Twenty-one days from Cairo to Jerusalem: three countries strung along one very old road

Cairo airport is twenty kilometres northeast and the drive in takes anywhere from forty minutes to two hours depending on the hour. Arrange the transfer through your hotel rather than negotiating at the exit, which is the one arrival hall in this trip where that matters.

Do nothing structural with the first evening. Khan el-Khalili, the medieval merchants' quarter, is the right introduction: a khan founded in 1382 that has been a market ever since, with a genuine trade in copper, spices and gold still going on behind the souvenir frontage.

Have mint tea at one of the old cafes off Midan Hussein, watch the mosque opposite fill up for evening prayer, and go to bed early. Tomorrow is the pyramids and you want to be there when the gate opens.

Be at the plateau gate when it opens. By ten the light is flat, the temperature is climbing and the camel touts have found their stride; by eight you can stand at the base of the Great Pyramid with very few people in the frame.

Walk rather than ride. The circuit from the Great Pyramid past Khafre's and Menkaure's to the panorama point and back down to the Sphinx is about three kilometres of sand and it is the only way to grasp the scale. Going inside a pyramid is a separate ticket, a hot bent-double climb up a shaft, and an empty stone room at the end; do it once and know what you are buying.

In the afternoon, the Grand Egyptian Museum, twenty minutes away and opened in full at the end of 2025. It holds the complete Tutankhamun assemblage in one place for the first time since it was found, and the grand staircase of colossal statues is worth the ticket by itself. Three hours minimum.

A day of buildings rather than monuments, and much the quieter of the two. Ibn Tulun was raised in 877 by a governor who had grown up in Iraq and built accordingly: a vast bare courtyard, a pointed arcade and a spiral minaret you can climb, which is nothing like anything else in Egypt.

Sultan Hassan, fifteen minutes away below the citadel, is the other extreme: a Mamluk complex finished in 1363, tight, vertical, and built at a scale that nearly bankrupted the state. Stand in the middle of the cross shaped court and look up.

Then take a taxi south to Old Cairo, where the Roman fort still stands and the Coptic churches, the synagogue and the mosque are all within one short walk. The Hanging Church is built across the gap between two Roman bastions, which is where its name comes from and why the floor gives slightly.

Trains for Alexandria leave Ramses station through the morning and take about two and a half hours across the Delta. Book first class the day before; it costs very little more and comes with a seat you have paid for rather than negotiated.

Alexandria's best ancient site is underground. The catacombs at Kom el-Shoqafa were cut for one wealthy family in the 2nd century and expanded afterwards, and the carving in the main chamber is Egyptian gods rendered in Roman clothes by sculptors who clearly knew both traditions and were not troubled by mixing them.

Come back up onto the corniche in the late afternoon for the Abu al-Abbas mosque, which stands over the tomb of a 13th century Sufi saint from Andalusia and dominates the seafront. Then walk the corniche as the light goes.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina opened in 2002 near where the ancient library stood, and it is a serious building: a disc tilted into the ground, granite walls carved with the alphabets of the world, and a reading room stepped down through eleven levels. There are four museums inside and a planetarium, and the guided tour is worth taking because the building explains itself badly.

Pompey's Pillar, twenty minutes inland, is misnamed twice over: it is a single granite column raised for Diocletian in 297 and has nothing to do with Pompey. It stands twenty five metres high on the site of the Serapeum, with two granite sphinxes and an underground gallery beside it.

In the afternoon, take the tram or a taxi fifteen kilometres east to Montaza, the khedival summer palace in a park of pines above its own beach, and use it as a place to sit rather than a place to tour.

The night train arrives in Luxor after breakfast, having crossed six hundred kilometres of the Nile valley in the dark. Check in, sleep for an hour if you need to, and start in the afternoon: everything today is on the east bank and within walking distance or a short taxi ride.

Luxor Temple sits in the middle of the modern town, which is the strange part: an avenue of sphinxes running north out of it, colossi of Ramesses II at the gate, and a 13th century mosque perched high on one wall where the ground level used to be before the excavation dropped away beneath it.

Karnak, three kilometres north, is not a temple but a precinct that thirty pharaohs added to over about two thousand years. The hypostyle hall alone has a hundred and thirty four columns in it, the tallest of them twenty one metres. Go late in the afternoon and stay until they close.

Cross on the first ferry and be at the valley gate when it opens. There is no shade there at all, the rock holds the heat, and by eleven the tombs are queued and airless.

The standard ticket admits you to three tombs of the sixty odd that have been found, and Tutankhamun's is a separate one that people either resent or insist on. Seti I, if it is open, is the most extraordinary painted interior in Egypt and priced accordingly. Whichever three you pick, go into them slowly: the value is in the ceilings.

