Six days covering Cairo, Luxor and Aswan without a cruise, staying in hotels and flying between the cities, with private Egyptologist guides.
You are met at Cairo International Airport, taken through the arrival formalities and driven to your hotel in a private air-conditioned vehicle. After check-in the day is yours, to rest or to start on the city at your own pace.
Your private Egyptologist takes you out to the Giza plateau for the Great Pyramids of Cheops, Chephren and Mykerinos, then the Sphinx and the Valley Temple, where the rituals that preceded a royal burial were carried out. Lunch at a good local restaurant, and the afternoon at the Grand Egyptian Museum, the most ambitious cultural project Egypt has undertaken in a generation and home to thousands of pieces displayed properly for the first time.
A short flight after breakfast, then straight into Luxor's East Bank with your guide. The Karnak Temple Complex is less a temple than a city of them, with chapels and obelisks accumulated over some two thousand years. Luxor Temple is smaller and better proportioned, and looks its best under lights in the evening. Lunch, then check in to your hotel.
Across the river to the Valley of the Kings, where pharaoh after pharaoh was buried in tombs cut into the hillside and decorated from floor to ceiling. The Temple of Queen Hatshepsut follows, and there is a stop at the Colossi of Memnon before you travel on to Aswan by private vehicle and check in to your hotel there.
A boat out to the Temple of Philae, built for Isis and among the loveliest settings in the country, then the Aswan High Dam. The afternoon goes to a Nubian village, where the houses are painted in strong colours and the language, music and hospitality are all distinct from the rest of Egypt. You fly back to Cairo from Aswan Airport in the evening.
A last breakfast, then check out and a representative accompanies you to Cairo International Airport for your flight home.