The size of a crowd matters. Think about the dejected atmosphere of an unpopular restaurant, the awkwardness of watching a play in an empty theatre or the shame of dancing in a club before it fills up. By contrast, as a tourist you often do want to be entirely alone at the world’s most magnificent sites, and yet you so rarely are.
I’ve been to Egypt three times. My first visit was in 2010 to Cairo—it was a year before the Tahrir Square uprising and tour group numbers in Giza were so overwhelming that all I remember is the feeling of being tired, hot, and keen to leave. The second was in 2019 when crowd sizes were down but temples and tombs still felt busy. The third was this month when—on our way home from visiting family in Kenya—my boyfriend and I stopped off in Luxor and Aswan and found ourselves all but alone in one of the most extraordinary places on earth.
“Why are you whispering?” I whispered to him at the entrance to the Philae Temple—a vast, buttermilk-colored structure erected to the goddess Isis at around the same time as the birth of Christ. Set on an island in the middle of the Nile about a mile downstream of Aswan, it shimmered with heat and ancient life on the day we visited, but—other than one machine-gun toting guard in white—no sign of modern life. “Because it’s so damn quiet,” he whispered back.
It was. If you cocked your ear you could hear the occasional voice drift over from the Nubian village across the water, and outside the ancient doorways was the sound of the moving river and chirps from the egrets and herons that live off it. But inside the temple there was nothing but the fluttering of birds cooling down in the shade and the whistling of the wind through empty rooms.
I had been to the Philae Temple before and learned about the hieroglyphic engravings on the ornate pillars. I’d been fascinated by the stories of animal gods and the reason for the Crusader crosses and all those scratched-out faces; I’d been overwhelmed by the sheer size of the place. But this was the first time I’d understood how powerful atmosphere can be, and not just meaning.
Standing alone under an engraving by CL Chambers, a British soldier who visited in 1870 and who definitely should not have scratched his name over an ancient goddess, I briefly understood how he must have felt 150 years ago: overawed by the beauty, drama and sheer foreignness of this ancient world—a feeling that was harder to conjure up on previous visits when surrounded by iPhones and voices chattering in 15 languages.
In Aswan we stayed at the Old Cataract—a grand dame hotel that’s undergone a recent face lift but which still boasts its famously spectacular pool with a view over the river, Elephantine Island, and the tomb of Aga Khan. On the sun loungers were a few Americans, a handful of French couples, and one or two Egyptians down from Cairo, but other than that it was us and too many staff for too few guests.
Luxor felt slightly busier but not by much. I loved the faded glamour of the Winter Palace with its gilt-edged portraits, green velvet curtains, and musty bars and dining rooms, and felt almost guilty at how low our room rate was for what we were getting. For once, having champagne tastes on a beer budget didn’t feel like a problem.
Usually only the very rich or powerful have the tomb of Ramses III to themselves, but I stood there alone, twenty feet below the earth, until a French couple broke the spell and asked me to take their picture. Usually every seat is taken on the feluccas that sail down the Nile at sunset, but we got a boat to ourselves. Usually our Nile view suite costs $700 a night, but we paid $100.
There is something bittersweet about visiting a city that relies on tourism when there are no tourists. The selfish side of me delighted in the empty Luxor Temple, the silent tomb of King Tutankhamun and the too-cheap hotel rates, while the other more compassionate part felt desperately sorry for the tour guides, restaurant owners and taxi drivers whose livelihood relies on visitors. We tried to over-tip wherever we went, but you can’t help everyone and I felt a stab of guilt whenever we turned down horse carriage rides or boat trips, aware that the pandemic meant there wouldn’t be more tourists along that hour, or even that day, to say yes where we had said no.
Hence my hope that—so long as the COVID situation in Egypt remains under control—the temptation of empty tombs combined with some extraordinary new discoveries will lure back fully vaccinated visitors sooner rather than later.
Last month, famed Egyptologist Zahi Hawass announced the uncovering of the lost golden city of Aten, near Luxor. The find—he explained—was the largest ancient city ever unearthed in Egypt, dating to the reign of Amenhotep III who ruled from 1391 to 1353 B.C. Its discovery has been described as the second most important archaeological find since the tomb of Tutankhamun and the artifacts have been transported to Cairo where they are set to be displayed at the Grand Egyptian Museum when it officially opens in the autumn.
I was lucky enough to go on a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum in 2019 and saw the beds and chariots that had been removed from Tutankhamun’s tomb—bright, burnished and astonishing for 3,350 years old. There were dusty mummies in vividly-painted boxes, extraordinarily detailed ceramics and a total of 100,000 treasures all uncovered along the Nile valley—the discoveries at Aten will only add to this hoard.
Another new (using that word in the loosest possible terms) attraction for 2021 is at Saqqara, a site 20 miles south of Cairo that’s home to one of Egypt’s richest archaeological finds. There you can visit the 4,700-year-old Step Pyramid, Egypt’s oldest surviving pyramid that’s about 200 years older than the more-famous Pyramids at Giza and is filled with extraordinarily vivid hieroglyphics.
A few months ago, more than 150 intact wooden coffins with brightly painted scenes outside and well-preserved mummies inside were discovered at the site, and have now been transported to the new Cairo Museum. The nearby Pyramid of Djoser, meanwhile, opened there last year and has been the subject of a Netflix documentary for anyone wishing to study up before they travel.
After days of tombs and hieroglyphics, we decided to swap the ancient world for the natural one on our last day in Egypt and read our long-ignored books in Aswan’s botanical garden, which covers an entire island in the middle of the Nile. Our bench was surrounded by sausage, frangipani and mango trees, and the hot orange sands of the desert were visible through the leaves, as were the dusty Nubian houses of Elephantine Island and the tips of the feluccas drifting past. Unfortunately, I didn’t finish a single paragraph—the river of history is just too distracting.
Melissa Twigg was a guest of Abercrombie & Kent, which offers a 10-night trip to Egypt for £7,595 per person including flights from the U.S. and transfers