A Nile cruise sounds like a single thing. It is not. The phrase covers everything from large ships sleeping several hundred passengers, with full entertainment programming and buffet dining, through to small wooden vessels carrying fewer than twenty guests and run on something closer to private-yacht logic. The river is the same. The experience is not.

Cruising occupies a strangely fixed place in the travel imagination. For some, the format is associated with regimented schedules and large ships engineered for mass-market efficiency. For others, the cliché is demographic — a holiday designed primarily for retirees.