Ten days in Egypt: everything you came for is on one river

Cairo airport is a slow half hour to well over an hour from downtown depending on when you land, so plan nothing fixed for the arrival. Drop the bags and go straight to the river.

Feluccas sail out from the Corniche in Garden City for an hour at a time, and the hour to be on the water is the one before sunset, when the noise falls away and the towers on both banks turn gold. Then east, into the medieval city.

Midan Hussein is the square in front of the mosque said to hold the head of the Prophet's grandson, and the Khan el-Khalili bazaar runs off it. Late evening is when the square belongs to Cairenes rather than tour groups: tea, shisha, families out at eleven, and a coppersmith still working at the back of a lane.

Be at the plateau gate when it opens. The first hour is cool and nearly empty; by mid morning it is coaches, camel men and unbroken sun, and there is no shade anywhere on the site.

The Great Pyramid was built for Khufu in the Fourth Dynasty, around 2500 BC, out of more than two million blocks. It rose 146 metres and stands a few metres shorter now, having lost its cap and most of its smooth casing. Khafre's, on higher ground behind it, keeps a patch of that original limestone skin at the very top, which is the clearest idea you will get of how these looked when they were finished. Walk out past Menkaure's and the small queens' pyramids to see the plateau without anybody on it.

The Sphinx is below, at the end of Khafre's causeway, carved from the bedrock and worn to the point where the face is more suggestion than portrait.

The afternoon belongs to the Grand Egyptian Museum, a short drive from the plateau. Four hours is the honest minimum for the whole thing, so pick: the Tutankhamun galleries, which hold the complete contents of one tomb, and whichever period you care most about. Standing in front of that gold with the pyramids of an earlier dynasty visible outside is the single best hour on this trip.

A walking day through the medieval city, going gently uphill towards the Citadel. Ibn Tulun comes first, raised in the 870s and quite unlike anything else here: an enormous plain courtyard on a six acre site, arcaded on all four sides, with a spiral minaret borrowed from Samarra in Iraq. It is the oldest minaret in Egypt, the staircase is on the outside, and the view from the top is the whole city at rooftop level.

Ten minutes east, Sultan Hassan is Mamluk building at its most extreme: finished in 1363, a wall of stone around a courtyard with four vaulted halls, one for each school of Sunni law, and a mausoleum behind the prayer wall. The much later Al-Rifa'i across the square was designed to match it and holds, among Egypt's royal family, the tomb of the last Shah of Iran.

Above both stands the Citadel, fortified by Saladin from the 1170s and the seat of power in Egypt for seven centuries afterwards. Inside it, Muhammad Ali's mosque, built between 1830 and 1848 in an Ottoman style with two pencil minarets, is the silhouette you see from everywhere in Cairo. Walk to the western terrace in the late afternoon: on a clear day the pyramids sit on the horizon behind the whole city.

The last Cairo day sits in Fustat, the oldest part of the city, which is two metro stops from downtown at Mar Girgis and completely walkable once you are there.

Coptic Cairo is a compact walled quarter built inside and on top of a Roman fort. The Hanging Church takes its name from being suspended over a gatehouse of that fort, its nave floating above a passage you can see down through a glass panel. A few steps away, the Ben Ezra Synagogue is the oldest surviving in Egypt, and the storeroom in it produced the Cairo Geniza, an archive of medieval Jewish life found in 1890 and now scattered across university libraries around the world.

Then, ten minutes south, the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, where the royal mummies were moved in 2021 in a televised procession through the city. They lie in a dark, cool, deliberately quiet hall downstairs, named and lit one by one: Ramses II, Hatshepsut, Seti I. After a week of tombs it is a strange and rather moving thing to meet the occupants.

In the evening, back to Ramses Station for the sleeper. Cabins are made up while you eat, the delta slides past the window, and you wake up in Upper Egypt.

The train gets in early, which is a gift: you are checked in and showered before the day has properly started, and the first hours in Luxor are the coolest ones.

Keep the day gentle. The Luxor Museum, on the corniche, is the best small museum in Egypt: a short, sharply chosen collection, much of it from a cache of royal statues found buried under the courtyard of Luxor Temple in 1989. An hour and a half here makes everything on the west bank easier to read.

Then Luxor Temple in the evening. It is lit after dark and stands below the level of the modern street, because the town built up around it while it was buried. Amenhotep III and Ramses II did most of the building; the mosque of Abu al-Haggag sits improbably halfway up an interior wall, at the height the rubble had reached when it was founded, and has been left exactly there.

