A cruise along the Nile is the best way to experience the wonders of ancient Egypt. The luxurious new river cruise from Uniworld is a trip to remember.
On the banks of the Nile River, the sun-baked temples and tombs are like books written in stone. They are not only physical passageways that you move through. These walls may be read and contain messages from distant planets. These sturdy stacks of etched and painted rock represent some of the most advanced communication tools ever created if the medium is the message. That was my initial reaction as I walked through the enormous temple complex of Karnak in Luxor in awe, and the thought persisted throughout my eight nights in Egypt.
I traveled from Paris, where I live, through Cairo to experience the Sphinx, a brand-new Uniworld river liner. But I had also come in order to realize a boyhood ambition of seeing the artifacts from ancient Egypt. My other travelers and I were spirited away from the scorching African sun at our first stop, the complex of temples built by Pharaoh Ramses II, by our guide, Hazem Khalaf, who had a pleasant sense of humor and extensive knowledge. For its sailings, Uniworld collaborates with the Egyptian-owned Spring Tours, whose director is Khalaf, a gregarious Egyptologist with 22 years of tour-guiding experience. He reveres his profession in the same way that a master chef, a doctor, or even one of Hemingway's priests' Spanish bullfighters might admire their craft.
The photographer for this article, Email Bendixen, and I first met the day before at the Hilton Luxor Resort & Spa, where gardens cascade into the Nile. There, we became accustomed to the water's still strong. This river exudes a dignity that is both obvious and enigmatic. It's partially visual, with those emerald depths slicing the arid, palm-tree-lined riverbanks and a sky that starts off vividly blue, later turning orange and purple, before becoming inky black and splattered with stars. However, the mere sound of the river's name conjures up its dignity as well. Egypt is the gift of the Nile, wrote the Greek historian Herodotus in his Histories in the fourth century B.C. It is inconceivable that anything significant or permanent could have happened here without it.
It is claimed that the Sphinx is a floating five-star hotel. With the pride of the creators, Khalaf and his close friend Sameh El-Sayed emphasize this. Together, El-Sayed and the Sphinx were launched in September 2021. El-Sayed is the ship's manager. El-Sayed handled the building's construction and design, even down to the hand-carved wood ceilings and marble baths. He immediately struck me as a serious and careful man.
We were all placed in cabins that resembled opulent suites, complete with floor-to-ceiling windows, king-size beds, and roomy sitting rooms. (The Sphinx furthermore provides four Royal Suites with separate living areas suitable for entertaining.) After the daily excursions, returning to the ship meant entering a familiar bubble and being tended over, though never to the point where it seemed intrusive. The Egyptian men who worked in the dining rooms and bars, as well as cleaned and replenished the rooms, were dependable and friendly. The personnel in this predominantly male-dominated service sector reflected the rest of the industry since women are still not seen as having the right to spend weeks away from their homes in this religiously conservative society.
Bendixen and I shared our meals together and developed a close bond with a number of our regular waiters, none more so than the obliging Abdo Zarif who consistently filled our glasses with refreshing Egyptian pilsners. Zarif refused to accept that we were not married, despite our repeated attempts to explain to him our working situation. Bendixen, if she came to the table before me, would question him with anxiety, "Is your spouse coming down?" Zarif and a few others assisted me in making a doggy bag one evening when she went to bed early so that she wouldn't miss dinner.
Sunset on the #Nile River never gets old.
— INSIDE EGYPT (@InsideEgypt) November 7, 2018
Set sail on a luxurious Nile cruise during our 14 Day tour of #Egypt. We took care of all the details so that you can just soak it all in. Book your adventure: https://t.co/vHDQ4H3uHH pic.twitter.com/p7i3OWruaQ
Meals were provided on the first-floor deck, which offered breathtaking views of the lake. Classic regional foods like couscous and börek (a puff pastry with salted cheese and yogurt dip) were among my favorites, along with the surprisingly smooth Egyptian and Libyan wines.
Many of the other passengers were enthusiasts of the open oceans and different European rivers, so I was curious to find out what drove them. One retired American woman told me early on that "on a cruise, you switch your brain off," and I started to see the philosophical gap between those who diligently rose at dawn to go on all of the taxing daily excursions and those who played hooky, stretching out and sunning themselves on the deck in pia-codified silence.
I landed somewhere in the middle, having jumped at this trip partly to visit Egypt and partly to escape the frenetic pace of Parisian life or to slow down, do less, consciously read phrases on paper instead of a screen, and gaze into the horizon at dusk. The Internet was consistently unstable throughout the entire trip, and when it did function, a VPN was required to get over the government's severe content restrictions, which, depending on your point of view, was either a godsend or a curse. I had a wonderful sense of relief.
A river voyage is a study of repetition and rhythm, among other things. After a few days on the Nile, you begin to experience some of the more meditative aspects of floating along the water and taking in the changing landscape. Sometimes the landscape is lush, with tall grasses, date palms, and papyrus, and other times it is arider, with children and livestock coming and going as they scale boulders framed by sand dunes. It occasionally displays startling sights, such as men and donkeys washing next to an industrial complex while the runoff from their activities is spilled.
