On our two week holiday, we visited Egypt for 10 full days, and made two night stopovers in Athens and Vienna on the way in and out. I last visited Egypt in 1992 and was nervous about going there after having my previous visit disrupted by having someone walk up to me on the street warning me to leave the country immediately (which I promptly did). Fortunately, this time I was traveling with my family and not solo, and we were backed by the travel services of Abercrombie & Kent which organizes everything on the ground at an elite level, and we found the food, hotels and security situation to be better than expected. We especially loved the fresh juices – good enough reason alone to visit there. Strawberry, mango, guava, hibiscus, orange – I can still feel the pulp of the fruit coming from the glass. Yum!
ATHENS – Emirates has a flight from Newark to Athens at midnight which offers a lovely business class service which we purchased with Amex miles. If you book in advance, you can get a one-way ticket for about 90,000 points. We were there in 2017 with the kids who did not remember the place, but we skipped the Museum of the Acropolis this time since we knew we’d be seeing a lot of that in Egypt. We did do a late afternoon walking tour of the Acropolis with a cool guide that I found on Tours by Locals (the Acropolis is a good site to visit during the last 2 hours of the day before the site closes), and visited some of the nearby areas such as the Plaka and went afterward for a walk along a promenade toward the top of a mountain with a monument facing the Acropolis where you can get a nice sunset view toward the sea.
Our hotel was the Grande Bretagne, an excellent property with a great buffet breakfast featuring all kinds of Greek specialties, and great facilities such as an indoor pool and spa open till 9pm and a very good gym. The rooftop restaurant offers a view of the Acropolis. Dinner was excellent, but you can also have a great fish dinner 15 minutes walk away at Atlantikos restaurant for about ¼ the price. If you want to go to Chabad for Shabbat, it’s about a ten minute walk from the hotel. The hotel is centrally located right on the main square of the city. A cheaper alternative is to book into the sister hotel “The King George” located adjacent to the hotel which shares its facilities. From the hotel you can walk to the main shopping points such as Attica department store, and Marks & Spencer. Food and pharmaceuticals are much cheaper here than at home. People have more money now than they did 8 years ago when the country was bankrupt and so things look better. Elizabeth was pleasantly surprised at how forward the fashion was here and liked the shopping in boutique stores. She found a few good leads from TikTok. The hotel is about half an hour from the airport.
CAIRO-GIZA PORTION
It is about a 90 minute flight from Athens to Cairo. We flew on Egyptair which was surprisingly decent for this flight as well as flights within Egypt. Their business class is not going to win any awards but it’s fine and you get good overhead space on all the flights we took which use a 737. All the flights we took ran on time or early, although the airline has a reputation for being late. Upon arrival, Abercrombie and Kent took us through a separate lane and skipped passport control. We stood in front of an office where our paperwork was processed, along with a bunch of Israelis who were probably embassy security personnel who were chatting in Hebrew in Athens and then switched to Arabic in the Cairo airport. They got processed faster than we did. It was an hour drive to the Marriott Mena House hotel in Giza, which is a JW Marriott looking to upgrade to the Luxury Collection. It was a great place to begin the trip; it’s a big compound with very nice gardens and facilities sch as a huge swimming pool and one of the better gyms I found in Egypt. I’ve started traveling with my own 18 inch foam roller because most hotels don’t stock them in their gyms anymore. I didn’t find one in any gym in Egypt except at the Four Seasons in Cairo. My advice to hotels is to stock 36 inch size rollers; nobody will walk off with those.
It is at least an hour’s drive from here to Central Cairo and we decided to break up our Cairo visit into two parts and use this place as our base for the things you do in the Giza area. From our balcony, we could see a pyramid. At dusk, you can get great photos with an Apple 15 Pro Max camera when the pyramid is lit up. From the area where they have buffets at dinner and breakfast, you get great views of a pyramid. It’s only a few minutes drive from the hotel to the pyramids of Giza and the newly opened Grand Egyptian Museum. The food here is pretty much Marriot food and we were told there were nearby restaurants and shopping areas that were new and excellent. But we were happy to just stay on property and Giza is not a place to walk around or a place we wanted to go around at night.
