Nile Cruise

The three night Nile Cruise from Luxor to Aswan perfectly balanced site seeing and relaxing. Every day we saw temples and tombs from ancient Egypt, but also spent many an hour relaxing and getting to know our fellow travelers.

The ruins were amazing. You can watch all the PBS specials you want, but you simply can’t understand the grandeur of the temples until you see them in person. The largest temple we saw was Karnak in Luxor. Despite its now dilapidated state, you can’t help but feel you are in the Notre Dam of its time.


My favorite temple was the temple of Philae. The island on which the temple originally stood did not hold the temple above the water level when they built a damn down stream at Aswan. Rather than let this beautiful monument to the goddess Isis drown, a group of Italian Egyptologists moved the entire temple piece by piece to higher ground. The new island is lush and green and the temple is as magnificent as ever.


The last nigh of the cruise we celebrated Michele’s birthday. After dinner the crew sang Happy Birthday to her in English and Arabic then danced her around the dining room, finally presenting her with a cake. She blew out the candles with another birthday girl in our group. Later we had an Egyptian costume party and danced our pants off.