Visitors are again traveling to Egypt in record numbers. But you don't have to hang with the hordes. Susan Hack reports on two fresh ways to see the wonders

Down on the Aswan Corniche, the big cruise boats are docked six abreast. More than three hundred of these boxy floating hotels ply 125 miles of river between Aswan and Luxor, usurper-descendants of dahabeahs, the two-masted native sailing ships that transported early European travelers—soldiers, scientists, artists, and aristocrats—up and down the Nile before the advent of trains and steamships.

British travel agent Thomas Cook sent the first tourist steamer up the world's longest river in 1869, launching the era of mass tourism in Egypt. "Under the desecrated colonnades, slathers of people circulate," complained the French artist Pierre Loti after mingling with "the Cookies" in the Karnak Temple in 1907. One shudders to think what Loti would make of the McDonald's now facing the Luxor Temple, the KFC at the foot of the Giza Sphinx, or the record six million tourists who visited Egypt last year. Despite temporary lulls following terrorism in the 1990s, 9/11, and the debut of the Iraq conflict, Egypt's ancient mystique, bolstered by increased security measures and tour operator discounts, is attracting more crowds than ever.

Although I live in Cairo, less than one block from the river, I've never seen the attraction of the classic Nile cruise, which, given the numbers, seems a formula for standing in long lines at tomb entrances and for catching stomach bugs from buffet salads. (The U.S. Navy Medical Research Unit conducted a three-year study of the epidemiology of diarrhea in Egypt, collecting piles of data from Nile passenger ships.) But word drifts north about a handful of entrepreneurs offering imaginative alternatives to the pharaonic package tour. I sign on for a three-day fishing trip on the crocodile-infested Lake Nasser, behind the Aswan High Dam, followed by a weeklong Nile voyage on a restored nineteenth-century dahabeah. By using new and resurrected modes of travel, I discover, it's again possible to experience the Nile in all its aspects—wild and tame, past and present—while avoiding the tourist hordes.

I'm in Aswan to meet Tim Baily, a rotund white Kenyan who grew up in the bush with his "nannies," Wamburu tribeswomen with filed teeth who taught him to respect and love wild places. He runs his Lake Nasser safari business, African Angler, with an Egyptian partner and assigns me one of his most experienced guides, Yousef Dowy, a lithe, twenty-eight-year-old Nubian who favors blue jeans and Ray-Bans instead of a traditional djellaba. The absence of a large-scale fishing industry over the past three decades has enabled perch in Lake Nasser to reach enormous size; the current record stands at 392 pounds. We've brought "Lake Nasser Special" rods, made by Britain's Harris Angling Company, Penn Power Graph 1000 reels, and a box of scary-looking lures from Finland and Australia. Green, orange, silver, or black, the lures are designed for different conditions, from shore casting to trolling, but all have multiple treble hooks and are longer than my hand.