Is It Safe For Americans To Travel To Egypt
March 18, 2020
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about Is It Safe For Americans To Travel To Egypt
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Tour Details
| Duration |
11 Days / 10 Nights
|
|---|---|
| Tour Location |
Cairo / Aswan / Nile Cruise (Kom Ombo, Edfu, Luxor)
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| Tour Type |
Daily Tour
|
| Pickup |
Cairo Airport
|
11-Day Luxury Escorted Egypt Tour for American Travellers
This 11-day luxury Egypt escorted tour from the USA covers Cairo, Aswan, and the full Nile corridor from Kom Ombo to Luxor in a single seamless journey. It is the only 11-day Egypt tour operating as a true escorted group from the USA — fixed departure dates, guaranteed small groups of maximum 12, and a dedicated Egyptologist guide who travels with the group from Cairo to Aswan, with no planning required on your part.
Beginning in Cairo, travellers explore the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Great Sphinx, the Valley Temple of Khafre, and the Grand Egyptian Museum before continuing to Saqqara, the Step Pyramid, the ruins of Memphis, and the Red and Bent Pyramids at Dahshur. The group then flies to Aswan for the High Dam, Philae Temple, and the Unfinished Obelisk, followed by a private felucca to Elephantine Island for the Nubian Village experience and the Nubian Museum and Botanical Garden. A five-star Nile cruise calls at Kom Ombo Temple, the Temple of Horus at Edfu, and the Esna Lock before arriving in Luxor. Luxor days cover a private sunrise hot-air balloon ride over the West Bank, Karnak Temple Complex, Luxor Temple at dusk, the Valley of the Kings, Hatshepsut Temple, and the Colossi of Memnon. The tour concludes in Cairo with the Hanging Church, the Church of St. Sergius, Ben Ezra Synagogue, the Citadel of Salah El-Din, the Mohamed Ali Mosque, and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation. For American travellers weighing their options across the full range of available routes and formats, browse all Egypt travel packages (11 days).
Why Book This Tour
- This is the only 11-day Egypt escorted group tour from the USA. Fixed departure dates. Maximum 12 travellers.
- A dedicated Egyptologist guide assigned to the group from Day 1 to Day 11
- The group forms before travel begins. No self-assembly required.
- Two domestic flights included: Cairo to Aswan and Luxor to Cairo
- Private sunrise hot air balloon over Luxor's West Bank
- Private felucca to Elephantine Island and the Nubian Village in Aswan
- Itinerary customizable around fixed group departure dates
- 24/7 in-destination support throughout; your Tripidays representative
Included
- Meet and be assisted by a Tripidays representative at Cairo Airport
- A dedicated Egyptologist guide assigned exclusively to your group
- Welcome to the Nile dinner cruise on the arrival evening
- Private modern A/C vehicle for all ground transfers throughout
- Domestic flight: Cairo to Aswan
- Domestic flight: Luxor to Cairo
- 6 nights at a Cairo hotel
- 4 nights on a 5-star Nile cruise
- Private felucca to Elephantine Island and the Nubian Village
- Private sunrise hot air balloon over Luxor's West Bank for the group
- Motorboat transfers to Philae Temple
- Daily breakfast throughout
- One bottled water on all touring days
- Entrance fees to all sites listed in the itinerary across all 11 days
- Fixed US departure dates confirmed at time of booking
- All local taxes and service charges
- 24/7 in-destination customer support throughout the tour
Excluded
- International flights to and from Egypt
- Personal expenses (souvenirs, extra meals, etc.)
- Travel insurance
- Gratuities for guides, drivers, and cruise crew
- Optional Sound and Light Show at Karnak Temple
- Any meals not explicitly listed in the day-by-day itinerary
Giza Attractions
- Pyramids of Giza
- Great Sphinx
- Valley of the Khafre Temples
- Grand Egyptian Museum
Cairo Attractions
- Citadel of Salah El-Din
- Mohamed Ali Mosque
- Hanging Church
- Church of St. Sergius
- Ben Ezra Synagogue
Cairo Attractions
- Step Pyramid of Djoser
- Red Pyramid
- Bent Pyramid
- Memphis
Luxor Attractions
- Valley of The Kings
- Hatshepsut Temple
- Colossi of Memnon
- Karnak Temple
- Luxor Temple
Aswan Attractions
- High Dam
- Philae Temple
- Unfinished Obelisk
- Edfu temples
- Kom Ombo temples
- Nubian Village
- Nubian Museum
- Botanical Garden
Itinerary
-
Your Tripidays representative meets the group at Cairo International Airport and escorts everyone to your 5-star hotel — no queues, no coordination, no guesswork. That evening, the group boards a private Nile dinner cruise as Cairo's skyline lights up the water around you, the first moment your Egyptologist guide sets the stage for what the next eleven days will hold.
