Seven nights is the full length of the river. Luxor to Aswan and back, which means you see Esna, Edfu and Kom Ombo twice — once heading south in the afternoon light and once coming north in the morning — and you get two full days in Aswan rather than the few hours a short cruise allows.
It also means you unpack once. For a week between Christmas and the first days of January, everything you need is in one cabin and the country moves past the window.
What makes this different from an ordinary week on the Nile is one night in the middle of it. Where you are at midnight on 31 December depends entirely on which day you board, and that is worth choosing deliberately rather than by accident.
Our ships leave Luxor every Monday, Thursday and Saturday, so only three of the seven possible New Year departures actually sail each season. The pattern that falls out of that is unusually tidy: every year you get one Aswan midnight, one Luxor midnight, and one mid-river.
| Board | Disembark | New Year’s Eve |
|---|---|---|
| Sat 26 Dec | Sat 02 Jan | Mid-river, moored at Edfu |
| Mon 28 Dec | Mon 04 Jan | Moored at ASWAN |
| Thu 31 Dec | Thu 07 Jan | Moored at Luxor (your embarkation night) |
| Board | Disembark | New Year’s Eve |
|---|---|---|
| Sat 25 Dec | Sat 01 Jan | Christmas aboard · midnight at Luxor |
| Mon 27 Dec | Mon 03 Jan | Moored at ASWAN |
| Thu 30 Dec | Thu 06 Jan | Mid-river, moored at Esna / Edfu |
| Board | Disembark | New Year’s Eve |
|---|---|---|
| Mon 25 Dec | Mon 01 Jan | Christmas aboard · midnight at Luxor |
| Thu 28 Dec | Thu 04 Jan | Moored at ASWAN |
| Sat 30 Dec | Sat 06 Jan | Mid-river, moored at Esna / Edfu |
Your Egyptologist meets you at Luxor airport or your hotel and takes you to the mooring, where check-in is usually from early afternoon. The rest of the day is yours. Most people spend it on the sun deck watching the east bank go about its business: feluccas working the current, the call to prayer carrying across the water at sunset, the Theban hills turning pink on the far side. Dinner is aboard and the ship stays moored at Luxor overnight. Nothing is scheduled, which after a long flight is rather the point.
Meals: Lunch and dinner
Across the river early for the Valley of the Kings: sixty-odd tombs cut into the rock of a single dry valley, of which your ticket admits you to three. The painted ceilings in the burial chambers have held their color for three thousand years, and your guide can read what is written on them, which changes the visit entirely. Then Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari, three terraces built straight into the cliff face, and the Colossi of Memnon, the last easily visible remains of what was once the largest temple complex in Egypt. Back aboard for lunch as the ship casts off and turns south. You pass through the Esna lock in the afternoon, a slow and oddly sociable business, and moor for the night on the stretch of river between Esna and Edfu.
Meals: Breakfast, lunch and dinner
Two temples, and they could not be less alike. The Temple of Horus at Edfu is the most completely preserved in Egypt, roofed and dark inside, with its granite falcon still standing at the entrance and a full account of the god’s mythology carved along the walls. Kom Ombo, reached in the afternoon, sits right on a bend of the river close enough to walk to from the mooring. It is the only Egyptian temple built symmetrically for two gods, Sobek the crocodile and Haroeris the falcon, so everything comes in pairs: two entrances, two colonnades, two sanctuaries. On one wall is a relief of surgical instruments that Egyptologists still argue about. Sail to Aswan. Overnight in Aswan.
Meals: Breakfast, lunch and dinner
The High Dam, the structure that changed the country more than anything built since antiquity. The Unfinished Obelisk, still lying in its granite quarry where a crack ended the work three thousand years ago; had it been raised it would have been the largest ever cut. And Philae, the Temple of Isis, taken apart block by block and rebuilt on Agilkia Island when the water rose behind the dam. Back to your ship for overnight in Aswan.
Meals: Breakfast, lunch and dinner
The optional day. Abu Simbel means by road or short flight, for the two rock temples of Ramesses II, themselves cut from a cliff and relocated in the 1960s in an operation almost as remarkable as the original construction. Or stay in Aswan and do very little: the Nubian Museum, a felucca around Elephantine, the botanical garden on Kitchener’s Island, and the souk in the late afternoon when it wakes up.
Meals: Breakfast, lunch and dinner
The river again, in the opposite direction and completely different light. What you passed heading south arrives from the other side, and the stretch between Aswan and Edfu is where the desert comes closest to the water on both banks. Much of the day is deliberately unscheduled: the sun deck, the banks going by, villages and sugar cane and egrets standing in the shallows. Your guide will fill in whatever you want filling in and leave you alone otherwise. Night moored at Edfu.
Meals: Breakfast, lunch and dinner
North through Esna and back to Luxor, where the two great east bank temples are saved for your last full day. Karnak is the largest religious building ever raised, added to by pharaoh after pharaoh across roughly two thousand years, and the Hypostyle Hall — 134 columns, the tallest of them over twenty metres — is the part that stops people talking mid-sentence. Then Luxor Temple at the other end of the restored Avenue of Sphinxes. One obelisk stands at its entrance; its twin has been in Paris since 1836. Look up at the mosque of Abu Haggag, still in use, built into the temple wall well above the ancient floor: that height is how deep the site lay buried before anyone dug it out. Final night aboard, moored at Luxor.
Meals: Breakfast, lunch and dinner
Breakfast aboard, then transfer to Luxor airport or on to your next hotel. If you are adding Cairo, the flight north takes about an hour.
Meals: Breakfast only
