My husband and I are planning a Nile cruise for our 40th wedding anniversary. However, I hear that people doing these cruises always get stomach bugs. If we pay more and get on a bigger and better boat, should we be ok? Belinda Cassidy, Tunbridge Wells

Sunday Times travel expert Richard Green responds: Egypt does have a way with stomach bugs - and not just on the Nile ships either. But wait, there are ways of minimizing your chances of a bout, and anyway, the experience of gliding down the Nile is so fantastic that it has to be worth the risk.

You are right though; some passengers even on the more expensive cruises do still get ill. Booking with a reputable tour operator will help your cause: the boats they use should be more modern and have better facilities ­ preferably with a state of the art filtration systems, good standards of onboard hygiene, and well trained staff. Ask before you book if you are in doubt.

There are so many theories about what to avoid ­ ice, salads, beef, brushing your teeth in anything other than bottled water, and so on, but none of these are a guarantee.

A golden rule is to aim for freshly cooked food ­ even something fried furiously at a roadside stall should be ok. Great, so how to survive a week of Nile cruise buffets then? Well, the boat crews do generally use either filtered or bottled water when washing salads, fruit and the like, but it's not ideal to have hot food turn tepid under a warming lamp or over tea candle over the length of a meal sitting.

A well-timed dash for dinner ­ when it has just been served and is still freshly hot - might well save a host of ad-hoc loo lunges later on.

The truth is that however good the onboard hygiene is, we often give ourselves bugs inadvertently, via our own hands. Take a good luck at the first tatty and filthy old Egyptian banknote to grace your palm and you'll see why.

You wouldn't really want to handle a living thing afterwards, let along tackle a pear. So a thorough hand washing before any fruit or meal is perhaps the best course of action for a constitutionally calm cruise.

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