Fayoum Oasis & Desert Safari Day Trip

Three hours from Cairo the road runs out and Egypt turns into something else entirely — and this is the day you go and look at it, in a 4x4 with an English-speaking driver.

First stop is Tunis Village, a mudbrick pottery town above Lake Qarun, where you can sit down at the pottery school and make something out of Egyptian mud with your hands.

Then Wadi El Hitan, the Valley of the Whales — a UNESCO World Heritage site where forty-million-year-old whale skeletons lie exposed in the middle of the desert, from when this sand was seabed.

The afternoon is the Magic Lake for sandboarding down the dunes, then Bedouin tea and dinner as the sun goes down, and back into Cairo around ten at night.