Evening Activity Nile Dinner Cruise
You'll board a private boat as the city's lights begin reflecting off the Nile, your Egyptologist guide introducing the group over dinner before a single temple has been visited. Cairo from the water at night is a disorienting version of the city ancient and electric at once.
Meals
Dinner
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Your guide collects the group from the hotel after breakfast and drives directly to the Giza Plateau before the midday heat builds. The afternoon moves to the Grand Egyptian Museum, purpose-built to house the world's largest collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts under one roof.
Great Pyramids of Giza
You'll stand at the base of Khufu's pyramid and understand immediately why no photograph has ever captured the scale correctly — the structure covers 13 acres and took an estimated 20 years to complete. Your guide positions the group for the full three-pyramid view before the tour groups arrive in numbers.
The Great Sphinx of Giza Tour
Your guide walks you to the viewing platform closest to the Sphinx's face, where the scale of the limestone body — 73 meters long, carved from a single ridge of bedrock — only becomes clear up close. The weathering patterns on the chest are one of Egyptology's most debated details, and your guide will tell you why.
Valley of Khafre Temples Tour
You'll enter one of the oldest standing stone buildings on earth, its massive pink granite blocks fitted without mortar to tolerances still puzzling to engineers. The temple processed the pharaoh's body before burial — standing inside it, the ritual purpose is written into the architecture.
Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM)
Your guide leads the group through the main atrium, where a 12-metre statue of Ramesses II greets visitors at the foot of the grand staircase, surrounded by artefacts arranged chronologically around it. The museum holds over 100,000 objects — your Egyptologist selects the pieces that reward time, including the complete treasures of Tutankhamun's tomb.
Meals
Breakfast and Lunch
-
The group leaves Cairo early for a full day in the desert south of the city, covering three sites that together tell the story of how pyramid-building evolved across five centuries. Your guide connects them as a single narrative rather than three separate stops.
Saqqara and the Step Pyramid of Djoser
You'll walk the desert plateau where Egypt's architects first figured out how to stack mastabas into a true pyramid — the Step Pyramid, built around 2650 BCE, is the world's oldest large-scale stone structure still standing. Your guide takes the group into the surrounding complex, where the ceremonial courtyards remain largely as they were built.
Memphis Open-Air Museum
The fallen colossus of Ramesses II lies horizontal in a purpose-built shelter here, and you'll look down on it from a raised walkway — 10 metres of painted limestone, still wearing traces of its original pigment. Memphis was Egypt's first capital and the administrative centre of the unified kingdom for over a thousand years.
Red Pyramid and Bent Pyramid at Dahshur
You'll see both pyramids from the desert floor before your guide explains what separates them: the Bent Pyramid shows the moment the builders changed the angle mid-construction, and the Red Pyramid, completed shortly after, is the first true smooth-sided pyramid ever built. The Red Pyramid is also open to enter — a long, steep descent into the burial chambers that almost no mainstream itinerary includes. For travellers who want more depth across the same duration, see Egypt's deepest cultural 11-day experience.
Meals
Breakfast and Lunch
-
The group transfers to Cairo Airport for the morning domestic flight to Aswan. Your Egyptologist is on the flight. Upon landing, a private vehicle takes the group directly into Aswan's three landmark sites, each on a different scale from anything in Cairo.
Aswan High Dam
You'll stand on the dam's viewing platform looking south across Lake Nasser — one of the largest artificial lakes on earth, stretching 550 kilometres into Sudan — and north at the controlled Nile below. Your guide explains what the dam solved and what it permanently submerged, including several Nubian villages that now lie underwater.
Philae Temple
A short motorboat takes the group across the water to Agilkia Island, where Philae Temple was dismantled block by block and rebuilt on higher ground before the reservoir filled in the 1970s. You'll enter through the colonnaded forecourt of Isis, the last temple built in the classical Egyptian style before Rome replaced the old religion.
Unfinished Obelisk
You'll crouch beside a crack in the granite that stopped the largest obelisk ever attempted — still lying in the quarry floor where workers abandoned it around 1500 BCE, attached to the bedrock on one side. It would have stood 42 metres tall and weighed 1,200 tonnes; your guide shows where the tools stopped and lets the incompleteness speak for itself.
Meals
Breakfast Lunch and Dinner
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This is the day the tour steps away from pharaonic Egypt entirely. Your guide arranges a private felucca from the Aswan corniche across to Elephantine Island, a short crossing that delivers the group into a completely different world from the temples of the day before.
Nubian Village on Elephantine Island
Your felucca ties up at the southern end of the island, where the brightly painted houses of the Nubian villages of Siou and Koti line the riverbank — a living community whose culture predates the pharaohs and survived the construction of both Aswan dams. You'll be welcomed into a family courtyard for tea, with your Egyptologist translating and providing the history that runs beneath the hospitality.
