This private 4 day Cairo and Fayoum luxury tour pairs the Giza Pyramids and the Grand Egyptian Museum with a day among 40-million-year-old whale skeletons at Wadi El-Hitan, all from a 5-star base in Cairo with your own Egyptologist guide, driver and vehicle.
Fayoum lies about 100 km southwest of Cairo. It is Egypt’s oldest oasis, watered since pharaonic times by the Bahr Yusuf canal from the Nile, and its desert edge hides one of the most important fossil sites on earth. Wadi El-Hitan, the Valley of the Whales, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005 for its late-Eocene skeletons of Basilosaurus and Dorudon, early whales that still carried small hind limbs, the clearest evidence anywhere of how whales moved from land to sea. Nearby, the Magic Lake in the Wadi El-Rayan protectorate shifts color through the day as light and mineral content change.
The Cairo days are just as strong. You stand before the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure and the Great Sphinx, then spend the afternoon in the Grand Egyptian Museum, where the complete Tutankhamun collection of more than 5,000 objects is displayed together for the first time. On the final morning you climb to the Citadel of Saladin, founded in 1176, visit the Alabaster Mosque of Muhammad Ali, and walk through Coptic Cairo to the Hanging Church and the Church of Abu Serga.
You choose between two levels of 5-star hotel in Cairo, and every transfer, tour and meal is private, so the pace is yours. Book your 4 day Cairo and Fayoum luxury tour with Egypt Best Vacations, or ask us to adjust it.
Your Egypt Best Vacations representative meets you inside the arrivals terminal at Cairo International Airport with a signboard and helps you through visa and passport formalities. A private vehicle takes you to your 5-star hotel, where your 4 day Cairo and Fayoum luxury tour begins. Dinner is served at the hotel.
Meals Plan: Dinner Only
Your private Egyptologist guide collects you after breakfast for the Giza Plateau. The Great Pyramid of Khufu, at 146 m when complete, was the tallest structure on earth for nearly 4,000 years; beside it stand the pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure and the Great Sphinx, carved from the bedrock of the plateau itself. Your guide explains how the Fourth Dynasty quarried, moved and set the blocks, and what the pyramids were for.
After lunch at a local restaurant you continue to the Grand Egyptian Museum. Climb the Grand Staircase past colossal royal statues to the galleries, where more than 5,000 objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb are shown together for the first time since their discovery in 1922. Return to your hotel for dinner.
Meals Plan: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
Leave Cairo early for the two-hour drive to Fayoum and on into the Wadi El-Rayan protectorate, switching to a 4×4 for the desert track to Wadi El-Hitan. A marked walking trail leads between skeletons of Basilosaurus isis, up to 18 m long, and the smaller Dorudon, lying where they settled on the floor of the Tethys Sea some 37 to 40 million years ago. The on-site Fossils and Climate Change Museum sets the finds in context. After lunch at a local restaurant, continue to the Magic Lake, whose colours shift with the sun and the minerals in the water, before the drive back to Cairo. Dinner is at your hotel.
Meals Plan: Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
