Luxor

Karnak is not one temple but a whole sacred city, built, added to and rebuilt over more than 1,500 years by successive pharaohs, and its scale genuinely overwhelms. You enter down an avenue of ram-headed sphinxes and through a massive unfinished pylon into court after court, but nothing prepares you for the Great Hypostyle Hall: 134 stone columns crammed into a petrified forest, the central twelve rising some 21 metres with papyrus-bud capitals wide enough for dozens of people to stand on top. Sunlight slants between them onto carved and once-painted reliefs, and you feel genuinely tiny. Look for the pair of towering pink-granite obelisks of Hatshepsut, the sacred lake, and the atmospheric back precincts where few groups bother to walk. It rewards slow, unhurried wandering rather than a quick march-through. An evening sound-and-light show sends visitors through the lit halls with narrated history if you want to see it twice.

The burial ground of the New Kingdom pharaohs hides in a barren desert valley behind the Theban cliffs, chosen precisely because it looked like nowhere worth robbing. Over sixty tombs honeycomb the rock, with eight to ten open on any given day, rotated to limit wear. Your standard ticket covers three; the finest, Seti I with its complete painted decoration, and Tutankhamun, whose actual mummy still lies in his surprisingly small tomb, need separate tickets. Down long, sloping corridors the colour survives astonishingly well: the star-spangled ceilings and yellow-gold walls of Ramesses VI, the vivid scenes of Ramesses III, the sunken relief of Merenptah. A little electric train carries you from the visitor centre into the valley. Go as early as you can, it becomes a furnace by late morning, and buy the general photo ticket if you want to shoot inside. Choose depth over quantity: three great tombs beat ten quick ones.

Right in the centre of town on the Nile corniche, Luxor Temple is more intimate and coherent than Karnak, and best saved for after dark. The entrance pylon is flanked by giant seated statues of Ramesses II and a single pink-granite obelisk, its twin standing in Paris on the Place de la Concorde. Beyond lies the graceful colonnade of Amenhotep III, its papyrus columns among the most elegant in Egypt, leading to sun-drenched courts and inner sanctuaries. What makes the temple unusual is its layers: a medieval mosque, still in use, perches improbably halfway up one wall, and faded Roman and early-Christian paintings mark where it once served as a church, three thousand years of continuous worship on a single spot. The recently reopened Avenue of Sphinxes, a nearly three-kilometre processional road, again links it to Karnak. Come in the evening, when floodlights turn the columns gold and the crowds thin.

Set against a sheer amber cliff on the West Bank, Hatshepsut's mortuary temple is the most architecturally striking monument in Luxor, three broad colonnaded terraces linked by long ramps that look almost modern in their clean symmetry. Hatshepsut was one of very few women to rule Egypt as pharaoh, and she built on a scale to match any king; after her death her successor tried to erase her, chiselling out her image, which you can still see hacked from the walls. Climb the terraces to find the delicate reliefs: the famous trading expedition to the land of Punt with its laden ships and exotic goods, scenes of her divine birth, and the little Hathor chapel with cow-headed columns. The setting, pale colonnades glowing against red rock, is unforgettable, especially in early light. There is almost no shade, and the stone amphitheatre traps heat fiercely, so come at opening and carry water.

Two colossal quartzite figures, some eighteen metres tall and badly weathered, sit alone facing the sunrise on the road into the West Bank, and almost everyone stops for a photo. They are all that was long visible of the enormous mortuary temple of Amenhotep III, once the largest in Egypt, flattened by earthquake and quarried away over the centuries. Their real fame is a quirk: after an earthquake cracked the northern statue around 27 BC, it began emitting a strange musical note at dawn as the morning warmth expanded the stone. Greek and Roman tourists travelled here to hear the singing Colossus of Memnon and scratched their names on its legs, until Roman restorers repaired the crack and silenced it forever. Behind the statues, ongoing excavation is steadily uncovering more of the buried temple and further shattered colossi. It is a five-minute stop, but a poignant one, and the classic first sight as you cross to the West Bank.

Luxor is one of the world's great ballooning spots, and drifting over the West Bank at sunrise is worth the very early alarm. Pickup is in the dark, a short motorboat hop across the Nile, then you watch the burners roar the great envelopes upright before lifting off just as the sun breaks over the eastern desert. For forty-five minutes to an hour you float over a patchwork you cannot see any other way: the terraces of Hatshepsut, the ridges hiding the Valley of the Kings, the ruined mortuary temples, and the sharp line where emerald sugar-cane fields meet bone-dry desert, all with the Nile shining beyond. It is calm and quiet apart from the burner, and genuinely suitable for families and older travellers since you simply stand in the basket. Flights depend entirely on wind and can be cancelled or rescheduled, so book it for your first morning to leave room to try again.