Egypt: Pyramids, Temples, and Very Little Sleep
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Cairo: Learning to Cross the Street
I arrived in Cairo a couple of days before my G Adventures tour started, and I'm very glad I did.
Mohammed from G Adventures met me and my awesome new friend Niki inside the airport and whisked us through the arrival process. Baggage came quickly, I grabbed some Egyptian pounds, and before long I was checking into the Steigenberger Hotel Tahrir Cairo.
Travel win of the day: for about $60, they let me check in at 6:00 AM.
Worth. Every. Penny.
After a nap, I met Niki for lunch at the hotel. It's always a bonus when you discover on day one that you're going to be spending the trip with genuinely great humans.
I had completely failed to plan anything for my extra time in Cairo, so Niki generously let me tag along on a walking tour she'd booked. As it turned out, it was just the two of us.
Our guide, Marina, introduced us to Cairo the proper way: by teaching us how to cross the street.
I'm only half joking.
Traffic in Cairo operates according to a system I never fully understood. Cars don't stop. Scooters appear from nowhere. Traffic lights seem largely optional, in the rare places they exist. There is constant honking and traffic everywhere, and yet somehow the whole thing works.
Having a local guide for my first venture into Cairo was invaluable. I'm not entirely convinced I would have made it across the first major street otherwise.
We stopped at Abo Tarek for koshary, an Egyptian comfort food made with rice, noodles, chickpeas, tomato sauce and crispy onions. It sounds like someone emptied a pantry into a bowl, but it's delicious.
We also tried fresh sugar cane juice, visited a local bakery, wandered through the city and eventually made our way back by subway.
One thing that caught my attention while we were exploring was a synagogue under heavy police protection. Security was stationed outside and photography wasn't allowed. It wasn't something I'd expected to encounter and definitely stood out from the rest of our wandering that day.
The following day, I did something I almost never do while travelling.
Nothing.
I slept. I worked a little by the pool. I ate at the hotel. I generally recovered from the combination of travel, very little sleep and the somewhat chaotic lead-up to this trip.
Not every travel day needs to be exciting.
Old Cairo and Meeting the Group
The tour officially started the next day, but we still had some free time before the welcome meeting. Niki, Kristina, Darcy and I decided to make the most of it with a private tour of Old Cairo with our excellent guide, Rasha.
We explored historic neighbourhoods and buildings, wandered through a market, survived the heat, and naturally found our way to more koshary.
I was becoming a fan.
The vendors at the market were enthusiastic, persistent and generally very entertaining. At one point, one of them somehow learned Kristina's name and started calling out after her: "Kristina! How can we get your money?"
Honestly, points for honesty.
One thing that surprised me about Egypt was the heat. Don't get me wrong, it was hot, but the dry air made it far more manageable than I'd expected. I was certainly sweating, but nowhere near as much as I would have been in similar temperatures back home.
That evening, it was finally time to meet the rest of our group.
There were twelve travellers in total, along with the amazing Jenna from G Adventures and our CEO (Chief Experience Officer), Mo, who would be guiding us through Egypt.
I also met my roommate for the tour, Evelyn, who was lovely and excellent to share a room with.
After a quick welcome meeting and a rundown of the week ahead, we headed out for dinner together and started getting to know the people we'd be spending the next several days with.
Pyramids. Finally.
The real adventure started the next morning with something fairly minor. The Pyramids of Giza.
Like most people, I'd seen countless photos of them over the years. I knew they were enormous. I expected to be impressed.
I still wasn't prepared for just how enormous they actually are.
Photos simply don't capture the scale. Standing beside them, looking up, it's difficult to comprehend that people built these things thousands of years ago.
We spent the morning exploring the pyramid complex, visited the Sphinx, took entirely too many photos and generally wandered around staring at things in disbelief.
We did have the option of going inside one of the pyramids, but with limited time I decided I'd rather spend mine exploring outside. No regrets. I wanted to see as much of the complex as I could rather than spend part of our visit climbing through a narrow stone passageway.
Seeing the pyramids in person really is as cool as you think it's going to be.
Afterwards, we headed to Nawaya, a G Adventures-supported community farming initiative, for lunch. The food was fantastic, and this was the beginning of one of the pleasant surprises of the trip: Egypt was incredibly easy for me as a plant-based traveller. I never struggled to find something good to eat, and quite often I had more food than I knew what to do with.
Then it was on to the Grand Egyptian Museum.
The museum itself is remarkable. The collection is incredible, the building is beautiful, and it even still had that unmistakable new museum smell.
After a couple of hours, however, I discovered that thousands of people attempting to photograph and video every single thing in a museum can become slightly exhausting.
Fortunately, I also discovered iced coffee. Balance was restored.