Nubian Museum
Back on the east bank, your guide leads the group through a museum designed specifically to document the civilisation partially displaced by the High Dam's reservoir — gold jewellery, pottery, household objects, and an entire reconstructed Nubian house showing what the flooded villages looked like before the water came. It is one of the least-visited serious museums in Egypt and one of the most rewarding.
Kitchener's Botanical Garden
A five-minute boat ride takes the group to this island garden, planted by Lord Kitchener in the 1890s with rare species brought from across the British Empire and sub-Saharan Africa. The Nile on both sides, shade overhead, and almost no other visitors — it functions as the group's deliberate pause before the cruise boards tomorrow.
Meals
Breakfast Lunch and Dinner
-
The group boards your 5-star Nile cruise in Aswan after breakfast. By midday, the ship is underway, sailing north through Upper Egypt with the desert cliffs on one bank and the green Nile valley on the other. The afternoon stop is Kom Ombo, 45 kilometres north of Aswan.
Kom Ombo Temple
Your guide walks the group along the elevated promontory where this temple stands directly above the Nile, its twin entrance halls built simultaneously for two gods — Sobek the crocodile and Horus the falcon — with each half a mirror of the other. The on-site crocodile mummies, displayed in a small museum inside the complex, are among the most viscerally unusual objects in Egyptian archaeology.
Meals
Breakfast Lunch and Dinner
-
The cruise sails north through the night to Edfu. Your guide leads the group by horse-drawn carriage from the river to the temple entrance — the traditional approach, and one that makes the scale of the pylon visible on arrival in a way a road transfer cannot. The afternoon passage through the Esna Lock is a working piece of river engineering worth watching from the sun deck.
Temple of Horus at Edfu
You'll pass through the 36-metre pylon into the most completely preserved cult temple in Egypt — every wall carved and painted, the inner sanctuary still intact with its original naos shrine. Your guide reads the inscriptions recording the myth of Horus defeating Seth, the story told in the carvings directly above where you're standing.
Esna Lock
The cruise passes through the Esna Lock in the afternoon, a working river gate that raises or lowers the ship several metres as water floods or drains around it. From the sun deck, you'll watch the stone walls of the lock close on both sides before the river level changes around you, a piece of Nile navigation most tourists never experience from the deck.
Meals
Breakfast Lunch and Dinner
-
The earliest morning of the tour. The group crosses the Nile by private boat to the West Bank before dawn, boards your private hot air balloon, and lifts off as the sun breaks across the desert. The afternoon and evening cover Luxor's East Bank — both temples in a single day at your Egyptologist's unhurried pace.
Private Sunrise Hot Air Balloon over the West Bank
You'll rise silently above the Valley of the Kings as the desert floor turns amber below — a private balloon for your group of twelve means the pilot can position for the angles your guide points out. At cruising altitude, the full scale of the Theban necropolis becomes visible: temples, cliffs, and the Nile stretching north and south as far as the light reaches.
Karnak Temple Complex
Your guide walks the group into the Great Hypostyle Hall, where 134 columns rise so close together the sky nearly disappears between them. It took more than 2,000 years and 30 pharaohs to build what you're standing inside — your Egyptologist traces the layers of construction that are legible in the architecture if you know where to look.
Luxor Temple at Dusk
You'll arrive as the floodlights come on and the stone takes on colour it doesn't have in daylight. The avenue of ram-headed sphinxes leading to the first pylon was buried under the medieval city for centuries; your guide walks the group along it as the evening crowd thins, ending at the inner sanctuary where Alexander the Great left his cartouche on the wall.
Meals
Breakfast Lunch and Dinner
-
A full day on the West Bank, starting early before the heat peaks. Your guide selects the tombs for the group — royal burial chambers that require explanation to read, and which your Egyptologist delivers standing inside the painted walls. The group flies back to Cairo in the evening.
Valley of the Kings
You'll descend into three royal tombs selected by your Egyptologist for their state of preservation and the depth of their painted narratives — the ceiling of Seti I's burial chamber alone, painted with the complete Book of the Sky, is worth the descent. Over 60 pharaohs were buried in this valley; your guide explains why they abandoned the pyramids and chose this hidden desert corridor instead.
Hatshepsut Temple
Your guide walks the group up through the three colonnaded terraces cut into the cliff face at Deir el-Bahari, where Hatshepsut recorded her legitimacy as pharaoh on every available surface. She ruled Egypt for over 20 years as a full pharaoh — the wall reliefs documenting her trade expedition to the land of Punt are the most detailed record of a foreign mission in the ancient world.
Colossi of Memnon
You'll stand before the two seated figures of Amenhotep III, each 18 metres tall, carved from single blocks of quartzite sandstone hauled from a quarry 700 kilometres away. For nearly 1,500 years, one of them emitted a sound at dawn that Roman tourists recorded as the voice of Memnon; your guide knows which one, and why it stopped.
