Visa Requirements for Egypt

Like many countries, Egypt requires an entry visa to enter the country. The requirement to get a visa is pretty simple and straight forward. Your passport needs to be valid for at least six months. If you follow the advice of most guide books, the easiest and cheapest way to get your visa is at your entry point into the country. For most of us that will be the Cairo International Airport. For most travelers, this will be a painless process and one that only costs about $15.

What bothers me are the emails I've received lately from both my airline of choice and my booking agent encouraging purchasing my visa in advance. In some countries and at certain historical times, obtaining a visa in advance of your travels was required. Back in the mid to late 80s, I remember going up to Montreal to get visas for France. Due to security threats, France required you have a visa obtained from one of their consulates or embassies in advance of your travel. It, too, was a pretty stratight forward process and since Montreal was just an hour away, I chose to do it in person instead of sending my passport off to NYC.  Plus, it gave me an excuse to eat lunch in the city (always a pleasant occasion).

There are also those countries that require you to fill out a tourist card application (almost always on the airplane just before landing) that gets processed as you go through customs. In Mexico, for example, it's an easy process to get your tourist card/visa for a full 180 days even if you're only going to be there for a week's vacation in Cancun. For this, there is no fee. Although I do have an objection to a visa with a fee attached (just a state sanctioned form of a tourist tax), we'll same that discussion for a later blog.

My objection with the airlines and travel services is that they're implying that I need to get my Egypt visa in advance or as they put it, to make my travels easier. Interesting, there is a significant fee associated with this service. In addition to paying the visa fee itself ($15), I also have to pay a service fee of approximately $45. I'm also asked to provided two passport quality photos (interestingly, I don't need these at the airport when I arrive to get my visa) which will cost an additional $10-12 (note: if you're a AAA member, go there for cheap, high quality passport-type photos for only $3). All told, I'm going to end up paying nearly $70 for this visa.

As the old saying goes, the proof of the pudding is in its eating. Having entered a number of foreign countries, I've never encounter any out of the ordinary procedures getting through customs. I'll let you know later whether we have any difficulties in Cairo obtaining our tourist visas. Across the board, the guidebooks all consistently describe the entry process as easy. Just be aware of agencies offering an unnecessary service with a pretty hefty price tag.

In any case, VisaCenter may provide some good information for your future travels, but please do your homework and check out whether or not you need to pay for services that are otherwise easily obtained upon entry to your destination country.

Tomorrow: New Year's Resolution: Fly For Less!

Backpacking 101: Leave The Suitcases At Home

There are no truer words in the English language than "travel light." How often we've gone on trips only to find that when we got home, we were unpacking clothes that never saw the light of day. With all the best intentions in the world, believing we'd really need those six pairs of pants, five pairs of shoes, ten t-shirts, and numerous other accessories, we over packed again for another trip. As the super-sized suitcase came on the market, our problem didn't get easier, it became much more difficult. Those large suitcases could hold enough clothes for a trip around the world without wearing items twice (I'm reminded here how our oldest son really did travel around the world with just a single t-shirt or, at least, that's what he was wearing every time he was in a photo!). In addition, as size increased, so did the weight of the filled suitcase. I'm a big fan of those little wheels on suitcases, but try pulling a couple of them down a cobble stone street for any distance. It doesn't work well! So, we found that the best way to travel light was to control the size and type of the container we were using. The solution: the backpack!

As you can tell from the photo, that's not a large backpack on Nancy. But, she had all the essentials for three weeks of travel in Mexico. It is easier to travel light in a warm area of the world, but, nonetheless, we've learned how to avoid taking really unnecessary items by being required to carefully choose what items we travel with.

We've arrived in many cities where we planned to go from the airport to the hotel by subway or public transportation. Have you ever seen folks lugging suitcases through those security turnstiles? Yikes! At rush hour, which is going to be crowded anyway, it's much easier to get on and off a subway with a backpack on than try to push your way through the crowd with a suitcase in both hands before the door closes again and you're off to the next station where you didn't want to get off. As much as we always try to stand by the door for ease of getting off, as the crowd gets denser and denser, the laws of physics push you further into the car.

Another advantage of traveling light is that it will also often save you time and help you avoid certain headaches that you just don't need particularly at the end of your trip. Last year at the airport, as we were leaving Mexico City, we had to stand in an hour long check-in line to get our boarding passes. Why you ask? If it had been as simple as just traveling with our backpacks, we could have gone straight to the ticket kiosk for travelers with no baggage to check. However, on this trip, because of all those newly acquired souvenirs, we had to buy a suitcase in the capital before leaving just to haul home our goodies. All of our travel stuff would no longer fit into our backpacks that we had arrived with. Well, that one suitcase required that we, too, join the mass of humanity checking in bags. The hour plus wait almost caused us to miss our flight. Of course, I'm glad to have brought home all those cool mementos of our travels, but they came at a price.

Our best advice to you our friends - always travel light!

Tomorrow: Visa Requirements for Egypt.

The Joy of Traveling

Just 4 days away from our departure for Egypt. As we're thinking about what we hope to experience, it occured to us that we rarely planned our great travel moments in the past. Undoubtedly, many of our fondest memories in Egypt will come from times when we least expect them or from directions and people who will surprise us.

