Visiting Egypt

Visiting Egypt

The Pyramids - Barbara at the entrance to the burial chamber

As regular readers to the Nile Cruise blog will know Barbara and I spent the week before last (12th to the 20th November) in Egypt visiting Cairo, Luxor and Aswan and introducing ourselves to hotel owners and ships managers.

We are currently selling a lot of Nile cruises and we felt it was a good time to pop over and experience for ourselves how things are at the moment.

We try and visit Egypt as often as possible each year, not just for pleasure but to stay in touch with people that we know and people that we do business with.

We visited Egypt just after the revolution about 18 months ago and found that everyone we spoke to was really excited about the future. Some eighteen months later people are just as excited but perhaps a little tired of waiting for some of the things they were expecting to materialise.

So things are getting back to normal but the tourist industry is still a little slower than people hoped it would be this long after the revolution.

However, as a tourist its’ probably a great time to go as queues are a lot smaller than they would normally be and when you visit the ancient sites such as The Valley of The Kings or the Egyptian Museum in Cairo you will find them a lot less crowded than normal.

During our visit we visited some of the main sites that you would visit on a Nile cruise such as Kom Ombo Temple, Karnak Temple and The Valley of The Kings as well as The Pyramids, The Sphinx and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. However we didn’t’ sail this time but took the road journey from Luxor down to Aswan with the road hugging the banks of the Nile as we travelled. Continue reading “Visiting Egypt”

Depart for Luxor

We have arrived in Luxor after a good flight with Monarch from Manchester. We stayed overnight at the excellent Premier Inn. Great price, nice hotel and spotlessly clean. The receptionist told us that the shuttle bus was £4 each to the airport whilst a taxi was just £6. If you take the shuttle you have to struggle on and off with your cases plus wait for it to arrive whereas a taxi takes you straight to the terminal and you have no struggle with cases or waiting times. So it was a taxi transfer that took about 10 minutes.

The only problem was that instead of arriving at the flight desk at our normal time of 3 hours before we left it to 2 hours. Bad move as we were at the back of a long queue and there were 4 long queues. Normally we are at the front of the queue and have no waiting. This time we were actually the last people to check in and we were the last people to board the plane. Luckily we had good seats in row 3 so we weren’t right at the back if the plane.

Flight was delayed by an hour because of fog but the captain made up time and we arrived just 30 minutes late. After a smooth transfer through the airport we finally boarded our cruise ship, the excellent Royal Viking Nile cruise ship which is where I’m txting this now. We have a lovely upper deck cabin and we are just about to go down for dinner.

Early start tomorrow so we’ll probably have an early night.

To finish…I would definitely recommend the Premier Inn at Manchester Airport. I would suggest you ask the hotel reception the difference in costs between the shuttle and a taxi and I would always turn up early for check-in.

Luxor Flight News From The Foreign Office

Today the Foreign Office has removed Luxor from it’s list of locations in Egypt that it recommends to travel to only if your journey is essential.  That means that flights to Luxor from the UK will resume shortly and Nile Cruise holidays will recommence.

If you read our earlier post today you will have read that a client of ours is currently in Luxor and is due to cruise at any moment and reports that Luxor is as normal and that the Nile cruise ships are ready to recommence immediately.

Lets hope that travellers from the UK will start to visit Egypt as soon as possible to help restore Tourism which is such a great part of the Egyptian economy.