A word about Abercrombie & Kent. Most of their business is group travel with small groups and Nile cruises. Families traveling independently are a very minute part of their business. But they are excellent at what they do. You get help planning a customized itinerary; they provide guides, visas, transportation and a coordinator who works with you on the ground to make things happen. Their guides are the best and they can arrange exclusive access to various sites. They vet the stores they take you to. Yes, they get a commission but that is also insurance that you are getting what you pay for and that someone cares that you are happy. Their minivans go into private entrances everywhere and get you past the crowds. They charge for their service but I totally recommend them in a place like Egypt. We used them also in Jordan and were very happy with them. One tip: Tips to the guides, drivers and coordinators over a 10 day trip add up to a lot of money. ATM’s here only give out $80 at a time. Bring cash with you or be prepared to use a credit card at the end to leave a lump sum to distribute as directed but expect to pay an additional 14% to cover taxes on the monies being reported as paid out to the people if you want them to get the full amount you are giving. When you are there it seems like it is easy for people such as your coordinator to do their jobs and you are not sure what value they are providing. There is a lot more behind the scenes in a place like Egypt than we realize and they do a lot of work to make sure things go right. We didn’t realize this until people told us from how far our drivers came to do the tour or other such things. For instance, when they drop you off at the airport, the coordinator sticks around till your plane takes off to be sure you are not still there and needing assistance. In Aswan, our son decided he wanted to do a certain activity, and the coordinator arranged it right away. I’ll tell you about that later.
On a rather full day of sightseeing (we started the day at 8:30 and finished by about 5), we started up at the paws of the Sphynx at the Giza Pyramids and had a visit with Zahi Hawas who is a famous archeologist who told us about his experiences and about the Sphynx. We walked around and saw cool parts of the monument. We then went to the Pyramid of Cheops where you can go inside if you really want to. It’s hot in there and you climb up some stairs to reach a little sweaty empty room. Went around the back for a look at the pyramid from behind. Lunch was at a really good restaurant called 9 Pyramids Lounge where we had our first taste of fantastic juices from Egypt. We also great views of a bunch of pyramids. Then a 45 minute drive to Saqara to visit two tombs and a pyramid in a different shape known as a step pyramid. One tomb had lots of decoration with some color. Another had many rooms. The third had one room in the middle with a coffin in the center and a large colonnade. One of these tombs “Wahtye” was especially nice (meaning it had a lot of well developed color) and it is not on the tourist list. We were blessed with a heat wave in March for this day but things cool off late afternoon, evenings and mornings. We visited a carpet school to see a demonstration of carpet weaving and then bought a carpet. They will make to order and ship to your door. Abercrombie brought us to 4 shops on this trip and they usually do a performance for the tourists and of course you feel you have to buy something, but we bought because we liked what we saw. The shops were this one, an alabaster one in Luxor, and a spice store and perfumerie in Aswan. The girls also bought at a jewelry store in Cairo.
On our second full day, we went to the Grand Egyptian Museum which is in its soft opening stage (grand opening scheduled for July 2025). It is a very large impressive place and we spent 2 hours there. Some of the exhibits are still missing. The museum is divided into 12 galleries which flow into each other and when it is fully open it will be much larger. Figure it will then take about 3 hours to see the place. Any more than that and it will just be overload. We saw King Tut stuff at the Old Egyptian Museum (it will be brought to the new museum soon) when we returned to Cairo city center at the end of the trip, and some large famous boats are in between the two places right now. This new museum has some interactive exhibits and has been done really well with moving sidewalks in the big hall with lots of tall statues around. There are plenty of food opportunities here for lunch or a snack. I would not advise going to any of these museums or temples without a guide; you just will walk past everything not knowing what is important. The country is strict about making sure Egyptologist guides know their stuff and our guides were all very well educated. The museums and tourist sites have English signs everywhere. Most of the sites we saw are handicapped accessible, so you might not be too old to visit even if you think you are. My takeaway from all this archeology was that Egyptian kings started planning their deaths from the first year of their reign. They showed off their future burial places. Today’s autocrats build palaces they want to live in and figure they are never going to die. Afraid of their people, they try to keep them secret.
We went from there to the airport for a 2pm flight to Luxor which is about 40 minutes in the air. Egyptair flies out of a terminal dedicated to it and Star Alliance carriers so the terminal is large but not that large. There was a small lounge for business class; a one way ticket in business from Cairo to Luxor was $150. Egyptair does not yet have Wifi.
