The West Bank in One (Exhausting, Wonderful) Day

We’d assumed our West Bank tour would start straight from the balloon field, still riding the high of watching the sunrise from 500 metres up. Instead, we were driven back to the hotel first, where our guide for the day would collect us properly. Egypt has a way of gently correcting your assumptions about how a day is going to go.

Our guide was Shima, a lively, cheerful woman who talked us through the history of the Valley of the Kings the entire drive over. If I’m being honest, a small part of us was quietly hoping for Hassan again — he’d spoiled us over the previous few days — but guide assignments aren’t really up for negotiation, and Shima turned out to be an excellent storyteller in her own right.

Valley of the Kings

The Valley of the Kings doesn’t photograph the way Giza or Abu Simbel does. From the outside, it genuinely just looks like a stretch of dusty rock and sand in a shadeless desert — there’s no single iconic silhouette to snap and caption. What’s actually there, though, more than makes up for the unglamorous exterior, and its profile shot up considerably worldwide after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922.

The ticketing system here takes a bit of getting your head around. A standard ticket gets you into any three tombs from a rotating list — the authorities cycle which tombs are open to help preserve them, so what’s available on your visit is genuinely a bit of a lucky dip. There are 64 known tombs total, but only around 18 are ever open to the public, and never all at once. A handful of “premium” tombs — Tutankhamun’s among them — require a separate ticket on top. It’s worth noting for anyone reading this now that prices have climbed significantly since our visit thanks to currency shifts: the standard three-tomb ticket runs around 750 EGP today, and Tutankhamun’s tomb alone is now roughly 700 EGP extra, considerably more than the 250 EGP we paid at the time. And in genuinely exciting ongoing news, over 30 additional mummies were discovered in the Valley not long ago, with plans to eventually add them to what’s on display.

With limited time, we let Shima pick our three tombs for us, and she chose well:

Tomb of Ramesses III was our first stop and, of the three, had the most beautiful decoration by far. It’s a good reminder that the pyramids, for all their grandeur, had one fatal design flaw: they were basically giant, unmissable billboards announcing “treasure buried here,” which made them irresistible targets for grave robbers. Once the ancient Egyptians caught on, they switched strategy entirely — burying their kings in secret, unmarked tombs dug deep into the ground here in the Valley of the Kings, entrances buried under sand and rock, specifically so they’d never be found again. (History had other plans, obviously, but the intent was solid.)

Tomb of Merenptah belonged to a pharaoh who never quite got his due, despite being the son of Ramesses II himself. The problem, really, was timing: he was already around 60 by the time his father — and a full twelve older brothers — had died ahead of him, leaving him only about a decade on the throne before he died too. His tomb is long, with a genuinely steep descent, making it the toughest of the three we visited physically. But the payoff is architecture that’s noticeably more advanced than the other two tombs, and paintings that survive beautifully near the entrance before getting simpler and more rushed the deeper you go — a fairly poignant clue that the artists were racing the clock as the pharaoh’s health declined.

Tomb of Ramesses IX was the easiest of the three, with no steep descent to contend with — just colourful paintings covering the walls and ceiling the whole way down, with a short final staircase leading to the burial chamber itself. A nice, gentler note to end the tomb-hopping on.

Hatshepsut Temple, Revisited (Properly This Time)

After the tombs, Shima took us to the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut — a temple we’d technically already seen twice by this point, first as the surreal backdrop to Opera Aida the night before, then again from thin air during our balloon ride that same morning. Seeing it now, on foot, in full daylight, felt like finally meeting properly someone we’d only glimpsed from a distance.

Architecturally, Hatshepsut’s temple was genuinely ahead of its time: it’s the first Egyptian temple built across three distinct terraced levels, rising directly out of the cliffs of Deir el-Bahri in a way that makes the whole structure look almost carved from the mountain itself rather than built in front of it. The stone quality rivals what was used at Abu Simbel, carved straight from the surrounding rock face. If you’re visiting, don’t just admire the symmetry from the courtyard — walk the ramps up through all three levels, and look closely at the colonnades on the upper terraces, which once held vivid reliefs depicting Hatshepsut’s famous trading expedition to the Land of Punt, one of the earliest detailed records of Egyptian trade with the outside world. Much of the temple’s original decoration was deliberately destroyed after her death by successors keen to erase her from the record, so what’s survived is genuinely worth slowing down for.

What made the visit especially memorable, though, was Shima’s telling of the woman behind the temple.

Queen Hatshepsut could only claim the throne, as a woman, by first marrying her own half-brother, Thutmose II, at around age 12, after their father Thutmose I died. When Thutmose II himself died, she initially stepped in as regent for his infant son, Thutmose III — before eventually claiming full pharaonic power herself and ruling as co-regent from around 1473 BC.

As pharaoh, she expanded Egyptian trade rather than pursuing war, built extensively throughout Thebes, and oversaw her greatest legacy: this very temple at Deir el-Bahri, where she would eventually be buried. She’s depicted in many surviving images as male — deliberately, on her own orders — which is likely part of why she remained largely overlooked by scholars until the 19th century, despite being one of the most successful and famous female pharaohs in Egyptian history.