The ship occasionally transforms into a gateway through which time travel appears to be actually possible. When cruise ships are docked nearby, the ancient Greco-Roman temple at Kom Ombo gives the sense that you can reach out and touch the weathered columns from your window due to its size and weight. It doesn't take much imagination to block out the sound of the motor and imagine oneself as a pilgrim from another era who has come to honor Horus or the crocodile god Sobek (the falcon-headed god). It is difficult to not admire the fortitude of the people who ventured into these predator-infested seas to worship — and even mummify — the reptiles that frequently assaulted them. The building was built in their honor.
While Khalaf delivered concise lectures on the background knowledge and language underlying the day's program, Spring Tours provided shuttle vans that cocooned us in climate-controlled comfort. On the way to the Valley of the Kings, where the pharaohs were buried in the desolate, hostile hillsides before they moved their capital from Memphis to Cairo and learned to build pyramids, we passed one of the most incredible sights I have ever seen: the Colossi of Memnon. It was next to a nondescript highway with ramshackle gas stations and convenience stores wrapped in blue Pepsi signage. It comprises two seated statues of Pharaoh Amenhotep III that are 59 feet tall and date back to 1350 B.C. The severity they express, despite being almost completely destroyed and effaced beyond recognition, is something I've never felt before. These are the surviving members of a group who thought they were divine in some way right now.
I entered Tutankhamun's Burial Chamber further up the road, deep within the Valley of the Kings' stone hills, and stood spellbound in front of his partially veiled, blackened, yet startlingly undamaged corpse. I could count all ten of his withered but amazingly tough toes, and it was the size of a tiny toddler. It is profound and strange to find yourself in the presence of actual locations that have long existed in your mind (as well as the collective consciousness of the culture). Prior to this journey, it had only really occurred to me at the Acropolis in Greece and the Garden of Gethsemane in Israel. In Egypt, it repeatedly occurred.
By the time the tour arrived at Aswan, one of Ancient Egypt's most significant cities, I had grown accustomed to spending my evenings on the roof deck, where I would clutch my icy gin and tonic as the air progressively cooled around me and take in the breathtaking sherbet-toned sunsets streaking the sky. The old Nubian city and series of islands in the river, on which tourists may find botanical gardens, archaeological monuments, and temples, surprised me with their lushness and natural grandeur. (Nubia was a prehistoric civilization in northeastern Africa that dominated sections of contemporary Egypt and Sudan.)
One morning, we went bird viewing around the islands. As the typical felucca sailboats zigzagged all around, Diaa Araby, our tour guide that day, pointed out big blue herons, lovely night herons, pied kingfishers, and reed warblers in the pampas grass along the river's banks. Khalaf said, "You have to tack back and forth when you take the boat against the wind. Driving a car in Cairo is like navigating a felucca on the Nile!
Saharan dunes that are steep and velvety plunge suddenly into the water on one side of the river. The Old Cataract Hotel, a colonial oasis in green and brick-red, is visible on the opposite side. Agatha Christie, among many other distinguished visitors, once withdrew for an entire year in 1937 to pen her book Death on the Nile. On the stunning hotel terrace where we enjoyed tea and cocktails one evening, I nearly saw Hercule Poirot himself. The razor-thin moon was revealed as the clear sky turned pitch-black and pinhole with stars, and I was reminded that Ramadan had started and that our kind team had been fasting and even skipping water since daybreak.
ASWAN REPRESENTED the cruise's high point, and we then reversed our path to Luxor. From there, some of us would take a flight to Cairo to see the Pyramids, fulfilling a longstanding goal for several of the travelers, including myself. Whole clans gathered at the Luxor airport to send off the lone family members who had saved enough money to travel to Mecca, creating a joyful environment.
Political realities re-emerged after landing in Cairo. Lest anyone forget, Egypt is a military dictatorship, and in the capital, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was shown on enormous billboards and murals everywhere I turned. The tour took us through the maze-like metropolis that, just over ten years before, had been the epicenter of an Arab Spring; those portraits serve as a reminder that it never materialized to the calm shelter of the Four Seasons Hotel Cairo at Nile Plaza.
The arrival of the Pyramids and its mesmerizing, noseless guard at the very end of the journey is fortunate. (Nothing, not even the horrifying presence of a Kentucky Fried Chicken, which Khalaf had joked the poor Sphinx must now stare at forever, can lessen these images.) Nothing that could fairly compete comes to mind.
The novelist Rachel Cusk said, "I have often thought about the survival of paintings and what it means for our civilization that an image has survived across time undamaged. And something of the morality of that survival — the survival of the original — pertains, I believe, to the custody of human souls too.
One of the women in my party started crying as we finally arrived at the Pyramids and got off the buses to go toward the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the only surviving "wonder of the ancient world." She wiped her eyes and spoke to no one in particular, "I have always wanted to see the Pyramids. I gave her a friendly grin before moving on to the massive stone piles. In today's polluted, golden-blue modern sky, the morality of the survival of these three-dimensional images from the furthest reaches of civilization is striking. As my own eyes started to well, I reasoned that it calls for precisely such a response.