Nile Cruise

The stretch of river between Luxor and Aswan is the classic Nile cruise: roughly 200 kilometres, three or four nights, and the only way to see the temples in the order and by the means they were built for. Boats tie up at Esna, Edfu and Kom Ombo, so the sites arrive at you rather than the other way round.

What the days look like

• Luxor — Karnak and Luxor Temple on the east bank, the Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsut on the west
• Esna — the lock, usually at night, and the sunken temple of Khnum in the middle of the town
• Edfu — the best-preserved temple in Egypt, reached by calèche from the mooring
• Kom Ombo — the double temple right on the bank, best at dusk
• Aswan — Philae, the High Dam, the Unfinished Obelisk, and feluccas around Elephantine

Choosing a direction

Sailing south to north runs with the current and tends to be slightly quicker; north to south gives you Aswan at the end, which most people prefer as a finish. Either way the best hours are the long stretches between stops, on the sun deck, watching the bank go by.

Practical

Take a jacket for the evenings — the river cools fast once the sun drops, even in summer. Sailings are quietest in the shoulder months; between June and August the afternoons on deck are genuinely severe.

Egypt is the Nile. Herodotus called the country "the gift of the river", and until 1970 the entire agricultural year turned on a flood that arrived every summer, laid down silt, and receded. Every site you pass on this stretch was placed in relation to that river: temples faced it, quarries fed it, and the dead were buried on the west bank, where the sun went down.

The river as motorway

For most of Egyptian history there were no roads worth the name. Everything moved by water — obelisks from Aswan, grain to the capital, armies, gods in procession. The prevailing wind blows south while the current runs north, so a boat could sail upstream and drift down, which is why the hieroglyph for "travel south" is a boat with its sail up and "travel north" a boat with the sail down.

The first cruise passengers

Organised Nile tourism is older than most people assume. Thomas Cook ran his first steamer up the river in 1869 and within two decades operated a fleet, complete with printed itineraries and a mail service. Florence Nightingale, Gustave Flaubert and Amelia Edwards all made the trip and published accounts; Edwards was so alarmed by what she saw being carted away that she went home and founded the Egypt Exploration Fund, which still works in Egypt today.

Agatha Christie stayed at the Old Cataract Hotel in Aswan and put a steamer on the river in Death on the Nile — which is, indirectly, why a good number of people are on this boat at all.