Before visiting Amarna, I’d read in different places that ‘There’s hardly anything to see in Amarna’ but also that ‘Seeing everything requires more than one day.’ Somehow, both turned out to be true.
As mentioned above, I hired a tour operator to take me on a day trip from Cairo. I booked it through Viator and paid around $150. Before arriving at Amarna, we also stopped at the Middle Kingdom tombs of Beni Hassan. Or at least that was the plan.
Once on the highway, we were caught in a dust storm, and all traffic ground to a halt for at least an hour. The tour guide kept telling me that everything was fine, and that we’d still have plenty of time to see everything.
But it was only when we got to Beni Hassan that she said there was only time to see two out of the four tombs!
As everything in Egypt seems to close at 16:00, we had to rush through Amarna. And as mentioned above, the tombs of Akhenaten and Ay were around thirty minutes apart.
Despite many other tombs being open for visitors in Amarna, I didn’t end up getting to see them.
All in all, I departed around 7am that morning and got back to Cairo at 11pm!
If I had to do things over again, I would’ve stayed for a few days in the nearest big city of Minya. And from there I would’ve hired a driver to take me around to the various sites nearby. In addition to Amarna and Beni Hassan, the area is also home to archaeological sites like Tuna el-Gebel.
Frustratingly, most of the updated information on Amarna is written by and for archaeologists and academics. There’s little relevant info for tourists on how to plan a visit, especially taking the complicated logistics into consideration. It wasn’t until I got there that I realized how much there was to see and how spread out everything really was.
And as more and more in Amarna is opening up all the time, much of the info online or in books is already outdated.
But upon a future return trip to Egypt someday, I definitely plan to do an extensive tour of Amarna, after which I hope to create a comprehensive guide.