name it. Politely declining did nothing — most just followed up with a slightly louder version of the same offer, as if we simply hadn’t heard them the first time.

The best moment came about halfway there, when a man started yelling at us to stop walking, insisting the road ahead was closed and we needed to turn right immediately. There was, of course, no closure. The road he was so concerned about was the exact road that led straight to Karnak Temple. We can only assume “turn right” led conveniently past whatever shop, carriage, or cousin’s tour service he was actually trying to sell.

If you’re wondering whether this is still a thing in 2026: yes, very much so. This particular scam — a stranger insisting your route is blocked so they can redirect you toward their own service — remains one of the most commonly reported tricks around Luxor and Cairo’s tourist sites, along with fake “official guides” who latch on uninvited and then demand a tip, and horse carriage drivers who quote one price before you climb in and a much higher one once you try to get off. None of it is dangerous, just relentless.

A few tips if you’re planning to walk it yourself: verify any “closure” with your hotel before you believe it, since a genuine closure is something staff would already know about; treat any unsolicited approach — guide, carriage, ferry — as a sales pitch rather than a favour and just keep walking; and if you do want a carriage ride at some point, agree on the exact price out loud before you get in, not after. We found that simply not breaking stride and not making eye contact worked better than any verbal response. Consider yourselves fluent in “polite deafness” by the time you reach the entrance.

Karnak Temple

We made it through, all safe and sound, mostly by mentally checking out of every interaction the last stretch of the walk. At the entrance, we found the same row of sphinxes we’d seen at Luxor Temple — this stretch is part of the same Avenue of Sphinxes that once connected the two temples across nearly 3km. At the time of our visit it was still mid-restoration, but for anyone reading this now: the full avenue reopened to the public in November 2021, so you can actually walk the whole thing today, sphinxes lined up the entire way. We got there a couple of years too early for that particular treat.

Karnak was known to the ancient Egyptians as Ipet-isu, “the most select of places” — a fitting name for what is really a city of temples, built up over more than 2,000 years and dedicated to the Theban triad of Amun, Mut, and Khonsu.

It’s the largest religious building ever constructed, covering roughly 200 acres (about 1.5km by 0.8km), and served as a site of pilgrimage for nearly two millennia. The sacred enclosure of Amun alone spans sixty-one acres — big enough to hold ten average European cathedrals. The main temple at Karnak’s heart is so vast that St Peter’s, Milan Cathedral, and Notre Dame could all fit inside its walls with room to spare.

The Hypostyle Hall alone is a genuine wonder: at 54,000 square feet with 134 towering columns, it’s still the largest room of any religious building on Earth. Beyond the main sanctuary, the complex holds several smaller temples and a sacred lake measuring 423 by 252 feet, where the sacred barges of the Theban Triad once floated during the annual Opet Festival. The lake was ringed by storerooms, priests’ living quarters, and even an aviary for aquatic birds — this was less a single temple than an entire self-sufficient religious city.

Karnak hasn’t been preserved quite as completely as Luxor Temple — plenty of sections are still mid-reconstruction, with columns and statues in various states of repair — but that scale more than makes up for it. The site simply covers far more ground than Luxor Temple does.

If we could redo this part of the trip, we’d have hired a guide for Karnak specifically. We got lucky that Hassan, still technically off-duty from guiding us at Kom Ombo, Edfu, and Luxor Temple, gave us a few pointers on what to look out for before we went in. Without that, we’d have wandered through a genuinely enormous site with very little sense of what we were actually looking at — Karnak is not the kind of place that explains itself.

Lunch at Sofra Restaurant

We stayed a few hours at Karnak until hunger won, then grabbed one of the white taxis parked outside the temple to take us to Sofra Restaurant, a spot we’d found through TripAdvisor reviews. Fair warning at the time: most of these taxis were older cars with no air conditioning, which is a memorable way to experience a Luxor afternoon. If you’re doing this today, it’s worth checking whether Uber or Careem are running in Luxor before you flag down a street taxi — both now operate there with fixed, upfront pricing, which sidesteps both the haggling and the guesswork over whether your ride will have working AC.

Sofra turned out to be one of the best meals of the entire trip. It’s tucked into a beautifully restored 1930s Egyptian townhouse, all carved wooden furniture, low lighting, and cushioned seating that makes you forget you’re a ten-minute walk from a temple complex. The food is proper, unfussy Egyptian home cooking done well — think mezze platters loaded with hummus, baba ganoush and stuffed vegetables, slow-cooked tagens, and rich, spiced meatballs in tomato sauce, all meant to be shared around the table rather than plated individually per person. No alcohol on the menu, but the fresh juice selection more than makes up for it. After days of fairly standard cruise-boat buffet food, it felt like the first “real” meal of the trip, and we left already planning to come back before we left Luxor.

Back to the Hotel (Braving the Carriages Again)

Our hotel was less than a kilometre from the restaurant, so we decided to walk back — bracing ourselves for round two of horse carriage offers. Some drivers were fairly relaxed about a polite no. Others were considerably more persistent, trailing alongside us at a slow trot for a good stretch of the walk before giving up.

Back at the Pavillon, we collapsed for a few hours to recover before getting ready for the evening’s plan: a performance of Opera Aida, staged outdoors against the cliffs of Hatshepsut Temple. That one deserves its own post entirely, so I’ll save the details — chic outfits packed specifically for the occasion included — for next time.