For a New Perspective on Luxor's West Bank, Hop on a Bike

A coach rumbles past and, for a fleeting moment, I feel a pang of envy for the air-conditioned cocoon its passengers are almost certainly enjoying. Then I look around. From behind tinted windows, they’re missing the street theatre playing out around us. “Cycling is the best way to really see Luxor,” Sayed Setouhy calls over his shoulder, his crown of cropped black curls silhouetted against the sun. “You have the freedom to stop, take pictures and discover things that people in cars and coaches don’t.”

It’s morning in Luxor and the city on the banks of the Nile is limbering up for the day. Gaggles of schoolchildren in matching uniforms chat at the roadside as a donkey cart clip-clops past. Laundry flaps from balconies, while dogs lie sprawled in scraps of shade, untroubled by the day’s gathering pace.

I’m on Luxor’s West Bank, a stretch of farmland, village streets and ancient monuments that’s perfect for exploring on two wheels. Many of its star attractions lie surprisingly close together, making it possible to pedal between tombs and everyday life in a matter of minutes. Sayed, who trained as a lawyer, now helps run his father’s bike-hire business and leads rides through his home city.

With my cherry-red push bike, we pedal past fields thick with banana trees until the Colossi of Memnon loom up ahead. We brake before them as Sayed explains what we’re looking at. “These are the gateway to the tombs,” he says, gesturing to the statues, “originally built to guard the mortuary temple of Pharaoh Amenhotep III.” It’s hard to imagine now, but they once marked the entrance to one of ancient Egypt’s most lavish temple complexes, most of which has since been lost to the ravages of time. 

The statues depict seated kings, their once-proud faces weathered into little more than flat smudges, still turned towards the rising sun. We tip our heads back to take in the hulking figures, each 18 metres high, now just steps from the commotion of the road. Visitors have been gazing up at them since the Greco-Roman period.

The Colossi are merely a curtain-raiser for the West Bank’s riches: the Valley of the Kings, where pharaohs were buried in elaborately decorated tombs; the Tombs of the Nobles; Queen Hatshepsut’s dramatic temple, chiselled into cliffs that rise almost vertically; and Deir el-Medina, the village of the artisans who decorated the royal tombs.

We cycle on, passing neighbourhood cafes gearing up for the midday rush, then leave our bikes outside Medinet Habu. This vast mortuary temple was built for Ramesses III and later enclosed within a larger walled complex. “What I like about this place is that you can see how it kept changing,” Sayed says. “Instead of one temple frozen in time, it feels like you’re walking through several different temples in a single visit.” We step inside to take in the towering gateway pylons and weathered reliefs, fragments of colour still clinging to the stone in places.

A few streets away lies Old Qurna, an abandoned village built directly over ancient burial grounds dating back 3,500 years. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, it was also home to families who built newer dwellings among the ruins of Thebes. “People were living here up until the early 2000s,” Sayed recalls. “Then, as more tombs were discovered beneath the houses, residents were gradually relocated by the government to a new settlement.” Today, roofless rooms rise above gaping holes in the ground, where the doorways to a handful of tombs are just visible, like the opened windows of an Advent calendar.

We pedal closer to the base of the mountain, which is honeycombed with tombs and dotted with cube-like houses. A team of around 10 archaeologists is sifting through the dirt at an active dig metres from the roadside. Sayed shrugs. “New things are being discovered all the time here,” he says.