3:00 AM Is Not a Reasonable Time
The next day began at 3:00 AM.
At 3:00 AM, everyone becomes surprisingly efficient.
Bags out. Airport transfer. Security. Coffee. Flight to Aswan.
One thing that surprised me throughout Egypt was airport security's complete lack of concern about liquids. Years of North American travel have trained me to surrender anything remotely beverage-shaped before security.
Egypt apparently had other ideas.
Full bottles of water? Fine.
Half-full coffee? Come on through.
This happened more than once during the trip, and every time I walked through security carrying a drink I felt like I was getting away with something.
After landing in Aswan, we boarded our bus and headed south through the desert toward Abu Simbel.
It's a long drive, with a whole lot of desert and not a whole lot else (great for napping). We did stop at a roadside rest area that had an impressive amount of personality for a place seemingly in the middle of nowhere.
And then we reached Abu Simbel. Suddenly, 3:00 AM didn't seem quite so offensive.
The temples are enormous, but what fascinated me just as much was the story of how they got there. When construction of the Aswan High Dam threatened to flood the site, the entire temple complex was cut into massive pieces and relocated to higher ground.
We went inside both temples, which somehow makes the whole thing even harder to comprehend. It's impressive enough standing outside looking at them. Walking through the interiors while remembering that all of this was dismantled and moved is another thing entirely.
Abu Simbel was absolutely worth the ridiculous wake-up call.
That evening we settled into the Basma Hotel in Aswan. After a fantastic sunset, some friends wanted to do a little shopping, so I tagged along to a cotton shop.
The shop owner very kindly called a car to take Marla back to the hotel. I didn't want her to go alone, so I went with her.
The car was spectacular. Old. Loud. Heavily decorated. Worth commemorating in words.
It was only a short ride, but it remains one of those completely random little travel moments that somehow sticks in your memory.
And after starting the day at 3:00 AM, I was very ready for bed.
Philae and Life on the Nile
The next morning we visited Philae Temple, one of the most beautiful temple complexes of the trip.
Getting there is part of the experience. Philae sits on an island, so we travelled there by boat, with the temple slowly coming into view as we approached.
Mo had also invited a couple of Nubian bracelet sellers to join us on the boat. They travelled with us both to and from the temple, spreading out their colourful bracelets and jewellery for anyone who wanted to shop along the way. No pressure, just there if people wanted to buy something.
The complex itself was gorgeous, with huge columns, intricate carvings and plenty of places to wander. At some point, a few people got separated from the rest of us.
Mo went off to find them.
Naturally, the mature and helpful response from those of us who remained was to hide behind the temple pillars so that when Mo returned with the missing members of our group, everyone else had disappeared too.
We were becoming an excellent group.
Then it was time to board our dahabiya.
Before this trip, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from this part of the itinerary or even what a dahabiya was.
What I discovered was one of my favourite parts of the entire trip.
Our boat had simple but comfortable cabins with private bathrooms and a spacious upper deck filled with couches and loungers. The crew took wonderful care of us, the food was consistently fantastic, snacks were always appearing, and drinks materialized whenever we wanted them.
The Wi-Fi existed mostly as a concept (but my esim was fine for the whole journey).
The coffee was instant.
Nobody's perfect.
One thing worth knowing is that alcohol wasn't served onboard. If you wanted a drink while sailing, you needed to pick something up before boarding.
The pace of life onboard was wonderfully relaxed. We spent hours watching life unfold along the banks of the Nile, chatting, reading, playing games and simply enjoying the scenery.
After Cairo, the pyramids, a 3:00 AM wake-up, a flight to Aswan and a long drive through the desert, suddenly having nowhere to be for a few hours felt downright luxurious.
We weren't completely useless, though.
One of our stops was Kom Ombo Temple, which is unusual because it was built as a double temple, essentially two temples in one, with matching entrances, halls and sanctuaries. One side was dedicated to Sobek, the crocodile god, and the other to Haroeris, a form of Horus.
The crocodile connection is hard to miss. Crocodiles were both feared and revered here, and there's even a small museum beside the temple containing mummified crocodiles.
Kom Ombo also has some fascinating carvings, including one often described as showing ancient surgical or medical instruments. This was one of those places where having Mo with us made a huge difference. There is so much carved into the walls that I could easily have walked past something interesting without having the slightest idea what I was looking at (mostly I just looked for the glyph that looked like a murder hornet to me... which apparently is a bee and is something royal).
That evening, dinner was set up right beside the river, followed by music and dancing with the crew. Amazing!
Temples, Cliffs and More Nile
After our first night onboard, we woke up to another day on the Nile.
And for part of the morning, we did absolutely nothing.