So, what is it that we hold on to from past trips and remember with the fondest of memories (and sometimes photos)?

*  In the middle of the night, helping just hatched baby sea turtles make it down to the sea outside San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua.

*  Enjoying a cafe creme with my parents at La Closerie des Lilas in Paris on their 50th anniversary while sitting at the same table where Hemingway wrote.

*Enjoying the company of local children everywhere.

* Being allowed to sit and ride on top of the bus as it pulls out of Todos Santos. This was a unique bird's eye view of the Guatemalan highlands.

* Horseback riding with our oldest son three hours into Keet Seel to see rarely visited Anasazi ruins in northern Arizona.

* Exploring the back streets of Mexico City looking for the mural art of Diego Rivera and his contemporaries.

* Sitting on top of  Temple IV in Tikal, Guatemala listening to the sounds of the jungle.

* A quiet moment inside Notre Dame Cathedral and then a climb to visit the gargoyles in the bell tower (the security fencing wasn't there when we was there).

* Visiting the El Pochote organic market in Oaxaca and making new friends.

* Bus rides, bus rides, and more bus rides on some pretty unbelievable roads.

* Picking out our own freshly caught seafood and having it cooked right there for us on the wharf in Essaouria,  Morocco (Jimi Hendrix hung out here).

* Tacos (real Mexican tacos) and our afternoon visit to a cantina for botanas Mexicanas ! It's said that the bullet hole in the ceiling at La Opera was put there by no other than Pancho Villa himself!


* Trying on silly hats with my brother Bob in Los Angeles.

Ah, the simple pleasures of traveling, now that's what I'm talking about!

Why Egypt?

In some ways, we're simply following in the footsteps of Herodotus who in the 5th century BCE might have been considered the first world traveler who ventured into Egypt. As we have joked with many friends when asked this question, we've simply replied that it's on our Bucket List. In many respects it's true that we do want to see the pyramids as one of those must see wonders of the ancient world. However, it's a bit closer to the truth to say that we haven't yet had our fill of traveling and that there are far too many other interesting places out there to see (at least once). In recent years, we've made numerous trips to Mexico where we do plan on ultimately retiring. But, in the meantime, we need to head in a few directions other than south to make sure that we experience all that we can and taste the riches of other parts of the world.

Egypt happened to end up at the top of our list this year. On that list with it were considerations like India and Nepal, Machu Picchu, the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Bali, Vietnam, the Great Wall of China, Istanbul, dove hunting in Argentina (no, this wasn't really one of Nancy's picks), and the list could go on and on. So, the decision was as simple as, where do we want to go first?

Just a few short years ago, our oldest son and I traveled in Morocco. It was my first taste of North Africa and I loved it! The food, the people, the culture and history consumed us as we traveled by train and bus from Tangier to Fez to Marrakesh (yes, I couldn't help but think about the Crosby, Stills and Nash song while on that express train). Ten years later, I'm looking forward to another visit back to the Islamic world.

If you're a fan of The Travel Channel's No Reservations, you might remember Tony Bourdain's episode on Egypt. His dilemma was whether or not he was going to visit the pyramids (you know, all those damn tourists!). Well, no question for us. It's probably our main activity for day two of our stay in Cairo. Yes, there will be all those @%#&^* tour buses parked near the Sphinx, but going to Cairo and not visiting the Giza would be like going to Paris and not viewing the Mona Lisa or visiting Rome and passing up the Sistine Chapel because of the crowds. Sure, it'll be disappointing not to have the pyramids all to ourselves, but that's just not the way it is going to be. We'll have plenty of chances to visit less well know sites such as the Step Pyramid  at Saqqara or the Mastaba of Ti where the quite mystery of the past still surrounds all those who visit.

Following the paths less taken will be how we experience the people and culture of Egypt.

Preparations in High Gear

In exactly one week, we will have out feet up and relaxing in the lounge of the Windsor Hotel  in Cairo (more on that classic hotel after we arrive). Between now and Sunday afternoon when we leave Burlington, we'll be trying not to forget anything that we might need for two weeks. We're traveling light! Just a backpack each! You ask, how is Nancy going to do that? Well, she actually did very well a couple of years ago in Mexico with no more than the one pack. Since it's 74 and sunny in Cairo today, heavy clothes are not required! We've also lighted Nancy's load by getting her a Kindle for Christmas. Now, instead of a whole duffel full of novels and magazines, she can travel much more easily with her one pound electronic library and never run out of something to read. Nonetheless, we do have a couple of hardcover guide books (The Rough Guide to Egypt) that we'll depend heavily upon to navigate our way around Cairo and then on further south to Luxor (we'll post our planned itinerary a bit later this week). We've been warned that Cairo is a very noisy city, so earplugs are already in our bag. We've also got a few more videos on ancient Egypt to finish watching this week. The Great Courses put out a 48-part series on The History of Ancient Egypt. This has helped us get oriented to many of the ancient sites we plan on visiting. In a short two weeks, however, we'll only be able to scratch the surface!

Practice, Practice, Practice

Still trying to learn how to blog and post photos. I think I'm getting the hang of it.

Getting Ready for Egypt

No, I won't be wearing any Hawaiian shirts in Cairo.