anonymousa867
21 Dec 2024
I had a great trip with the best team. Driver Ahmad safely managed the difficult road. The guide Ash is so knowledgeable that he knows the temple in and out, gave the necessary information, in the most interesting way. He also shared relevant link to another temples, how to identify figures, symbols and ancient gods. He answered all my questions and can immediately point out the exact figures to illustrate it!
I learned so much from Ash on that day to the level that I can implement it on the next day when I was in another tour in Karnak & Luxor temple the day after with another tour company and an incompetent guide! I can figure out all things on my own with a little bit the help of Internet!
We had local food that was delicious and not pretentious.
If I can give 7 stars to this trip I would!
Travel in Egypt is an experience in itself. Roads are rubble with a strip of tarmac down the middle with 4 lanes of cars, trucks, buses, 6 year old boys on donkeys, old men on carts of 50000 bundles, pedestrians just wandering into the traffic, and stalls by the side of the road selling cabbages and cauliflowers twice as big as your head that you have to avoid. Added to this are the constant police check points, and stupidly, as i decided to sit in the front seat of the car, we got stopped everywhere...well, hay ho. Maybe im weird but i just really loved all this, so this was just such a great trip, good driver, informative guide, and two of the most amazing temples ive seen...and ive seen a LOT of temples. Just do not miss Dendera..its outstandingly beautiful, ornate and still has so much of the original colours. Its really late by Egyptian standards, from the Ptolemaic period, but it is just so overwhelming inside i actually thought i might burst into to tears, and at Abydos there were only 4 other people in the temple...just so fantastic i dont know what to say. My driver was fab, and so was the guide, though, sometimes, i cant deny, i feel with guides...are they there for me, or, am i there for them as they get a bit irritated that i want to take photos or spend more time looking at something than they think i should, or not listening properly to their spiel. Just a small gripe on what was a great trip. An experience in every way.
The temples of Dendera and Abydos were wonderful and very well preserved and the meal was delicious, however I give this specific experience only 2 stars because of the guide, who repeatedly tried to convince us to end the tour early by first attempting to change the pickup time to 2 hours earlier and then giving us a hard time when we refused. Then he asked over and over again to not go to Abydos, trying instead to get us to go to a temple in Luxor instead, saying the drive to Abydos was long and if we went to Luxor we would have more time to ourselves later in the day. Given that the whole point of this tour was to see temples outside of Luxor, we did not like this, but he kept trying to persuade us even after we said many times we wanted to see Abydos. Also, throughout the whole day, the guide kept trying to sell us additional tours and experiences, which we repeatedly declined. We found his constant attempts at upselling and ignoring our reasons for declining to be very exhausting, and it really detracted from the experience of seeing the temples.