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 hot air balloon ride over Luxor takes off just as the sky begins doing its best impression of a watercolour painting — pinks and oranges bleeding into each other over the Valley of the Kings, hundreds of feet below you. It’s consistently ranked as one of the most magical ways to take in the…
Watching an opera was not on the itinerary when we first sat down to plan this trip. We were there for temples, tombs, and questionable local taxis, not evening wear. But somewhere in the middle of the planning chaos, I stumbled across a TripAdvisor post announcing that Opera Aida was making a comeback to Luxor,…
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…
Our original plan had been very sensible and very boring: see Luxor Temple only after we’d checked out of the cruise the next day. But sensible plans have a way of falling apart the moment Hassan gets involved. We were at Edfu Temple that morning when Hassan — our guide for this leg of the…
A Nile cruise in Egypt has always been on my bucket list, ever since I grew up devouring Agatha Christie novels and imagining myself gliding past temples in a linen dress, solving crimes optional. So naturally, when I sat down to plan this itinerary, the Nile cruise went straight to the top of the list….
