Blog de Viajes a Egipto

Egyptian cooking runs on pulses, bread, slow-cooked greens and charcoal. It is filling, it is heavily seasoned rather than hot, and it is inexpensive enough that you can work through most of the classics in a week without keeping track. If you learn one word before you arrive, make it koshary. After that: ful and taameya at breakfast, molokhia and mahshi at the table, kofta off the grill, and om ali at the end of dinner. Koshary, the plate to eat first Koshary is rice, short pasta, brown lentils and chickpeas layered into one bowl, buried under spiced tomato sauce and a thick handful of fried onion. It is the national dish. Two bottles sit on the table and they are the point. One is dakka, a sharp garlic vinegar. The other is shatta, chili sauce. The bowl arrives lightly seasoned and you finish it at the table. Pour, stir the whole bowl from the bottom, taste, pour again. Koshary shops usually sell koshary and nothing else, which is why they are good at it. Bowls come in sizes, and the middle size is already a large meal. As served it contains no meat, though it is worth asking whether the tomato sauce was built on meat stock, because some kitchens do that. Breakfast is savory, and it starts early The Egyptian breakfast is beans. Ful medames is fava beans cooked slowly overnight and mashed at the counter with oil, cumin and lemon, then topped with whatever the shop keeps in reach: tahini, chopped tomato, a boiled egg, green chili. It is served warm and it holds you until the middle of the afternoon, which is exactly what a morning at the temples requires. Beside it is taameya, the Egyptian falafel. It is made from split fava beans rather than chickpeas, which leaves it green inside and lighter than the chickpea version sold elsewhere, and it is often rolled in sesame seeds before frying. Both go into bread with salad and tahini, and both are sold from carts and small shops from very early in the morning. The bread is aish baladi, a wholewheat pocket flatbread baked so that it puffs and separates. It arrives with almost every meal and it is the utensil as much as the side dish. Add white cheese, pickles and a plate of eggs and you have the standard local breakfast. Hotels serve an international buffet, so if you want the local version, one morning outside the hotel is what it takes. The stews people grow up on Molokhia is the dish worth understanding before it lands in front of you. Jute mallow leaves are chopped to a fine green pulp and cooked in broth, then finished with garlic and coriander fried in ghee and poured in at the last second, which is the smell that fills the room. The texture is thick and slippery, closer to okra than to soup. It comes with rice and usually chicken or rabbit. Mahshi is vegetables stuffed with spiced rice and herbs and simmered in tomato: vine leaves, peppers, zucchini, eggplant, cabbage. It is home cooking that restaurants also do well, and it is frequently made without meat, though that is worth confirming rather than assuming. Fattah belongs to celebrations, above all Eid al-Adha, the feast that follows the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Toasted bread goes in the bottom of the dish, then rice, then meat, then a garlic and vinegar tomato sauce poured over the lot. It is rich, and a portion is larger than it looks. You will also see tagen on menus, spelled various ways. In Egypt this means a stew of meat or vegetables baked and served in its own deep clay pot, which is a different dish from the cone-lidded Moroccan tagine that shares the name. The charcoal grill Kofta is spiced ground meat pressed onto skewers; kebab is chunks of lamb or beef done the same way. Grill houses often sell by weight rather than by portion, so you order a quantity, choose the mix of kofta and kebab, and it arrives with bread, tahini, salads and pickles that nobody asked for and everybody eats. Shawarma is carved off the vertical spit into bread and is the reliable answer to a late arrival back at the hotel. Hamam mahshi, pigeon stuffed with rice or green cracked wheat, is a festive dish and a genuine local specialty; it is small-boned and fiddly to eat, which is part of the ritual rather than a flaw. Fish is a separate world. On the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts, and at Nile-side fish restaurants inland, you pick from the ice display, it is weighed in front of you, and it comes back grilled or fried with bread and salads. Sweets, and where they are actually eaten Om ali is the one to try first: layers of pastry soaked in hot milk with nuts, coconut and raisins, baked until the top browns, served scalding. It appears on restaurant dessert menus rather than at the pastry counter. The rest are usually bought rather than ordered. Basbousa is a dense semolina cake soaked in syrup. Konafa is shredded pastry baked over cream or nuts. Baklava arrives in the layered Ottoman style. Pastry shops sell these by weight from a glass counter, you point at what you want, and you eat them with tea rather than at the end of a meal. During Ramadan the counters fill with qatayef, stuffed pancakes folded and either fried or served with cream. What to drink Shai, black tea, is constant. It comes very sweet unless you say otherwise, often with fresh mint, and it is offered in shops and workshops as hospitality rather than as a sale. Karkadeh is hibiscus, deep red, served hot in winter and cold in summer. Asab is sugarcane juice, pressed to order at juice shops and drunk on the spot. Coffee is ordered by sweetness rather than by size: sada for none, mazbout for medium, ziyada for

