I finally just found a shop that sells tonic. I forgive Cairo the black snot, the toilets like running sores and even the all-night industrial tailor whose workshop is above my bedroom. All for tonic water.

For four days, the Kasr Ibrim (and yours truly, ensconced in a Royal Suite) coasted over the still waters of Lake Nasser, the world’s largest artificial lake. Compared with the cruise up the narrow Nile from Luxor to Aswan, you can barely see the coastline – at times the lake stretches up to 30km wide.

Dotted along the coastline are tiny shacks for fishermen who live out here for six months at a time. Our boat buys their catch for the freshest fish.

Other signs of life are just weird: on the first night, we moored by a tiny rock of an island whose inhabitants included an egret, a handful of hunting kestrels and…seven cats. I don’t know how, but the staff all know there are seven. I saw one, a tri-coloured marmalade one. It was my first sign of land animals here. It was digging a hole to um, defecate in… it was slightly depressing.

There is no mobile phone reception, no tv and no other humans save the fishermen and the guards of the temples, shipped out here by Egypt’s antiquities department for their sins or serving out their compulsory National Service, the young men in grubby white uniforms with ‘police’ poorly embroidered in red spending their time staring vacantly and growing soft moustaches. They must have been very bad. There are no women, and they live in close quarters, huddled against the harsh, rocky desert.

These temples are remote now, in 2008. Imagine: they must have been considered the other side of the moon in 1390BC.

So why build here? Ramses II (and this whole cruise is about the man) used the far reaches of his kingdom to slap up some pretty heavy propaganda – the temples’ facades are covered in images of his greatness. Smiting a Nubian here. A Hittite there. He was one for the smiting, our Ramses II.

The ruins of the fortress Kasr Ibrim, after which our ship is named, once guarded a narrows of the Nile, extracting tolls and providing safe haven for villagers when under attack. The mud-brick fortress was 70 meters above the water, but today, thanks to the flooding of the countryside, the waters of the Nile and Lake Nasser lap at its skirts.

The Nubians, it has to be said, have been beaten by both ends of the stick – their heritage has been lost to the shifting desert sands, to be rediscovered in the early 1800s only to be lost once again to the rising waters of the Nile. It takes a whole new meaning to being between a rock and a hard place.

You lucky things, you get a triple hit of deathbyblog, as I’m about to head off into the great Lake Nasser, a phone and internet-free zone which spans 500km, 300km in Egypt, the rest in Sudan. The fabulous MV Antares had satellite internet the entire time we slowly schlepped the 215km south from Luxor to Aswan, but the Kasr Ibrim (www.kasribrim.com.eg )(named for a fortress on the edge of the lake, a site for fortifications since 1000BC) is old world, in the nicest possible way.

There are only seven or so boats cruising the lake, compared with 300+ on the strip between Luxor and Aswan, and Kasr Ibrim leads the pack with its sister, the pioneering Eugenie.

I thought I’d be squished into a single cabin with a porthole the size of a pigeon’s eye, but I’ve landed a suite. A suite. Up the back of the boat with my own wraparound sun deck complete with sun loungers, some awesome leather armchairs and the walls of the entire suite decked out in walnut veneer, which was weird at first, but I feel better now I’ve realised it matches my leatherbound laptop. It has a few old touches that make me giggle, like the built-in radio near the bed head (no plugging the ipod in here!) and the paper hygiene sash wrapped around the toilet, like the Miss Congeniality sash on a runner-up beauty queen.

While the Antares was 98% Spanish tourists (we were the 2%), the Qasr Ibrim is usually 60:40 French to Brits, though this time the French have won and there are but nine native English speakers on board, which suits us all to the ground. We’re a small, energetic group, the Brits all from down south – Surry, Kent and Essex, in their 50s and 60s and raring to go.

We took a little boat out to the Temple of Kalabsha, which is on a sometimes island in the lake. Our guide, Mustafa (or Safi to his mates), is hip and lanky, and pointed out many interesting carvings on the temples’ walls – not just Horus, Isis etc etc, but pics of the megalomaniacal Ramses II giving a few Nubian soldiers a good hiding, being breast fed by goddesses (as a full-grown man…hmmm…a few Oedipal complexes being played out here), and a procession of people bringing him offerings, including leopard skins, shields fox furs, monkeys, cheetahs and giraffes.