LUXOR
The airport is small and easy to get out of. It was a half hour drive on empty roads to the hotel. We decided on the advice of an Egyptian travel agent I know to extend our visit to Luxor by an extra day and to go to a small hotel off the beaten path. It is one of two Relais & Chateau properties in Egypt. It is called Al-Moudira and it turned out to be a great find. When you pull up to it, you wouldn’t know there was a resort there but once you step inside past security it is a very nice oasis in the middle of nowhere about 25 minutes from town. Very reasonably priced, we got a villa and everyone had some space. The villas were decorated by a French Lebanese woman with taste and had unusual architecture with blue-colored skylights and unusual ceilings and a swimming pool. It was a more authentic Egyptian experience with pretty gardens, a large pool for the resort as a whole, and a farm from which ingredients used in cooking are used. They bake pita bread daily. The staff were really super friendly. One evening I worked with hotel management to make Karen a small birthday party to celebrate her 60th birthday. They brought in some musicians, whirling dervish dancers and gave us a special beautiful room with a dinner table only for us. They charged a very small fee for all of this. It was a very memorable evening. The hotel is building out its farm with animals and outdoor activities and gave us a tour. It might be a nice place to visit even if you have already been to Luxor and seen the main sites. The food is really cheap here and it is good. Service here is a level above; with our villa we had the services of a butler who was all over us from morning till midnight. It all sounds very luxurious but they probably pay him something like $50 a day and that would be a king’s ransom here.
This hotel is on the West Bank of the Nile. From here, we went touring to some sites such as the Valley of the Kings and then the Valley of the Queens. Each has some tombs and there is the temple of the queen Hatshepsut who was a unique Boss Lady in Egyptian history because there were so few queens. We had lunch at a local hotel which was not bad at all and went to that alabaster factory where we bought some cool items such as a beautiful chess set. We left time to chill at our hotel. The second full day here we left at noon and went on a one hour Nile cruise with lunch on board that took us from the West side of the Nile to the East side while A&K moved our luggage to a different hotel in Luxor on the East side. We visited two main sites on this side – the Karnak Temple and the Luxor Temple. Both are impressive and I would say that the most impressive sites on the trip were these two plus the tombs we saw earlier in the day at the Valley of the Kings including the one of King Tut. What really made it fun were the guards inside each tomb who fooled around with our kids and took cool photos and of course we gave out tips to all of them. You gotta carry small Egyptian bills around to keep handing out to people but they are small potatoes. Luxor Temple we saw at dusk and that is about 5-10 minutes walk from the hotel we stayed at in Luxor. That hotel in the center of town is called the Sofitel Old Winter Palace which is on many people’s bucket lists and the place you would normally expect to stay in Luxor. Although the hotel has some nice suites, it is owned by the government and it has a dingy dark look to much of the building and its common spaces. There is a new pavilion in the back of the property which we did not see the inside of. We had a Nile view and our room was very well decorated in traditional style. We ate in their signature French restaurant. They have a huge pool and a large garden. You wouldn’t want to leave the property at night to walk around; I went out with Elizabeth and was immediately accosted by 3 men and we turned around and ran back to the hotel. One of them strode up right beside me suddenly saying “Don’t be scared…I’ve been following you since you left the hotel.” I did not see the Hilton at Luxor but I was told that it might be a better bet to stay there and just eat and visit the gardens at the Winter Palace. In all these hotels in Egypt, location is not so key because you never walk anywhere from the hotel. I thought the temples were the most impressive but the kids were more impressed by the tombs. Luxor had most of the most impressive sites on the trip. Having been to other archeological sites in the west, these were very life-size and had complete structures you could see to imagine what was once there. It’s much more impressive than Pompeii for example. It also makes the museums of Cairo less impressive by comparison. We were good seeing museums in Cairo at the beginning and end of our visit; we could first see things to see what kinds of things we would see later as we traveled through Egypt, and then see similar things after we had seen the sites where they came from.
From Luxor, it is about a 4 hour drive to Aswan. You could spend several days doing this on a cruise but I would be stir crazy bored. Tourists are not generally supposed to use the desert highway which is faster but less safe. You can go on this road if you bribe the right person. But you want to see the temples of Edfu and Kom Ombo on the way and you can’t do that if you go with the highway. Edfu was also one of the top sites we saw on the trip. It’s a free standing structure pretty complete. As you go on this journey one annoying speedbump at a time every 30 seconds, you pass through all the villages and see real people. You see the meat hanging from the markets, people zooming by on their tuck tucks and motorcycles, and hear the Friday sermons on the loudspeakers from the local mosque. It’s a great power play to be the village “priest” making sermons and having everyone being forced to hear them. It took us 2.5 hours to reach Edfu, then another 1.5 hours to reach Kom Ombo and then another hour to reach Aswan. Figure an hour at each stop. We had box lunches packed for us. After about 7 hours of touring, we reached our hotel in Aswan. We started at 10 and finished by 5:30.
