10 Days in Egypt: What You Can Actually See

By ten days the standard Egypt itinerary is already complete. Cairo, the cruise, both banks of Luxor — that is eight days of content. So a ten-day trip is really a decision about what kind of holiday the last two days belong to.

There are four honest answers, and our nine ten-day trips split between them.

Option one: add the Red Sea

Fly from Luxor or Aswan to Hurghada or Sharm el-Sheikh and finish on the coast. This is the most common way to spend the extra days and, for most people, the right one — the reef starts a short swim from the beach, and after a week of limestone and heat the change is real.

Ras Mohammed, at the tip of Sinai, is the best wall dive in the country and reachable from Sharm as a day trip.

Option two: go deeper into Egypt

Abu Simbel, properly, with a night in Aswan either side rather than a pre-dawn round trip.

Or the Sinai interior — Mount Sinai climbed overnight and Saint Catherine's Monastery at the bottom of it, which has never closed in seventeen centuries.

Or Dahab, which is the Red Sea without the resort architecture and the only coastal town in Egypt that people extend their stay in.

Option three: add a second country

Egypt and Jordan is the natural pairing — Petra is a short flight from Cairo and the two countries read as one journey. Egypt and Dubai works on flight routing rather than on any connection between the places.

Both cost you Egypt time. A ten-day Egypt-and-Jordan trip is a six-day Egypt trip.

What still gets left out

Alexandria, still — it is two hours from Cairo and always loses to something else.

Middle Egypt entirely: Beni Hasan, Tell el-Amarna and Abydos are extraordinary and are on nobody's ten-day plan.

The Western Desert. The White Desert and Siwa need three or four days of their own.

The nine ten-day trips we run