الأقصر

Luxor is the world's greatest open-air museum, built where ancient Thebes once split its life across the Nile: grand temples for the living on the East Bank, and a honeycomb of royal tombs cut into the hills of the West Bank for the dead.

Spend your days among the towering columns of Karnak and floodlit Luxor Temple, then cross the river to the Valley of the Kings, the terraced temple of Hatshepsut and the Colossi of Memnon. At dawn, hot-air balloons drift over sugarcane fields and desert cliffs, and by evening the Nile turns to copper under the feluccas.

Give Luxor at least two full days — the concentration of monuments here is unmatched anywhere in Egypt.