Deir el-Bahari afterwards is the opposite kind of building: three colonnaded terraces cut back into the cliff, built for Hatshepsut in the 15th century BC beside the much older temple of a king who had died five hundred years before her. Finish at the Colossi of Memnon on the way back to the ferry, which take ten minutes and are on the road anyway.

The quieter west bank day, and the better one. Medinet Habu is Ramesses III's mortuary temple, almost complete, with its painted reliefs still holding colour on the ceilings and the outer walls carved with a naval battle in obsessive detail. Very few people come, and it is the single best preserved temple complex in Egypt.

The Ramesseum, a couple of kilometres north, is the ruin Shelley wrote Ozymandias about: the colossal seated statue of Ramesses II lies broken across the second court, seventeen metres of it, over a thousand tons, dragged here from Aswan in one piece.

Finish at Deir el-Medina, the village where the men who cut the royal tombs lived with their families for four hundred years. Their own tombs are up the slope behind the houses and are small, cheerful and painted by people who did this for a living: better craftsmanship, in places, than the kings got.

The flight goes through Cairo and takes most of the middle of the day. Then it is an hour and a half north by road up the Gulf of Aqaba, with the mountains of the Sinai on the left and Saudi Arabia visible across the water on the right.

Dahab is a strip of low buildings on a stony bay, and it exists for the reef. Drop everything, borrow a mask, and walk into the sea at the Lighthouse, which is a hundred metres from the promenade and has turtles in the sea grass.

Then eat lying down on a cushion, which is the local posture, and go to bed without an alarm for the first time in nine days.

The Blue Hole is eight kilometres north of town, a near circular shaft in the reef with a shallow saddle at one edge, and it is the signature dive of the Red Sea. It is entirely safe as a snorkel and as a shallow dive; the danger is not in the site but in the temptation to keep going down, and the memorial plaques on the cliff above the car park are the reason to have a plan and stick to it.

Snorkellers get most of the value for none of the risk: the wall on the northern side drops away vertically from about two metres, and the coral in the top ten is the best of it.

In the afternoon, go on by camel or boat to Abu Galoum, a protected stretch of coast with no road into it. That is the point: no road means no cars, no beach clubs and no crowd, just a couple of Bedouin huts, a reef and a very long lunch.

This is the crossing, and it takes a day whichever way you cut it. A bus or taxi runs an hour up the coast to Nuweiba, the fast boat to Aqaba crosses in about sixty minutes, and everything either side of that is queuing. Departure times move; do not book anything time critical on the far side.

Aqaba issues most nationalities a free entry stamp on arrival at the port. From there it is an hour inland and up onto the plateau to the Wadi Rum visitor centre, where the Seven Pillars of Wisdom stands opposite the car park, named after Lawrence's book rather than the other way round.

Your camp will collect you in a pickup. Get to the red dunes for the last half hour of light, run down one, and then go and eat whatever is cooking under the sand.

A jeep day, arranged through the camp, covering perhaps eighty kilometres of sand track between the massifs. Camels are the slower and more romantic alternative and cover perhaps a fifth of that, which is a real trade rather than a pose.

Khaz'ali is the pick of the stops: a narrow cleft in a cliff with a shallow pool at the back and three thousand years of inscriptions cut into both walls, Thamudic and Nabataean, of feet, camels and people. You can walk in a hundred metres or so before it closes up.

Lawrence's House, which probably was not, stands on Nabataean foundations with a view down a valley that justifies the stop regardless of who slept there. Finish at Umm Fruth, a fifteen metre rock arch you can scramble up if you have a head for it and photograph from below if you have not.

Ninety minutes north from Rum to Wadi Musa, which is the town outside the gate and where you sleep for the next three nights. Drop the bags and go in: the site is open into the late afternoon and the light at the end of the day is the best of it.

The walk in runs about two kilometres from the gate, past free standing tombs and then into the Siq itself, a canyon a little over a kilometre long, three metres wide in places and a hundred and fifty deep, with the paved Nabataean road and the channels that carried water into the city still visible along the walls.

Then the Treasury, which everyone has seen and which is still a shock, because the photographs cannot convey that it is carved into the cliff rather than built against it. Sit on the sand opposite for twenty minutes before moving on. The Street of Facades that follows is a wall of tomb frontages on the way into the city proper.

Back in at eight, before the day trip coaches from Amman arrive around ten. Today is the main valley and the eastern cliff, and the climb at the end of it.

The theatre was cut by the Nabataeans out of the hillside, straight through existing tombs, and enlarged by the Romans afterwards to seat several thousand. Opposite it, the Royal Tombs are a row of enormous carved facades along the eastern wall, and the stone inside the Silk Tomb is banded in colours that look painted.

The High Place of Sacrifice is a stair of about eight hundred steps up the mountain south of the theatre, and the reward is a flat summit with cut altars, a drainage channel, and the whole city laid out below. Come down the back way through the Wadi Farasa, which passes a lion carved into a cliff and a garden tomb and is much better than going back the way you came.

