Three cities, three different Egypts, six days. Our 6 day Cairo, Alexandria and Luxor tour puts the Giza pyramids, the Greco-Roman Mediterranean and the temples of ancient Thebes into a single week without a wasted morning. It runs privately throughout — your own Egyptologist guide, your own driver, your own vehicle — and the domestic flights between Cairo and Luxor are included in the price.
You begin in Cairo with the Great Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx, then the Grand Egyptian Museum and its Tutankhamun galleries. Day three runs north to the coast: the Catacombs of Kom El-Shoqafa, the granite column raised for Diocletian that the Crusaders misnamed Pompey’s Pillar, the Citadel of Qaitbay standing on the foundations of the ancient lighthouse, and the modern Library of Alexandria.
Then south by air. Luxor gives you Karnak and Luxor Temple on the first afternoon, and the west bank the following morning — the Valley of the Kings, Hatshepsut’s terraced temple at Deir el-Bahari, and the Colossi of Memnon. Your final day returns to Cairo’s other histories: the Citadel of Saladin, the Coptic quarter, and Khan el-Khalili.
Most operators sell this Cairo, Luxor and Alexandria route as a small group departure. This one does not. Every itinerary we run is designed by a working Egyptologist and guided by licensed Egyptologists, which on a six-day trip across three cities is the difference between a schedule that works and one that only looks good written down.
Our representative meets you inside the arrivals terminal at Cairo International Airport, holding an Egypt Best Vacations signboard, and assists you through passport and visa formalities. From there it is a private transfer to your hotel, with the rest of the day free to rest or explore at your own pace.
Meals Plan: No Meals Included
Your guide collects you from the hotel for the first full day of sightseeing. You begin on the Giza plateau at the Great Pyramids, built for Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure across roughly eighty years of the Fourth Dynasty, and at the Sphinx, carved from a single outcrop of limestone left in the quarry that supplied the pyramids.
Lunch is at a local restaurant. The afternoon is at the Grand Egyptian Museum, the largest archaeological museum devoted to a single civilization, where the Tutankhamun galleries display the tomb’s contents together for the first time since Carter cleared it.
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
North to the coast this morning, about 220 kilometres and three hours by road. You start underground at the Catacombs of Kom El-Shoqafa, cut three storeys into the rock in the second century AD. It began as a private family tomb and grew into a public cemetery of more than three hundred burials. What makes it worth the descent is the decoration: Egyptian gods carved wearing Roman armour, Anubis in a legionary’s uniform, two religions arguing on the same wall.
A short drive away stands Pompey’s Pillar, a single granite column almost twenty-seven metres tall. It has nothing to do with Pompey. It was raised for the emperor Diocletian around 298 AD, and Crusaders assumed the general was buried beneath it. It marks the site of the Serapeum, the great temple of Serapis.
Then the Citadel of Qaitbay, built by Sultan al-Ashraf Qaitbay in 1477 on the foundations of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, using stone that had fallen from it. You finish at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the modern successor to the ancient library, before lunch at a local restaurant and the drive back to Cairo.
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
Transfer to Cairo Airport for the short flight south to Luxor, where your guide meets you in the arrivals hall.
You go straight to Karnak, the largest religious complex ever built, covering around a hundred hectares. It was the chief sanctuary of Amun and grew for roughly two thousand years as each pharaoh added to what came before. The hypostyle hall alone holds 134 columns, the tallest of them nearly twenty-three metres.
From there to Luxor Temple, built mainly by Amenhotep III and Ramesses II and dedicated to the rejuvenation of kingship. During the Opet festival the statue of Amun travelled here from Karnak along the Avenue of Sphinxes that has now been excavated along its full length.
Transfer to your hotel for a free evening in Luxor.
Meals Plan: Breakfast Only
Cross to the west bank this morning. In the Valley of the Kings the New Kingdom pharaohs abandoned pyramids and cut their tombs deep into the rock beneath el-Qurn, the natural pyramid-shaped peak that dominates the valley. Sixty-five tombs are numbered; your standard ticket admits you to three, and your guide will pick the best three open on the day rather than the busiest.
Next is the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, three colonnaded terraces set against the cliff. Hatshepsut ruled as senior co-ruler alongside her stepson Thutmose III for around two decades, and the reliefs here record the expedition she sent to Punt.
Your sightseeing ends at the Colossi of Memnon, two quartzite statues of Amenhotep III and almost all that is readily visible of what was once the largest mortuary temple on the west bank.
Then to Luxor Airport for the flight back to Cairo and transfer to your hotel.
Optional tour: Sunrise Hot Air Ballooning over Luxor
Meals Plan: Breakfast Only
After breakfast and checkout your luggage travels with you in the private vehicle, so the last day is a full one rather than a wait in a lobby.
You start at the Citadel of Saladin, begun in 1176 to fortify Cairo against the Crusaders and held by every ruler of Egypt for the next seven hundred years. Its dominant building is the Alabaster Mosque of Muhammad Ali, built between 1830 and 1848 and faced in the Egyptian alabaster that gives it its name.
Then down to Coptic Cairo: the Hanging Church, suspended over a Roman gatehouse and named for it; Abu Serga, the Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, where tradition holds the Holy Family sheltered in the crypt below; and the Ben Ezra Synagogue, where the Cairo Geniza preserved nearly a thousand years of manuscripts that rewrote what we know of medieval Mediterranean life.
You finish in the lanes of Khan el-Khalili, trading since the fourteenth century, before your transfer to Cairo Airport.
Meals Plan: Breakfast Only