ASWAN
The Old Cataract Hotel is one of the top resorts in Egypt and we liked it a lot. There is the old palace building and the new one. We preferred the new one with its brighter and more modern and colorful rooms with bigger windows and balconies and killer views over the Nile River. The resort also had good facilities such as indoor and outdoor pools, a decent gym and nice gardens. The restaurant used for breakfast and dinner was a cathedral-like room that you would expect to see in Cordoba, Spain. It needed and had 7 foot tall waiters to blend in. The food was generally very good and the menus were fish and vegetarian friendly. This hotel explains why privatization in Egypt is key to future success; this hotel is majority-owned by a billionaire and it operates at a very different level than the Sofitel counterpart in Luxor. Jeremy has decided that he would like to be an African dictator when he grows up.
We took a felucca boat ride to Elephantine Island just across the river from the hotel to visit a Nubian village and museum and feel the sense of the lack of modernity on the pedestrian-only island. 50% of the population of Aswan is Nubian. It is sort of like Indians in America. We went into Aswan proper to a spice market shop and the local shuq. There are some very nice scarves to be bought here and for $10-25 you can do very well. We found nice scarves on Elephantine Island and at a shuq just after the Unfinished Obelisk site (see below). We went to a bakery called “What its name?” (in Arabic) and they had a mob scene of people buying Arabic and Western pastries. Lots of men doing the shopping here. We got a big box of Arabic pastries but alas to us they tend to taste the same, and after a week we were sick of them. The kids decided they wanted to go sandboarding – think snowboarding on sand dunes – and our trusty trip coordinator arranged it. You had to take a boat out to this sand dune and the poor guy was standing out there with the kids in the sunny heat in his suit and tie the whole time and wouldn’t take it off. The “ski run” takes about 10 seconds and then you have to climb up with all the gear. The kids did it 4x and were exhausted.
We did some Aswan sightseeing including an unfinished obelisk, a new dam, the old Aswan dam, a boat ride and visit to the Philae temple on a little island, a perfume shop and a place to buy handkerchiefs (something I use that is hardly sold anymore in the western world, even at Harrods). Here people still use them and the Egyptian cottons are soft as opposed to the rough stuff being made today in China. Temperatures vary each day at this time of year; we had days in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, but always a cloudless sky during our visit the last 2 weeks in March. Aswan we did in a more chill way touring about 4-5 hours a day and staying there 3 nights. As we left, you were about to get 100 degree days here.
On the political side, there is not much to say. People here don’t say much because it is a dictatorship and nobody wants trouble. They seemed to have liked Sadat for getting back the Sinai and getting economic benefits out of the peace with Israel. They tolerate Sisi but feel he wastes too much money and is a dictator. They probably would prefer having Mubarak come back over Sisi. They did not care for Morsi and his Moslem Brotherhood and setting back the clock. Egyptians like their army and they like stability. Anything that makes things stable and economically good is welcome. The butler at our hotel says he wants to move to Russia because he learned Russian in the university and has heard he can live better over there, no matter what kind of country it is. Walking through the market here, a cheap Baby Bjorn would do wonders (you strap your baby to yourself and then you can carry shopping bags with your free hands). Throughout Egypt we did not see any helicopter tours or professional photographers taking pictures of tourists to sell them.
ABU SIMBEL
After 3 nights in Aswan it was time to move on to the famous site of Abu Simbel at the lower end of Egypt, less than 50 miles from the Sudanese border. In Egypt they refer to the southern part as Upper Egypt and the northern part as Lower Egypt (it’s counter-intuitive to me but makes sense when you consider that it refers to the direction of the Nile which originates down in Ethiopian highlands and works its way north to the Mediterranean Sea). It was a 30 minute drive to the airport which is rather small and domestic only. They made us write down our passport numbers at two different stations in the airport and they took away my nail scissors. They have separate lanes for men and women for patdowns. If you have your Priority Pass card with you there is a small airport lounge. We were very lucky today because the temperature in Abu Simbel was in the 70’s; it is often well over 100. It is about a 30 minute flight and then a ten minute drive from the airport to the site of the temple set into an artificially built rockface (the whole thing was moved about 500 meters from its original position about 50 years ago because they were afraid it would flood and be destroyed where it was). Sit on the left side of the plane for the landing so you can see it from the air.
