When you think you have seen it all, Egypt always manages to surprise you with something new and unexpected. How is it possible to find fossil whales stretched out on the sandy surface of the Sahara? How many gigantic pyramids did the pharaohs build? And to walk among the ruins of the city of Akhenaten and Nefertiti is to relive one of the most dramatic episodes of Egyptian history.

This tour explores the Fayoum and Middle Egypt, an area little visited by the majority of travellers. This makes it special, as does its fascinating mixture of Nile valley and desert, and also because, as travel is with 4x4 Landcruisers, it is possible to view the antiquities at close quarters.

Though the remains of the ancient capital city of Memphis have largely disappeared, its necropolis stretches for over 70 kilometres along the escarpment of the Western Desert from Abu Rawash to the Fayoum. Here, starting around 2700 BC, the pharaohs had their funerary complexes built – pyramids, temples, chapels and tombs of the elite that surrounded the royal household. At the last count, forty royal pyramids have been discovered and investigated, some in fairly good condition, others dilapidated or unfinished. Starting with the Step Pyramid at Saqqara it is possible to follow the developments in the architecture and building techniques of the Pyramid Age, the changes in religious beliefs that occurred in this formative period of Egypt’s history and the problems and mishaps encountered by stonemasons and builders.

The Fayoum offers a very different landscape – cotton fields around a vast expanse of water, Lake Qarun. The area became particularly important during the Graeco-Roman period, when reclamation programmes increased the land under cultivation, making it the granary of Egypt, and eventually of Rome. With the passage of time, the lake has shrunk, so that nowadays the ancient townships stand isolated in a desert environment, forgotten relics of what were once thriving agricultural communities.

Further west, in the desert, an almost unbelievable discovery is that of a valley where fossils of whales and other marine life are scattered across the sandy surface. About 400 skeletons of whales and sea cows have been identified. They lived and died in the shallow waters of the Tethys Sea between 42 and 37 million years ago, and they remained trapped in the mangrove swamps that grew along the ancient shoreline. Now a World Heritage Site and a National Park, Wadi el-Hitan is one of Egypt’s best kept secrets.

Back to the Nile valley, and another marvel – Tell al-Amarna, the city built by pharaoh Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti to honour their sole god, the Aten. The events that took place during the brief reign of Akhenaten remain extremely controversial – no two Egyptologists agree as to the nature of the Amarna Revolution. However, enough remains at Tell al-Amarna to visualise the once splendid and sophisticated capital of Egypt, where art thrived in an explosion of creativity centred around the king and the royal family as the earthly incarnations of the divine. The site is unique. Though short-lived, it was never reoccupied and as a result it provides today’s archaeologists with the only example of ancient urban planning at the height of Egypt’s power in the fourteenth century BC.

On the west bank of the Nile, at Beni Hassan, there are a number of tombs dated to the twelfth dynasty, around 1800 BC. They are the tombs of the princes of the Oryx nome, the powerful élite of the area during the Middle Kingdom. These nobles were buried in vast and beautifully decorated rock-cut tombs overlooking the river. Images of daily life, scenes of dancing and wrestling, the abundant flora and fauna of the Nile valley – these paintings are full of colour and life, and they leave the visitor with a sense that survival for eternity, the ultimate goal of the ancient Egyptians, has been truly achieved.