Who you are actually booking with

The name

Tuya was a noblewoman of the Eighteenth Dynasty — mother of Queen Tiye, great-grandmother of Tutankhamun. Her tomb in the Valley of the Kings was, until 1922, the best-preserved ever found in Egypt. She is not on the postcards. That is rather the point: the country is deeper than its five most photographed objects, and the job of a good guide is to show you the rest of it.

How we are set up

We are a licensed Egyptian travel agency operating out of Cairo. We run private trips only — your guide, your driver, your vehicle. We do not sell seats on a coach and we do not subcontract you to whoever has capacity that morning.

Every Pharaonic itinerary is led by a guide licensed by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. That licence takes four years of study and is checked at the gate of every major site. Plenty of operators send a driver with a memorised script instead. You can tell within about ten minutes.

What we will tell you honestly

• Whether going inside the Great Pyramid is worth the ticket for you specifically. Often it is not.
• When a day trip is too long and an overnight is the better trip, even though it earns us less.
• Which sites are genuinely quiet at which hours, because we are there every week.
• When the answer is that you should not do this in August.

Coverage

Cairo and Giza, Saqqara and Dahshur, Alexandria, Luxor and Aswan, Abu Simbel, Nile cruises, the Red Sea at Hurghada and Marsa Alam, Sinai and St Catherine's, Siwa Oasis and the Western Desert. If you want somewhere that is not on the list, ask — we have probably been.