Exchanging Money in Egypt: Where to Change Cash and How Much at a Time

Egypt runs on cash. Your hotel will take a card and so will a large restaurant, but the porter, the taxi, the man selling cold water outside a temple gate and the guide you spend three days with all deal in Egyptian pounds. At some point on your first day you will be standing in front of an ATM or an exchange counter working out how this is supposed to work. It is a simple problem with a few sharp edges. Get the method right and money stops being something you think about for the rest of the trip. The currency you will be handling The Egyptian pound is written EGP, and locally you will see it abbreviated as LE. Say "pounds" and everyone knows what you mean. It divides into 100 piastres, but piastres have effectively disappeared from daily use, and the coin you end up holding is the 1 pound coin. Notes run from 5 pounds up to 200, and the two you will care about most are the 10 and the 20, because those are the tipping notes. Both of those circulate in two versions at once: the older paper design and a newer plastic one in a different colour. They are equally valid, and the plastic ones are simply harder to tear. Spend a minute on your first evening laying out what you have and learning the colours, because the 50 and the 200 are easy to confuse in a dim souk while someone waits. The pound has moved a lot against major currencies in recent years. That has one practical consequence for you, and it is not the one people expect: holding a large pile of pounds for two weeks has no upside, and turning them back at the end has a cost. Change what you need, when you need it. What to bring from home Which currency travels best US dollars and euros are the two currencies every Egyptian bank and licensed exchange office will take without a second look, at the best rates on the board. British pounds are accepted at banks and the larger exchange offices, though not everywhere. Beyond those three, do not assume a counter will take what you are carrying. If your home currency is anything else, do not try to solve it in Egypt. Either buy dollars or euros at home before you fly, or plan to draw pounds straight from an ATM with your card and skip the cash exchange entirely. Most people are best off doing a bit of both. The condition of your notes matters more than you think This is the detail that catches out travellers who have never been asked about it anywhere else. Egyptian exchange counters inspect foreign notes and refuse the ones they do not like. A tear, a heavily worn edge, a pen mark, an ink stamp, a stain: any of these can get a note handed back to you. Sorting your cash at home takes two minutes and saves an argument at a counter in a language you do not speak. Two related habits are worth knowing. With US dollars, many places prefer the newer series designs and will either refuse older ones or quote a worse rate for them, which is a market convention rather than an official rule. And larger denominations often attract a slightly better rate than small ones, so a single hundred tends to do better than five twenties. Bring the bulk in large notes and keep one or two small ones for a moment when you need a little cash quickly. Where to change money, and what each option costs you Where Rate What to know ATM Close to the interbank rate Two fees apply: the machine's own charge and whatever your bank adds. Fewer, larger withdrawals cost less. Bank branch Fair and posted Passport required. Slower, but the calmest place to change a large amount of cash. Licensed exchange office Fair, sometimes marginally better than a bank Look for a shopfront with a licence displayed and a rate board. Passport required, and quicker than a bank. Hotel front desk Noticeably worse Convenient at midnight. Fine for a small amount, wrong for the bulk of your trip money. Someone who approaches you Sounds excellent Do not. This is where counterfeits and short counts live. ATMs are the default answer for most people. They sit in arrivals halls, bank lobbies, shopping centres and the lobbies of most tourist hotels, and drawing pounds directly avoids the double conversion of buying dollars at home and selling them again in Egypt. Tell your bank you are travelling first, because a card blocked on day one is a genuinely bad start, and check what your bank charges per foreign withdrawal so you can decide how often to use one. For changing physical cash, banks and licensed exchange offices are the two respectable options, and the difference between them is mostly speed. Both will want your passport. Count the money at the counter before you walk away and keep the receipt, which matters more than it sounds for reasons that come up at the end of the trip. The street changer is the one absolute. Someone offering a rate well above the boards is not being generous, and the loss shows up either as counterfeit notes or as a count that comes up short while you are being hurried along. Staying with official counters is part of the same ordinary caution that makes the rest of the country straightforward, which the guide to whether Egypt is safe to travel in goes into properly. Always let the machine charge you in Egyptian pounds At an Egyptian ATM, and on some card terminals in shops, you will be offered a choice: pay in Egyptian pounds, or pay in your own home currency with the amount helpfully displayed for you. Choosing your home currency is dynamic currency conversion, and it hands the exchange rate to the machine's operator instead of your bank.

The Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square: What Is Still There and How to Visit

The Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square is the one that lost its headline act and stayed worth visiting anyway. For most of a century it held the Tutankhamun treasure and the royal mummies, and a trip to Cairo was arranged around it. Both of those collections have since moved out. What remains is a dense, old-fashioned, faintly overwhelming museum in a salmon-pink building from 1902, holding tens of thousands of objects that never went anywhere. What the museum is, and what changed The building opened in 1902 on the north side of what is now Tahrir Square, in the middle of Cairo. It was designed from the ground up as a museum rather than adapted from an older building. The design came from a French architect, Marcel Dourgnon, who won an international competition for it. The result is neoclassical, painted salmon pink, arranged as two floors of galleries running around a covered central court, and lit largely from above. Two departures reshaped it. The complete Tutankhamun assemblage, everything recovered from the tomb, went to the Grand Egyptian Museum beside the pyramids. The royal mummies went to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization at Fustat, in the south of the city, where they are displayed in a deliberately somber lower hall. What did not move is the rest: the Old Kingdom sculpture, the Amarna material, the Predynastic objects, the jewelry, the coffins, the papyri, and the enormous quantity of everyday things that make ancient Egypt feel inhabited rather than ceremonial. If you want the full picture of Tutankhamun and the monumental pieces, that is a separate visit, and our Grand Egyptian Museum tickets and opening hours page covers it properly. The pieces worth crossing the room for The collection is large enough that a list of highlights is more useful than a list of galleries. These are the objects that repay standing still. The Narmer Palette. A flat shield-shaped slab of dark siltstone, carved around 3100 BCE, showing a king wearing the crown of Upper Egypt on one face and the crown of Lower Egypt on the other. It is usually read as the earliest surviving record of Egypt unified under one ruler. It is also small, undramatic and very easy to walk past, which is worth knowing before you are standing next to it. The seated statue of Khafre. Carved from hard greenish stone, with the falcon god Horus folding his wings around the back of the king's head. Khafre built the second pyramid at Giza, and this is the piece that explains what the Old Kingdom was aiming at: absolute stillness, absolute symmetry, no hint of a human mood. The Amarna room. Akhenaten's reign produced Egyptian art at its strangest, with elongated skulls, heavy hips and drooping faces replacing the standard proportions almost overnight. The colossal statues of Akhenaten himself are unsettling in a way no photograph conveys. The Predynastic and Early Dynastic cases. Flint knives, slate palettes and pottery from before the pyramids. It makes the rest legible, because it shows the civilization before it settled into the style everyone recognizes. Many of the gods you will meet in the sculpture galleries are identifiable on sight once you know the animal heads, and our short guide to recognizing Egyptian gods by their animal heads is worth ten minutes before you go in. The same is true of cartouches: once you can pick a royal name out of an oval ring, the labels stop being the only way to read a case, and how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs covers enough to make that possible. Tickets, timing and what you pay The general adult ticket for foreign visitors is 550 EGP, roughly 11 USD at mid-2026 exchange rates. Tickets are set by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and sold in Egyptian pounds, so the pound figure is the real one and the dollar equivalent moves with the rate. The full ministry list for the sites on a normal itinerary is on our page of official Egypt monument entrance fees. Photography inside is a separate ticket, bought at the same time. Tripods are not permitted anywhere in the building, so check at the window what your ticket covers rather than assuming one ticket covers everything. If cameras matter to you across the whole trip, the rules vary site by site and are summarized in our note on camera rules at Egyptian sites. On time: two hours is the realistic minimum, three to four is comfortable, and past five hours the collection stops going in. The museum is not generously supplied with places to sit, which becomes a factor faster than you expect. Going at opening helps on two counts: the light through the skylights is better early, and the coach groups arrive later in the morning. One warning that applies to this museum more than most. The distribution of objects between the three big Cairo museums has been shifting for several years and is still being adjusted, and internal renovation moves things between halls. If you are traveling specifically to see one object, confirm on the museum's own official channel that it is on display before you go. Getting there The museum sits directly on Tahrir Square, which is as central as Cairo gets. Sadat metro station sits under the square itself, so arriving by metro puts you within a few minutes' walk of the entrance and skips the traffic entirely. Otherwise, ride-hailing works well in Cairo and removes the fare negotiation that street taxis involve. Our page on using Uber and Careem in Cairo explains how pickups work around busy squares, which matters here because the square is large and drivers cannot always stop where the pin lands. Traffic around Tahrir is heavy in both directions of the working day, so build in more time than the map suggests. The area around the square is busy and heavily policed rather than dangerous, and the practical concerns are ordinary city ones. If you would rather have that spelled out