90 minutes at the site is plenty. There is a 4-star hotel here called Seti but I don’t see a reason to stay overnight. There are two temples here. The first is large but not too large and it is well decorated. They moved it from its original place and it took years to take it apart and then put it back together in little pieces. The second temple was for Ramses II’s wife. We called it the feminist temple. Her tomb in Luxor is closed for restoration and you have to pay huge bribes to see it now. We didn’t go to see it but in the future you could see it.
You go back to the airport with one gate and then a plane departs to take you back to Aswan. The flights don’t go daily so you have to plan this. The alternative is to take a bus or a drive from Aswan which is about 3-4 hours each way. Because of the heat and security issues, most bus tours go in convoys at about 4am and reach the site at about 7-8am. We were happier with a 10am flight that came back at 2:30. The flight actually left Abu Simbel about half an hour early and arrived back in Aswan before it was scheduled to take off. That might have been a world record for me. This flight stops in Aswan to unload and then take on passengers and then continues to Cairo. We sat on board for about 45 minutes and then it was another 75 minutes in the air to Cairo. If you sit on the left side for landing, you will see the city and the Nile cutting across it. This seems like a lot for one day but it was not bad at all and it was efficient to get in a plane and wind up back in Cairo without having to get off again or to go to the hotel and back to the airport another time.
BACK TO CAIRO
It’s Ramadan time and checked baggage arriving near sundown won’t be delivered for 2 hours says our guide. It’s a good thing we had carry-on only with us. We had drivers missing exits because they were out of it while fasting. I’d hate to have an airplane pilot fasting. At the Four Seasons Nile Plaza hotel a 45 minute drive away, our luggage sat for an hour after sundown till someone went downstairs and grabbed it. There seems to be a surplus of 5-star hotels in central Cairo so the room rates and food and beverage prices are pretty cheap relative to the rest of the country. The hotel had an Iftar buffet which was Ramadan-themed and we had little to eat from it, but the staff were nice and made food for us such as fish, rice and veges. Again, we love those juice drinks. This hotel has good facilities including indoor and outdoor pools, spa and gym. The gym is 24 hours and the other stuff open till 10pm. Our room was a corner suite with a balcony over the Nile and nice views; it was spacious but had no local flavor and was plain vanilla that could have been anywhere except for a picture of a pyramid somewhere in the room. The St. Regis hotel is a few miles away in the financial district and the Ritz Carlton is close by and used to be a Hilton. I didn’t see those two hotels but was happy with our hotel. They are building a huge Marriott in the central Tahrir Square but right now pedestrians are barred from walking in the square because they had a revolution there a decade ago and are still sensitive about it. In Cairo, they build new buildings next to old ones that just stay vacant. They don’t seem to want to tear things down in the center of the city. You can’t go outside at night to walk around at the Four Seasons; there is no sidewalk; the street is like a Formula One racetrack with no traffic lights and the area behind the hotel is dark and dingy. They are supposedly renovating the area around the hotel to fix this. I can’t really tell you how the city has changed over the past 30 years, but they have built some ring roads that help get you around the city. The streets are not well designated with lanes and pedestrian walkways or traffic lights so things are chaotic and 3 lanes of traffic fit into 2 lane roads, which is how I remember it being 30 years ago. The government has pretty much given up on the city and encourages new development in the outskirts and its new administrative capital 45 minutes away. In certain districts, they have kicked out residents, built new housing for them and demolished whatever structures used to exist. I haven’t visited Alexandria, a city 2 hours north of Cairo but I’m told it is relatively more pleasant there. I was told that over the past decade the government invested a lot into tourism infrastructure such as Western style toilets at many sites and bettter access roads.
