Alexandria To Cairo

[hinkley]

Does anyone have recomendations for a private tour for overnight ? also did the ship get your visas for this port we are with NCL & I think they only provide visas for people on ships tours.

[neicie]

I read a post some days ago and they said to advise the pursers office that you are going on a private tour and they will organise visas for you, that was on an NCL post but I imagine it would be with all lines. Have a look at DeCastro tours, they are very good, we have booked a private tour for this coming May. If you like I could forward you the itinerary, just post your email address. They have a basic one but you can make changes to it and its much cheaper then the ships one. Hope this helps

 

Denise

[TudorSue]

You will get a short-stay visa stamped in your passport, which is good-I think- for three days.

 

We did an overnight in Cairo last November with a small party of 10 organized through the CC Roll Call. Just be sure you advise the Excursions staff onboard that you will be overnighting off the ship, and give them the tour operator contact information. You may need to verify with them that your tour operator has a tourist police escort between Alexandria and Cairo. We were on Oceania, and they required this...and our Egyptian tour operator already had this in place. I'm not sure if this rule about the police escort applies to a strictly private party, as opposed to a tour bus.

[mountainmare]

Check out the Africa port of call for alot of info.

[wripro]

I am doing an overnight from Alexandria to Cairo off the Seabourn Pride in a couple of weeks. I am using Champion Tours, who have been very good to deal with. They are picking us up at the ship in Alexandria, driving us to Cairo for two days of tours with an Egyptologist guide, seeing all the sights we have asked for. We are spending the night in a hotel (paid for separately) and then they drive us back to the ship in time for departure. If you are interested post your address and I can email you the info.

[Hlitner]

We spent 2 weeks in Egypt this past October (on our own) and traveled between Alexandria and Cairo (both ways) with a car/driver. Its a major road by Egyptian standards with plenty of traffic in both directions (its a 4 lane highway). During our journey from Alexandria to Cairo we did get stopped at a police check-point...but were quickly cleared when my driver showed his credentials (the police did not even talk to my wife and me as we sat in the back of the SUV). This is a very secure route and its hard to imagine the need for "tourist police" here as opposed to the area south of Luxor (towards Dendara) where there is some political unreast and even private cars (me) travel in government secured convoys. In the North (Alexandria to Cairo) the biggest problem are the vendors who want to see things. As to Visas, I do not know the current situation regarding cruise ships, but I can tell you that Egyptian Visas are simply tax stamps which can be bought at any port of entry for about $20 and pasted into your passports. We had filled out Visa forms on our flight into Cairo, but when we arrived at the airport our booked driver met us with the stamps (he had simply purchased them at the airport bank) and nobody even asked for our Visa forms. As to Egypt, we had a wonderful 2 weeks (from Abu Simbal in the South to Alexandria in the North). After spending a lot of time just walking (with no guides or guards) in many Egyptian cities, we never had evenone incident of rudeness. In fact, when Egyptians would ask where we were from and we would tell them the USA, the response was usually "Welcome to Egypt." We did have a couple of folks tell us they do not understand the US government, but even they welcomed us to their country and said they like Americans. As to safety, after walking the streets of Cairo, Luxor, Aswan, and a few other places night and day I felt safer in Egypt than in many American cities. As to those that insist on believing the worst of many foreign places, I suggest you simply look at statistics of how many Americans have been harmed (in the past few years) in places like Egypt and Turkey as oppossed to the murder and robbery rates in our own cities. My comment is not political, just fact based on more than a quarter century of international travel. On the other hand, I currently live 2 1/2 hours (by car) from Manhattan, and many or my friends are afraid to drive (or even visit) New York. A recent mayor of York, PA boasted (about 5 years ago) that he had never been on a plane or left this part of the country in his entire life. Its too typical where those who have never been try to advise those who go.

 

Hank