Eight days with one long-haul flight in and out: three nights in Cairo and four on a deluxe Nile boat from Luxor to Aswan, ending at Abu Simbel.
Our representative meets you at Cairo International Airport, handles the airport formalities and transfers you to your hotel in a private vehicle. The rest of the day is free, which after a transatlantic flight is the right way to use it.
A guided morning on the Giza Plateau for the Great Pyramids of Cheops, Chephren and Mykerinos, the Sphinx, and the Valley Temple below them. Lunch at a local restaurant, then the newly opened Grand Egyptian Museum, where the treasures of ancient Egypt finally have galleries built to their scale.
Breakfast, check out, and a short flight south. The Karnak Temple Complex takes up the afternoon — shrines, columns and sacred lakes spread across a site that took centuries to build — and then Luxor Temple, which is at its best around sunset. You board the boat afterwards for dinner and a first evening on the water.
Into the Valley of the Kings, where the royal tombs including Tutankhamun's are cut deep into the cliffs. Then the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, built straight into the mountainside, and a photo stop at the Colossi of Memnon. Lunch back on board, and the boat starts south towards Edfu in the afternoon.
A horse-drawn carriage from the mooring to the Temple of Horus at Edfu, one of the best-preserved temples in Egypt. Then on to Kom Ombo, which is split down the middle between Sobek the crocodile god and Horus the Elder, so precisely that the two halves mirror each other in every detail.
You wake at Aswan, which is the gentlest of Egypt's cities. The Temple of Philae comes first, built for Isis and standing on its own island, then the Aswan High Dam, the structure that changed what the river does and, with it, most of what modern Egypt is. Lunch back on board and a quiet evening.
An early start for a private excursion to Abu Simbel, where Ramses II had two temples cut into the mountainside and the four colossal seated figures at the entrance are on a scale nothing prepares you for. A UNESCO World Heritage site, and the reason to set the alarm. A flight from Aswan to Cairo afterwards, and a free last evening.
Breakfast, then a transfer at the scheduled time to Cairo International Airport for your flight home.