We stayed here 2 nights and on our last full day in the city we had a long day that started at 9am and finished at about 9pm. We started with a Coptic church in an old neighborhood followed by the restored historical Ben Ezra synagogue (you could take a photo with a nice bribe). The synagogue used to house the famous Cairo Geniza which was the depository of the Jewish community’s communal records. It’s not there now (the papers have been moved mostly to England) but you can see where it was stored. We visited the Museum of Egyptian Civilization which was surprisingly interesting. After we viewed the permanent exhibition, we went downstairs to see the restoration rooms where they clean and restore artifacts that they either store, send away or exhibit. It was an interesting visit to see the various scientists and artisans that do their restoration work. We spent a good 2 hours at the museum. They have good food there and at all the tourists sites they have clean western-style toilets. I didn’t see one crappy toilet the entire trip, which is more than I can say for America.
We then went to two famous grand mosques, one of which (Sultan Hassan) had the grave of the Shah of Iran. My kids did not know anything about Iran’s revolution. Lunch at Placha, a houseboat with good Egyptian food that everyone liked on the island of Zamalek, an upscale district near central Cairo housing many embassies and some hotels such as the St. Regis (and probably a more pleasant area to stay and walk around). If I were returning to Cairo, I’d look closely at the St. Regis. After some chill time at the hotel, we went on an evening walking tour of the central Khan el Khalili bazaar in Cairo and enjoyed the festive atmosphere as people were breaking their Ramadan fasts with music and lights in the streets. We had our final dinner at an iconic restaurant Naguib Mahfouz (named after a Nobel Laureate from Egypt) with more Egyptian food. Jeremy had finally had enough of it and couldn’t take it anymore. I tried Om Ali dessert (a milky bread pudding) several times and just don’t like it and had enough rice pudding. The kids don’t want to see baba ghanoush or falafel for a month.
On our last day, we went to the Old Egyptian Museum of Antiquities which is right next to the main Tahrir square. The museum was much better than I remember it from 30 years ago and it might have helped that we had a good guide with us. Some of its exhibits will move to the new museum but there will still be plenty there to see. We spent about 90 minutes inside. There were some good snacks outside and a bookshop (but I found the same book on Amazon and just had it shipped to our home and it got there before we did). After a short walk along the square, we headed to the airport 45 minutes for our flight. The departure experience was not bad at all and they had a large buffet in the airport lounge. For whatever reason, there were 3 Star Alliance airport lounges all near each other. They do security when you enter the gate area, which is more expensive but sensible. Our 3 hour flight to Vienna on Austrian Airlines left exactly on time. It seemed the crew were afraid that they would be stuck if we were 5 minutes late and a coup occurred in the meanwhile. Austrian also had no Wifi but their food is pretty good.
All in all, Egypt surpassed my expectations. Nobody got sick and I got no use out of all the anti-biotics and anti-nausea drugs I dragged along. We got good value for money, liked the food and hotels and sites (and the cheap prices we paid for all of it), and Abercrombie and Kent did a good job of holding our hands and opening doors throughout the trip. I would not recommend doing this solo. It was good to split up Giza and Cairo. Luxor and Edfu were the most impressive sites. Different people tell you different stories about where you can and cannot go (such as highways) and I can’t tell you the truth among the stories. Al-Moudira was a great diversion from a standard hotel and offered warm personal hospitality. Service here is higher than at US hotels and I can understand why Arabs sniff at service in the USA. Laundry is dirt cheap here so send out your underwear and socks instead of packing two weeks worth of it. We were lucky with the weather; even when it was hot, we didn’t get too much sun or heat, but I wouldn’t try to go here past March. In December it’s a zoo at year-end and sunset is at 5pm. The sweet spot here is February-March. Ramadan time was an interesting time to visit. Cairo is fun for Arabs because most of the countries in the Middle East are not fun. Dubai is fun but expensive. They have A380 double decker planes coming here from Dubai. Egyptians seemed friendly. This place offers good value for money and we’d come here again even if we were not only interested in sightseeing, especially to a place like Al Moudira in Luxor. I’d want to see Luxor Temple during the day plus the avenue of the Sphinxes which I only saw at night. The Grand Egyptian Museum will be finished with more things to see, although I think museums are sort of lame when you can go to Luxor and see real life temples and tombs instead of just one item at a time in a museum. There is Gaza bordering this country but you’d never know it. This place is much more chill than Israel where we had been just a few months ago with sirens going off at night and people going to bomb shelters and the whole country in a funk over hostages and a war on several fronts around them.
