4 Nights Luxury Nile Cruise from Luxor

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. Dinner is served when you want it rather than when the buffet opens, and afterwards Luxor Temple is lit from the far bank and you can see it from the deck.

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 itself: 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 on a boat this size it is a quiet one — the bank sliding past, tea when you ask for it, and a balcony of your own to watch it from.

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.

After breakfast, meet your Egyptologist and begin exploring the highlights of Aswan. Visit the beautiful Philae Temple, dedicated to the goddess Isis and spectacularly located on an island. Continue to the Aswan High Dam before visiting the Unfinished Obelisk, where you will discover how ancient Egyptians worked with enormous blocks of granite. Return to your cruise and enjoy the remainder of the day on board in Aswan.

Breakfast on board, then check-out. We take you to Aswan airport, the station or your hotel whenever you need to be there — and if you are carrying on to Abu Simbel, Cairo or the Red Sea, tell us and we will arrange it rather than leave you at the dock with a suitcase.