The Steigenberger Regency has panoramic windows, a pool and a Jacuzzi, and sails five days from Luxor to Aswan, visiting Karnak, Edfu, Kom Ombo and Philae.
You board at Luxor, settle into your cabin, and lunch is served. In the afternoon your guide takes you to Karnak, where the columns and shrines run across close to 200 acres; you walk the Hypostyle Hall and the avenue of sphinxes. Luxor Temple follows, lit by the setting sun, and is unusual in showing layer on layer of use — pharaonic, Greek, Roman, Christian and Islamic — on one site. Dinner back on board.
Across the river after breakfast. Three tombs in the Valley of the Kings, each painted with the journey through the afterlife in vivid detail, then the cliff-carved Temple of Hatshepsut and a pause at the Colossi of Memnon. Lunch on board as the Regency starts south past palm groves and riverside villages. You go through the Esna Lock around sunset, which marks the point where the landscape becomes properly Upper Egyptian.
A short horse-drawn carriage ride after breakfast to the Temple of Horus at Edfu, a Ptolemaic building in exceptional condition and covered in mythological relief. Back aboard and on to Kom Ombo, the dual temple honouring Sobek and Horus the Elder, where surgical instruments are carved into one of the walls and the Crocodile Mummification Museum stands next door. An easy evening as the ship sails towards Aswan.
Breakfast, then the High Dam, followed by a boat across to the Temple of Philae on Agilkia Island, built for Isis. The Unfinished Obelisk comes last, still lying where it was cut. Lunch on board and a free afternoon: a felucca on the river, or a short trip to a Nubian village, where the hospitality is the point.
Breakfast, then you leave the Regency.
Optional: An early excursion to Abu Simbel, for the rock-cut temples of Ramses II and Queen Nefertari above Lake Nasser