With overnight passenger vessels now allowed to sail between Cairo and Luxor in Egypt, a portion of the Nile River previously closed off to river cruise ships, it opens up an extended river cruising experience to some sites that most tourists would have otherwise not had access to. But it also signals greater confidence in security along the Nile River. Or maybe it’s just a publicity stunt.
Whatever the reasoning behind the Egyptian’s government decision this week to reopen this stretch of the river, the fact is that 465 miles of Nile River are now available to river cruisers that haven’t been available to them since sometime in the mid-1980s or mid-1990s, according to varying reports.
The river cruise route had been off-limits in part due to security concerns over extremist activity along this stretch of the Nile Valley, and in part because of unpredictable water levels.
Anyone who has taken a river cruise along the Nile in the past several years might have had the experience of armed guards boarding their ship for the 50-mile sailing from Luxor north to the Dendera Temple complex, a symbol of some of the problems that have arisen along the Nile’s Cairo-Luxor passage in the past (few will forget the killing of 62 tourists in Luxor in 1997 by Islamic terrorists).
Without the ability to make the complete sailing from Cairo to Aswan, river cruise operators have instead been starting their cruises in Luxor (a one-hour flight south of Cairo) and then sailing the 140 miles south to Aswan from there, visiting archaeological sites along the way such as the Valley of the Kings, Temple of Hatshepsut, Edfu and Philae.
And likely many operators will continue to offer this itinerary — the extended river cruise from Cairo all the way to Aswan more than quadruples the length of the river cruise from Luxor to Aswan, and not everyone has the time or energy for that much Nile cruising.
But for those who do, Abercrombie & Kent is among the operators already offering the longer river cruise as part of a 16-day Egypt itinerary for 2013 and notes the new ports that will now be included on the extended cruise. They include Beni Hassan, where tombs were carved into the limestone cliffs on the east bank of the Nile during the Middle Kingdom; Amarna, an ancient capital built by King Akhenaten around 1350 B.C.; Sohag’s Red and White Coptic Monasteries; and Abydos, a holy city center dedicated to the god Osiris, and a burial place for kings and pharaohs dating back to the fourth millennium B.C.
The Egyptian Tourist Authority has said that so far, four major Nile cruise operators have launched Cairo-to-Aswan river cruises, which take seven nights to complete.