Oberoi Philae

Oberoi Philae is not a Lindblad ship. She belongs to Oberoi Hotels & Resorts, who have run her on the Nile since 1996 and refitted her in 2015, and Lindblad charters her for a handful of Egypt departures a year. That distinction matters more here than it does on most charters, because what Oberoi is good at (a sixty-five-person crew looking after forty-four guests, a spa, a proper kitchen) is not what an expedition company is good at, and the two halves of the trip are visibly different in origin.

What Oberoi built

She is a five-deck river vessel, 236 feet long, with twenty-two rooms in three grades: cabins with river views, suites with floor-to-ceiling windows, and suites with private terraces and heated whirlpools. Almost every window slides open, which sounds like a small thing until you have spent a day in an Egyptian riverside town and want the air.

The upper deck carries a temperature-controlled pool eleven meters long; Oberoi claims it is the largest on the river, and nobody appears to have argued. There is an Oberoi spa with private treatment rooms, a salon, a fitness room, a library lounge, a bar, a movie theater and a dance floor. Dining is two rooms: an enclosed restaurant covering international, Indian, Asian and Middle Eastern cooking, and a poolside restaurant on the top deck for anything eaten outdoors.

The crew-to-guest ratio is close to three to two. On a vessel this size you notice that by the second morning.

What Lindblad adds

Oberoi’s own product is a short hop, two or three nights between Luxor and Aswan, Tuesdays and Saturdays. Lindblad’s is a ten- or eleven-night Egypt trip with the ship at its center and a good deal of land on either end, and the addition is people rather than equipment. Egyptologists sail aboard and hold the evening sessions in the Lounge, explaining who built each site and why, and National Geographic’s Egypt program supplies the specialists. The itinerary now takes in the Grand Egyptian Museum, which opened after most of these pages were written.

There are no Zodiacs, no kayaks and no undersea program. This is a river with banks and a jetty at each stop, and the tools that define a Lindblad polar ship are simply irrelevant here. Do not come expecting them.

Where she actually sails

The Nile, between Luxor and Aswan, and nowhere else. Departures run out of Luxor rather more often than Aswan, and the season is October through March; January, February, March, October, November and December are the sailing months, and the gap in between is the Egyptian summer, when the temperature at Kom Ombo makes a site visit an endurance event. If you want her in July, you cannot have her.

Who she suits

People who want Egypt at close range with somebody knowledgeable at dinner, and who are not embarrassed to enjoy a spa afterward. The ship is comfortable in a way that the expedition fleet is not, and the sites (Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, Kom Ombo, Edfu, Philae itself) are the entire point.

She does not suit anyone looking for an expedition in the polar or Galápagos sense. Nothing here is remote, nothing is landed by inflatable, and the ship ties up at a town wall each evening alongside other ships doing the same thing. She also does not suit anyone who wants to sail in summer, or anyone who dislikes a long land program bolted to a short cruise: the eleven nights are not eleven nights aboard.