5-Day Cairo, Luxor & Aswan Tour with Domestic Flights

Your representative meets you at Cairo International Airport with a sign bearing your name and escorts you to a private air-conditioned vehicle. Your driver takes care of the journey into the city, so you can sit back and watch Cairo's skyline of minarets and apartment blocks roll past instead of negotiating with a taxi driver.

After check-in the day is free. If you land early, rest first, then ask the concierge or your guide for an easy outing close to the hotel; if you land late, go straight to sleep. This is the only unhurried day until departure, and the next three are full, so treat it as a chance to recharge.

Your guide confirms tomorrow's pickup time at the airport or with a short welcome call in the evening. No meals are included today. Get a good night's sleep: from tomorrow the program moves quickly, with a flight south on Day 3.

After breakfast you are driven to the Giza Plateau, where the Great Pyramid of Khufu, the Pyramid of Khafre and the Pyramid of Menkaure rise above the western edge of the city. Your Egyptologist explains how these tombs were engineered and what they meant to the kings who commissioned them some 4,500 years ago. Walk around the base of the Great Pyramid and you get a real sense of the scale: its sides were laid out on a square measuring roughly 230 meters each way.

You continue to the Great Sphinx, carved from a single ridge of limestone with the body of a lion and the face of a pharaoh, and widely attributed to Khafre, whose causeway runs alongside it.

From Giza you head to the Grand Egyptian Museum, the largest archaeological museum dedicated to a single civilization. Your guide leads you up the Grand Staircase, lined with statues of kings and gods, and through the Tutankhamun exhibition halls, where the king's complete tomb collection, including the gold mask and gilded shrines, is displayed together. Lunch at a local restaurant is included during the day.

You return to your hotel by evening and should rest early: tomorrow begins with a morning flight.

You are collected early for Cairo Airport and a morning flight to Luxor, ancient Thebes. Your Luxor-based guide meets you on arrival and begins on the West Bank, the realm the ancient Egyptians associated with sunset and the dead.

In the Valley of the Kings, pharaohs of the New Kingdom, Tutankhamun among them, were buried in tombs cut deep into the mountainside, their walls covered in painted scenes of the sun's journey through the night. Entry typically covers three tombs, with Tutankhamun's own tomb available as an optional extra. You then visit the Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari, whose colonnaded terraces rise against the cliffs, built for Egypt's most powerful female pharaoh. A photo stop at the Colossi of Memnon, twin seated statues that once guarded a now-vanished temple, follows.

After lunch at a local restaurant you cross to the East Bank for Karnak Temple, the largest religious complex of the ancient world, whose Hypostyle Hall holds 134 massive columns. Look up: many still carry their original painted colors near the top. The day ends with a shorter visit to Luxor Temple, set right on the Nile corniche.

In the evening you transfer to your Luxor hotel to rest before tomorrow's drive to Aswan.

You leave your Luxor hotel early for the drive south to Aswan, three to four hours in a private air-conditioned vehicle. The road shadows the Nile through sugarcane fields and date palms, with the desert never far beyond the last irrigated strip, and small villages along the river.

In Aswan your local guide begins at the High Dam, completed in 1970 to control the Nile's annual flood. Behind it lies Lake Nasser, one of the largest artificial lakes in the world, stretching south across the border into Sudan. A short motorboat ride then takes you to the Temple of Philae, dedicated to the goddess Isis. When rising waters threatened to submerge it, the temple was dismantled block by block in a UNESCO-led rescue and rebuilt on higher ground on a nearby island; look for the long colonnades and the reliefs of Isis with her son Horus.

After lunch you visit the Unfinished Obelisk, still lying in its granite quarry. Had it been finished it would have been the largest obelisk ever raised, but a crack in the stone forced the workers to abandon it, leaving their marks in the rock. Time permitting, you can add a short felucca sail around Elephantine Island, an optional extra paid locally. You then transfer to Aswan Airport for your evening flight to Cairo, landing late in the day.

After two long days in the south, your last morning is calm. Breakfast is at your Cairo hotel, and you have free time until your transfer, depending on your flight schedule.

Your private driver collects you at a time that allows for Cairo traffic and international check-in, and drives you to Cairo International Airport. Rush-hour traffic can double the journey time, so the pickup may feel early; it is planned that way so the trip ends without a scramble.

If your flight leaves later in the day, the spare hours are a good moment to repack the souvenirs you picked up along the way and look back over the route you have covered: the pyramids of Giza, the tombs and temples of Thebes, and the granite islands of Aswan, the length of Egypt's classic route in four nights. Any additional sightseeing on this final day is outside the package.