The itinerary planned was met in full - Great...
Egypt
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Jul 23 - Aug 6, 2022
The itinerary planned was met in full - Great service!
Even though the planning was based on a baseline itinerary found in KimKim, the local specialist helped us adjusting it to our timeframe and interests, with not many fillings that could take us away from our main sites of interest.
In addition, the guides were knowledgeable on the history to explain in detail, some times we got lost in the many names of gods or the different timelines, but is just a lot of information to capture in 2 weeks of ancient history.
We started our trip in Cairo, where we were welcomed by Mahmoud just after deplaning, who helped us to smoothly clear immigration and customs. We travel extensively for work and leisure and we believe we can move around airports and cities with minimal directions, but don't take lightly the help the tour operators and local guides provide in Egypt, is not an easy country no navigate unless you are local.
We had two guides in Cairo, Mostafa and Khalet, very funny guys, they did a thorough explanation of all Egypt history, but also adding context of the findings, the impact in the region and world development. They were also very polite to introduce the fillings to every tour, like the papyrus museum, to make it fully optional, not mandatory as other tour operators do...
After Cairo and Alexandria, the latter is not fully recommended unless you have extra time, we travel south to Aswan, where we met our guide Ahmed, very knowledgeable person, but tour guides in this highly touristic area seem to be more pushy on the filling tours, and are more expectant on adding extra activities to the itinerary, which we didn't like so much as it was very obvious and constant.
The tipping culture was not new to us, coming from the US, but the freedom of tipping for good service is universal, sometimes it felt compulsory even for not so good service....
After visiting Aswan, Abu Simbel, Luxor and in between, we returned to Cairo, and once again, were welcomed by Mahmoud, who was attentive of keeping us in line with our tour schedule until he left us at the airport checked in for our flight to Amman.
In Amman we were welcomed by the tour operator at the airport, even though it was way easier to navigate compared to Cairo's, and then met Ahmad, our driver for all the tours in Jordan.
Even though Ahmad is not a tour guide, he knows all the places to visit, and helped us meet our itinerary including the guides for the sites that required further explanation like Jerash and Petra. He helped us coordinate everything in the itinerary in Jordan, and this was a very good surprise as we didn't have high expectations about Jordan, only for Petra, but Amman, the surroundings, the desert and the dead sea were great additions to our trip. Including that Jordan is more organized and less chaotic than Egypt, so it was a good comparison of cultures within the Middle East.
In summary, we had a great time, we didn't have issues, we never felt unease or that we didn't meet the expectation of our summer vacation. We fully recommend KimKim, I personally don't like tours, I rather do my own sightseeing, but I have also learned that some places are better leveraged with local help, and that is what we found valuable of the connections KimKim provide, beyond the platform that was super easy to connect, communicate and fulfill our travel plans.
Activity Reviews
Hello Juan,
So happy to hear you had a great time in Egypt, it is always great to hear positive comments from our travelers.
Thank you again for trusting us to plan everything for you and wish to see you again !
Ibrahim