Interesting Egyptology facts to date:

All these carvings were once painted. Men were brown (because they worked in the fields) while women were yellow or white.

Men had their hearts weighed before being sent to heaven or hell. Women didn’t need to pass judgement, going directly past Go, straight into heaven.

Egyptians didn’t do human sacrifice.

Baboons, pigs and donkeys were considered an animal form of Seth, the bad, devil-like god.

When Egyptian kings married their sisters to become sister-wives, it didn’t mean they had sex with them. It was just to keep the throne in the family. Aaaaaah!

I am the first to admit that I used to fall asleep during Ancient History. So I am fully geared up for a dose of temple fatigue, which I confess was starting to kick in yesterday, despite a gorgeous guide, Mary, and the beautiful island setting of the Temple of Philae, just near the famous High Dam and Lake Nasser, built in the 1960s to reign in the excessive, damaging floods of the River Nile.

Built in Egypt’s Greco-Roman period by er, Greco-Romans who had a fetish for all things ancient Egyptian, the Temple of Philae and its surrounding temples (templettes?) were then admired in turn by romantic Victorians, who painted them in idyllic rustic settings – you know the types of paintings, where a lissom dark-eyed shepherd would be lounging suggestively by a rock in the foreground while his charges nibbled sweet herbs amongst the picturesque ruins.

The modern-day version of Philae was slightly out of kilter with the Victorian view. The shepherds were shepherds of tourists, umbrella-wielding clockwatchers, and their charges, instead of woolly lambs, were battalions of over-exposed tourists, including, frighteningly, a team of English Women Of A Certain Age wearing spaghetti-strap singlets with beige shorts that rode up at the crotch, revealing lumpy, veined legs and swinging tuck-shop arms.

“That’s the worst sight I’ve seen in Egypt yet,” muttered Mummy, whose seen a few horrific things in her few brief days in this country including (a) my apartment, (b) Cairo’s mildly rabid cat population and (c) the toilets on Egyptian trains.
Aswan is Nubian territory. Nubia is one of those ephemeral concepts of a country, sort of like the Basque region, where a distinct ethnic group’s traditional lands have been swallowed up by surrounding countries. So Nubians, which are scattered as far as Cairo to northern Sudan, on Egypt’s southern border, are concentrated around Aswan. The diaspora was further exacerbated by the former prime minister Nasser and his High Dam, which just happened to swallow 42 (or 47? the numbers keep changing) Nubian villages.

The government relocated the 800,000-odd villagers, paying them a small compensation, and when the global village realised the proposed dam would also immerse a swag of significant temples, they rushed in to save the temples, performed by heroic piece-by-piece removals. Interestingly, while the Czechs, Dutch etc slaved away to painstakingly restore the temples on higher ground, other countries (no names, but here’s a hint, New York) scraped up a few gems, thus saving them and to accept thanks instead of money, said oh, ok, we’ll take the temples to our own countries and they will be looked after very well in our museums that we charge a lot of money for people to enter… ‘Nuff said. Elgin’s Marbles (Now how did that slip in??)

So anyway, now the tat that’s foisted upon us tourists is all Nubian. Bright hats in colours not dissimilar to reggae colours (and I’ve seen at least one Bob Marley flag hoisted on one of the small local boats that sail between the islands), pretty weaves and, gruesomely, necklaces made from camel bones. Ok yes, I DID buy one. It is chic, in a faintly grotesque way, though you could never pick the pretty beads for being camel bones. Unless you’re Nubian. Perhaps they’re just cat bones…

Every day on the MS Antares, our receptionist, Haggag, gives us an itinerary. Some of the four days we are on board, it’s littered with temples and tombs. For a few brief periods, we have the morning or the afternoon free to watch life on the Nile – the white egrets on the wind, little fishing boats, lines of date palms, desert sands coming down to the river’s edge, cattle grazing happily on the skinniest sliver of land, taken out in small boats once the rainy season has finished and deposited there for the quiet life.