The early start that decides the trip. Cross on one of the first ferries and be at the Valley of the Kings for opening: the valley is a bare gorge with no shade in it, and the tombs get hot and airless as the day fills up.

More than sixty tombs are cut into this rock, and the standard ticket admits you to a small number of those open on the day, with a few of the famous ones sold separately at the gate. Take a long one, take a well painted one, take one nobody is queueing for, and look at the ceilings. Tutankhamun's own tomb is small and plain; its contents are the thing, and they are back in Giza.

Around the cliff at Deir el-Bahari, Hatshepsut built her mortuary temple as three colonnaded terraces cut straight into the rock face. She ruled as pharaoh in the fifteenth century BC and had herself shown in a king's regalia; her successor later had her name chiselled off much of it, which you can still see.

Finish south at Medinet Habu, the mortuary temple of Ramses III, which gets a fraction of the visitors and keeps more of its colour and deeper carving than anything else on the bank. Then back across the water for a late lunch and an afternoon out of the sun.

Karnak was built and rebuilt for about two thousand years, one pharaoh's pylon in front of another's, so walking in from the front is walking backwards in time towards the oldest sanctuary in the middle. It is one of the largest religious complexes ever raised anywhere.

Go at opening. The hypostyle hall is the reason: 134 columns in sixteen rows, the central ones carrying architraves high above your head, with paint still visible where the roof used to shade it. Past it are Hatshepsut's standing obelisk, the sacred lake and a long sequence of ruined courts that most groups never reach.

Inside the enclosure, the open air museum is where the earliest structures were rebuilt from blocks found reused as filler in later pylons, among them a small, exquisitely carved limestone chapel of Senusret I. Almost nobody buys the extra ticket for it, which is their loss.

Keep the afternoon free. This is the day to do nothing: a couple of hours on a felucca, tea on a roof, and an early night before the train.

A short travel morning. The train up the valley takes three to four hours through a continuous green strip of cane and palms a couple of kilometres wide, with desert visible on both edges of it. It is the best window seat in Egypt and costs almost nothing.

Aswan is immediately different: smaller, hotter, slower, with granite islands in the river and Nubian villages painted blue and ochre on them. Drop the bags and start at the Nubian Museum at the southern end of town, which was built jointly by Egypt and UNESCO and opened in 1997 as an answer to what the High Dam flooded. It runs from rock art to the relocation photographs, and it is the piece of context that makes the rest of Aswan land properly.

Then out onto the corniche for the end of the day. The Ferial Gardens sit on the rocks above the water at the southern end, and the sun goes down behind the west bank with feluccas working the channel below.

Start in the granite quarry on the edge of town, where an obelisk still lies half cut in the bedrock. It would have stood about 42 metres and weighed close to 1,200 tonnes, larger than any obelisk ever raised, and it was abandoned where it lies when a crack ran through the stone. You can see the trenches around it and the marks left by pounding it out with harder rock. Half an hour, and it teaches more about how any of this was built than a whole temple does.

Then the boat to Philae. The temple of Isis stood on its own island until the dams put it under water for most of the year; in the 1970s it was taken apart and rebuilt on Agilkia, a neighbouring island reshaped to receive it. The crossing takes ten minutes and the approach, with the pylons standing straight out of the water, is the best arrival at any site in Egypt.

Isis was worshipped here for centuries after Egypt turned Christian, and the last dated hieroglyphic inscription anywhere was cut on this island in the fourth century AD. Crosses carved over reliefs mark where monks later took the building over. On the eastern shore, Trajan's Kiosk stands roofless on fourteen columns, open to the river, and is the building everybody photographs from the boat without knowing what it is.

The last morning is on the water. The public ferry to Elephantine costs a few pounds and lands in the Nubian villages of Siou and Koti, where the lanes are too narrow for cars and the houses are painted in flat blocks of blue and ochre. At the southern tip are the ruins of the ancient town: temples to the ram-headed Khnum and the goddess Satet, and the nilometer staircases cut down to the water, from whose readings the year's taxes were set.

Across a narrow channel is Kitchener's Island, given to the man himself in the 1890s and planted from everywhere the British Empire reached. It is now a botanical garden of nearly seven hectares, with royal palms down the middle and more shade than the rest of Upper Egypt put together. An hour is enough and most people stay longer.

Then back for lunch on the corniche, and out: Aswan has flights to Cairo, and the sleeper north leaves in the evening if you would rather do the whole thing by rail.