Egypt tour on a shoestring

Planet

On this tour in Egypt, to help protect the environment, we avoid any domestic flights and while travelling on the River Nile we provide a separate facilities boat to accompany our felucca sailboat. This facilities boat has a proper toilet and shower on board, and its waste tanks are emptied at approved locations so that nothing is discharged into the river. This helps prevents the pollution of both the waters and the banks of the Nile with human waste, which happens on many other felucca trips.

Drinking water and the waste associated by single use plastic water bottles is something we are working hard on in Egypt as well as other destinations. All travellers are encouraged to bring their own refillable water bottles and we are rolling out a program of providing large water canisters in our vehicles on group tours to take refills from. We are also offering water filtering bottles to travellers, all of which which can vastly reduce waste generated by our customers both during the tour and on an ongoing basis.

Our Egypt guides are strict in monitoring and preventing littering to protect the sites we visit and waste bins are provided in all vehicles.
Many of the sites we visit are incredibly important historical and natural wonders, and we encourage our travellers to treat these sites as such, sticking to marked paths, not climbing on ruins, picking wild plants or flowers, and avoiding disturbing the local wildlife as much as possible.

People

In Egypt, we support local crafts makers and artists by visiting a couple of carefully selected local shops. Here travellers can learn about the historic methods of producing papyrus, alabaster and perfumed oils,, as well as purchasing souvenirs if they wish. All products sold in these shops are sourced from the surrounding local communities.

The felucca crews we use are all from the local Nubian population around Aswan. We use only Egyptian guides, all trained and qualified in Egyptology, and use a locally owned Nubian guesthouse in Aswan which provides a very different experience to standard hotels and puts much more back into the local community.

To provide a more in depth experience of Egyptian culture, we also take a walking tour through the Nubian Village we stay in outside Aswan, and through the less visited back streets of Old Cairo before reaching the more touristy sections of the Khan-el-Khalili bazaar.

We make a donation for every customer who visits Egypt which is split between supporting a children's orphanage in Cairo which we have helped for nearly 20 years, and also in doing litter/waste clean up programs in some of the desert areas we visit.