Egypt's original Red Sea resort — island-hopping boats, the country's biggest dive scene, and an easy base for desert safaris and day trips to Luxor.

Everything you need to plan a trip to Egypt's Red Sea resort town — the best things to do, where the divers go, what a day actually costs, and how the whole town fits together.

Egypt's most remote Red Sea coast — untouched reefs, the best odds anywhere of swimming with dolphins and dugongs, and a genuinely laid-back pace.

Egypt's sprawling, sleepless capital — the last standing wonder of the ancient world, five thousand years of history stacked block by block, and a river of traffic running through all of it.

A barefoot Bedouin fishing town on the Gulf of Aqaba, where world-class free diving and the legendary Blue Hole sit a few steps from a cushion-strewn seafront café and the Sinai mountains behind it.

The desert plateau where the Great Pyramid still stands exactly as it was built 4,500 years ago — the single most recognizable stretch of ground on the planet.

The world's greatest open-air museum — ancient Thebes, where pharaohs built temples on one bank of the Nile and buried themselves in hidden tombs on the other.

Egypt's calmest, most colorful city — granite islands in the Nile, a temple that was moved stone by stone to save it from the water, and Nubian villages painted in every color imaginable.

Egypt's Mediterranean face — a Greek-founded port city of faded belle-époque grandeur, sunken royal palaces just offshore, and a corniche that has nothing to do with the Nile or the desert.

Egypt's most remote oasis — a Berber-speaking desert town of palm groves and salt lakes near the Libyan border, where Alexander the Great once consulted an oracle and the night sky is untouched by a single city light.

Egypt's entire eastern coastline in one guide — 1,200+ km of coral reef, wreck dives and open water spanning Hurghada, Sharm El Sheikh, Dahab and Marsa Alam, for travellers planning around the sea itself rather than any single town.

The river that built Egypt — 6,650 km of water running the length of the country, best experienced slowly, by felucca or cruise, between the temples of Luxor and Aswan.