3 Nights Easter Nile Cruise From Aswan To Luxor

Arrive in Aswan, where our tour guide meets you outside the terminal to begin your Aswan tour.

Aswan is the frontier town. For most of pharaonic history this was the end of Egypt and the beginning of Nubia, and everything here is shaped by that — the granite quarries that supplied the obelisks, the island temples, the cataract that stopped the boats.

Start at the Aswan High Dam, the structure that rearranged the entire southern Nile in the 1960s and forced the rescue of the temples now standing on higher ground.

Then Philae Temple on Agilkia Island, reached by motorboat. Philae was built for Isis under the Ptolemies and the Romans, and it held out as a functioning temple long after the rest of Egypt had converted — the last hieroglyphic inscription anywhere in Egypt was carved here. When Lake Nasser rose, the whole complex was cut apart and rebuilt on Agilkia, which was reshaped to match the profile of the original island.

Finish at the Unfinished Obelisk, still attached to the bedrock of the northern granite quarry. Had it been extracted it would have stood around 42 metres and outweighed anything else ever raised. A crack through the granite stopped the work, and what is left is the clearest picture anywhere of how Egyptian quarrying actually worked.

Board your cruise ship in the late afternoon. Dinner and overnight aboard, moored in Aswan.

Optional tour: Nubian Village in Aswan

Meals: lunch and dinner

Breakfast aboard. The morning is free while the ship remains moored in Aswan — spend it on the sun deck, or take the optional excursion by road to Abu Simbel, which leaves very early and returns before the ship sails.

The ship casts off around lunchtime and runs north to Kom Ombo, arriving in the afternoon. Kom Ombo sits on a bluff directly above the river, and it is the strangest plan in Egyptian architecture: a temple built twice in one footprint, mirrored along its central axis. The southern half belongs to Sobek, the crocodile god; the northern half to Haroeris. Two entrances, two hypostyle halls, two sanctuaries, nothing shared.

Next to the temple, the Crocodile Museum holds mummified crocodiles recovered from the site — the animals were bred, kept and mummified in honour of Sobek, and the display makes sense of a cult that otherwise reads as an oddity.

Back aboard. The ship sails on to Edfu through the evening. Dinner and overnight aboard.

Meals: breakfast, lunch and dinner

Early start. Take a horse-drawn calèche from the mooring through the town of Edfu to the Temple of Horus.

Edfu is Ptolemaic, built between 237 and 57 BC on the site of a much older temple, and it is the most intact building of its kind in Egypt. The pylon still stands to full height, the roof is on, and the walls carry a complete set of ritual and festival texts — the founding of the temple, the daily service, the annual reunion of Horus of Edfu with Hathor of Dendera, and the defeat of Seth. Read Edfu and you can reconstruct what was happening inside temples where nothing but the foundations survive.

Return by calèche and sail on. During the day the ship transits the Esna Lock, dropping through the barrage that regulates the river above Luxor.

Arrive in Luxor. Ancient Thebes, and the east bank was the city of the living: Karnak first, the largest religious complex ever built at roughly 100 hectares, where thirty dynasties added pylons, courts and chapels for nearly two thousand years without anyone ever finishing it. Then Luxor Temple, two miles downstream and connected to Karnak by an avenue of sphinxes. Both were dedicated to the Theban Triad — Amun, Mut and Khonsu — and once a year the gods travelled the avenue between them in the Opet festival.

Dinner and final overnight aboard, moored at Luxor.

Meals: breakfast, lunch and dinner

Breakfast, then disembark and cross to the west bank, the side of the river the ancient Egyptians reserved for the dead.

The Valley of the Kings holds sixty-five numbered tombs, cut deep into the limestone and decorated with the underworld texts that were meant to carry the pharaoh through the twelve hours of night. Your ticket admits you to three tombs; your guide will pick the three currently open that are worth your time, which changes with the rotation.

Then the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, rising in three colonnaded terraces against the cliff. Hatshepsut began as regent for Thutmose III and went on to rule as a crowned king in full pharaonic regalia — with his regnal years still running alongside hers. Her Punt expedition reliefs are on the middle terrace and are worth the climb on their own.

Finish with a photo stop at the Colossi of Memnon, the two seated quartzite figures of Amenhotep III that once flanked the entrance to the largest mortuary temple ever built on the west bank, now almost entirely gone.

Transfer to Luxor airport, Luxor railway station or your Luxor hotel.

Staying on in Luxor? See our Luxor day tours.

Optional tour: Sunrise Hot Air Ballooning Over Luxor

Meals: breakfast