10-Day Egypt Eclipse Tour with Luxor Totality and the Full Nile

Meet and assist inside Cairo International, then take a private transfer to your 4-5 hotel in Cairo. The evening is yours to land softly: the oldest country on Earth begins in the morning.

See the Great Pyramids in the morning light with unhurried time at the panorama viewpoint, then come face to face with the Sphinx. After lunch at a local restaurant, continue to the Grand Egyptian Museum, where Tutankhamun's complete treasures are finally displayed under one roof, with your Egyptologist cutting the collection down to its stories.

Start early and take the road south, some 650 kilometres up the Nile Valley from Cairo to Luxor, ancient Thebes, with the river, the cane fields, and the desert edge alongside you the whole way. Travel by private air-conditioned vehicle, with stops where you want them rather than where an airline schedule puts them. Reach Luxor in the afternoon, drop your bags at your apartment-style hotel, your base for the next four nights, then visit Karnak's Great Hypostyle Hall - 134 columns of carved sandstone in the largest religious building of the ancient world - in the last and best of the light.

Depart early for a hand-scouted viewing site near Luxor, chosen for clear horizons and reliable access. Spend hours on location before first contact to settle in and set up, then experience the whole event from first contact to last, with more than six minutes of totality at the centre as day becomes night over the Nile Valley. Return unhurriedly, and keep the evening deliberately free to let it sink in.

Cross the river in the morning light to explore the Valley of the Kings and a carefully chosen set of painted tombs, the great terraces of Queen Hatshepsut's temple against the Theban cliffs, and the Colossi of Memnon standing watch over the floodplain. After lunch at a local restaurant and an afternoon at leisure, return to the east bank for Luxor Temple as the light turns gold and the crowds go home, with the colonnade of Amenhotep III standing under the same sky that went out over it the day before.

Head north to the two great temples day-trippers miss. At Dendera, the astronomical ceiling still carries its original blues and golds, a chart of the heavens two days after you watched them go out, while at Abydos the reliefs of Seti I are, simply, the finest carving in Egypt. Rarely crowded and endlessly photographable.

Follow the classic river road south. At Edfu, the Temple of Horus is the most complete in Egypt, with its roof still on and darkness still in the sanctuary, and at Kom Ombo the double temple to Sobek and Horus sits directly above a bend in the Nile. Reach Aswan, Egypt's gentlest city, by evening, and settle into your 4-5 hotel for the final three nights.

Travel by boat to Philae, the temple of Isis rebuilt stone by stone on its island. Then continue upriver to a painted Nubian village for tea and colour, followed by a traditional felucca ride under sail as the sun drops behind the west-bank dunes - the Nile exactly as it has looked for five thousand years.

Take the early run south to Abu Simbel, where Ramses II's four colossi have guarded the Nubian frontier for 3,200 years, included and worth every pre-dawn minute. Have lunch after the visit, then return north to Aswan with the afternoon and evening free: the granite islands, the last of the light on the cataract, and no airport to make. Most itineraries fly you out exhausted the same day; this one gives Abu Simbel a night to settle.

Have breakfast, transfer to Aswan airport, and fly north to Cairo to meet your international departure.