One day, there is nothing scheduled, so our itinerary reads: breakfast 8am, lunch 2pm, tea time 5pm, captain’s cocktails 7pm, dinner 8pm. The idea that cruise ships feed you like a battery hen is well and truly alive on this ship. The Spaniards don’t seem to mind, and plough through epic amounts of pastries, bread, potatoes and dessert at each sitting. We’re desperately trying to hold our end up.

For two sittings (Corby, this is for your benefit, so pay attention) we have Egyptian food, which is closely linked to Lebanese. The Egyptians, it has to be said, know their eggplant. On this lunchtime, the eggplant is done three ways – as a dip in babaganoush, fried and rolled into cigar shapes, dressed with pureed basil and oil, or with chunks snuck into a dreamy sauce for kebab. I’m also quite sure I saw it hiding in an okra dish.

There’s also lashings of tahina, tabouleh, and the ubiquitous foul (pronounced ‘fool’) fava beans mashed into a savoury porridgy thing (I’m not making this sound great, am I?) and dressed with cumin, oil and lemon juice, and I like it with pieces of tomato in it. The kitchen also made a special dish which they don’t serve guests, but the rest of Egypt lives on, koshary. It’s an uber-carbohydrate hit of macaroni, rice, lentils, chick peas and broken spaghetti cooked up and served with a garlicky tomato sauce and another sauce of chilli marinated in oil and water to make a thin pouring sauce that adds a little kickerooni.

I have tried koshary in various koshary halls, as they’re known, in Cairo. I’ve even tried it in what’s supposed to be the best places in the city. And I came to the conclusion that I didn’t like koshary. My mind is changed, it is divine. But you’ll have to go on the Antares to eat it.

It’s a truism that you work harder on your holidays than you do in real-life work, which explains why the clerk on reception was ringing us at 4am with a cheery hello.

The balloon ride we’d booked on was the lure to drag ourselves out of bed at this ungodly hour, nearly two hours before sunrise.

After coffee in the ship’s bar and a ferry ride in the dark across the Nile to the West Bank of Luxor (quick Egyptology lesson for you: east bank, sunrise, life, temples. West back, sun sets, death, tombs) we got to the balloon launching site, right beside the Ramesseum, one of the main sites in Luxor, which we’d managed to miss completely in our three days in the area.

So instead of standing around watching around 20 ground crew get seven balloons up and running, we nicked off to photograph the Ramses II vanities – the pharoah in a god-like formation, once around 18m high, now the four are headless as time and earthquakes have taken their toll.

We finally got into the last balloon of the morning, a struggle as the wind changed constantly, but ended up taking us across the Nile, a rarity that delighted our pilot. Before us were perhaps a dozen balloons that drifted serenely across the straight-lined canals that run alongside the Nile, skimming mosques’ minarets, past a school that we played havoc with, as every child and their teachers hung out the window in a frenzy of ‘hellos’ to land gently in a field of sugar cane.

The owner of the fields came to greet us on this rare occasion, and welcomed us to his land, even though we had squished some of his young plants. Small boys mobbed us with demands of ‘money’ and ‘baksheesh’ but the consensus was that it would be the pitifully paid ground crew, not the jammy kids, who would get any spare change.

The afternoon saw us back on the Antares, snoozing and lolling on the sun deck.

Brigid delights in the old-fashioned sailor suits, though she laments the straight-leg trousers they wear. “Where are the bell-bottoms?” she wails, debating how they could possibly scrub decks in skinny leg jeans, and during dinner last night, we passed through Esna Lock, the key control on the Nile.

Last night, we jumped ship to another vessel, the MV Antares, reportedly one of the best boats on the Nile, rivalling the Zara, which staff say just has a better marketing budget. It is divine. We will spend four nights sailing Luxor to Aswan, which takes just three hours by road.

