The ultimate Egyptian voyage: A cultural tour of Cairo and a luxury Nile cruise with my father

My father, whose surname is King and who recently turned 79, often grumbles about growing old. To help put things in perspective, I invited him to join me on a trip to Egypt, where they started recording the names and birthdays of their kings more than 5,000 years ago.

Amazingly, it worked. With so much genuinely ancient stuff to occupy his attention, he forgot all about his own advancing age and bounded around the monuments like Indiana Jones with an iPhone instead of a bullwhip.

We started in Cairo with two nights at the famous Mena House, virtually under the paw of the Sphinx and in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Unfortunately, the historic wing of the hotel, where Churchill was once a regular, was closed for renovation. However, as if by way of consolation, the Grand Egyptian Museum had just opened less than a mile down the road.

The museum’s acronym, GEM, is apt. It’s a jewel box of stupendous proportions and ingenious design, containing a staggering collection of treasures. Despite the long and widely publicised delays to its opening, it’s still a work in progress. Once fully finished, it will display no fewer than 100,000 objects, including all 5,000 or so artefacts from Tutankhamun’s tomb, making it the largest collection in the world dedicated to a single civilisation.

My father and I spent an enchanted four hours wandering its 12 main galleries. “We didn’t even scratch the surface,” Dad said cheerfully as we remerged into the mellow glow of the Cairo afternoon. “Can we come back tomorrow?”

Sadly, we couldn’t. The centrepiece of our trip was to be a cruise down the Nile from Aswan to Luxor on the luxury river boat Oberoi Zahra.

Before going aboard, though, I wanted very much to spend a night at the Old Cataract hotel in Aswan and had manipulated our schedule slightly in order to squeeze it in. Like Mena House, the Cataract is one of Egypt’s most storied hotels, best known as the place where Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile. Christie could write a novel in 12 weeks but stayed at the Cataract for nearly a year. I didn’t find it hard to see why. There’s a magic about it. It’s not just the architecture — a charming confection of Victorian stateliness, Art Deco angularity and wild Moorish flourishes. There’s also a certain auspiciousness to its location, on a high bank on a picturesque bend in the river opposite the ruins of Elephantine Island. From the hotel’s vast, shady terrace we watched the feluccas drift by, their sails catching the honeyed sunlight as effectively as they caught the breeze.

Our boat, too, though of a very different kind, was a delight. “Zahra” has multiple meanings in Arabic, among them “brightness” and “brilliance” — fittingly, as the interiors were airy and radiant by day, glossy and glamorous by night.

We occupied a fabulous two-bedroom suite, newly created at the end of 2024. It was the size of a decent London flat, though in a configuration that would seem odd anywhere apart from on a boat, wrapped as it was around the bow of the vessel in an inverted V shape, with one bedroom to port, another to starboard and a sizeable, chicly furnished living area in the middle overlooking the bow.

On the promenade deck above, at the opposite end of the boat, was the Katy Perry Suite. That’s not its official name, but that’s what I called it, since it was the cabin in which I’d heard the singer stayed when she’d chartered Zahra for her 35th birthday. Part of me was wary of so much as setting eyes on this suite, in case it brought on a violent compare-and-despair reaction. But when I was invited to take a sneak peek, I couldn’t resist. Amazing. The vast outdoor deck, in particular. Remarkably private, almost hidden, yet with wide-open 180-degree views. Happily, though, I was untroubled by envy. I preferred the suite I was sharing with Dad.

Overall, the style among Oberoi Zahra’s 25 cabins and two suites is consistent — impeccably crisp and contemporary, really only differing in position and proportion. Though there are Egyptian elements to the design, notably in works of art and craft, these are unobtrusive and low-key.

Which is perhaps just as well. With one or two excursions a day to some of the most iconic sites in the land, it’s not as if you’re bereft of Egyptian-ness. On the contrary. The intensity of the exposure to such an abundance of history is overwhelming. Our itinerary took in Philae, Edfu, Kom Ombu, the Valley of the Kings, Luxor and Karnak. All that in four days. People spend lifetimes studying these places. Having a guide, of course, helped greatly. And this is another stroke of genius on the part of Oberoi – guides are allocated per party, not per group, let alone per boat. So if you’re travelling as a couple or as a family, you and your partner or you and your kids will have, for the duration of your trip, the undivided attention of an expert who’ll quickly become more like an old friend than a guide – albeit an uncommonly well-informed, patient and helpful old friend.

It was only on our third evening that I realised there was a very neatly divided, almost symmetrical quality to our daily routine. The time we spent on the boat was leisurely and sybaritic, involving long lunches and dinners (invariably excellent), spa treatments and gazing from a sun lounger into the middle distance in a state of blissful idleness. The time we spent ashore, by contrast, was intense and cerebral, steeped in history, art, religion, facts, ideas. It's all about balance.

With a little encouragement from Oberoi (it didn’t take much), we spent a couple of nights after the cruise at The Oberoi Beach Resort, Sahl Hasheesh, on the Red Sea. It’s a large but immaculate and supremely well organised resort right on the water. On a clear day – which is to say, basically every day – you can see across the swaying palms and beach all the way to Saudi Arabia. In short, a marvellous place to let all those thousands of years’ worth of temple dust settle.

By then Dad I were already talking about our next Egypt trip. Oberoi are launching two new luxury dahabeyas — old-fashioned, twin-masted wooden vessels — this year, Melouk and Malekat, each with five cabins and two suites. Having had a fine time on Zahra, we’re keen to try one or other of these smaller, more nostalgically styled vessels.

A day or two after returning home to Scotland from our trip, I spotted by chance a newspaper item concerning the discovery at Taposiris Magna, near Alexandria, of what archaeologists believe may be a bust of Cleopatra. This is the funny thing about Egypt — there’s always, always something new. And, unlike our parents, unlike ourselves, it never gets old.

The details

Audley Travel (01993 838 410; audleytravel.com) offers a nine-night, tailor-made trip to Egypt from £6,195 per person, based on two travelling. This includes international and domestic economy flights; airport meet-and-greet and visa service on arrival; transfers; three nights on The Oberoi Zahra, Luxury Nile Cruiser, sailing from Aswan to Luxor (full board, including soft drinks but excluding alcohol, and guided tours); three nights at The Oberoi Beach Resort, Sahl Hasheesh (B&B); two nights at Marriott Mena House, Cairo (B&B); one night at Sofitel Legend Old Cataract, Aswan (B&B); and a full-day tour of the Grand Egyptian Museum, the Sphinx and the Pyramids of Giza.