Luxor or Aswan — if you only get one

If you have time for both, take both — that answer is boring and correct. This article is for everybody else: one stop on the Nile, and a decision to make. The two places are three hours apart and they are not variations on a theme. They are different holidays.

The geography, in one paragraph

Luxor sits about 650 km south of Cairo, on the site of ancient Thebes, with the living town and two enormous temples on the east bank and the entire funerary landscape — tombs and mortuary temples — on the west. Aswan is roughly 215 km further south again, at the First Cataract, where granite breaks through the riverbed and the Nile stops being navigable. That was Egypt's southern frontier for most of its history: the edge of the country, and the gateway to Nubia.

That single fact explains most of the difference between them. Luxor was the capital of an empire at its height. Aswan was the border town, the quarry, and the trading post — and it still feels like all three.

Luxor: the densest concentration of ancient monuments on Earth

The claim gets repeated so often that it has stopped meaning anything, so here is what it actually amounts to on the ground.

Karnak is not a temple, it is a temple complex that was added to for roughly two thousand years by pharaoh after pharaoh, each wanting to outbuild the last. The hypostyle hall alone has 134 columns, the tallest around twenty metres, and walking into it is the single most overwhelming architectural moment in Egypt. Nobody's photographs work. Everybody tries.

Luxor Temple is smaller, in the middle of the modern town, and best at night when it is floodlit — a rare case where the tourist-brochure recommendation is simply right.

The west bank is the other half of the day and the reason people come. The Valley of the Kings holds the rock-cut tombs of the New Kingdom pharaohs, painted floor to ceiling and still bright. Hatshepsut's terraced temple sits against the cliff at Deir el-Bahari. Medinet Habu has the best-preserved colour of any temple in the country, and a fraction of the visitors.

What Luxor gives you is density. You cannot exhaust it in two days, or five. What it also gives you is heat, dust, a genuinely hard-working tourism economy, and more people trying to sell you things than anywhere else in Egypt outside the Cairo bazaars.

The columns of the hypostyle hall at Karnak