6 Days in Egypt: What You Can Actually See

Six days is where an Egypt trip starts working. Five days forces you to drop half the country; six does not, provided you fly between Cairo and the south rather than driving or taking the sleeper train.

There are two quite different six-day trips, and they are not competing versions of the same thing.

The standard shape: Cairo plus a cruise

Two days in Cairo, then fly to Aswan and cruise to Luxor, flying back from Luxor at the end.

The Cairo half covers the Pyramids, the Sphinx and the Grand Egyptian Museum on one day, and the medieval city — Khan el-Khalili and the Citadel — on the other. Two days is enough for the headline sights and nothing more; see Cairo in two days for what that really looks like.

The Nile half covers Philae in Aswan, then Kom Ombo and Edfu on the way north, and one side of Luxor at the end.

The other shape: six days on a dahabiya

Six of our ten six-day trips are dahabiyas — small sailing boats with a handful of cabins that spend five nights between Aswan and Luxor rather than three.

This is a completely different holiday. You see roughly the same temples, but with two extra days of sailing, moorings on empty banks, and time that is not accounted for. It suits people who want the river rather than the checklist, and it does not include Cairo at all.

If you are weighing the two, cruise or land tour covers the trade-off in more detail.

What still has to be left out

Abu Simbel, unless you give up something in Cairo for it. It is a full day from Aswan by road, or a short flight that still eats most of a day.

The second side of Luxor. Six days gives Luxor one morning, which means Karnak or the Valley of the Kings, not both.

The Red Sea, Alexandria, Siwa and the oases. All of these need days you do not have.

Who six days suits

• First-time visitors who want the whole shape of Egypt in a working week.
• Anyone whose leave is fixed at one week including travel days.
• Couples on the dahabiya version, where the point is the boat rather than the sites.
• It does not suit anyone whose main interest is Luxor specifically — that wants its own trip.

The ten six-day trips we run