Visiting Egypt

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.

We also visited Tahir Square on the Friday and Saturday which was back to normal with some of the craziest drivers we’ve ever seen driving on the roads in and out of the square. It was quite an experience to visit one of the famous locations in Egypt’s revolution and to find that life goes on normally for the thousands of Egyptians who work and live near the square.

Over the coming days I’ll tell you more about the places we visited and the people we met.

I’ll finish this post by just saying that we had a wonderful time in Egypt, as always, and found the people so welcoming and friendly and that we really recommend that you take the opportunity to visit this wonderful country as soon as you can.

We have some great last-minute Nile cruises available at the moment and if you visit our Nile cruise bargains page you be able to see our latest offers.