Some Post-trip Comments & Photos

Guides: Salah (Jordan) and Akram (Egypt) were our guides. Both gentlemen were very good guides.

I think Salah's job was a little easier since he only had a group of 8 under his care. He is a well-educated man and former army officer with great skill in personalizing his chats with us on various topics. He knew the history of the sites we visited and also was able to provide relevant context to help us understand what we were seeing.

Akram is a university educated Egyptologist with a wry sense of humor. He knows his material well and was quite good at handling our group of 22 with a wide range of physical abilities and age range (up to 88 years young). He could read much of the ancient inscription on the walls of temples and tombs and was able to identify the individual cartouches.

I know our trip would not have been nearly as enjoyable had we not been fortunate enough to have these gentlemen assigned to our groups. As an aside, both guides enjoyed frequent coffee refills; maybe avoid guides who are not well-caffeinated.

Note: on our day trip to Abu Simbel, some people stayed behind, so only two guides were sent with the smaller group. We were with Tarek that day. He, is quite personable and knowledgeable, but we enjoyed our time with Akram more, perhaps because we knew him better.)

Jerash

Petra - The Urn Tomb

Local transport in Wadi Rum

Salah (centre) world class guide

2. Flights: We had nine flights in all on this trip, four overseas flights and the rest while we were in the middle-east. Security in the Jordan and Egypt airports is much different. At most, passengers put  their bags through x-ray just to get into the terminal building. At some, a second screening takes place where shoes, belts, and watches are removed before passing through the metal detector for the mandatory pat down. Most of the inspectors do not wear gloves and those that do, don't change them very frequently. Women and men go through separate lines. 

Travel without checking a bag would be a challenge. The list of items banned from carry-on luggage is much more restrictive than in the EU or North America. No tools or instruments of any kind are allowed. In addition to the usual items, tweezers, nail clippers, scissors, little screwdrivers (ie. for eye glasses screws) and other small metal items are all disallowed in carry-on bags. 

For the most part, our flights were on schedule.We were fortunate in that. Bags going through Cairo baggage handling will get extremely dirty. Our needed to be washed.

Scenes from Cairo: traffic near a major mosque in old Cairo

One of the old city gates in the Bazaar

The Alabaster Mosque within the walls of the Citadel

Royal family carving in the Egyptian Museum

Carving of a man and wife, an example of classic Egyptian art

Carving of workers

King Tutankhamen

Gold covered shrine from the tomb of Tutankhamen

Scrolls displayed in Egyptian Museum

3. River Tosca cruise ship. This ship was built in 2009 for Nile cruises. The intense sun had done its predictable damage. On first sight, the ship did not look too inspiring from the outside. The ship operators fooled us. They spent their money on the interior, not the exterior. From walking into the lobby, every part of the ship was very well maintained. The carpets were clean and not faded. The dark wood panelling was polished. Staterooms and bathrooms were spotless and well-appointed. The comfortable lounge and dining room were not crowded. We did not use the spa or small exercise room. We did use the small coffee room and library as well as the sun deck which had more than enough comfortable chairs, sofas, and tables, some in the open and some in shade under a canvas roof. We enjoyed the French balcony in our room, but we spent more time on the sun deck when cruising in daylight. From the room, only one bank of the river is visible. From the sun deck, we could see the interesting sights on both sides of the ship.

Staff was friendly and professional. They could not do enough for the passengers. When returning to the ship, we were always greeted with a cool damp towel and small refreshing beverage. I'm guessing the guides called ahead from the busses to give the ship staff an ETA so they could have the welcome set up.

The food in the dining room was very good, at least as good as any other cruise ship we have been on. Water was provided in the staterooms in glass carafes, two on a table and two more in the in-room fridge. They recently switched to this method to provide clean water to reduce the use of single-use plastic bottles. That's a good idea, but in the bathrooms, the ship still uses small disposable plastic bottles for shampoo and other amenities. Perhaps they will address that, too.

Our stateroom was near the stern of the ship, on the top passenger deck. At times, we could hear the engine hum, noticeable, but not loud enough to be annoying. When the captain was maneuvering sideways to dock, the ship had a mild shudder. Also, the ship has no elevator, which could be a concern for some. In our stateroom, the air conditioning worked very well. We had a French balcony, the floor-to-ceiling glass windows sliding open. 

On river ships, occasionally the docking space is limited and the ships need to 'raft'. That is tying up against a ship that is already at the dock. To get to or from our ship, we'd cross through the lobby of the other rafted ships which gave us a chance for comparison. None were better that the River Tosca. Once on the trip, I saw six ships rafted together at a dock. 

When we booked our cruise, we intended to be on the new ship that was to be launched in January, The Sphinx. However, some weeks prior to departure, we learned that a fire in the shipyard had burnt The Sphinx down to the waterline. We had some concerns about being put on the older ship, but in the end, it worked out fine and we probably wound up with a bigger stateroom than we would have had on The Sphinx.

Karnak obelisk