Five days between Luxor and Aswan on the Mövenpick MS Royal Lily, with 56 deluxe cabins and 4 Royal Suites, visiting Karnak, Edfu, Kom Ombo and Philae.
You board before lunch, settle into your cabin and eat on deck as the boat sits at its mooring. The afternoon covers Luxor's East Bank, starting at Karnak — a complex successive pharaohs kept adding to for the better part of two thousand years, until it became the largest religious site ever built. Luxor Temple follows, in the middle of the modern town and once joined to Karnak by an avenue of sphinxes.
Across the river after breakfast to the Valley of the Kings, where Egypt's greatest pharaohs were buried in tombs cut into the hillside. You go down into three of them, painted floor to ceiling with scenes from the Book of the Dead. The Temple of Hatshepsut follows, built in terraces against the cliff, and the morning ends at the Colossi of Memnon. The boat sails for Esna in the afternoon.
A horse-drawn carriage takes you from the mooring through the town to the Temple of Horus at Edfu — the most complete temple standing in Egypt, with its pylons, reliefs and inner halls all still intact. You sail on to Kom Ombo, whose temple is split down the middle between Sobek the crocodile god and Horus the Elder.
The morning starts at the High Dam, a piece of twentieth-century engineering that reshaped the whole country's relationship with the river. From there you visit the Unfinished Obelisk, still lying in the granite quarry where it cracked, and take a boat across to the Temple of Philae on Agilkia Island, built for Isis and rebuilt there stone by stone once the water rose behind the dam. There is a taste of Nubian culture to finish.
Breakfast on board before you disembark. If you have the morning free it is worth adding the excursion south to Abu Simbel, where Ramses II had two temples cut straight into the cliff face and UNESCO later lifted the whole thing to higher ground.
Optional: Excursion to Abu Simbel