The areas around here are quite tightly controlled by police in response to terrorist attacks in the past 10 years, so today, after we sailed up to Qena to visit Dendara, the most spectacular temple yet, we were met by Wa’el, our lacklustre guide, in a brand new, super-red private car with driver. We jumped in the car, a police van with two smiling cops in the back brandishing guns pulled in front of us, and when we looked behind, saw about four tour buses and a horde of minivans full of tourists following behind as we led the convoy to Dendare and Abydos, the other major site near Qena. At all the road blocks through the town (and there were many), the police grinned and waved. May all my future police escorts be so cheerful.

This temple, dedicated to the goddess Hathor, is my favourite hysterical site in Egypt. It is just beautiful and beautifully preserved. There is a restoration program currently ongoing to clean all the soot from the high ceilings – a legacy of the cooking fires of the Christians who romped into Egypt and lived in the by now abandoned temples from 90AD (give or take a few decades).

Beneath the soot are the original colours of the painted carvings, which cover the stone walls from top to bottom – the azure blue sky up above, the signs of the zodiac and the long eyes and long hair of the beautiful goddess herself. Most of her faces, and there are many in the temple, have been hatefully gouged out. The guidebooks blame the Christians, our Christian guide says that’s just a negative marketing campaign against his religion.

We spent a few hours in there, and the chief custodian, Mamhoud, took me down the warm, secretive crypt. As we walked along the narrow corridor, he tapped the floor, which instead of stone, was alabaster. ‘It’s a door,’ he said in the quiet gloom. ‘There is more below us…’

Luxor, land of temples and tombs, is completely at ease with its tourist population…as long as the tourists buy their dodgy necklaces, suspect pashminas (um, from Peshwar?), faux papyrus or, perhaps, a glow-in-the-dark phosphorus pharoah. If you were Pharonically obsessed, you could even buy a t-shirt (Egyptian cotton, of course), screenprinted with a pic of your face superimposed on a pharoah’s head dress.

The city sits on the east bank of the Nile, where the Karnak and Luxor temples still stand, 2km apart, once linked by the Sphinx-lined road, the Valley of the Sphinx. That royal route was interrupted by Egypt’s most recent Muslim population, who built their houses between the massive sculptures. Most was cleared off to preserve the ruins, though a 13th century mosque still sits in between the two.

For two nights, we slept on the Dahabiya Hadeel, a new riverboat modelled on the elegant boats of the 1920-40s, with its wicker chairs, shady canopies and (very un-1920s) jacuzzi on the deck. The captian, Mustafa, prowled the decks in his sea-green gallibiya, asked mum if she’d consider being wife no. 2 (the current one has seven kids so it’s all a bit of a handful). Mother says no, but they’re quite a fetching pair.

The first day was spent in the Valley of the Kings, and can I say…I was disappointed? Spare me from the hate mail, but the combination of bad guiding, hot day and incessant rushing (if you spend thousands of dollars getting here, why do they rush you?) made for a less than impressive experience. There. I’ve said it.

Of course we missed the train to Luxor. Blame it on the rain. It rains in Cairo around six times a year – just enough to settle the dust and not enough to warrant bringing everything in off the roofs or balconies, which are the city’s junk and rubbish repositories.

The roads, which dip in the middle, filled instantly with mud, the traffic – already bad as it was Friday, the first day of the weekend – went into overdrive. A friend told me he spent five hours in the car yesterday, crossing the city for a business lunch. And my newly-arrived mum and I spent 40 minutes in a taxi doing what could have been walked in 20…

The train was there, we could smell it, taste it, but alas, not touch it, falling in a heap of bags and backpacks seconds after its departure, to be picked up by Ibrahim, the same super-schmoozy tourist policeman who had helped me buy my ticket a few days before.

So imagine his delight in scraping me, mum and our junk off the floor, to give me a dressing down. “What did I tell you about arriving half an hour beforehand?” he asked. “The rain, the rain!” we protested. He shook his head, but after an hour of idle chat, some string-pulling and promises of everlasting, non-marrying friendship, scored us the last two seats on the 12.30am train.

Which is why now, at 9am, we’re having our third cup of tea and watching the harvest from our seats as we trundle slowly toward Luxor and a week on the Nile.