How to Choose an Egypt Tour Operator: 8 Checks Before You Pay

The operator worth booking is the one that will answer eight concrete questions before you pay, in writing. A company that answers all eight has told you how it works. A company that will not answer several of them has told you that too. What changes your trip is which link of the supply chain you are buying from, and what that link will put in writing before you pay. Who you are actually talking to A company selling an Egypt tour in English is not necessarily in Egypt. It can take your booking, keep a margin, and contract an Egyptian operator to do the work: the guide, the hotels, the drivers, the boat, the person who rearranges your day when a tomb closes for conservation. You may never learn that operator's name. That arrangement is not a scam and it is not automatically worse. It carries real advantages. What it does carry is distance. Every question you ask while planning, and every problem on the ground, travels through an extra office before it reaches somebody who can act on it. So the useful question is not which company is best. It is whether the company taking your money is the company doing the work, and if it is not, whether you are getting something worth the gap. Both answers can be right for you. What is never right is not knowing which one you bought. The size of the resale margin is not published, and it moves per company and per season. What you can establish in an afternoon is which side of the line you are standing on. The eight checks Run these in order. Each one can be settled before you pay anything. 1. The company you pay and the company that runs the trip Ask it flatly: are you the operator in Egypt, or do you contract an Egyptian operator? A direct operator answers in one sentence and names the city. A reseller either explains the model honestly, which is a good sign about everything else, or talks about partnerships and local expertise without naming anyone. Then ask the question that settles it: what company name will appear on my card statement, and where is that company registered? Vagueness here is itself the answer. 2. The Egyptian license, and the name it is issued to Companies running tours inside Egypt are licensed by the Egyptian tourism authorities. Ask for the license number and the registered company name it belongs to, then check that the registered name connects to the entity that will receive your payment. Trading names and registered names diverge for ordinary reasons, but the two should be connectable on request, and a company that will not connect them has told you something. If you are booking outside Egypt, ask instead which Egyptian license holder will operate the ground portion. 3. A licensed Egyptologist, and the language they guide in Guiding at Egyptian monuments requires a license, and it is checked at the gates. That license is the line between someone who reads the walls at Karnak and someone who holds your tickets and waits by the vehicle. Ask whether your guide is licensed, and ask separately which language they guide in, because those are two different guarantees. The wording you want in your itinerary is a licensed Egyptologist guiding in English, not English-speaking staff subject to availability. One thing that is normal rather than a downgrade: a long program often uses a Cairo Egyptologist and a second one in Upper Egypt, because working knowledge of the ground is regional. The license and the language are what should stay constant. 4. What the word private is covering Private covers at least three different arrangements. It can mean your party alone with your own guide and vehicle. It can mean a private transfer to a site where you then join a group of eighteen. It can mean a private vehicle that collects four other parties from four other hotels first. Ask three specific questions: how many people are in the vehicle, is the guide with our party only, and does the vehicle stay with us through the day or leave and come back. Then ask whether the itinerary contains any stop at a papyrus institute, perfume workshop, alabaster factory or carpet school. Those stops exist to pay commission, they consume the hours you came for, and an operator that includes them without saying so has shown you how the day is going to be paid for. 5. Prepaid monument tickets, or cash at the turnstile This is where two quotes that look identical stop being identical. Gate tickets in Egypt are a real line of money, and an operator either buys them before you land or leaves them on your side of the ledger. Giza is 700 EGP, about US$14. Abu Simbel is 822 EGP for both temples, about US$16. Going inside the Great Pyramid is a separate 1,500 EGP ticket, about US$29, bought at Giza on the day and normally excluded. Ask for the gates on your itinerary listed one by one, marked prepaid or not prepaid. A program that quotes a few hundred dollars less per person and then collects seven or eight gates from you in cash has not saved you anything. It has moved the money and added a queue. The itemized version of that arithmetic is set out in what an Egypt tour includes and excludes. 6. The boat, by category and by name If your trip has a river section, this is the check to run first. Egyptian river operators move passengers between vessels of the same category to keep sailings full, so what you are guaranteed months ahead is the category and the itinerary, and the specific vessel is confirmed close to departure. That is standard practice rather than a switch pulled on you. What separates a straight operator from a careless one is whether they say so upfront. Ask whether a named boat is guaranteed or only