She surrounded herself with loyal figures in key government roles, including her chief minister Senenmut, whom some historians have speculated may also have been her lover — though the evidence for that remains thin. Her position as a female pharaoh was deeply controversial in her time, and she fought to legitimise it by pointing to her royal bloodline and insisting her father had chosen her as his successor. To reinforce the image, she dressed the part: the pharaoh’s headdress, a ceremonial false beard, the traditional kilt worn by male rulers — visually claiming both masculine and feminine authority at once, a genuinely striking piece of political branding for someone ruling more than 3,000 years ago.

Other West Bank Highlights

The Colossi of Memnon greet you on the way into the Valley of the Kings area — two enormous seated statues of Amenhotep III (1386–1353 BCE), each rising 60 feet and weighing around 720 tons, carved entirely from single blocks of sandstone. The throne each figure sits on is decorated with imagery of his mother, his wife, and the god Hapy. They were originally built as guardians for Amenhotep III’s mortuary temple complex, which once stretched out behind them — now almost entirely gone, lost to earthquakes, flooding, and centuries of later builders quarrying the site for their own construction materials. The two Colossi are essentially all that remains standing of what was once a massive complex.

Valley of the Queens, sadly, we had to skip entirely. It’s home to the tomb of Nefertari — the one whose statue we’d admired at Luxor Temple days earlier — widely considered the most beautifully preserved tomb in all of Egypt, but it comes at a serious price: at the time, entry cost around 1,200 EGP for a strictly limited ten-minute visit. Between running low on time and being thoroughly cooked by the heat, we made the call to let it go. Small update for anyone hoping to see it themselves: the tomb’s access has been genuinely unpredictable in recent years, closing periodically for conservation due to humidity damage, and its status seems to shift regularly, so it’s worth checking current availability specifically before you build it into your itinerary — don’t assume it’ll be open just because it was last season.

A genuinely useful tip regardless of what you visit here: bring a wide-brimmed hat or umbrella. There is no shade anywhere in this part of the West Bank, at all. Shima told us that when she’d worked here in August, the heat had literally melted the sole of her shoe. A small portable fan is also worth packing for the tomb interiors, which trade the outdoor heat for a different, stuffier kind of hot.

Lunch on a Felucca

We wrapped up the tour with a very late lunch aboard a felucca, drifting along the Nile under sail rather than motor — a proper change of pace after a morning spent scrambling in and out of tombs. Felucca lunches tend to be simple and unfussy by design: think grilled chicken or kofta, rice, a selection of Egyptian salads and dips, fresh bread, and usually something sweet to finish, all served picnic-style on cushions around a low central table while the captain quietly tacks the boat back and forth with the wind. There’s something genuinely restorative about eating slowly on the water after a morning of heat and history — easily one of the more underrated parts of a West Bank day.

After lunch came the customary souvenir shop stop — a fixture of pretty much every guided tour in Egypt, since guides typically get a commission for bringing groups through. To Shima’s credit, she wasn’t remotely pushy about it and left us entirely to browse or not as we liked. We did the polite loop, bought nothing life-changing, and headed back to the hotel to say our goodbyes.

Our Hotel in Luxor: Pavillon Winter Luxor

A quick word on where we stayed. We chose Pavillon Winter Luxor for its strong TripAdvisor reviews and, more than anything, its location — we wanted somewhere central, walkable to the temples, without paying historic-hotel prices. At the time, it functioned as the more affordable Accor-run sister property to the grand Sofitel Winter Palace next door, sharing the pool and gardens, with direct back-door access between the two. For the price, it genuinely felt like getting the Winter Palace experience at half the cost.

One update worth flagging for anyone planning a stay now rather than reminiscing about one, like me: both properties are currently transitioning under Mandarin Oriental management, with renovations underway and a planned reopening as Mandarin Oriental Winter Palace, Luxor. Whether the old shared-facilities arrangement between the two survives that transition in its current form is genuinely unclear, so if that setup is part of why you’re considering staying here, it’s worth confirming directly with the hotel before booking rather than assuming it’ll still work exactly the way it did for us.

Closing Thoughts on Egypt

And with that West Bank day, our entire Egypt trip came to a close. Looking back, it was a genuinely relentless itinerary — ten days, and we didn’t let ourselves skip a single thing on the list, hot air balloons and Verdi operas included. Exhausting, in the best possible way.

If you’re building something similar, my honest advice is to give yourself twelve days instead of ten. Spend one full unhurried day in Aswan rather than rushing through it, and if there’s any room in the budget, stay at least one night at the hotel where Agatha Christie herself wrote parts of Death on the Nile — yes, I’m that person, and I’m not even sorry. (For the record, that hotel — the Old Cataract in Aswan — is going through the exact same Mandarin Oriental transformation as our Luxor hotel, so if literary pilgrimage is on your list too, book sooner rather than later while the current version still exists.)

What struck me most, reflecting on it now, wasn’t any single temple or tomb — it was how much of this trip came together through flexibility rather than rigid planning. A guide’s casual mention of a schedule change gave us Luxor Temple at sunset. A TripAdvisor post we stumbled across gave us a once-in-22-years opera. None of it was in the original plan, and all of it ended up being the best part. If there’s one thing worth taking from ten days of temples, tombs, and questionable taxis, it’s that: build the skeleton of an itinerary, then leave enough room in it to say yes to the things you didn’t know to plan for.

Thank you for following along on this one. Egypt, it’s been a privilege.