Meals
Breakfast Lunch and Dinner
-
The group lands in Cairo early and moves directly into the oldest layers of the city the Coptic quarter, the medieval citadel, and a museum that compresses the full arc of Egyptian history from prehistoric times to the twentieth century into a single building.
Hanging Church (Al-Muallaqah)
You'll enter through a narrow gateway and climb the staircase that leads up to the nave — the church is built directly above the southern gatehouse of the Roman fortress of Babylon, suspended above it rather than standing on ground level. Your guide walks the group through the 13th-century icon screen and the Coptic artwork whose iconography predates the Byzantine style by several centuries.
Church of St. Sergius and Bacchus (Abu Serga)
This is where the Holy Family is said to have rested during their flight into Egypt, in a crypt beneath the nave that predates the current church structure by several hundred years. You'll descend into the crypt with your Egyptologist, who places the site in the context of early Christian Egypt and its relationship to the pharaonic tradition immediately around it.
Ben Ezra Synagogue
The site where, according to tradition, the infant Moses was found in the bulrushes is now one of the oldest synagogue buildings in Egypt, restored in the 19th century and housing one of the most significant document troves in Jewish history — the Cairo Geniza — before those documents were removed to Cambridge. Your guide explains what the Geniza contained and why it mattered.
Citadel of Salah El-Din
Your guide leads the group up to the medieval fortress that commanded Cairo from the 12th century until the 19th, its walls enclosing mosques, palaces, and military buildings from seven centuries of successive rulers. The view from the northern terrace takes in old Cairo and the Giza plateau simultaneously — the pyramids visible on the horizon above the city.
Mohamed Ali Mosque
You'll enter the Ottoman-style mosque Mehmet Ali built inside the citadel between 1830 and 1848, its twin minarets and lead-covered domes visible from most of Cairo below. The alabaster interior catches the light differently at every hour; your Egyptologist explains why an Albanian ruler chose an Istanbul-inspired design for a building in medieval Cairo.
National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation (NMEC)
The group's final museum holds the Royal Mummies Hall — 22 pharaohs and queens, including Ramesses II, Seti I, and Hatshepsut, displayed in a climate-controlled hall designed specifically for long-term preservation. You'll walk past rulers whose names appeared in every temple of the last nine days, now visible in person at close range. For travellers drawn to heritage framing rather than chronological touring, Egypt's UNESCO heritage journey builds its entire itinerary around confirmed UNESCO sites
Meals
Breakfast and Lunch
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Your Tripidays representative transfers the group from the hotel to Cairo International Airport. Your Egyptologist travels with you to the departure terminal, the same guide who met the group on Day 1, sees every member through to the final handover. No independent transfers, no logistics to manage on the last morning.
Meals
Breakfast
Notes:
* You can let us know if you'd like to customize your tour itinerary to meet your needs. We value your input and aim to accommodate your requirements.
Frequently Asked Questions
This tour includes 6 nights in a 5-star Cairo hotel, 4 nights on a 5-star Nile cruise from Aswan to Luxor, two domestic flights (Cairo to Aswan and Luxor to Cairo), a dedicated Egyptologist guide for all 11 days, all ground transfers by private A/C vehicle, entrance fees to every listed site, daily breakfast, a welcome Nile dinner cruise, a private felucca to the Nubian Village on Elephantine Island, and a private sunrise hot air balloon over Luxor's West Bank all pre-arranged before you leave the USA.
It is the only 11-day Egypt tour operating as a true escorted group from the USA — fixed departure dates, a guaranteed maximum of 12 travellers, and the same dedicated Egyptologist guide who travels with your group from Cairo to Aswan and back, with every detail pre-arranged before departure.
On Day 5 in Aswan, your group crosses to Elephantine Island by private felucca to visit the Nubian villages of Siou and Koti — living communities whose culture predates the pharaohs — where you are welcomed into a family courtyard for tea while your Egyptologist provides the history behind the hospitality. Travellers who prefer a more traditional Nile-first approach can compare the classic fly-and-cruise Egypt alternative.
The group boards a 5-star Nile cruise in Aswan on Day 6 and sails north, stopping at Kom Ombo Temple that afternoon, Edfu Temple of Horus the following morning (reached by the traditional horse-drawn carriage from the river), and passing through the Esna Lock before arriving in Luxor on Day 7 evening. The cruise covers the full Aswan-to-Luxor corridor — 4 nights on board — with your Egyptologist guiding every temple stop.
Yes two domestic flights are included as standard. The outbound flight runs from Cairo to Aswan on Day 4, and the return flight runs Luxor to Cairo on the evening of Day 9. International flights to and from Egypt are not included and are booked separately.
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Medical Kit
Comfy Clothes
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