What to Pack for Egypt

Egypt is an easy country to pack for and a surprisingly easy one to pack wrong. The mistakes are not exotic. People bring a suitcase full of hot-weather clothes and then shiver on a temple ramp at six in the morning. They bring a charger that fits nothing on the wall. They arrive with a card and no cash, in a country where the small transactions of a travel day are still settled in paper money. None of it needs specialist gear. It needs a bag built around four things: layers, closed shoes, sun protection, and small denomination cash. The short version If you read nothing else: light cotton or linen clothes that cover shoulders and knees, walking shoes you have already broken in, sunscreen and a hat, one warm layer for the evenings, a two round pin plug adapter for the 220V sockets, and cash in small bills for tips and markets. That covers most of a normal Egypt trip. Clothes, and the three settings you are dressing for One suitcase has to work in three different environments, and they are less alike than the brochure photographs suggest. City streets and archaeological sites are the default setting, and the practical convention is shoulders and knees covered. This is not a law, and nobody stops you at the gate of Karnak. It is a courtesy that also happens to be the more comfortable choice, because covered skin under a strong sun is cooler than bare skin. Light long sleeves outperform a sleeveless top at two in the afternoon in Luxor. Mosques are the setting with an actual requirement. Arms and legs covered, hair covered for women, shoes off at the door. A large light scarf handles this in about ten seconds and then goes back in the day bag, where it also earns its place against fierce air conditioning on buses. Clean socks, and shoes that come off without sitting down, make mosque visits painless. Pools, boats and the Red Sea are the third setting, and there the rules simply stop. Swimwear at the pool, whatever you like at a resort in Hurghada or Sharm. If you want the season by season detail on cut, fabric and color, the fuller guide to what to wear in Egypt goes deeper than a packing list can. Shoes, and the mistake that costs you a week You walk more than you expect, and rarely on flat ground: sand, stone polished slick by centuries of feet, temple ramps, and stairs built to no modern standard. Closed walking shoes with a real sole, already worn in, do more work than anything else you pack. Add flat sandals for the hotel, the pool and the boat and your footwear is finished. The rule that matters: never travel in shoes bought for the trip and not yet worn. A blister on day one follows you through every site for the rest of the week, and there is no rest day on a normal Egypt itinerary. If a Nile cruise is on your itinerary, the boat-side version of this list, including what the cabin already provides, is in our guide to packing for a Nile cruise. The season changes the bag more than people expect Egypt has two personalities and the desert switches between them daily. A day that reaches 35C (95F) in Aswan still cools sharply after dark, and out in the open desert the drop is far larger. The answer is always layers rather than a heavier single garment. October to April This is the comfortable half of the year for sightseeing, with warm sunny days that suit long site visits. The nights are what catch people out. Winter mornings in Cairo can start below 10C (50F), and standing on the open deck of a moving boat adds wind to whatever the thermometer says. Pack a mid-weight jacket or a thick sweater, a light scarf, and at least two long-sleeved tops. Pay particular attention if your itinerary includes a hot air balloon flight over Luxor or the early convoy south to Abu Simbel. Both start well before sunrise, when the air is at its coldest, and a jacket is the difference between watching and enduring. Set that layer aside in the day bag the night before. May to September Luxor and Aswan pass 40C (104F) regularly. Here quick-drying technical fabric beats heavy cotton, and pale colors beat dark ones. The hat stops being an accessory. High-factor sunscreen reapplied through the day stops being optional. In exchange you get emptier sites and softer early mornings, which is a real trade rather than a consolation. If your dates are still movable, the month by month comparison in our guide to the best time to visit Egypt is worth reading before you buy anything. Electricity: what your chargers meet at the wall It is easy to forget, and awkward to solve once you have landed. Egyptian sockets take the European two round pin plug, types C and F, running at 220 volts and 50 hertz. If your plugs at home are flat-pinned or three-pinned, you need a physical adapter. Bring two. One of them will stay behind in a hotel room. An adapter changes the shape of the plug and nothing else, which is fine for almost everything you carry. Phone chargers, laptop bricks and camera chargers are nearly all dual voltage, and the fine print on the housing will say something like 100-240V. If it does, an adapter alone is enough. The exception is a heating appliance built for a 110V country: a hair dryer, a straightener, a curling iron, a travel kettle. Those genuinely need a voltage converter, not an adapter, and plugging one straight into 220V will destroy it and possibly trip the room. The easier answer is to leave it at home, since most hotel rooms and most cruise cabins provide a hair dryer. Two more power details worth planning for. Cruise cabins and older hotel rooms often have only one or two accessible

