Luxor

I arrived by overnight train from Cairo, stumbling off the platform at six in the morning into heat that already had intention. The station opens directly onto a road that leads to Luxor Temple, and I walked there before I’d found a place to put my bag — drawn by the columns visible above the palm trees, impossibly tall and still holding their paint in patches. The temple was empty at that hour. A guard waved me through and went back to his tea, and I stood between the colonnades of Amenhotep III as the sun came over the East Bank hills and hit the sandstone until it glowed the precise colour of warm bread.

Luxor divides itself naturally between the living and the dead. The East Bank — the side the sun rises on — holds the city proper: a Corniche that runs along the river where old men fish in the evenings, a souk that smells of cumin and burned sugar, tea houses where games of dominos run from noon until midnight. The West Bank, where the sun sets, holds everything else — the mortuary temples, the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, the Colossi of Memnon standing in the cane fields like sentries abandoned by the army that posted them. Every morning I took the local ferry across — five Egyptian pounds, packed with schoolchildren and vegetable sellers — and spent the day in that dry limestone world before returning to the East Bank for dinner as the last light turned the river copper.

The Corniche is where Luxor becomes itself — the version of the city that exists between monuments, in the gaps between the ancient and the commercial. Old men sell sugarcane juice from hand-cranked presses. Boys race bicycles along the riverbank. Women in long abayas walk with perfect posture carrying plastic bags of bread. A restaurant called Sofra, hidden up a lane off the main road, serves kofta and fattah and pickled vegetables that arrive in small dishes without being ordered — the meal materialising around you the way hospitality does in Egypt, instinctively and without ceremony.

When to go: October through February is the window. December and January bring European tour groups in force — the Corniche fills with cruise ships and touts, but the temples at opening time are still manageable. November is ideal: the light has the low warmth of autumn, the crowds thin, and the nights are cool enough to sleep without air conditioning.