Nine days is the length at which an Egypt trip stops being a dash and becomes a holiday. This 9 day Egypt Christmas tour gives you four nights in Cairo and four nights on a Nile cruise, which is enough to see the Pyramids and the Grand Egyptian Museum without an alarm clock, sail from Luxor to Aswan with a full day for every temple on the way, and still come back to Cairo for the Egyptian Museum and the old Coptic churches, which, in Christmas week, is the right way to end. Domestic flights, a private Egyptologist guide on every touring day, entrance fees and 20 meals are included, and you spend the festive week in a country where December means 22 degrees and blue skies.
We run the tour as a small group of no more than 16, with private departures on request. Choose between our Gold and Platinum hotel and cruise levels, and between triple, twin/double and single rooms and cabins. Departures run through the Christmas and New Year period, timed to the Nile cruise sailing days, so you can decide whether you would rather spend Christmas Eve on the river or in Cairo.
The shape of the trip is simple: Cairo, the river, Cairo. You land, and the first full day belongs to Giza and the Grand Egyptian Museum, the two things everyone comes for, seen back to back so that Khufu’s boat and Tutankhamun’s treasures sit next to the pyramids they came from. On day three you fly south to Luxor and board your cruise ship, and the next four days are the classic Nile route: Karnak and Luxor Temple, the Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsut’s terraces, Edfu’s complete temple of Horus, the double temple at Kom Ombo, and Aswan with Philae on its island. Then you fly back to Cairo for a slower last full day among the Egyptian Museum’s Old Kingdom masterpieces and the churches of Coptic Cairo, before your flight home.
What makes this the nine-day version rather than the eight is the second Cairo stretch. Shorter Christmas packages fly you straight from the Nile to the airport. Here you get a proper final day in the capital, and a night to rest before you travel, which after a Nile cruise most people are grateful for.
Everything is guided by an Egyptologist, in English, in a small group. Meals are mostly included: breakfast every day, lunch on all eight touring days, and dinner on the four cruise nights. Hotels and the ship are 5-star by Egyptian classification at both levels; the difference between Gold and Platinum is explained further down.
Egypt does Christmas twice. Hotels and cruise ships mark 24 and 25 December with trees, lights and a festive dinner for their international guests, and then the country’s own Christians, roughly a tenth of the population, celebrate on 7 January by the Coptic calendar. If your dates fall around either, you will see it: carols in the hotel lobby, decorated ships along the Luxor corniche, and, in the first week of January, the churches of Coptic Cairo dressed for their own feast. Day eight of the tour takes you into three of them.
The weather is the other reason to come now. Cairo in late December is around 20 degrees by day and cool at night; Luxor and Aswan are a few degrees warmer and rarely see a cloud. It is the most comfortable time of year to walk the Valley of the Kings, and the light on the river in the late afternoon is the best you will get all year.
