Joanna Lumley's Nile Episode Rating Graph

She begins her adventure on a fishing boat on Egypt's coast, where the Nile spills into the Mediterranean, before capturing the spirit of Agatha Christie in Cairo and enjoying a Nile cruise. She also travels along the river by train, road and felucca sailing boat, and ends the first part of her trip in Aswan, a town the Victorians described as being on the edge of civilisation.

The actress follows the river into the deserts of Northern Sudan, where she meets the survivor of a crocodile attack and goes in search of the creature. She is then introduced to the treasures of Nubia, an ancient kingdom of Africa ruled by the little-known Black Pharaohs, before visiting Sudan's capital city Khartoum, where she talks to nomads who live in the remote sub-Saharan desert.

The epic river journey brings the actress to Khartoum, where she watches whirling dervishes practising their devotional dancing and experiences a Sudanese beauty treatment that makes use of wood smoke. She then takes a short diversion into Ethiopia's Simien Mountains to meet an unusual group of Olympic hopefuls training in the thin air of the highlands