Cairo & the Nile — 7 Nights

Met at Cairo and driven into the city, with the evening free and the first sight of the Nile from the corniche. Nothing is scheduled: most flights arrive tired and the city takes some absorbing. If you have the energy, the corniche walk after dark is the gentlest possible introduction to a city of over twenty million people.

The Giza plateau from early in the day, before the heat and the coaches. The Great Pyramid was built around 2560 BC and remained the tallest structure made by human beings for nearly four thousand years, which is the fact that reframes everything else about it. The panorama point behind the three pyramids gives the scale; the Sphinx and the valley temple sit below. Going inside one of the pyramids is possible, hot, and a matter of taste.

The museum collection in the morning — whether the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza or the older one on Tahrir Square, both are more than a morning's worth and the guide sets the route. The afternoon goes into Khan el-Khalili, a market working on the same site since the fourteenth century, and the coffee houses in it that have been open for two hundred years. Islamic Cairo around it holds some of the finest medieval architecture anywhere and almost nobody walks it.

A short flight south to Luxor, which is built over ancient Thebes. Karnak in the afternoon is the point of the day: a temple complex extended by pharaoh after pharaoh across roughly two thousand years, its hypostyle hall holding a hundred and thirty-four columns, the largest of them twenty-one metres high. Luxor Temple in the town is smaller, later and better at dusk when it is lit. Overnight in Luxor.

Across to the west bank at first light for the Valley of the Kings, where sixty-three tombs were cut into the rock of a dry valley rather than built above ground, precisely so they could not be found — which did not work. Three are open on the standard ticket. The Colossi of Memnon and Hatshepsut's terraced mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari fill the rest of the morning. Board the cruise boat in the afternoon and sail south.

Edfu in the morning, the temple of Horus and the most completely preserved in Egypt — built between 237 and 57 BC, buried in sand for centuries and therefore intact to the roof, with its inscriptions still legible. Kom Ombo later in the day is unusual in being symmetrical: a double temple with two entrances, two sanctuaries and two sets of everything, shared between Sobek the crocodile god and Horus the elder. The evening is on deck as the river goes past.

Into Aswan, where the Nile is at its most beautiful — granite islands, white sails, and the desert coming down to both banks. Philae temple was dismantled and rebuilt on higher ground when the High Dam raised the water behind it, and it is reached by motorboat. The Unfinished Obelisk in the granite quarries would have been the largest ever raised had it not cracked, and it explains how the others were cut. A felucca at sunset is the way to end the day.

A last morning at Aswan before the flight — the Nubian villages on the west bank are worth an hour, with their painted houses and a quite different culture from the rest of Egypt, or the Aswan souq, which is a working market rather than a tourist one. Then the transfer to the airport for the domestic flight and your onward connection.