Egypt was a country I always wanted to visit. My interest in visiting the country was not spurred by the repeated viewings of Brendan Frasier fighting off mummies in "The Mummy" and "The Mummy Returns". It was spurred by the accounts of all my friends who traveled to the country and saw the magnificent temples and pyramids. When my friends and I were deciding on where to go for our annual Thanksgiving trip earlier this year, I suggested Egypt and everyone in the group agreed that it was a good destination. We shopped around for a local tour agency and decided to sign up for a nine- day tour with a local company called Lady Egypt (http://www.ladyegypt.com/). Representatives from this company were not only professional but highly responsive and services were rendered to our satisfaction (save a few misses which were not their faults but their partners'). After months of planning and anticipation, we set out to this exotic country armed with an entry visa and a suitcase full of Asian snacks and instant noodles. There were six of us in total - Alison, Joyce, Peter, Dede, Ein and yours truly. For the next nine days, we would visit many tourist sights in Cairo, Luxor and Aswan and cruise up the Nile River.
The flights from New York to Cairo via Frankfurt on Singapore Airline (SQ) and Lufthansa Airline were largely uneventful. Service and inflight entertainment on SQ were excellent as always. We had to stop in Frankfurt for 10 hours so we took this opportunity to eat some average tasting German food , did some shopping and rested up a bit. We left Frankfurt in the evening and arrived Cairo in the wee hours of the morning. Upon arrival we were greeted by our rep from Lady Egypt. We then had to queue up in the long lines of passengers waiting to pass through the three immigration counters in the international terminal. Cairo International Airport was a rudimentary structure lacking the modern facilities of an international airport. Fortunately the government is building a new terminal to accommodate the growing number of international travelers to the country. Upon immigration clearance, we were transported to our hotel to catch some sleep. The first thing that greeted us at the hotel (and at every subsequent hotel we had stayed during the duration of our visit) was a metal detector. Talk about safety reassurance. We were briefed by our Cairo rep the next morning on our tour itinerary for the next nine days. We were also introduced to our English speaking tour guide, Mahmoud Elkomy. Mahmoud (a common name in the middle eastern countries like John or Rob) was a very funny tour guide who possessed great knowledge about the country (he can be reached via email at mahmoudtourguide@yahoo.com if you are interested in using his service)
We spent the following week visiting pyramids, temples and cruising on the famous Nile River. Our schedule was pretty hectic. We had to get up at the crack of dawn to visit these sights before they got too crowded. There were also some destinations where we needed to travel in groups of buses/vans led by the police convoy. The goal of such mandatory practice was to protect the foreign tourists from any terrorist attacks. Ever since the Egyptian militants killed a number of tourists in Luxor ten years ago, the Egyptian government has taken extra caution in protecting the tourists visiting its country. If you have Caucasian tourists who are Americans on board a bus or a van, they will even send a couple of soldiers with machine guns to be on the same vehicle with them. Apparently anti-American sentiment runs pretty high here, and we have our current administration to thank for that. I pity our Canadian friends (especially the Caucasian ones). For fear of being mistaken as Americans, they have been taking extra effort to tell people where they are from by sewing the Canadian flag on their caps, clothes and backpacks. As for us, since we are all Asians, we told everyone that we were from Malaysia. We were very popular with the locals -- apparently they love Malaysia (I don't know why - same national religion perhaps?). This much I know -- they buy a lot of TVs that are imported from Malaysia, like Panasonic TVs.
If there was a good time to visit Egypt weather wise, it would be the month of November, January and February. The weather we experienced was simply amazing. Sunny and breezy with temperature ranging in the high 70s to low 80s during the day and high 60s to low 70s during the night. Weather warmed up as we traveled from Cairo (North) to Aswan (South). However this was also the peak travel season in Egypt so every tourist sight we went to was simply packed to the brim with tourists.
Of the places we visited, the most memorable ones were the Pyramids and the Sphinx in Giza, the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, the Temple of Hatshepsut, the Temple in Abu Simbel, the Karnak Temple and the Nile River. Each temple/tomb has its unique history (dating back thousands of years) and intricate wall carvings. The only regrettable part with the wall carvings was that many of them were chiseled out during the colonization era by the Christians and Catholics who regarded those cravings as evil or demonic. It was sad to see these cravings being ruined that way. Our tour guide Mahmoud was very detailed in his explanation of the history of each temple and the Pharaoh/God that it was built for. But I could not remember the names of the Pharaohs that Mahmoud mentioned, save one female Pharaoh, Hatshepsut. She is undeniably my new idol given what she did to claim her throne. To get to power she married her own half brother and to maintain power later in her life she married off her own daughter to her half-son (whom her late husband had fathered with another woman). If Hatshepsut's life was made into a movie, Angelina Jolie would be the best actress to play her.
