Full-Day Private Tour of the Abydos and Dendera Temples

The Temples in Abydos and Dendera were beautiful. Definitely worth seeing. Tour was well organized. We were picked up and dropped off at our hotel by our guide Sam. Sam gave us a very detail explanation of the temples. Bring food for the ride as there is no lunch pre-arranged for the tour. We were aware of this before starting the tour and it is listed in the details of the tour.

I feel a bit torn about writing this review as I found that our tour guide for this trip was extremely knowledgeable and kind. He also really took the time to make the tour appropriate for our level of understanding (at the time of this tour we had already seen a number of temples), and began pointing out minute details that we hadn't heard on previous tours. He was one of our favorites from the trip, and I would recommend this tour for him alone (well, and for the temples, which were amazing--especially Dendera). Now, for us, this was not a private tour. When the tour company informed me of this I was already pretty stuck because I had planned out the whole rest of the trip and I was really looking forward to the Abydos and Dendera Temples. However, I found this customer service experience to be a little abrasive, not because it really mattered for our temple experiences, but because I feel like the title clearly stated that this was a private tour. I feel like it would have been easy to just advertise it for what it was and I wouldn't have minded. Another thing that bothered me was that we we were only allotted 1 water bottle per person (for an 8+ hour day)? There was no break for lunch until nearly the very end of the day, and even this was just a rushed stop at a convenience store around 4pm (though, we were provided with 2 small bags of Doritos). Lastly, I found the tour manager of Imperial Egypt (not the tour guide) to be pretty rude, though I only communicated with him via What's App and never in person. For starters, if your hotel is located on the West Bank, then you must take a water taxi or a ferry to get to the East Bank. This isn't as much of a pain as it sounds, and we found it extremely easy to do. However, the tour manager told us to meet a what ended up being a pretty vague location ("the ferry"). When we arrived well over an hour early, we were harassed by vendors until we decided to grab breakfast at a nearby hotel for shelter. When I texted the tour manager about the change he did not understand and appeared to get frustrated with us for not being in the previously specified location (even though we were 2 mins down the street). A big deal was made out of us holding up the other couple on the trip (even though, again, this was originally billed as private tour).

My wife and I really enjoyed the tour and temples were fascinating. Although the drive to the temples were about 3 hours, it was worth the time to see the small towns and villages along the way. We stopped at a forced vendor stop outside of the Abydos temple, I say forced because we were not told and had to wait for about 1/2 hour before we can leave and while waiting being bombarded by the shop keeper and any other vendor that walked up. Maybe it was overdone because of the low tourism, but it was a headache. Lastly although we never felt unsafe, but when leaving the temples, we were escorted to a certain point by the Egyptian police. Not sure why and never got a clear answer. As a side note and this applies to anything you do: take plenty of money for tipping, does not have to be a lot, but tips definitely help the people who work in tourism.