Egypt

Egypt - I expect the very name conjures up romantic images of camels, deserts & ancient monuments, as it did to us before we went.

Unfortunately, although the Pyramids, Sphinx, Karnak, etc were interesting we felt Egypt was the pits. We had been warned that Cairo was very polluted and that was certainly the case, but the rest of the country was about as bad. It was quite the filthiest country I have ever visited and that does not refer to the ever present dust that one expects to find in a predominately desert country.

Rubbish was everywhere, even built into the banks of some canals and pushed down the banks of the Nile. The attitude to litter seemed to be, if you empty a packet of food or cigarettes in the car, just chuck the rubbish out the window. If you have household rubbish in a bag, leave it in an empty allotment nearby, or sweep it down an embankment. If you use a tissue on the street, just dump it in the gutter or on the pavement. The people in the tourist areas were greedy, grasping pests, service was poor & the food was pretty ordinary too - not a patch on Thailand or Turkey (see my earlier articles).

It was very obvious that graft was a way of life, with those at the top of the food chain getting the biggest slice of the action, so everyone was keen to fight their way up the ladder.

Tourists were at the very bottom of the food chain and aggressively targeted.

The star system of grading hotels & tourist boats reflected either a very low standard compared to the rest of the world, or that stars could be purchased, probably both. We stayed in a 5 star hotel, which would probably rate 3.5 star elsewhere & only 2 for service. The Nile cruise boat was graded 5 star and although it would again probably rate 3.5 star, I would grade it a bit more for the fact that the toilet was, thankfully, near the bed! The 3 day cruise itself from Luxor to Aswan was OK, but nothing to write home about.

The name of the game throughout was RIPOFF; eg at the Egyptian Museum which you paid to enter, you had to pay extra to get into the section containing the mummies of the kings. A sign at the museum of Alexandria said it all: 'Foreigners LE35 , Foreign Students LE20, Egyptians LE2, Egyptian Students LE1'. In other tours we have taken in India & Turkey, the tour guide doubled as the tour leader as well. It was obvious that in Egypt the system was set up to ensure extraction of tips to the maximum number of people with a tour leader & then guides at every location visited.

General comments on the tour organised through a company I will not bother to name are:

- The Al Kalili market/bazaar was nowhere near as good as the one in Istanbul we had just visited, or that in Tehran that I visited in 1968 & we were constantly pestered, which put us off completely. Egyptians just do not have the pleasant way of enticing tourists to part with their cash that the Thais have.

- The Citadel museum was a joke with most of the interesting bits closed off.

- The tour didn't cover the Step Pyramid & museum, which I did on my own later & which I found most interesting. But avoid Memphis which is usually part of that option in a tour, where the only interesting thing was the great statue of Ramses II which was certainly not worth the LE35 entry fee (rip off).

- We did an overnight train trip from Cairo to Luxor (& returned the same way) on which we were advised dinner & breakfast would be served as part of the so called first class service. Don't use the train! If you must do it, make sure you take adequate food with you as that served on the train is inedible, (which our tour leader admitted when we caught him buying his own rations at a nearby stall!)

- The optional Nubian Dinner of the tour suddenly increased from the advertised LE40 because we had to pay the driver to take us from the out of the way hotel we were dumped in to the river, then the boat trip, then the tour of the village, then tips on top. Also, we were too far out of the town to visit the Nubian museum without paying for a taxi. Another rip off!

- Because my partner was sick we visited the Gayer-Anderson museum in Cairo on our own after the tour, which turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip for us. It contained some lovely items & was a time capsule of a bygone era in an old style house no longer existing in any areas we saw in Cairo, to that city's detriment.

- One of the things I look forward to on any trip to foreign destinations is experiencing the food of the country. In Egypt the food was pretty awful, especially after Turkey. The bread was generally stale, choice & flavour were poor. One of the best meals we had was at the Nubian village with freshly baked bread & home cooked servings of vegetables and meat.

- Naturally, the tour leader did not refund us the cost of entry to places that were included in the price of the tour, but which we had missed because of sickness.

We were both sick on the trip, my partner quite badly, despite taking every precaution. This was the first time either of us have been sick on any of our trips in Europe, India or the Far East and we were not alone - all our tour group were either sick or feeling off at one time or the other.

My advice to anyone contemplating a trip to Egypt to see the ancient monuments is to visit your local library, borrow a book & DVD & enjoy them in the comfort of your own home.

If you must visit the country, make sure you allow plenty of extra cash for the ripoffs you will encounter, ensure you have plenty of medication with you for stomach upsets, and make sure your travel insurance has good accident and health cover!

Also, research where you want to go thoroughly, plan the shortest & quickest route between points & be very careful what you eat, so you are in & out of the country in the shortest possible time. That way you may avoid being pestered too much & getting too sick, (although I wouldn't bet on the last)