12 Days Egypt Tour: Alexandria, Nile & Red Sea

The plateau in the morning, starting at the Great Pyramid and working down the line. Going inside is possible and is not for everyone: the passage is low, steep and warm, and there is nothing at the end of it but an empty granite chamber, which is either the whole point or a wasted hour depending on the person. Saqqara takes the afternoon, a short drive south, where Djoser's Step Pyramid predates everything at Giza. The tomb chapels around it are the reason to linger, because their reliefs show farming, butchery, boat building and accounting rather than gods, and Egypt becomes much easier to picture once you have seen ordinary work carved on a wall.

The drive to Alexandria takes most of the morning along the desert road. Kom el Shoqafa is a Roman tomb complex cut three levels down into the rock. The lowest level is usually under water. What makes it worth the trip is the carving: Egyptian gods rendered in Roman dress, Anubis in a legionary's uniform, two religions visibly arguing on one wall. A spiral stair wraps a shaft down which the bodies were lowered, and you walk down beside it. You stay in Alexandria tonight, which is the right call, because the city is a different country from Cairo after dark.

Kom el Dikka holds the only Roman theatre found in Egypt, uncovered by accident when the ground was being cleared for a housing block. Around it are lecture halls from a late antique school, with tiered stone seating and a teacher's chair, which is about as close as anywhere comes to a picture of how the ancient world taught. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is a short walk if you want it, though it is a modern building making a very old argument. You drive back to Cairo in the afternoon and check in at the Four Seasons. Tomorrow you fly south, so the evening stays free.

You fly to Luxor and cross to the west bank the same day. Medinet Habu is the mortuary temple of Ramesses III and the least visited of the large west bank sites, which stops making sense the moment you are inside it. Colour survives in the shaded parts of the ceiling. The sunk relief is cut deep enough to hold shadow at any hour of the day. The outer walls carry the record of a war against the Sea Peoples, the dead counted in severed hands, which is not a figure of speech. The Valley of the Queens follows, and whether Nefertari's tomb is open that day is worth asking about, because the painting in it is the best preserved in Egypt.

The MS Le Fayan sails from Luxor on Thursdays, which is what fixes the start date of the whole itinerary rather than the other way round. You board late in the morning and the ship casts off in the afternoon. The first hours go by on the sun deck watching the east bank, which is a slower way to look at Egypt than anything else on this trip. For someone travelling alone the ship changes the arithmetic: the guide stays private when you go ashore, and on board there is a dining room where you are not the only person eating by yourself. Nothing else is asked of you today.

Edfu is reached from the mooring, and the Temple of Horus is the most completely preserved in Egypt, roof included. Walking it is the clearest lesson anywhere in how these buildings worked, because you pass from open court to dark sanctuary the way a priest did and the light drops at every step. The granite falcons in the forecourt are the ones every photograph is of, and they are worth stopping at. Kom Ombo comes in the late afternoon, built for two gods at once and therefore doubled down the middle, with two entrances, two sanctuaries and one wall between them. The crocodile museum beside it holds mummified crocodiles from the site, which is less grim than it sounds and explains exactly what the temple was for.

You come off the ship at Aswan in the morning. Philae is reached by boat, and the temple on that island is not standing where it was built: the whole thing was cut into blocks and moved when the High Dam raised the lake over its original island. Isis was still worshipped here after the rest of Egypt had turned Christian, which is why the latest carving runs so late and why there are crosses cut over parts of it. You are staying at the Old Cataract, on the rock above the river, which has enough history of its own to be worth asking about, and the free afternoon is usually spent on a felucca as the sun goes down.

You leave Aswan in the dark, because Abu Simbel is a long way south and the temples are best before the middle of the day. Ramesses cut them into a cliff to be seen by anyone coming north into Egypt, so the four seated figures outside are as much a border sign as a religious building. The whole site was cut into blocks and lifted above the waterline in the nineteen sixties, and the join lines are visible once you know to look for them. Inside, the smaller temple built for Nefertari is the one people underestimate, and it is the better building of the two. You are back in Aswan by the afternoon and you will want a quiet evening.

A short flight crosses to the coast and the country changes completely. The reef here starts close enough to the shore that you do not need a boat to see it. The water is clear in a way the Nile never is. Sahl Hasheesh is quieter than Hurghada itself, which is the reason to be down there rather than in the town. Nothing is scheduled today and that is the design: nine days of sites has earned one where the only decision is what time to eat. Diving and snorkelling are arranged on the spot rather than booked in advance.

You fly back to Cairo in the morning and the last day of substance is spent on foot. Al-Muizz Street runs through the medieval city and is closed to cars along its main stretch, which is rarer in Cairo than it sounds. The buildings along it are Fatimid, then Mamluk, then Ottoman in sequence, so one walk covers about a thousand years without leaving the street. Go in the evening, when the facades are lit, the shops are open and the heat has gone out of the day. The sabil kuttab buildings, half public fountain and half school, are the ones to stop at, because there is very little like them anywhere else.

The last morning is unscheduled and the transfer is built around your flight rather than a check out time. If there is room for it, the Museum of Egyptian Civilisation and its royal mummies is the right final hour, because it puts faces to names you have been hearing for a fortnight. You are taken through check in the same way you were met on arrival. Twelve days covering the delta, the valley, the lake and the coast is a great deal of country, and doing it alone with a guide is what keeps that pace survivable.