Luxor or Sharm el-Sheikh?

Luxor has no swimming beyond the hotel pool. The Nile is not for bathing, and the Red Sea coast near Hurghada is a separate trip of about four hours, not an afternoon out.

In Sharm, the sea is the reason to come. Naama Bay has the most ordinary sandy bay, while at Sharks Bay, Ras Um Sid and along the Nabq coast, wooden jetties take you over the reef flat to the drop-off, so you can snorkel straight from your sun lounger. Expect hotel-owned and partly man-made beaches, and pack reef shoes.

The two are on a par, and both eat best on Egyptian staples like ful, taameya and koshari rather than anything made for visitors. In Luxor, the most memorable meals tend to be home cooking at West Bank guesthouses, while the rooftop restaurants are worth it for the temple views more than the plates.

Sharm's eating is shaped by all-inclusive buffets and the international strip in Naama Bay. The better meals are grilled fish in the Old Market and Bedouin-style dinners out in the desert. Drinking is easier in Sharm's tourist bars than in Luxor, where alcohol stays mostly in the hotels.

The gap here is about as wide as it gets. In Luxor the monuments are the whole point of the trip. Temples line one bank of the Nile and the necropolis lies on the other, listed together by UNESCO since 1979, and a careful visitor can spend several days of early mornings there and still leave sites unseen. The small museums in town fill in the background. The modern town has no later history worth seeking out, so everything of interest is ancient.

Sightseeing in Sharm fits into one evening stroll round the Old Market. The Al Sahaba Mosque is floodlit after dark, and the Coptic Heavenly Cathedral has painted interiors worth a look. There are no museums of note, so a culture-minded visitor based there spends whole days in transit to reach the kind of heritage Luxor has close at hand.

Sharm has the only real night out of the two. Naama Bay's promenade has bars, shisha lounges and a few large clubs that stay open late, and beach bars put on DJ nights. It is a tourist scene, though, at its liveliest in the European summer and around Christmas and Easter, and quieter outside those peak vacation weeks.

Luxor goes to bed early, partly because tomb visits and balloon flights start at dawn. Evenings mean a hotel bar or rooftop, or tea and shisha in a street café while families walk along the corniche.

Sharm's outdoors is mostly underwater, and it is world class. Ras Mohammed's reef walls are about 30km away, the wreck of the Thistlegorm lies nearby, and the Tiran Strait reefs are a short boat ride out. On land there are jeep and quad trips into the red granite mountains of South Sinai, and the Nabq protected area has mangroves.

Luxor's nature is gentler and comes in one scene: a green strip along the Nile against bare desert cliffs. A felucca at sunset, birds on the river islands, a bike ride through the West Bank fields and the path over the Theban hills are lovely, but they fill gaps between temple visits rather than a whole trip.

Luxor has more to reach in a day. Dendera's Temple of Hathor, the vivid reliefs at Esna and Edfu, the most complete of the Ptolemaic temples, are all within two hours, and Abydos makes a longer day. The catch is that every outing is another temple.

From Sharm there are really two trips. One is laid-back Dahab on the Gulf of Aqaba. The other is St Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, often combined with a night climb to see sunrise from the summit. Coach trips to Cairo or Luxor mean very long days on the road.

Sharm makes a straightforward resort week with children. Kids' clubs, water slides and family pools are standard in the big hotels, and calm, shallow lagoons and glass-bottom boats get younger children looking at fish safely.

Luxor suits a different family: older children already hooked on pharaohs, who will love crawling into painted tombs, the Mummification Museum and a dawn balloon flight. For little ones, the shadeless sites and persistent touts are hard going, and even in the cool season a pool and an afternoon rest are essential.

Luxor is the easier of the two, at least on the East Bank. You can walk between Luxor Temple, the museum and the corniche, Karnak is a short calèche or taxi ride away, and the public ferry crosses the Nile easily. The spread-out West Bank sites need a driver for the day, or a bike in the cool months.

Sharm stretches about 30km along the coast from the Old Market to the Nabq hotels, and only Naama Bay is pleasant on foot. Getting about means hotel shuttles, negotiated taxis or excursions with hotel pick-up, so most people stay at their resort.

Neither city is a shopping destination, and in both you will be haggling over spices, papyrus, alabaster and cotton galabiyas against persistent sales talk. What differs is the extras. In Luxor you can watch alabaster being carved by hand in the West Bank workshops, while Sharm adds perfume oils, Bedouin-style jewellery and a few modern malls for beachwear and familiar brands.

Luxor is the cheaper place to spend your days. Guesthouses, local food and the river ferry cost very little, and even the grand riverside hotels are reasonable. The big costs are foreigners' entry fees at the temples and tombs, plus drivers and guides.

Sharm is good value mainly if you stay put, since its all-inclusive hotels undercut many Mediterranean resorts. Once you leave the hotel, restaurants in Naama Bay, imported drinks, taxis, dives and boat trips are all priced for tourists.

Neither offers a stage worth travelling for, and both put on belly dance and tanoura whirling shows for hotel guests. Luxor has one thing Sharm lacks: the sound-and-light show at Karnak, where you walk through the floodlit temple. Sharm's equivalent is large evening shows put on for package tourists.

Sharm is the better place to switch off. Nearly every big resort has a spa with a hammam-style bath, steam rooms and massage, and the days revolve around the pool, the sea and winter sunshine, with nothing to rush for.

Luxor has spas in some larger riverside hotels, but a sightseeing trip there means early starts, and the East Bank's traffic and touts are tiring. The calmest option is a mud-brick guesthouse among the West Bank fields, with a long afternoon rest and sunset on the river.