Bells' Summary of do's and don'ts in Egypt

Bell’s summary of Egypt

Do not attempt to tour Egypt on your own. It would be a great waste of time to see the Temples and Tombs without a knowledgeable guide who can explain what you are seeing and the significance of it.  Organising transport, tickets and navigating thru the hawkers would be horrendous.  Would never do this without a qualified guide.

There are no traffic rules, no marked lanes and even scarier than Bangkok. You need a good driver to get you around.  We played a game of spot the car without dents and scratches – 9 days in country and we couldn’t find one!

Insight Vacations have been fabulous.  Cannot fault them in any way.  Whilst in Country nothing has been too much trouble.  The mini buses are spacious with only 2 rows of seats, the drivers are professional and ever helpful.  Our guide Mohamed (I think all guides are called Mohamed) is a young trained Egyptologist full of interesting facts and figures and had a great way of imparting information in a storytelling format.  He also had a very good sense of humour and figured out very quickly when we were taking the mickey out of him.  The pace of the tour was excellent.  We tended to do sightseeing in the morning and have the afternoon off with occasional excursions in the evening.  We saw everything we wanted to see but still feel quite refreshed.  The hot dry air does exhaust you and everyone commented on how long and well they slept at night.

There is a fair bit of walking over very rough ruins – uneven stonework, lots of steps and boats have 3 stories with no lifts, so you do need to be steady on your feet rather than super fit to get around the boat and all temples.

The main season for tourists ends at the end of April with the stragglers (like us) coming in May.  We found the timing to be fantastic as there were no crowds and as there were only 2 of us we were joined up with a couple from a Trafalgar tour.  Being just 4 on the tour meant that Mohamed could adjust timings and itineraries to suit us.  This was great as we agreed to be up and about before 7am to beat the heat of the day and again when venues were open visiting in the evening when cooler.  This gave us plenty of free time during the day for lounging around the pool. The trade off for avoiding the crowds being it was much hotter when sightseeing.

Normally there are 332 ships operating in the peak tourist season but this year only 40 boats were operating.  A disaster of a year for Egyptian tourism.  There has been no trouble whatsoever traveling around so I will be telling people to ignore all the warnings.  If there is trouble it is confined to a couple of streets in Cairo. We have never felt unsafe, even wandering through the Cairo bazaar on our own when there were hardly any people about. Aswan and Luxor appear a lot cleaner than Cairo.

My only complaint would be the train trip to Aswan as we (and everybody else on the train) were expecting first class. Unless young or adventurous I would advise skip the train in favour of a direct flight.

9 days touring is sufficient to see the major sights.

2 nights in Cairo is plenty – the city is hot, dirty, crowded and not at all pleasant.  You only need to stay long enough for 1 day at the Pyramids and 1 day doing the Museum. Book a good quality hotel to provide a haven away from the crowded streets when you are not sightseeing. We stayed at the Marriott and found this ideal with good restaurants available at reasonable prices.

Disregard what you read in reference to the dress code.  Tourists wander everywhere in shorts, single tops etc.   I came with only long sleeved or ¾ sleeved cotton shirts and trousers as advised.  I don’t regret this as I found the loose shirts comfortable and they prevented me from getting sunburned. Egyptian cotton shirts are plentiful and cheap at every stop. A good sunhat is essential. 

The tours provide plenty of bottled water but it is never chilled.  Ice is not offered in any drinks on the boat as it is unsafe.  We were advised to not eat the salads on the boat but disregarded this as figured it would be the same quality as any of the hotels.  I have had no problems with tummy upsets.  Alan did but only lasted 24 hrs  I suspect he picked up the bug at a not very clean public toilet (which I refuse to use) before we boarded the boat.

The hawkers are probably the worst aspect of touring Egypt as they are generally persistent and in-your-face the whole time when entering and leaving any public venue. More often than not they would be young children so that you would take pity on them and buy something. They won’t take no for an answer and follow you at every opportunity. At some venues even the guards will try to take advantage of you by trying to show you things and then expecting payment. It can be very tiring, and when the price often starts at 10 or even 20 times an appropriate cost it does not leave a good impression of the Egyptian people. But generally we have found the people to be very warm and friendly.  The hawkers are particularly bad this year due to the downturn in tourism, they are fighting each other to get a sale, very sad!

The trip has been everything we expected