We sailed. We ate. We lounged around on deck, watched the riverbanks drift past, chatted, read, and played some Monopoly card game Jenna brought.
This was exactly what I'd hoped the dahabiya portion of the trip would be. There were still plenty of things to see in Egypt, but we didn't have to spend every waking minute seeing them.
Eventually, it was time to be tourists again.
Our first stop was Gebel Al-Silsila, but our dahabiya couldn't take us right up to the site. Instead, we climbed into a smaller boat for the trip to shore.
Gebel Al-Silsila felt quite different from the massive temples we'd been visiting. This area was once an important sandstone quarry, and much of the stone used to build ancient Egypt's temples was cut from these cliffs.
We walked along the rocky riverbank to the Shrine of Horemheb, with smaller shrines, carvings and inscriptions cut directly into the surrounding rock.
Then it was back to the dahabiya for more sailing, eating, lounging and staring at the Nile.
We were getting very good at this.
Later we reached Esna, where our dahabiya docked and we headed into town to visit Esna Temple.
The temple is particularly interesting because modern Esna has essentially grown up around and above it. You walk down below present-day street level to reach what remains of the ancient temple.
Inside, the columns are enormous and covered from top to bottom in hieroglyphs. Restoration work has revealed remarkably vivid colours that had been hidden beneath centuries of dirt and soot. After seeing so much ancient stone in shades of beige and sandstone, suddenly looking up at richly coloured ceilings and columns was pretty spectacular.
And then, once again, we returned to the boat and sailed on.
By evening we'd tied up alongside the Nile for the night. There was no big excursion or elaborate plan waiting for us, just dinner onboard and another quiet evening on the river.
There are trips where you come home feeling like you need a vacation from your vacation. The dahabiya portion of this one was doing a remarkably good job of preventing that.
But then Luxor happened.
Goodbye, Dahabiya. Hello, Luxor.
Eventually, our wonderfully lazy life on the Nile had to come to an end.
After a few days of being fed extremely well, looked after beautifully and becoming far too comfortable lounging on deck while Egypt drifted past, it was time to say goodbye to our amazing crew. They had taken such wonderful care of us, and leaving the dahabiya genuinely felt a little sad. I could very easily have stayed onboard for a few more days.
Egypt had other plans for us.
We transferred from our dahabiya to a smaller boat for the final trip back to shore, where a bus was waiting to whisk us off to the first stop of what was going to be a very full day.
First up, the Valley of the Kings. This had been high on my Egypt wish list, and it completely lived up to expectations.
I had time to explore four tombs: Tutankhamun, Ramesses III, Ramesses IV, and Ramesses V & VI.
Each was different, but what surprised me most was the colour. After thousands of years, some of the paintings and hieroglyphs are still astonishingly vivid. Corridors and chambers are covered from floor to ceiling with carvings, figures and scenes, and some of the ceilings are spectacular.
It's one thing to see ancient Egyptian artwork behind glass in a museum. It's quite another to walk through the actual tombs surrounded by it.
Tutankhamun's tomb was much smaller and less elaborate than the others, but it was Tutankhamun's tomb. Knowing the story of its discovery and just how much was found packed into that relatively small space made standing inside it feel pretty surreal.
The others were larger, more elaborate and, in places, incredibly colourful. By the time I came back out into the desert sun, the Valley of the Kings had very comfortably earned its place on my Egypt must-see list.
Hatshepsut and a Couple of Really Big Guys
From the Valley of the Kings, we headed to the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari.
Hatshepsut was one of ancient Egypt's few female pharaohs, and her temple is spectacular before you even get close to it. Built in three enormous terraces directly against the towering cliffs, it looks almost like it's part of the landscape.
We climbed through the different levels, past rows of columns, statues and carvings telling stories from Hatshepsut's reign. After spending the morning underground in the Valley of the Kings, suddenly being back out in the blazing sun with this enormous temple rising against the cliffs was quite the change of scenery.
It was still hot.
From there, we made a quick stop at the Colossi of Memnon. These two badly battered but still enormous statues depict Amenhotep III and once guarded the entrance to his massive mortuary temple. Each stands roughly 20 metres tall, which explains why even after more than 3,000 years of abuse from earthquakes, weather and time, they're still pretty hard to miss.
There isn't a huge amount to do here. You basically get off the bus, look at two gigantic ancient Egyptians, take some photos, say something along the lines of "those are really big," and get back on the bus.
Which, after the Valley of the Kings and Hatshepsut's temple, was about the appropriate amount of effort.
By this point, we'd also earned lunch.
We visited a local family who welcomed us into their home and fed us an enormous meal. This was another thing I really enjoyed about the G Adventures itinerary. Between all the temples and tombs, there were opportunities to actually meet people, eat local food and experience a little bit of everyday Egypt rather than spending the entire trip moving from one ancient monument to another.
