Here’s my chronicle of our recent trip to Egypt, in March 2024, which I hope you will enjoy.
Setting the Scene
Visiting Egypt has been a dream of mine and, over the years, Marti and I have steeped ourselves in Egyptian historical fiction, movies, guidebooks, and traveling King Tut museum exhibits. Having spent the winter months in Cyprus, Cairo was just one easy further step south and going now made sense.
Marti and I flew from Larnaca, Cyprus to Cairo on Egypt Air on March 22nd, for a ten-day tour. Our friends and veteran travel buddies John and Alyce, from San Diego, flew in later that day from Rome to join us.
Practicalities
When I started planning the trip last summer, we acknowledged the tremendous logistical and cultural challenges Egypt presents and decided right away to work with a tour company. This proved to be a very good decision, especially after the Oct. 7th Hamas raids and the ensuing Gaza warfare, although we never felt at increased risk.
We did our research and selected Egypt Tours Portal to organize everything, which they did very well. They arranged drivers, guides, our Nile River cruise ship, museum and site tickets, and most meals. One payment to them covered everything except tips, gifts, a few meals, booze, and international flights. We were very satisfied with the service they provided.
The four of us had a van with driver and a guide at our private disposal. Although we had a prearranged itinerary, we had the flexibility to customize each day’s activities and starting times. The drivers were great, the vans were air-conditioned, and the guides were well-versed and very kind.
The van and driver notwithstanding, the roads in the areas of Egypt we visited were generally in horrible shape. Rough, pot-holed, and in poor repair. There were serious speed bumps everywhere, for example, flanking all intersections, so braking, crawling over them, and reaccelerating repeatedly made for an unpleasant ride after a while.
Driver behavior, especially in Cairo, was crazy. Where lane lines existed, they were mostly ignored, even on freeways. We shared the road with all manner of non-automotive vehicles: donkey carts, tuk-tuks, and small motorcycles with as many as six riders crammed on them. Egyptian pedestrians are also world-class jaywalkers, with a “go ahead, hit me” attitude, which matched drivers’ “OK, maybe I will” attitudes.
In Cairo, roadside billboards were everywhere and at night they were lit up like Las Vegas. There were huge electronic signboards advertising all sorts of stuff that spanned the entire 12-lane freeway. Yet, Egyptian drivers seemed concerned about sparing their headlights and turned them on only sporadically at night!
Our visit occurred during the Muslim holy period of Ramadan. As you may know, this is when the faithful may not eat or drink anything from dawn to dusk. Normally, I would not have scheduled a visit during Ramadan but I didn’t realize that its dates change year-to-year. It had minimal effect on us directly as the tourist industry goes 24 x7 but some shops were closed, some menus were reduced, and we felt a bit bad about eating lunches, for example, when we knew our guide was eating nothing.
Nearby hostilities notwithstanding, tourism was up and it was crowded at most of the sites we visited. The weather was in the 70s-80s and nice. We experienced one sandstorm, in Aswan, which blotted out the sun but didn’t interfere with our activities.
Egypt recently experienced some serious inflation (Americans don’t know squat about real inflation) which resulted in an exchange rate for us of 50 Egyptian Pounds to 1 US Dollar. It wasn’t quite carry-your-money-in-a-wheelbarrow time, but it meant we were getting 2,000 or 3,000 EGP from an ATM at a go and handing out 100- and 200-EGP tips (expected for just about everything) like candy. It puts a big wad of bills in your pocket and messes with your mind.
Our itinerary included two days in Cairo, fly to Luxor, spend six days cruising between Luxor and Aswan, and finally fly back to Cairo for two final days.
Arrival in Cairo
Marti and I flew into Cairo airport, where we were met in Arrivals by an Egypt Tours Portal rep who walked us through getting visas, clearing customs, and picking up our luggage, and then introduced us to our waiting guide, Ahmed. He took us out to our van, and we headed off around Cairo to the Giza plateau area and our hotel, the Hyatt Regency Cairo West. The hotel grounds were like a military compound, with two security checkpoints in the driveway (along with the ubiquitous speed bumps) and a bag scanner inside the front door. Hooray! We were in Egypt!
The Hyatt was nice, and we appreciated the unIslamic availability of cocktails and wine in the bar. Several large, loud tour groups were also staying there, making us keenly appreciative of our private tour arrangements. Our friends John and Alyce arrived a few hours after we did.
Marti particularly like the cellphone towers disguised as palm trees.
