8 independent reviews for Small group tour of Egypt, Nubian adventure

Dear Alice, Thanks for taking the time to provide us with your post-tour feedback, I'm really pleased to see that you did enjoy the tour, though I'm sorry to hear you didn't like our tour name. Whilst the focus of this tour isn't necessarily on the Nubian culture, this name was chosen since this tour travels as far south as Aswan, which was part of the ancient region of Nubia and where many Nubians still reside today. We also use Nubian crew for the felucca sailboat trip. It's good to hear that you enjoyed your visit to Abu Simbel, whilst this is quite a long day, we do recommend it as it's an incredible temple and very unique when compared to others in the country (and also the fascinating history of UNESCO moving the temple back in the 60's). We don't include it in the standard itinerary precisely because it is such a long drive there and back from Aswan, and therefore not for everyone. I'm sorry to hear that you didn't feel the trip benefited local people or contributed to conservation though. In Egypt we do only employ local staff within our offices and all guides and drivers we use are local Egyptians also, this helps to contribute to the local people, their families and Egyptian economy. Whilst on our tours whenever we make stops for shopping, we do consciously choose smaller retailers or those owned by local Egyptians too. We also use a support boat with our felucca trips which has its own toilet on board and protects the banks of the Nile from being covered with toilet paper and waste which happens on a lot of other felucca trips. On the issue of single use plastics in Egypt, this is a huge problem that Egypt is battling with and we did want to address your comments about this. Prior to start of the COVID pandemic, we had had been starting to use large water containers within our touring vehicles, from which our guests would be able to refill their own water containers. We did decide to pause this during the pandemic to avoid cross contamination via touch points. As the COVID situation has now improved somewhat, this is something that we are looking at restarting again, so we hope to have large water containers within our vehicles again in the coming months. We're sure that this will greatly reduce the numbers of plastic bottles being used by our guests whilst in Egypt. Other initiatives we have in Egypt, include donations we make to a local Cairo orphanage for each booking and we have also run desert clean up days in the Fayoum region (though these have been paused recently for security reasons). To reduce domestic flights, we do use the sleeper train or travel by road on the vast majority of our Egypt tours which produces less carbon emissions. Overall, I'm pleased to hear you enjoyed your time in Egypt and I hope that the above information is helpful. All the best. Anthony.