Fed, watered and briefly restored to functioning-human status, we climbed back onto the bus.
Karnak, Luxor, and One Last Dinner
By this point in the trip, we'd seen a lot of temples. Karnak still managed to make an impression.
One of my favourite things there was the row of sphinxes leading toward the temple. Then there's the Great Hypostyle Hall. Walking among its forest of massive columns, all covered in carvings and hieroglyphs, is one of those experiences where photos don't have much hope of conveying the scale.
Everywhere you look, there's something else. Columns, statues, obelisks, carvings, courtyards. By this stage of the day my brain was probably operating at about 60 percent capacity, but Karnak still had me wandering around staring upward.
Eventually, we checked into the Sonesta St. George Hotel Luxor, right on the Nile, for a little break. And I use the word break fairly generously. But I did find some iced coffee.
That evening, we headed back out to Luxor Temple. Visiting as it was getting dark gave it a completely different atmosphere from the temples we'd seen during the day. The columns and statues were lit against the night sky, the worst of the day's heat was finally behind us, and somehow I found a little more energy for one final ancient Egyptian spectacular.
Afterwards, we gathered for our final dinner all together.
There's a joke in the travel industry about FAM trips: if you can't figure out who the asshole in the group is, it's probably you. I genuinely couldn't find one. Mildly concerning for me.
For my non-industry friends: A FAM is a trip for travel advisors to get familiar with a destination, tour or travel product so we can better sell it. They're not free, there's usually very little free time, and "vacation" is definitely not the word I'd use. But they're incredibly helpful.
Seriously, though, we had an absolutely fantastic group. Twelve people thrown together for a week of very early mornings, long days, heat, airports, buses, boats, temples, tombs and entirely too little sleep, and somehow everyone was great. By our final dinner, these people I'd met only days earlier didn't feel much like strangers anymore. I couldn't have asked for a better group to experience Egypt with.
Apparently Sleep Was Still Optional
The trip was officially over. A sensible person would have celebrated by sleeping in. Several of us had other plans.
Very early the next morning, we stumbled out of the hotel and started the slightly elaborate process of getting ourselves into the sky. First a boat across the Nile to meet a van, then a drive to the balloon launch area, followed by some waiting around while everything was prepared.
Eventually, though, there we were, climbing into the basket of a hot air balloon as the sun was just coming up.
Watching the sun rise over Luxor from a hot air balloon was a pretty spectacular way to end the trip. The Nile, farmland, desert and ancient sites stretched out below us while dozens of other colourful balloons floated through the sky around us.
At this point, waking up before dawn almost felt normal.
I have absolutely no regrets.
Eventually we came back down to earth, made our way back to the Sonesta and finally did something extremely sensible: ate breakfast.
I had a little time to relax by the pool before it was time to start saying goodbye. One by one, this fantastic group of people I'd spent the past week laughing, sweating, sailing, eating and exploring Egypt with began heading their separate ways.
Then it was my turn.
I flew back to Cairo and spent my final night at the Le Méridien Cairo Airport, where I accomplished precisely what I wanted to accomplish.
Nothing.
Egypt, You Were Something Else
Before visiting Egypt, I expected pyramids, temples and history.
I didn't expect iced coffee by a Cairo pool, sailing quietly along the Nile, learning to cross streets with blind faith, discovering that airport security had made peace with beverages, laughing endlessly with new friends, or realizing that every day somehow managed to top the one before.
Egypt is a country where poverty is very visible, and yet one of the things that struck me most was how incredibly generous, hospitable, and welcoming people were. Again and again, we were welcomed, fed, helped, laughed with and made to feel genuinely wanted there. Hospitality didn't feel performative or transactional. It simply seemed woven into the experience of being in Egypt.
And a huge part of what made this trip so special was the people.
We couldn't have asked for a better guide than Mo. Having someone who is fiercely proud of both his country and the experiences he creates for travellers adds so much to a trip. Egypt's history is impressive on its own, but Mo had a gift for bringing it to life in a way that never felt like a lecture. He was a historian, teacher, organizer, problem-solver and seemingly a friend of approximately half the population of Egypt. He also knew when to stop talking, a gift not every guide possesses.
And then there was Jenna from G Adventures, who may be the most passionate G Adventures person I've ever met. She genuinely loves the company she works for, and that enthusiasm is infectious. Just as importantly, she had a wonderful way of making sure everyone felt included and welcome from the very beginning. When you throw twelve different people together for a week, that matters.
Egypt is fascinating, chaotic, welcoming, exhausting, beautiful, and unlike anywhere else I've ever been.
I'd go back in a heartbeat.
Ange out.
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