The Best Way to See the Nile? Take a Slow Cruise Aboard a Dahabiya

A sharp crack echoes across the Nile. Then another. Barefoot in a green-and-white tin boat scarcely wider than his shoulders, fisherman Fahmy Hassan brings a wooden pole crashing down onto the water. Each strike sends spray flying, inadvertently flushing an indignant yellow-footed egret from the reeds.

Earlier that morning, before my group boarded the dinky boats south of Edfu to watch the fishermen of Bisaw Island at work, Fahmy had explained the age-old technique: striking the water sends vibrations rippling through the river, driving fish towards his waiting net. Curious to see if it works, we watch as he begins hauling the net in, hand over hand. For a moment, it looks empty. Then a silver-grey catfish glints beneath the mesh, prompting cheers from both the fishermen and visitors.

“This is nothing,” he says with a laugh, holding up the wriggling catch between pinched fingers. On a good day, his net overflows with striped Nile tilapia, caught here since the time of the pharaohs, and enormous bayad catfish, often stretching from his wrist to his shoulder. Some will feed the islanders; others will find their way onto the fine china of fancy Cairo restaurants.

Dressed in an American sports T-shirt, black cargo trousers rolled to his calves and a baseball cap shielding his face from the sun, Fahmy is continuing a tradition that goes back generations. His father taught him to fish these waters, just as his father had before him, he tells me as we row slowly back to land. It’s a reminder that the Nile remains Egypt’s lifeblood, sustaining the rural communities that dot its banks.

Long before cruise ships arrived, travellers floated south aboard elegant two-sailed dahabiyas, relying on the Nile’s winds and currents rather than engines. Their passengers included archaeologists, Victorian adventurers and the writer Amelia Edwards, whose 1873 odyssey inspired the classic travelogue A Thousand Miles up the Nile, which helped renew public fascination with ancient Egypt.

Following in their footsteps, I’d boarded the 55-metre-long wooden Safiya the previous day for a voyage between Edfu and Aswan, a roughly 70-mile, three-night journey in southern Egypt. Rather than dashing from one temple to the next, the plan is to slow down, mooring beside riverside villages where daily life still revolves around the Nile.

With just 12 cabins, the Safiya feels like the Goldilocks of Nile boats: not a tiny felucca, with its basic sleeping quarters and shared facilities, but far more intimate than the mega cruise ships gliding past our sundeck. It doesn’t take long to slip into the languid rhythm of life on the dahabiya. My cabin is simply furnished but comfortable, its large windows framing an ever-changing panorama, and it’s easy to while away an afternoon watching the world drift by.

At the water’s edge, children crowd onto a rickety wooden jetty, egging one another on before launching into daredevil backflips, their laughter carrying across the river. One fearless boy even swims out to tap our hull as we pass, cheered on by his friends before turning back triumphantly to shore. A water buffalo watches the excitement with the air of an old hand, half-submerged in the shallows and scarcely glancing at our boat as it glides by.

As evening falls, we’re ushered off the boat in Al Ramadi Qibli, a small farming settlement on the west bank of the Nile, where fields of date palms stretch back from the river. Beneath a palm-thatched shelter, platters of roast chicken, fragrant rice, bamya — okra slow-cooked in a tangy tomato sauce — warm flatbreads and dates are passed down a long communal table. Afterwards, a trio of musicians strikes up on a lute and hand drums, playing late into the night beneath strings of fairy lights.

The following morning, Bisaw Island comes into view up ahead. Home to around 350 people, it sits midstream, its shoreline fringed with banana trees bowing under the weight of ripe fruit and candelabra-like doum palms, whose chestnut-brown fruit is used to make a sweet local drink. This exceptionally fertile land was inhabited only seasonally until 1970, when the completion of the Aswan High Dam brought an end to the Nile’s annual floods and allowed permanent communities to take root.

Until recently, the island’s relative isolation meant opportunities were largely limited to running the family home, farming or fishing, like for Fahmy. But that’s beginning to change, we discover at Bisaw Crafts, a one-room workshop and store that opened in 2025. Inside, 18-year-old Menna Mahmout stands by the window, absent-mindedly watching children chase one another along the dusty lane outside. A black headscarf frames her face and a long tunic dress catches the light with tiny silver sequins. Around her, macrame hangings dangle from wooden poles, while colourful woven bags brighten the studio’s whitewashed walls.

“A year ago, women from Cairo came here and taught us crafts like macrame,” she says, running her fingers through the neat rows of knots on a cream-coloured wall hanging that takes her a full day to complete. “Then I taught myself the rest on TikTok.” She grins as I admire the textiles on display, created by Menna and the collective of 18 other local women. “It’s the first business like this on the island. Before, I stayed at home cooking and cleaning, but now I have somewhere to go every morning. It’s completely changed my life,” she says, adding that one day she’d like to have her own shop.

Bisaw Crafts isn’t the only sign that the island is opening up to visitors. We spend the rest of the day wandering through banana groves with a local farmer, learning to make sun bread — paper-thin dough baked in makeshift mud ovens — with a village housewife, Zainab Mustafa, before sharing a home-cooked meal in her family home, its walls washed in turquoise and cerulean.

On our final day we stop in Daraw, a market town some 25 miles north of Aswan, famous for its camel market. We’re here for the produce, though: watermelons stacked like overblown beach balls, tubs of dried hibiscus perfuming the air and glossy dates piled into neat pyramids. Back on board, our haul of sun-warmed mangoes is sliced and served on deck with glasses of fresh mint tea as the river slips by.

By evening, the Nile has turned the colour of ink. The call to prayer carries across the water as Aswan comes into view, its waterside mosques and temples catching the last of the light. Impressive as they are, it’s the people who stay with me long after I step ashore: Fahmy bringing in his nets, Menna knotting macrame in the island’s workshop and children diving head-first into the mighty Nile.