4 Nights Deluxe Nile Cruise from Luxor to Aswan

We meet you at Luxor airport, your hotel or the station and take you straight to Karnak — not one temple but a complex built and rebuilt over two thousand years, with the hypostyle hall of 134 columns at the centre of it. Then Luxor Temple, which is best in the late afternoon when the light drops and the avenue of sphinxes runs out in front of it. You board in time for dinner, moored at Luxor for the night. Worth coming up on deck after — Luxor Temple is lit from the far bank and you can see it from the boat.

If you have added the balloon, you are collected before dawn and up over the West Bank as the sun comes up behind the hills — the temples, the green strip and the desert beyond, all at once. After breakfast, the West Bank: the Valley of the Kings and three of its tombs, the terraced temple of Queen Hatshepsut beneath the cliff at Deir el-Bahari, and the Colossi of Memnon standing alone in the field where their temple used to be. Back on board for lunch as the boat casts off and sails south through the Esna lock. This is the long afternoon of the trip and the one the Deluxe cabin and the sun deck are actually for — the bank sliding past, tea at four, and nowhere to be.

Edfu after breakfast, reached the way visitors have always reached it — by horse-drawn carriage through the town to the Temple of Horus. It is the best-preserved temple in Egypt; buried in sand for centuries, which is exactly why the roof is still on and the reliefs are still sharp. Back on board, the boat sails to Kom Ombo, where the temple sits at the top of the riverbank almost at the mooring. It is the only temple in Egypt built as a double — one half for Sobek the crocodile god, one for Horus the elder — and the museum beside it holds the mummified crocodiles found in the sand around it. Best seen in the late afternoon light.

Aswan is the softest city on the river and the day matches it. The High Dam, the wall of rock that created Lake Nasser behind it and ended the annual flood that had shaped Egypt for five thousand years. The granite quarries and the Unfinished Obelisk, 42 metres of stone abandoned where it cracked three thousand years ago. Then by motorboat to Philae Temple on its island, moved stone by stone to higher ground when the dam was built. Back on board for your last night, moored at Aswan.

If you have added Abu Simbel, you leave early — three and a half hours south across the Nubian desert to the four seated colossi of Ramses II, cut straight into the cliff above Lake Nasser, and the smaller temple he built for Nefertari beside it. Otherwise, breakfast on board and check-out at your own pace. We take you to Aswan airport, the station or your hotel whenever you need to be there — and if you are carrying on to Cairo or the Red Sea, tell us and we will arrange it rather than leave you at the dock with a suitcase.