We didn’t see any of the sound and light shows and are told they can be long. We’d see one of them on a return trip. We would need to keep in mind that you can only get $80 at a time from an ATM. You can make multiple withdrawals but you wouldn’t want to freak out your ATM card provider for suspected fraud. My only complaint to A & Kent was that they might have suggested some options to us pre-trip that we didn’t know about until we got there such as seeing extra temples at Luxor (and we did indeed see them). It would have been a shame to miss them since they were right next to the other ones we saw and took all of 10 minutes to see. This trip could be done in 6-7 days but I strongly advise against it. You can only absorb so much information about archeology in a day and at a certain point it all starts to look the same. It’s better here to do Cairo, Luxor and Aswan over a 10 day trip and allow some chill out time in the middle and to be able to stick things in while you are there at the last minute such as if your teenage boy has the urge to board down a sand dune. Also, tours tend to start early in the mornings and guides tend to want to rush you out. Many of these sites are best visited in the afternoon the last hour or two before closing after all the buses have left. If you travel individually, you can go when you want to go. Also, kids don’t want to get up early in the morning and neither do I; no doubt their favorite day of the trip in Egypt was on Saturday when we let them sleep all morning.
VIENNA
I didn’t realize I hadn’t been to Vienna since 2012. Life goes by quickly sometimes. The city is eternal and doesn’t really change as far as I can see. It’s not fascinating but it is a good place to stopover after being in the middle east; it’s safe, efficient and clean, and the food is good. You can drink from the tap again but the toilet paper here was harder than in Egypt; maybe this is why Austrians are so tight-assed. We spent 2 nights here on the way home. I had been expecting everyone to want to be in a civilized place after 10 days in Egypt but actually Egypt turned out to be better than expected. Still, Cairo is not Vienna and I was happy to see well demarcated streets and a lack of chaos. And the pastries are certainly better here. Our day of arrival was Karen’s birthday and the hotel put up balloons in our room and gave us a sacher torte cake. The kids ditched us for dinner and went Italian. The Park Hyatt hotel is inside the ring (the new Rosewood is 2 minutes walk from here). Most of the hotels are along the ring. The Bristol is now closed for renovations for a few years. The hotel has a beautiful breakfast room (a former bank) also used as a restaurant at night. Also has a very good gym, an indoor pool and spa facilities open till 9pm. I chose this hotel for its location and facilities. You could do better moneywise by going to the Hilton on the Stadtpark and then just taking a metro to the center of town which would probably take the same amount of time as it does to walk from the Hyatt to the center of town, but inside the ring there are pedestrian only areas and you feel the city more. There are no views at this hotel because everything is pretty much the same height all around you. You would get views from the Hilton across the river and toward the city. The second advantage of the Hilton is that the express train to the airport (16 minute ride) goes right to where the hotel is.
A few minutes walk takes you to Juden Platz which has a memorial to the Jews of Vienna. We took a 3 hour walking tour of charming areas of Vienna and to see new hip sections that are being renovated. The nachsmarket is a very long outdoor food market a few minutes walk past the opera house. We saw the main cathedral. The Demel Café is one of my happy places on the planet and I shared 4 desserts with the kids. Between the walking tour, Demel, a café in the Stadtpark and dinner, I had 4 pieces of strudel that day. My version of a pub crawl. Uber works well in this city and half the time they send you a taxi. When we went to the airport, a taxi came out of the line right by the hotel and picked us up. You avoid a lot of taxi surcharges when you take an Uber as well. It’s also cheaper than 4 people in the airport train. Uber to the airport was 25 minutes and $40. Vienna airport is good for departures. The NH Hotel is within walking distance to the terminal. ATM machines in Vienna are plentiful (not anymore these days in many cities in Europe) but they will give you 100 Euro notes if you don’t ask for smaller notes. You also need to reject the “conversions” being offered at ATM’s these days or you will be ripped off, meaning you don’t want to agree to the USD equivalents but just accept the amount you get and reject the conversion. You get the interbank rate this way which is a better conversion rate.
Normally people wouldn’t be so upset having no Wifi for 9 hours in flight but Austrian still doesn’t have it on most of its flights and it is a pain these days being in the air during a business day and out of touch for 9 hours. Elizabeth was on an Austrian flight to Poland and we couldn’t find out even from the cockpit if the flight had arrived. The airline’s advantage is its good food and there was a chef on board who could customize the dishes.
Well, that’s it. We had postponed this trip a few times due to covid and then the Gaza war, although once inside the country you’d never know anything was going on anywhere else in the world, let alone on its border. We had a good time after all.
