Day train Cairo-Luxor, Egypt
First post in my Egypt 2021 series. After having roamed around Cairo, our next destination was Luxor. We were met with a dounting choice, how do we get there?
We were met with three options:
- Fly there. EgyptAir for 49$ USD each, luggage included, 1hr flight time.
- Car/Bus. Price uncertain but safety has no price and this option certainly does not make any sense.
- Train! Because of the current worldwide situation, it’s hard to find good boat cruises on the Nile and we read that the train journey is very scenic. A good way to substitute the cruise. Night sleeper train for tourists costs 80$ USD, an absolute joke compared to the cost of living in the country. No, we want the day train, the 11-hour long one!
- Fly there. EgyptAir for 49$ USD each, luggage included, 1hr flight time.
- Car/Bus. Price uncertain but safety has no price and this option certainly does not make any sense.
- Train! Because of the current worldwide situation, it’s hard to find good boat cruises on the Nile and we read that the train journey is very scenic. A good way to substitute the cruise. Night sleeper train for tourists costs 80$ USD, an absolute joke compared to the cost of living in the country. No, we want the day train, the 11-hour long one!
The first one is to just get a seat and wait for the ticket inspector to come and directly purchase a ticket from him (let me know if you see a female inspector!). This is not the option we chose.
The second possibility is to get a ticket from the self-service ticket machines. We couldn’t find information on those so we decided to give it a shot, and it worked! When entering from the south entrance of Ramses station, you discover a huge hall where you can access a few platforms. Upon inspection on the main display we found that our train was leaving from a platform that was not accessible from the main hall. We had to exit through a corridor on the left of the main hall (when you face the main display). This corridor leads to other platforms. It is in this corridor that we found a single self-ticketing machine, pictured below.
the holy grail
The machine did work but there was a catch. It wouldn’t let us buy Cairo-Luxor tickets, only Cairo-Aswan tickets. We think this is the reason a lot of people had trouble using those machines. We ended up buying the Cairo-Aswan tickets (not a big price difference) and the payment went through with a Revolut credit card. In the end it turned out to be a good idea. Indeed when we arrived in Luxor we handed our tickets to some people waiting for the train. They were very happy, they got a free trip to Aswan!
Pro-tips:
- we got the lunch menu for 100LE each. It included a half chicken, rice, vegetables, tahini sauce, a coke can and desert. Well worth it, tasty, didn’t get sick.
- for architecture lovers: try taking pictures of all the water towers you can spot. It was a fun little game we played and it was interesting to see how different they could be.