The Monastery first, while it is cool. It is eight hundred and something steps up from the far end of the site, an hour of climbing with tea stalls at intervals, and the facade at the top is larger than the Treasury and stands alone on a plateau with a view west into the Rift Valley. Nobody regrets doing it and everybody underestimates it.

Come down for lunch and spend the afternoon on the flat, which most visitors skip entirely. The Great Temple was a colonnaded precinct with a small theatre built into it, excavated only in the last thirty years, and it shows that Petra was a city and not just a cemetery.

The Byzantine church nearby keeps a floor of mosaics from the 6th century, under a shelter, with animals and personifications of the seasons, and it is the last chapter of the site: Petra was still inhabited long after the Nabataeans stopped carving.

Three hours north on the fast road, or five on the King's Highway through Dana and Kerak if you have hired a car and want the scenery. The bus takes the fast one.

Amman's downtown sits in a valley with the citadel hill directly above it. Start on the hill: there has been a settlement there for seven thousand years, and what stands is a Roman temple of Hercules, a Byzantine church and an Umayyad palace complex, all on one plateau with the city spreading up the slopes in every direction.

Walk down to the Roman theatre in the evening. It was built into the hillside under Antoninus Pius, seats six thousand, and locals still sit on the upper rows at dusk because it is the coolest place downtown.

Jerash is fifty kilometres north and takes forty five minutes, and it is the reason to give Amman two nights. It was a provincial Roman city of the Decapolis, buried in sand after an earthquake in 749 and dug out from the 1920s onwards, and what came out is the most complete Roman city anywhere east of Italy: an oval forum ringed with columns, a colonnaded main street with the chariot ruts still in it, two theatres and a hippodrome.

The Temple of Artemis, to the patron goddess of the city, is the high point of the site in both senses. Its columns are engineered to flex in the wind, and the guards will demonstrate by wedging a spoon into a joint and letting you watch it move.

Back in Amman in the late afternoon, the King Abdullah I Mosque with its blue dome is the one mosque in the city that welcomes non-Muslim visitors, and there is a church directly opposite it, which is the photograph everybody takes.

Leave early. Shared taxis for the King Hussein Bridge go from Abdali in Amman from about seven, the crossing itself is a bus between two terminals, and the whole thing takes anywhere from two hours to most of a day. Bring water, cash in dinars for the departure tax and the bus, and patience.

On the far side it is under an hour up to Jerusalem, climbing out of the Jordan valley, past Jericho and up through the Judean desert. The city appears suddenly at the top.

Give the first afternoon to the citadel by the Jaffa Gate, which is the best possible orientation: excavations going back to the Iron Age, a museum that walks you through four thousand years in an hour, and a rampart walk with the four quarters of the Old City laid out below you.

Everything today is inside a few hundred metres, and the whole day is governed by opening hours rather than by distance. Check them the night before; they change with the calendar of three religions.

The Temple Mount, the Haram al-Sharif, admits non-Muslim visitors only during limited morning slots on certain days, by the wooden ramp beside the Western Wall, and the interiors of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa are closed to them entirely. Queue early, dress conservatively, and expect a security check. What you get is the platform itself and the Dome from outside, which is worth the wait: an octagon of blue tile and gold finished in 691, and the oldest surviving Islamic monument anywhere.

The Western Wall below is the exposed section of Herod's retaining wall for the platform, built around 20 BCE, and the plaza in front of it functions as an open air synagogue. Then the Holy Sepulchre in the afternoon, which is six denominations sharing one building under an agreement so brittle that a ladder left on a ledge in the 18th century is still there because nobody may move it.

Take a taxi to the top of the Mount of Olives and walk down, which is the correct direction and about an hour and a half with stops. The view from the top over the Old City, with the golden dome in the middle of it, is the one on every postcard and it is best before nine.

The Pater Noster church near the summit is built over Constantinian ruins and covered inside and out with tiled panels of the Lord's Prayer in more than a hundred and thirty languages, which is oddly moving regardless of belief.

Further down, the Russian church of St Mary Magdalene with its seven gilded onion domes was built by Alexander III in 1885 and is open only a couple of mornings a week. At the bottom, the Tomb of the Virgin is a crusader stair of forty seven steps down into a dim rock cut crypt, and it is the coolest and quietest place in the city.

Ben Gurion is sixty kilometres west, about an hour by shared taxi or the train from Jerusalem's Yitzhak Navon station, and the airport asks travellers to arrive three hours before the flight and means it. Anyone who has just come overland from Egypt through Jordan should expect a longer conversation at security than usual and should build in the time rather than the resentment.

That still leaves a morning. Walk the Old City once more before the shops open, when the lanes belong to the people who live and work in them and the light comes down between the stones, and then go.