Most people choose to travel between Aswan and Luxor on a Nile Cruise, stopping in Kom Ombo and Edfu to see the temples. However, this will cost you both money and time, as the cruise is expensive and always takes more than a day. After some research on the official page of Egyptian National Railways, we chose to do it on a single day (Saturday), by train.
When our decision was made, we didn’t know that some trains that run from Aswan to Luxor aren’t mentioned on that website. The original plan was very strict and we could not miss anything, or else we’d have to find another way to reach Luxor. But we realised on that Saturday that there’s a train going north from Aswan to Luxor roughly at each hour, so our task became easier. Here’s how it went:
In Aswan, we bought a ticket for Kom Ombo on the first (5:30am) train. We got it the day before, but this is not a very busy train, anyway. We arrived at Kom Ombo, our first stop, one hour after (6:30am).
Aswan train station 
Kom Ombo train station
Many tuktuks are waiting on the road next to the train station and they’ll gladly take you to the temple. It only opens at 7:00am so we still had to wait 10 minutes there. This temple is dedicated to the gods Horus (falcon) and Sobek (crocodile). It is not as big as Philae or Abu Simbel so it’s possible to cover it and the neighbouring Crocodile Museum (where you can see mummified crocodiles) on one hour. We caught another tuktuk back to the station, where another train heading for Luxor was waiting.
- Tuktuk (one way): 30-40EGP
- Temple of Kom Ombo: 140EGP
Temple of Kom Ombo 
Reliefs of surgical instruments (Temple of Kom Ombo)
We entered the train without a ticket because it’s possible to buy it on board as well. However, the ticket collector didn’t speak English and was very chill so we travelled for free until Edfu (±1 hour).
We applied here the same logic as in Kom Ombo: tuktuks take you everywhere, so we caught one to get to the temple. This one’s bigger (we were not expecting to find anything like this in such a small town) but doable in less than two hours. We rode back again to the city centre (tuktuk) and had lunch at a shady restaurant near the river.
- Tuktuk (one way): 40-50EGP
- Temple of Edfu: 180EGP
Back to the station, we took our last train of the day to Luxor and arrived at sunset (±5:00pm). Click here to see how we spent our time there! You may also read our quick guide to visit Aswan by clicking on this link.
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