Day 12: Cairo, Egypt

Sheraton Cairo Hotel & Casino

3 January 2026

We had booked a private tour of the newly-opened Grand Egyptian Museum for today. We are going to the Museum with our Viking tour, but they only allow you a few hours and we want to have more time than that to see the largest museum in the world.

We were collected at 9am from the hotel by a driver, and then we picked up our very young, very enthusiastic tour guide Mohamed, along the way. His whole family are tour guides speaking a vast array of languages and so he was full of information and anecdotes. 

His English was very good, but he spoke very fast and it was sometimes difficult to follow everything he said. He was also full of lots of the more sensational stories (about poisoned flowers in Tutankhamun's tomb that killed all the workers, Tutankhamun being assassinated by Queen Nefertiti, a 3 tonne shrine disappearing overnight etc.). I preferred it when he stuck to actual historical facts.

The drive to the Museum took about 30 minutes through the terrible Cairo traffic. We saw horse-drawn wagons packed with vegetables, donkey carts, minivans, buses, cars and the ubiquitous motorbikes. Apparently here they offer an Uber Bike service, so you can order a motorbike through Uber and be taken wherever you want to go for a very cheap price - as long as you are happy to risk your life on the roads.

On the drive, we turned a corner and suddenly the pyramids came into view. They were amazing - absolutely enormous! I had never appreciated their actual size but seeing them compared to Cairo buildings made you realise how big they are. (I'm glad we were impressed. The pyramids are something you want to be impressed by!)

The Museum was also amazing. It's been 10 years in the construction and only officially opened last November. All the artefacts from Tutankhamun's tomb are on display here - all 5,400 of them. It was also designed so that you get a perfect view of the pyramids from the gallery windows.

There were quite a lot of people there, but it is so large a building that they spread out quite quickly. You are met in the entrance foyer by a 32 foot statue of Rameses the Great. It was housed for many years in a square at the main railway station but was moved to the Museum several years ago and the building constructed around it. Apparently, it was transported by a specially built lorry, because of its enormous weight and height (being built of solid granite and weighing in at 83 tons), which travelled very very slowly through the streets of Cairo in the middle of the night. Millions of people came out to see it pass by and stood in silence as a mark of respect. Quite moving!

The Museum is an amazing space, with a magnificent grand staircase, enormous windows and more Egyptian artefacts than you could ever hope to see in a lifetime. There were also more tour groups than you could possibly imagine, speaking every conceivable language. 

Some highlights were the actual liver of Queen Hatshepsut, which they were able to analyse and determine that she died of cancer while also having diabetes, the mummified crocodiles and ibises, the Tutankhamun death mask and series of absolutely unbelievably enormous coffins and shrines, the life-like statue of the scribe Metri, the mummies and so much more!

I was also rather fond of this sweet sphinx here. Apparently, there are lots of sphinxes all over Egypt - not just 'the Sphinx'. 

After a 2 hour tour around the Museum, Mohamed gave us an hour to ourselves, which was good, before taking us to a restaurant for lunch. I think he thought he needed to give us bland American food, because we had chicken, chips, rice and salad. (Not the lovely Egyptian meal we were hoping for.)

The restaurant was in a part of town that was obviously a bit poorer, because there were street dogs wandering up and down, ordinary people wandering about, cars parked everywhere and lots of noise and activity. Our driver just double parked for the entire time we were eating, but I notice he stayed with his car. Probably he didn't trust the locals!

After lunch, we came back to the hotel for a leisurely afternoon before having a light dinner in the Club on the 26th floor - a buffet which is included in the price of our room.

Tomorrow, we visit the pyramids!