Sail the River Nile aboard steamer Agatha Christie rode
Death on the Nile writer journeyed up the Nile and back aboard the SS Sudan, and a cruise aboard the venerable vessel takes travellers back in time to the 1930s. If only the risks of a holiday in Egypt were as benign as in those days, Adam Lane reports
By the time a terminal glare from my wife silences my efforts at a David Niven accent, it is too late. The gangplank has not yet been pulled on board, but in the wood-lined 1930s-saloon of the SS Sudan, we have already fallen through time. The ship is 130 years old, ancient Egypt's treasures lay downriver and the waiters have been compelled to wear a fez as part of their uniform.
On the wall are black and white photographs of a glowering King Farouk on his wedding day, in 1938. Wilfully dated lamps illuminate brass fire extinguishers, an antique globe and some well-worn drinks tables while 12 copies of , in English and French, pad out the small library's shelves. This is, after all, a former royal paddle steamer and original Thomas Cook tourist boat, as well as the ship that carried Agatha Christie up the Nile to inspire one of her - and her fictional detective, Hercule Poirot's - most famous outings.
When we booked the trip, I congratulated myself that foresight had yielded the Hercule Poirot room - surely, I felt, the prime cabin for any right-thinking person making this voyage. As we emerge on the first morning, however, we discover fortune may not have played much of a role, after all. There are only five guests on board: a French couple, my American wife, an older German lady who doesn't want to set foot off the ship until journey's end, in Luxor, and I. None of us is bilingual and all appear quite content to be subsumed by the sleepy creakiness of the boat. If a murder is going to happen on this voyage, the detective is going to need a small room and more than one phrasebook.
Grand Hyatt Taipei relaunch, and the golden age of Nile travel