Haggling in Egypt: How to Bargain Without Overpaying

The first number you hear in an Egyptian bazaar is not a price. It is an opening position, and everybody involved knows it, including the man who just said it. Treating that number as a price is what turns a week of shopping in Egypt into a week of quietly resenting it. Haggling here is a conversation with a shape. Once you know the shape, it stops being a test of nerve and becomes one of the more entertaining half hours of the trip. Why nothing in the bazaar has a price tag In a shop with marked prices, the price is a fact about the object. In a bazaar, the price is a fact about the conversation: what is being sold, who is buying, what time of day it is, and how the last hour has gone for the seller. The absence of a tag is not an oversight. It is a signal that this is a shop where the number is arrived at rather than read out. None of this is aimed at foreigners. Egyptians negotiate with each other too, in smaller amounts and with less ceremony, and a merchant who names a number expects you to answer it. The person who pays the first number asked is not being clever or generous. They are declining to take part, and the seller notices. So the useful attitude is not suspicion. It is participation, done with good humor and no hurry. What actually happens, from hello to handshake Point at something and ask what it costs. Ask flatly, the way you would ask the time, because visible enthusiasm for one specific object is expensive: it tells the seller exactly which item you will not walk away from. The number that comes back will be well above what the seller expects to receive. Your answer goes low, roughly half of it or under, said pleasantly and without apology. That first counter is not an insult and is not treated as one, provided you deliver it smiling. Then the two of you move toward each other in steps, he comes down, you come up, and somewhere in the middle you either meet or you do not. Standing up and heading for the door genuinely works, and it works for a boring reason: it is the only moment in the conversation where the seller learns something true about your limit. Which is also why it only works when it is real. Fake departures performed three times in a row teach him nothing except that you will be back. One rule closes the whole thing. If he accepts your number, you buy. Agreeing a price and then changing your mind is the only move in this entire exchange that is taken badly, and it is taken badly by everyone. Decide your number before you open your mouth The question people arrive with is what a thing should cost. It is the wrong question, because there is no single answer and nobody in the market is able to give you one. The workable question is what this object is worth to you: the figure at which you would carry it home pleased rather than calculating. Fix that figure in Egyptian pounds, before the conversation starts. Two useful things follow. You stop needing to know what a local would have paid, which you were never going to find out anyway. And you stop converting currency on your phone in the middle of a sentence, which reads across the counter as clearly as if you had announced your budget out loud. Do the conversion once, over breakfast, and carry the pound figure in your head for the day. If you are still working out what to keep in your pocket at all, how much cash to bring to Egypt sets out the layer of the trip that runs on cash. Small notes are most of the technique Reaching the end of a careful negotiation and producing a 200 pound note quietly undoes it. There is no change, someone is sent out to find some, the shortfall becomes a rounding up in the seller's favor, and the number you agreed was never the number you paid. Carry a fold of 10, 20 and 50 pound notes separately from your wallet. Counting out the exact agreed amount is the clearest possible signal that the conversation is finished, and it is far more effective than saying so. Equally, do not fan out a thick stack while you look for the right notes. Everything visible in your hand becomes part of the negotiation. Where the price moves, and where it does not Getting this boundary wrong in either direction is uncomfortable. Haggling in a pharmacy is odd. Accepting the first number from a street vendor is a donation. Negotiate here Do not negotiate here Bazaar and souk stalls Shops with marked prices Street vendors and roving sellers Supermarkets and pharmacies Street taxis with no working meter, and inDrive, where you name your own fare Uber and Careem, where the fare is quoted in the app before you accept Camel, horse-cart and felucca rides Restaurants and hotel bills Craft workshops and independent art dealers Official ticket windows at monuments Anywhere the number is printed, displayed or quoted to you before you agree to it, it is a price. Anywhere a person says it out loud after looking at you and waits for your answer, it is an opening position. Rides, camels and boats are a different negotiation Buying an object and buying a service look similar and are not. With a scarf, the only variable is money. With a camel ride, a horse cart at the pyramids or an hour on a felucca, the variables are money, duration, route and who ends up where. Agree all of it out loud before you get on or in, and agree it in one sentence: this price, for this long, ending at this place, for this many of us, including getting back. The

