Day 17: Cairo - Luxor, Egypt

Viking Amun Riverboat

8 January 2026

A big travel day today! We had to be up and packed by 5.15am and ready to leave for Cairo Airport by 5.45am. The trip from Cairo to Luxor, to meet with our boat, is a 7 hour drive - or a 1 hour flight, so we went by plane.

Getting 80 people to the airport and on a plane, without losing anyone or any baggage, was a feat. It was a small plane and was chartered by Viking - so everyone on board was a Viking guest. Pretty impressive!

We arrived in Luxor around 10am and were taken straight to Karnak Temple. What an amazing place! It's enormous and is full of obelisks, statues and columns of enormous height, all made from blocks of solid granite. It's almost impossible to comprehend how they actually made these objects and manoeuvred them into place. 

The main hypostyle hall has 150 massive columns which are all covered with images and hieroglyphs and would have been brightly painted. Rameses the Great has over 20 colossal statues of himself scattered about and everything is on an enormous scale. Out front, there is an avenue of ram's headed sphinxes greeting visitors. Just a wonderful place.

After the Temple, we were taken to the boat, given 10 minutes to unpack and then directed to the dining room for lunch. Our room is a suite (not the biggest on the boat, but pretty nice all the same.) We have a balcony looking out on the Nile, a bedroom, a walk-in robe, a nice bathroom and a lounge/study. There are also lots of books on the shelf - all brand new as the boat was only commissioned in November last year. Most of the books are about Egypt or other ancient history, so they are right up my alley.

Lunch was very nice. It's an a la carte menu - small, but of good quality. We shared a table with a few other people (all American) and had some nice conversations. The group are 90% American, 9% Australian and there is one poor woman from the UK. She must feel like quite an outsider!

For lunch, I had roast tomato soup and fish & chips, with a glass of wine. All very nice.

We were allowed to relax after lunch and so I unpacked everything. There's a lot of storage space and enough coat hangers in the cupboard for me, so I was very pleased. 

At 5.30pm, we were taken to nearby Luxor Temple. I was a bit dubious about yet another temple, but this was absolutely amazing. It was dark by the time we arrived and all the statues and columns were floodlit. Incredible! Again, there were hundreds of massive columns and statues and we were given a tour and then allowed to wander around for half an hour by ourselves. The site was very busy, with lots of other tourists also gaping at everything, but there was plenty of room to spread out.

This temple is joined to Karnak Temple by an avenue of 6,000 sphinx statues covering a distance of 3km. Everything they do in Egypt is on a colossal scale! Apparently, once a year, the ancient Egyptians would carry the solid gold statue of the god Amun-Re from Karnak Temple, up this sphinx avenue, to spend time with the statue of his wife, the goddess Mut at Luxor Temple. After 23 days, they would carry him back. This sphinx avenue was covered by houses up until about 10 years ago, until there was a massive project to pull down the buildings and uncover the sphinxes and restore them to their original grandeur. Such a wonderful project. It's so impressive.

After this, we were brought back to have dinner on the boat. They had opened a second restaurant for dinner and so the diners were spread out over two eateries and we didn't have to share a table, which is nice sometimes. 

I had stuffed figs (delicious), gnocchi with winter vegetables (a bit odd) and apple crumble (very good). Jim had seafood bisque and veal tenderloin with potato croquettes. He said his were all good too. 

A good first day on board (even though we haven't sailed anywhere yet).