Valley of the Kings - Highlights

As you can imagine this was one of the highlights of the trip - a place I'd wanted to visit since I was 12 years old. But first, we stopped at Deir el Medina, the village where the tomb builders lived. We went into the tombs of Sennedjem and of Anbherkha. They were painted, not sculpted into the stone. There were trees, baboons, boats, harvesting, beautifully executed and in excellent condition.

The area is huge craggy rocks, rearing up. No smooth slopes here. We passed the home of Howard Carter, discoverer of Tutankhamun's tomb. It's a domed structure high on a hill.

Your ticket lets you enter three tombs. It's an extra 100 Egyptian pounds to visit the tomb of Tutankhamen and 50 to visit that of Rameses VI. No cameras are allowed so you have to work hard at absorbing and remembering every little detail.

Our guide Rami was very helpful. He walked us up the valley, pointing out where each tomb was, and then when we got further up, stopped and went over it all again. Sarah, our Victoria University lecturer, told us what to expect in each, and recommended what she thought was most exciting. But we still had to choose.

I started at the tomb of Thutmosis III. He lived from 1504 -1450 BC. You had to climb up some steep steps to the entrance. The tomb and antechamber are covered with stick figures, showing all the usual expected scenes but without much colour. The ceiling is painted like a dark blue starry sky.

It was great to see what Tutankhamen's tomb is like, after seeing almost all the contents in the Cairo Museum. Here, there's the red granite sarcophagus and one of the gold inner coffins. There are large sacred baboons painted on one wall.

The tomb of Rameses VI was superb. A long corridor, getting higher as you walked down it. A beautiful blue ceiling in the corridor, with Nut (pronounced Nute), the sky goddess. Her legs were at the beginning, her body stretched for metres and metres along the side of the roof, and ended in her head and arms at the other end, so that she was wrapped around, protecting everything.