Blog de Viajes a Egipto

Egyptian Food: What to Eat and How to Order It

Exchanging Money in Egypt: Where to Change Cash and How Much at a Time

The Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square: What Is Still There and How to Visit

How to Choose an Egypt Tour Operator: 8 Checks Before You Pay

What to Pack for Egypt

Haggling in Egypt: How to Bargain Without Overpaying

The National Museum of Egyptian Civilization and Its Royal Mummies

Egypt in 4 Days: What You Can Realistically See

What Men Should Wear in Egypt

What to Wear in Egypt as a Woman

Nile Cruise With Kids: A Family Guide to Cruising the Nile

The Nile River: From Its Source to the Sea, and How to Sail It

Abu Simbel Sun Festival: 22 October and 22 February

Egypt With Kids: A Practical Guide for Families

Is Egypt Expensive? The Honest Answer

Uber and Careem in Cairo: How Ride Apps Really Work

Climbing Mount Sinai at Sunrise: the Night Ascent, the Summit and St Catherine's Monastery

The Sound and Light Show at the Pyramids of Giza

Photography in Egypt: The Rules, the Tickets and the Light

Internet and SIM Cards in Egypt: A Traveler's Guide to Staying Connected

Arabic Phrases for Travel in Egypt

How Much Does a Trip to Egypt Cost? A Real 2026 Breakdown

Egypt in December: Weather, Crowds and the Festive Season

Egyptian Hieroglyphs: What They Mean and How to Read Them

Valley of the Kings: Tickets, Tombs and How to Visit in 2026

Grand Egyptian Museum: Tickets, Opening Hours and a Complete Visiting Guide for 2026

The Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt: God-Kings of the Nile

The Ancient Egyptian Calendar: How the 365-Day Year Began

The Sinai Peninsula: Where Egypt Crosses Into Asia

Ancient Egyptian Amulets: What the Ankh, the Scarab and the Eye of Horus Actually Did

High Season, Low Season and Shoulder Season in Egypt

Cairo Airport: What Happens When You Land, and How to Leave

What to Pack for a Nile Cruise: The Definitive List

Is Cairo Safe? The Real Risks and How to Get Around

How Much Money to Bring to Egypt: The Cash You Actually Need

What Language Is Spoken in Egypt and How to Communicate

Vaccines for Egypt: What Travelers Actually Need

Travel First Aid Kit for Egypt: What to Pack and What to Buy There

Food Prices in Egypt: What Meals Really Cost

Nile Cruise Boats: Types, Categories and How to Choose the Right One

Egyptian Gods and How to Recognize Them

Hot Air Balloon Over Luxor

Abu Simbel: Tickets, Timing and Getting There

How to Choose a Nile Cruise

What to Wear in Egypt

Can You Drink the Water in Egypt?

Egyptian Food: What to Eat and How to Order It

Exchanging Money in Egypt: Where to Change Cash and How Much at a Time

The Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square: What Is Still There and How to Visit

How to Choose an Egypt Tour Operator: 8 Checks Before You Pay

What to Pack for Egypt

Haggling in Egypt: How to Bargain Without Overpaying