Located on the Red Sea in the Sinai Peninsula, Dahab is known as a great place for snorkeling and diving. Anyone who knows me well knosw that I am not the biggest fan of water activities. Especially those that involved actually going underneath the water in large bodies of water that are not pools. So …
After our climb up Mount Sinai, we moved on to Dahab to relax for a couple days. Dahab is a small town on the Red Sea that is just getting to be more popular with tourists. It still feels like a backpacker town, though, and even our hotel (the Dyarna Hotel) wasn’t completed finished. Nonetheless, …
When I booked my tour to Egypt with Gecko’s Adventures, one of the main reasons I picked the one I did was because it included climbing Mount Sinai for the sunrise. I was not disappointed. We were awoken at 2:00 a.m. with a pound on the door and by 2:30 a.m. we were downstairs, sipping …
The last leg of my two week tour through Egypt was the Sinai Peninsula. It was about a 6 hour “bus” ride from Cairo to Mount Sinai, through mostly rocky desert terrain. I put bus in quotes because it was really just a large minivan. Our group of 14 apparently wasn’t large enough to merit …
I left my Cairo hotel around 1:30 p.m. and attempted to hail a taxi to take me to Khan el Khalili. I was told it should cost me about 10-15 Egyptian pounds, but I soon realized that whatever I am told, it’s really about 10 more. The taxi driver absolutely refused to take me for …
I survived my first overnight train in Egypt without a hitch. The ride from Cairo to Aswan was long but uneventful and the toilet at the end of our car was nowhere near as bad as I expected. So I was feeling cautiously optimistic as we boarded a second overnight train, this time in Luxor, …
Once upon a time, someone in Luxor, Egypt decided it would be a brilliant idea to get tourists to ride donkeys into the Valley of the Kings – the large valley on the West Bank of the Nile where the Egyptians buried their kings. I may have survived camel riding without a hitch, but riding …
Sailing down the Nile is a tricky thing. First of all, it feels weird to say “sailing down” the Nile when we were actually sailing north. But since the Nile flows in that direction, I suppose it is more accurate to say “sailing down” instead of “sailing up.” Second, staying on the boat is basically …
What visit to Egypt is complete without a camel ride? And even better, a ride on a camel named Macarena? I have to admit, I was a bit nervous about riding a camel for the first time. They are so much larger than horses and I have not had good luck with horses in past. …
One of the common misconceptions of group tours is that you don’t get any free time to explore on your own. This may be true for some tours, but my Gecko’s tour to Egypt offered up plenty of free time and I made good use of it. On our second day in Aswan, I convinced …