While we enjoyed visiting the pyramids and the temples and seeing the famous Nile River, we found our three-day cruise on the Nile River to be a boring experience. Given the size of the river the cruise was not a big ship so it doesn't have a lot of amenities like a standard cruise ship. We love shopping (well at least some of us do) so it killed us to find out that there were only two shops on the boat. Luckily one of them sells jewellery. One afternoon while Alison and I were reading on the sundeck and Dede was napping, the three hardcore shoppers (Peter, Ein and Joyce) decided to check out the jewellery shop and ended up spending two hours there. By the second hour of their visit, they were already on a first-name basis with the shop owner.
The food in Egypt is nothing to write home about. Nevertheless we managed to find our meals enjoyable, thanks to Peter who brought a suitcase full of Asian snacks, condiments and instant noodles. There were a few things we liked when we were there however. The falafels were not to be missed. There was also a meal called "Koshary" that we enjoyed a great deal. Koshary is a traditional Egyptian meal that consists of a strange combination of macaroni, spaghetti, rice, black lentils, chick peas, garlic sauce and a spicy tomato chili sauce, all topped with fried onions. Talk about a low carb dieter's nightmare. It's a perfect poor man's meal -- inexpensive and tasty. Koshary is usually sold by street vendors but for the best Koshary in Cairo, go to "Abu Tariq". Just ask your hotel/tour guide and they will tell you where it is. Down your Koshary with a glass of fresh squeezed sugar cane juice. In fact Alison liked it so much that she downed three mugs of it in one meal. She even pushed Peter out of the way to get to the sugar cane juice but that is a different story.
While we truly enjoyed the sights and the weather on our trip to Egypt, we found the Egyptians' overly aggressive behavior in asking for tips to be a major turn-off. Everywhere we went (including the bathrooms), we would encounter the locals asking us for tips. The train attendant on our sleeper train reminded us that we should tip him generously before we got off the train. The guy who demonstrated to us on how to make pots out of stones asked us for tips even though we had purchased some merchandise from his employer's store. Known locally as "Baksheesh", tips are apparently the backhand economy of Egypt. The argument is that the locals don't make enough money so they need tips to supplement their wages. From what I was told asking for "Baksheesh" is a common practice in Egypt and other North Africa countries. That's bull if you ask me. Look, I have been to other poor countries like Vietnam or Cambodia. While the locals in those Southeast Asian countries will try to sell you their merchandise in an aggressive manner, they will not stand there and just ask you for money without offering anything to you. To me asking for tips out right just comes across as greedy and rude. Anyway, here is a guide to how much you should tip when you are in Egypt:
Travel company's representative in each city 20-30 Egytian Pounds
Tour guide 40-60 Egyptian Pounds per day (more if you have group with more than 2 people)
Drivers 20-30 Egyptian Pounds per day (more if you have group with more than 2 people)
Cruise Staff 20-30 Egyptian Pounds per travelling member
Toilet attendant 1 Egyptian Pound per use
At time of writing, 1 USD equals 5.5 Egytian Pounds. When in doubt about how much to tip, always ask your tour guide. He/she can give you some guidelines to fair tipping.
Aside from having to tell off some locals for their overly aggressive behavior in asking for tips, we also had to fend off the annoying little Egyptian kids who would not leave us alone. It was our luck to encounter hordes of school kids on field trips everywhere we went. They saw us like they had never seen Asian people before. We were fine by those who asked us where we were from or what our names were (you know, little kids and their curiosity). But some crossed the line by touching our hair or chasing after us. Even the mild mannered Joyce started telling some kids off on the eighth day of our trip, and she was the one who chastised the rest of group for being mean to the kids at the beginning of the trip. Me? I just toyed with the kids who asked me questions or the locals who asked me for tips. I had to indulge in some harmless fun to keep myself amused instead of getting aggravated by these behaviors.
Female travellers are advised to dress conservatively when visiting Egypt, but it appears that some female travellers from the Western countries, especially those from Poland, did not get the dresscode memo. The way these Polish girls dressed would put Mariah Carey in her crazy days to shame. To prevent drawing any unnecessary attention, the four ladies in our group all dressed conservatively. However given Dede's darker skin, she would still get ogled everywhere she went. Apparently Latinas are very popular in this part of the world (which explains the fascination of Egyptian men with Shakira) and Dede looked like a Latina, even though she is Asian.
To be fair, all these nuisance aside, Egypt is still a country worth visiting at least once in your lifetime. After all, this is the country where you can see the last Seven Wonder of the World, The Pyramids, and ancient temples with carvings on the wall that explain in great detail the relationship between the Pharaohs and their Gods/Deities. All of us had a great time on this trip. We laughed a lot (most of the time it was on the expense of poor Ein). We also snacked a lot (to the point where Mahmoud said he had never guided a group that ate as much as us). Most importantly we saw the historic temples and pyramids that we would remember for life (but if our memory ever fails us we have the 1000+ pictures we took on the trip to jolt back our memories). We felt that the nine days we had spent in Egypt just flew by quickly, except for the three days that we had to spend on the cruise.
