Fayoum Oasis, Meidum & Hawara Pyramids: Full Day Tour from Cairo
Cairo · 11 hours · shared departure for 4–12 travellers · from $40 per person · departs on Tuesdays, Saturdays
About this departure
Everyone knows how the pyramid story ends — three of them on a plateau at Giza, the most photographed stones on earth. Almost nobody goes to see how it started, or how it ended.
Both are within a couple of hours of Cairo, in and around the Fayoum. At Meidum you find the strangest pyramid in Egypt: a bare stone tower rising from a mound of its own rubble, the collapsed remains of an experiment that came a generation before Giza and did not entirely work. At Hawara, a thousand years later, you find a mountain of eroded mud brick — a Middle Kingdom pyramid beside which once stood a building the Greeks thought more impressive than the pyramids themselves. Herodotus called it the Labyrinth, said it held three thousand rooms, and claimed it surpassed anything he had seen. Almost nothing of it remains, and that absence is its own kind of encounter.
Between them lies the Fayoum itself — not a true oasis but a great depression fed by a channel off the Nile, green with palms and orchards, with Lake Qarun at its northern edge, the remnant of a vastly larger prehistoric lake. It is the softest landscape in Egypt, and the reason a pharaoh chose to build here in the first place.
Three stops, and a single question running through all of them: how did a civilisation learn to build in stone, and what happened when it stopped?
Day 1 — Fayoum, Meidum & Hawara
The Shape of the Day
07:00 AM — Departure from Cairo
Your guide and driver collect you from your hotel and head south-west out of the city.
07:00 AM – 08:45 AM — The Road to Meidum
Under two hours through the valley, the desert edge on your right, until a strange square tower appears on the horizon.
08:45 AM – 10:00 AM — The Meidum Pyramid
Time at the collapsed pyramid and its surrounding mastaba field, and a descent into the burial chamber for those who want it.
10:00 AM – 10:45 AM — On to Hawara
A short drive west into the Fayoum depression.
10:45 AM – 12:00 PM — The Hawara Pyramid & the Labyrinth
Amenemhat III's mud-brick pyramid and the empty ground beside it where the Labyrinth once stood.
12:00 PM – 01:15 PM — Lunch
A break at a local restaurant, included with the Pharaoh's Feast package.
01:15 PM – 02:00 PM — Into the Oasis
Through palm groves and farmland toward the water.
02:00 PM – 04:00 PM — Lake Qarun & the Fayoum Countryside
Time along the lakeshore and through the villages and waterwheels of the oasis.
04:00 PM – 06:00 PM — The Return
North again to Cairo, arriving at your hotel in the early evening.
The Meidum Pyramid — The One That Fell
Your first stop looks less like a pyramid than a tower, and the confusion is the whole point.
Meidum was begun in the reign of Huni and completed under Sneferu, father of Khufu — the pharaoh who built more pyramid than anyone in history while trying to work out how. It started as a step pyramid, in the tradition of Djoser at Saqqara. Then the design changed: the steps were packed out and cased in smooth limestone to make Egypt's first true pyramid.
It did not hold. The outer casing slid away — whether during construction, soon after, or slowly over centuries is still argued — leaving the inner core standing alone as a three-stage tower, ringed by an enormous skirt of its own debris. The Arabic name for it means "the false pyramid," which is fair enough.
Sneferu went on to build the Bent Pyramid and then the Red Pyramid at Dahshur, and the geometry his engineers arrived at is the geometry his son used at Giza. So Meidum is where the failure happened that made the success possible — and unlike a finished monument, it lets you see straight into the middle of the thing.
Hawara — The Pyramid and the Vanished Labyrinth
From Meidum the road turns west into the Fayoum, and at Hawara you meet a very different pyramid — a great weathered hill of mud brick, blunted by four thousand years of weather.
This was Amenemhat III's, built in the Twelfth Dynasty when the Middle Kingdom had returned to pyramid-building but no longer with limestone cores. Its interior was a masterpiece of anti-theft engineering: a granite burial chamber carved from a single block, dead-end passages, sliding trapdoor stones. It was robbed anyway.
The pyramid, though, is not what made Hawara famous. Beside it once stood a mortuary complex so vast that Greek and Roman visitors wrote about it in disbelief. Herodotus claimed it exceeded the pyramids themselves — courts and chambers past counting, twelve roofed halls, an upper storey and an underground level he was not permitted to enter. Strabo and Pliny described it too. They called it the Labyrinth.
Today there is almost nothing: a field of chips and dust, quarried away over centuries for its stone. Your guide will show you where it stood, and you will look at empty ground. It is one of the more affecting things in Egypt — a building described by three separate ancient authors as among the wonders of the world, of which essentially nothing survives.
The Fayoum & Lake Qarun — Green Egypt
The afternoon belongs to the landscape, and it is unlike anywhere else you will go in this country.
The Fayoum is a depression west of the Nile, fed by a natural channel that ancient engineers widened and controlled — the Bahr Yussef. The result is a bowl of cultivation in the middle of the desert: palm groves, olives and figs, mango orchards, irrigation canals and the wooden waterwheels the region is known for, turning without power.
At its northern edge lies Lake Qarun, salt and still, the shrunken survivor of the great prehistoric lake that once filled this whole basin. Egyptians have come here to hunt, fish and escape the city for four thousand years; Amenemhat III built here for exactly that reason. The desert cliffs on the far shore hold some of the most important fossil beds in the world, where the ancestors of whales have been dug out of what was once seabed.
You will spend the last part of the day here — along the water, through the villages, in the green quiet — before the road back to Cairo.
Returning to Cairo
The drive north brings you back to your hotel in the early evening.
You will have seen the pyramid that failed, the pyramid whose great neighbour vanished entirely, and the green bowl of land that drew pharaohs out of the valley — and passed a day in a part of Egypt that most visitors never think to look for.
Upcoming departures
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Included
- Licensed English-speaking Egyptologist guide
- Private air-conditioned vehicle
- Hotel pickup & drop-off in Cairo or Giza
- 1 bottle of mineral water per person
- All taxes and service charges
- Entrance fees
Not included
- Optional extras in the Fayoum
- Personal expenses
Meeting point
In front of the Egyptian Museum (Tahrir)
Operated by an Egyptian travel company licensed by the Ministry of Tourism and registered with ETAA.