Egypt Best Vacations’ private Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsut Temple tour covers Luxor’s West Bank in 4–6 hours, from $55 per person, with hotel or Nile cruise ship pickup, all entrance fees, and a licensed Egyptologist guide. Three royal tombs cut deep into the limestone of the Valley of the Kings, the rising terraces of Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahari, and the two weathered giants of the Colossi of Memnon — the essential Theban morning, run entirely privately.
This is our home ground. Egypt Best Vacations is based in Luxor, which means your guide is a working Egyptologist who knows which tombs are open this week, which three are worth your tickets, and how to reach the valley before the coach groups arrive. As a TripAdvisor Travelers’ Choice Award winner for 2024, 2025 and 2026, we run the morning at your pace, in your own air-conditioned vehicle. Want to see the West Bank from the air first? Pair this tour with a sunrise hot air balloon flight, or browse all our Luxor day tours.
8:00 AM: Your Egyptologist meets you in your hotel lobby in Luxor, or at your Nile cruise ship’s gangway, and you cross to the West Bank. From May to September we recommend starting at 6:00 or 7:00 AM instead — the valley holds heat like an oven by mid-morning, and the earlier light is better for photographs.
8:30 AM – 10:30 AM — The Valley of the Kings: More than sixty tombs lie beneath this dry, sun-struck wadi, cut into the rock for the pharaohs of the New Kingdom over roughly five centuries. Your standard ticket admits you to three tombs from those open on the day; the rotation changes for conservation, and your guide will pick the three that repay your time — usually a long, steeply descending corridor tomb with its full painted program intact, and one where the ceiling still carries its field of golden stars on deep blue. Inside, your Egyptologist reads the walls with you: the sun god’s night journey through the twelve hours of darkness, the weighing of the heart, the texts that were never meant for living eyes. Ask about the pigments — the blues and greens here are ground mineral, not dye, which is why 3,000 years underground has barely touched them.
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM — The Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari: Nothing else in Egypt looks like this. Three colonnaded terraces rise straight out of the cliff face at Deir el-Bahari, so precisely matched to the rock behind them that the building seems to have grown there rather than been built. Hatshepsut ruled first as regent for her young stepson Thutmose III and then took the full titulary of a pharaoh, and her temple argues her case in stone. On the second terrace your guide walks you through the reliefs: her divine conception by the god Amun, and the famous expedition to the land of Punt, somewhere on the southern Red Sea coast, with its cargo of incense trees, ebony and live baboons. Look for the Osiride statues on the upper terrace — and for the places where Thutmose III’s workmen later chiselled her name away, which tells you as much as the reliefs do.
12:15 PM – 12:45 PM — The Colossi of Memnon: Two quartzite giants, close to eighteen metres tall, sitting alone beside the road. They are Amenhotep III, and they once flanked the gateway of his mortuary temple — the largest temple ever raised in Thebes, bigger than Karnak, and almost entirely gone. An earthquake brought it down, and the northern colossus began to sound at dawn: a faint ringing note that drew Greek and Roman tourists for two centuries and left graffiti on the legs. A Roman repair silenced it around 199 AD. Behind the statues, the ongoing excavation at Kom el-Hettan has re-erected further colossi from the temple’s buried ruins, and the site is far more than the photo stop most itineraries make of it.
1:00 PM: Your Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsut Temple tour ends with a comfortable drive back to your Luxor hotel or cruise ship.