Ahmed and our driver collected us the next morning and we were off to see the Pyramids! The day’s schedule was The Great Pyramids, the Sphinx, lunch at a local restaurant, jewelry store shopping, and the Saqqara Step Pyramid.
All the sites we visited are essentially national parks. They were complete with large parking lots full of cars, vans, and tour buses (very chaotic-seeming at first but actually quite fluid), modern ticket offices, bag scanners, lots of armed security staff, and QR-code-reading entry turnstiles. And, oh yes, lots of tourists.
At each site our guide whisked us through/around lines and security, handed us pre-purchased tickets, and ushered us into the site – very nice, indeed.
Here are a few photos from our visit to the Giza Pyramids:
The pyramids and Sphinx were amazing! We couldn’t quite stop smiling, just being there at last.
The Great Pyramid of Khufu (aka Cheops) standing since 2570 BC, filled the sky and two other adjacent pyramids stood beside it. We declined offers to go inside them, given what we’d heard about the steep and claustrophobic decent/ascent leading to not much to see. The Sphinx was smaller than imagined and located in a pit, so not what I expected. Still, it was cool to be there. Lots of these things, like the Sphinx, were largely buried in sand in the modern era and had to be excavated to be seen whole (more amazing Egyptian engineering feats).
The pyramid complex is quite a large area and, whenever we needed it, our van magically appeared to take us to our next stop. After a few hours, we headed out for lunch at a nearby restaurant. The food was typical Mediterranean fare but pretty tasty. Ahmed kept a watchful eye on us and paid the tab.
A note about drinking water: we were advised to use bottled water for drinking and brushing our teeth, and we did so religiously. We also avoided unpeeled fruits and vegetables. The tour company provided each of us a half-liter of bottled water at the start of every day. Happily, the result was that none of us came down with King Tut’s Revenge.
After lunch we went to a jewelry shop. These planned shopping stops are interesting and provide a commission for our guide. This stop brought us into what was a modern, well-appointed and well-lit store behind a very modest facade, with a very welcoming staff. We were plied with cups of hibiscus tea and given a pleasant, but hard, sell. Marti and I both spent a bit of money on gifts for others, but we forgot to haggle. It was an interesting experience and not too mercenary-seeming.
Our final stop of the day was the Saqqara “step pyramid” site, which was 30-minutes away down really awful roads and through some dirty, poor neighborhoods I found disturbing. Dumped trash lined the road and a canal, side roads were not paved, and the buildings were ramshackle. The difference between my personal circumstances and that of the people outside the van was profound. I would not have liked to make that journey alone.
We noticed quite a lot of buildings, everywhere, that were unfinished or never finished. For example, a 3-story building would have a fourth floor that was just cement columns and rebar sticking out of its top. We weren’t sure why, but in some countries an “unfinished” building isn’t taxed, so never technically finishing construction keeps the taxman away.
In Saqqara, we visited the Step Pyramid of Zoser which was the first major tomb to use a pyramid shape and durable materials, and set the pattern for the pyramids that followed
← It looks like John just realized he was standing on the trap door to the secret crypt below! This was our first tomb visit and our first exposure to hieroglyphics.
About the site vendors: The exit from each park-like site we visited was through a gauntlet of vendors. This souk featured salesmen who would step up and almost block your way, waving dish towels, table cloths, tee-shirts, statues, etc. trying to get you to stop and buy.
All were adept at sizing us up on the fly as Americans and switching their sales pitches to well-spoken English. Some of them were children; there were flocks of 10-year-old boys hawking refrigerator magnets, for example. “Six magnets for just one dollar” was a familiar cry. We politely said No Thanks and kept moving, and occasionally our guide intervened if necessary. After a few days, we kind of braced ourselves for the onslaught when leaving a site; it was tiresome and not the best final memory to have of a place.
Many vendors didn’t take No for an answer and you had to repeat yourself over and over again (even in Arabic, the basics of which we had learned). In fact, I noticed that many Egyptians we dealt with had a selective inability to hear the word No. For example, this kind of exchange was typical: “Do you want a dessert” – “No, thank you” – “Good, I’ll bring you a dessert then”.
Engaging with some of the younger kids, perhaps out of compassion, was a mistake as it often caused others to swarm you. Our guide had to shoo some folks out of the door to our van at one stop, in order to close it.
And that concludes the start of our exciting visit. Tomorrow, we fly off to Luxor, the mysteries of southern Egypt, and our Nile cruise ship. Join us in my next post, Part 2, for the continuation of our journey.
The Occasionally-Examined Life 