6-Day Cairo, Alexandria & Luxor Tour with Pyramids and Valley of the Kings

A representative meets you at Cairo Airport, helps you through the arrival formalities and walks you to a private air-conditioned vehicle for the drive to your hotel. After check-in the rest of the day is yours.

Use it well, because the next four days are full. Cairo is a city of more than 20 million people, and the first evening is the right time to get your bearings without a schedule: a slow dinner, an early night, perhaps a look at the Nile from your hotel if it faces the river. Drink plenty of water, especially if you have flown in from a cold climate, since the dry air catches many visitors off guard.

Before bed, set out what you will need for Day 2: sunscreen, a hat, sunglasses, comfortable closed shoes and a little cash in small notes for tips, restrooms and any optional extras. No meals are included today.

After breakfast your representative collects you for the Giza Plateau on the western edge of the city. The pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure were built about 4,500 years ago as royal tombs, and the Great Pyramid alone contains more than two million blocks. Walk its base and you begin to grasp the scale; stand back on the plateau and you see how the three were aligned with remarkable precision.

Below them crouches the Sphinx, with a lion's body and a king's head, carved from the bedrock in front of Khafre's pyramid and generally thought to bear his face. Lunch follows at a local restaurant.

In the afternoon you continue to Saqqara, the great necropolis where the Step Pyramid of Djoser rises in six tiers. Built around 2670 BC, it is the oldest monumental stone building in Egypt and the experiment that led to Giza. Your last stop is Memphis, capital of the Old Kingdom, where the open-air museum displays a fallen colossus of Ramesses II and an alabaster sphinx among the palm trees. A private car then returns you to your hotel.

The day begins at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, which tells Egypt's story from its first farming villages to the present. The centerpiece is the Royal Mummies Hall, where kings and queens of the New Kingdom lie in climate-controlled cases in a deliberately hushed setting. Seeing the actual faces of rulers you have read about, Ramesses II among them, is more moving than most people expect, and the displays on embalming explain how they were preserved.

After lunch at a local restaurant you drive up to the Citadel, the fortress Saladin built in the 12th century, which served as the seat of Egypt's government for roughly 700 years. Inside its walls stands the Mosque of Mohamed Ali, raised in the 19th century in the Ottoman style, with slender pencil minarets, a vast domed prayer hall and walls faced in alabaster. Remove your shoes at the entrance and cover shoulders and knees.

You finish at Khan el-Khalili in historic Islamic Cairo, a maze of lanes selling lanterns, spices, silver, textiles and inlaid boxes. Haggling is expected and good-humored, so start low and smile. A private car takes you back to your hotel.

After breakfast you head north by private air-conditioned vehicle to Alexandria, the city Alexander the Great founded in 331 BC and the capital of the Ptolemies. The drive takes you out of the Nile Valley and across the desert toward the Mediterranean, and it usually runs to roughly three hours each way.

Your first stop is the Catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa, found by chance in 1900 and dating to the 2nd century AD. A spiral staircase leads down several levels to burial chambers where Egyptian gods wear Roman armor, the clearest example anywhere of the two cultures merging. Nearby stands Pompey's Pillar, a single shaft of red Aswan granite more than 25 meters high. Despite the name, it was raised for the Roman emperor Diocletian in the late 3rd century.

After lunch at a local restaurant you visit the Qaitbay Citadel, built in the 15th century on the site of the Pharos, the lighthouse counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Waves break against its walls, and the views across the Eastern Harbor are excellent. Last comes the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, opened in 2002 in tribute to the ancient library, with a tilted disc-shaped roof and an outer wall carved with letters from scripts around the world. You then return to your Cairo hotel by road.

After breakfast you transfer to the airport for a domestic flight to Luxor, ancient Thebes, where a representative meets you on arrival. The day starts on the East Bank at Karnak, the temple complex of the god Amun that successive pharaohs expanded over some 2,000 years. Its Great Hypostyle Hall holds 134 columns, many carved and still faintly painted, and walking among them is like moving through a stone forest.

From Karnak you go to Luxor Temple, built largely by Amenhotep III and Ramesses II. A towering pylon guards its entrance, and the Avenue of Sphinxes that once linked it to Karnak runs north from its gate. Lunch follows at a local restaurant.

In the afternoon you cross to the West Bank. In the Valley of the Kings you descend into rock-cut royal tombs whose walls are covered in scenes and texts meant to guide the king through the underworld; Tutankhamun's tomb is here too. You then visit the terraced Temple of Hatshepsut, built for one of Egypt's few female pharaohs, and stop at the Colossi of Memnon, two giant seated statues that are nearly all that remains of Amenhotep III's mortuary temple. In the evening you fly back to Cairo, where a representative meets you and takes you to your hotel.

Your last morning starts with breakfast at the hotel. After four days of early starts and long drives, enjoy it slowly, and use any free time before checkout to pack carefully, especially anything fragile you picked up at Khan el-Khalili, such as glass perfume bottles or brass lanterns, which travel best in your carry-on.

At the agreed time, a representative accompanies you in a private air-conditioned vehicle to the airport for your departure flight. Cairo's traffic can be unpredictable, so the pickup is planned with a comfortable margin for international check-in.

On the way out of the city, look for the pyramids on the western horizon if the air is clear. After Giza, Alexandria and Luxor, you leave with a much fuller picture of Egypt than most six-day visitors manage.