After spending a few nights eating, drinking and racing down water slides at a resort in Hurghada it was time to move on to Luxor. Here came our first experience of the Egyptian scammers! Uber quoted us a very reasonable price to Luxor. However, all of the Uber drivers (who appeared to be the same man) then messaged with an inflated price. The taxi service in the hotel quoted an even higher price then gave an alternative of a local minibus. So we had no option but to go with the scammer Uber man. Hurghada is built for package holidays, not independent travellers like us! Anyway, we made it to Luxor just fine but feeling ripped off and we did enjoy the amazing barren desert drive.

Our Airbnb more than made up for the experience though after our driver getting lost and stuck down some dusty lanes in what felt like the ‘real’ Luxor we found our lovely villa with a swimming pool to ourselves. We enjoyed wandering the side streets and meeting the friendly local Egyptians, observing the differences in the way we live our lives. The girls were surprised to see children of all ages playing unsupervised out on the dusty streets until late into the night.

We stayed on the west side of the Nile and used the public ferry to cross to the east side (batting away over-enthusiastic private boat trip sellers on our way). As with everything in Egypt we paid significantly more than the locals for everything and then some, bartering is our new hobby.

Luxor is described as the world’s greatest open-air museum and you really can feel history coming alive. The east side of Luxor has the magnificent Karnak Temple, as made famous in ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. You can see more about our James Bond-esque experience here.

The heat put a stop to our next plan of visiting Luxor Temple and we instead saw it from the window of McDonalds – the most scenic view from a burger restaurant I have ever experienced!

The next day we rose before the sun to beat the crowds and the heat to visit the Valley of the Kings and Tutankhamun. Phoebe has written about our experience here. We then explored Hatshepsut temple, a magnificent structure rising from the cliffs opposite the city of Luxor. It is considered to be a masterpiece of ancient architecture.

Our original plan was to take a Nile cruise from Luxor to Aswan then a night train back up to Cairo. However, once we set foot on the west bank of Luxor we decided to stop here for longer and explore Luxor at our own slower pace and enjoy our villa. Catching the public ferry across he Nile and enjoying dinner at restaurants bordering the river gave us our Nile experience instead. The night train worked out to be far more expensive than we expected and it is cheaper to fly to Cairo so we are going with the cheaper route and fly to Cairo shortly for more Egyptian exploration and a city break.