Luxor and Aswan: from Karnak to Abu Simbel on a Nile cruise

After the crowds of the Valley of the Kings, Medinet Habu surprises you with its calm: great walls covered in reliefs, some of which keep their blues, reds and yellows.

The mortuary temple of Ramesses III, from the 12th century BC, opens with a fortified gate modelled on Syrian fortresses. Its walls tell of the king's wars, including the battle against the "Sea Peoples". On the way, the Colossi of Memnon, two seated statues of Amenhotep III about 18 m high, are all that remains of his mortuary temple.

Allow an hour at Medinet Habu and ten minutes at the Colossi, freely accessible by the roadside.

Our favourite on the West Bank: reliefs as beautiful as Karnak's, with a fraction of the visitors.

On Elephantine Island, dirt lanes wind between houses painted blue, yellow and with geometric patterns, and you hear the rooster more than the car horns.

The island faces central Aswan. It is home to two Nubian villages and, at its southern tip, the ruins of ancient Abu with its Nilometer, used to measure the flood. The Nubians, the people of the upper Nile Valley, were largely displaced when Lake Nasser was filled.

Cross by public boat or felucca, wander through the villages, drink karkadé tea in a guesthouse. On the West Bank, other Nubian villages can be visited by motorboat. Half a day.

In the Great Hypostyle Hall, you feel tiny: a forest of columns covered in hieroglyphs, so wide that it takes several people to reach around one.

Karnak is the great sanctuary of Amun-Ra, enlarged by successive pharaohs over more than two thousand years. The Hypostyle Hall has 134 columns, and the complex mixes pylons, obelisks, a sacred lake and chapels from every period.

Follow the main axis through the pylons to the sanctuary, then branch off to Hatshepsut's obelisk and the sacred lake. Allow at least two hours, three if you like reading the reliefs.

This is where you grasp the scale of pharaonic power: the Hypostyle Hall alone covers more than 5,000 m².

Outside, a valley of bare limestone baking in the sun; inside the tombs, corridors entirely painted with funerary texts, gods and solar boats in still-vivid colours.

The New Kingdom pharaohs had their tombs cut here, hidden in the Theban cliffs, more than sixty in total. Only some are open, on rotation, to protect the paintings.

The general ticket covers three tombs open on the day; Tutankhamun, Seti I and Ramesses V and VI cost extra. Allow two to three hours, plus the little train linking the entrance to the tombs.

After three hours of desert, the facade appears on the shore of Lake Nasser: four seated statues of Ramesses II, cut into the cliff, facing the sunrise.

Ramesses II had two temples cut here, the great one dedicated to himself and the main gods, the small one to Queen Nefertari and the goddess Hathor. Threatened by the High Dam's lake, they were cut into blocks and rebuilt higher up in the 1960s, in an operation coordinated by UNESCO.

You visit both temples in one to two hours: halls with Osiride pillars, reliefs of the Battle of Kadesh, the sanctuary at the back of the Great Temple. Around 22 February and 22 October, the rising sun reaches the sanctuary statues.

After dark, floodlights turn the pylon, the obelisk and the colossi of Ramesses II gold, in the middle of a town that carries on living around them.

Built mainly under Amenhotep III and then enlarged by Ramesses II, the temple was linked to Karnak by an avenue of sphinxes about three kilometres long, excavated and reopened to the public in 2021. Its twin, the other obelisk from the entrance, has stood on Place de la Concorde in Paris since 1836.

You walk through the Court of Ramesses II, the Colonnade of Amenhotep III and the peristyle court to the rear rooms, where Roman frescoes still survive. An hour to an hour and a half is enough.

Its night lighting makes it the ideal evening visit, a few minutes' walk from the Corniche hotels.

Three terraces of white columns stack up at the foot of an ochre cliff several hundred metres high: the architecture looks surprisingly modern.

Hatshepsut, one of the few female pharaohs, had this mortuary temple built in the 15th century BC. Its reliefs tell, among other things, of the trading expedition to the land of Punt, with its ships, incense trees and exotic animals.

Climb the ramps to the upper terrace, lined with Osiride statues of the queen, then look for the Punt reliefs on the middle terrace. Allow an hour.

The Valley of the Kings is just on the other side of the mountain, about ten minutes away by car.

You arrive by boat, between granite rocks, and the temple appears to float on the water, its pylons reflected in the lake.

Philae was the great sanctuary of the goddess Isis, active until the 6th century AD. Flooded for part of the year after the first Aswan dam, it was dismantled and rebuilt on the neighbouring island of Agilkia during the campaign to save the monuments of Nubia.

You walk through the colonnaded court, the pylon with its reliefs of Isis and the Kiosk of Trajan on the water's edge. An hour and a half including the crossing, more if you stay for the sound and light show.

The entrance pylon, as tall as an apartment block, shows the king striking his enemies under the gaze of Horus; behind it, the temple is almost intact, roof included.

Built in the Ptolemaic period, between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, the Edfu temple is one of the best preserved in Egypt. Long buried in sand, it was protected until it was cleared in the 19th century.

You pass through the court, the hypostyle halls and on to the sanctuary, where the god's granite naos still stands, before walking round the outer corridor. Allow an hour to an hour and a half.

Roof, halls and naos are still in place: you're visiting a near-complete Ptolemaic temple, from pylon to sanctuary.

Set on a mound by the Nile, the temple turns honey-coloured at sunset, as the cruise boats line up below it.

Kom Ombo is a double temple, a rarity: its southern half is dedicated to Sobek, the crocodile god, its northern half to Haroeris, a form of Horus. Everything is doubled, from the doors to the sanctuaries.

Follow the two parallel axes, find the so-called "surgical instruments" relief and the carved calendar, then finish at the small museum of mummified crocodiles. Allow an hour.

In dark rooms where every statue has its own beam of light, you're a few centimetres from the faces of the pharaohs.

On the Corniche, the museum gathers finds from the Theban region: statues from the Luxor Temple cache discovered in 1989, objects from Tutankhamun's tomb, a reconstructed wall from Akhenaten's temple at Karnak, royal mummies.

The visit takes an hour to an hour and a half, in peace, with clear labels in English.

It is still there, lying in the pink rock of the quarry, half freed: the largest obelisk ever attempted in Egypt, abandoned when the granite cracked.

Cut in the Aswan quarries, which supplied granite for temples across the country, it would have stood about 42 metres tall. Nobody knows who ordered it; it is often attributed to Hatshepsut.

Walkways let you see the tool marks and the crack that doomed the project. The visit takes half an hour.

From the top of the dam, you see on one side the blue vastness of Lake Nasser, on the other the Nile, a river again, narrow, heading for Aswan.

Completed in 1970, the High Dam ended the Nile's annual floods and created Lake Nasser, which stretches into Sudan. Its construction forced the rescue of Abu Simbel, Philae and other Nubian temples, and the relocation of many villages.

You stop on the road along the crest, at the Soviet-Egyptian Friendship monument and the viewpoint over the lake. Thirty minutes is enough.