This is my official review of our recent trip to Egypt with Adventures by Disney.
Those of you that know me know that I’m a dreamer when it comes to travel. I want Germans in lederhosen and snake charmers in India. In England I want to drink tea, in her majesty’s colonies - cold gin. I want to meet the locals and sketch their stories into watercolor memories. I want the fantasy of travel and I’m more than willing to make sure that happens. That’s why we chose Adventures by Disney for this trip, there is certain promise of fantasy adventure.
Let’s start before the beginning, then I’ll talk about the trip and finally, the good, the bad and the ugly.
There’s no doubt about it, it’s expensive, very expensive. Adventures by Disney isn’t any more expensive than other premium travel outfits, but there are others offering almost the same trip for a third the price.
Why Disney then? Firstly, the promise of fantasy adventure. The ABD commercial features a father and son sword fighting in front of a castle. Who doesn’t want that? Secondly, ABD offers exclusive access to attractions, like getting into the pyramids after closing. Finally the accommodations are - well, you do get what you pay for.
We booked the trip for 2021, but COVID wasn’t done yet, then rescheduled for 2022 and the trip was cancelled because of COVID and terrorism. A lot of people on the tour had the same experience, it is what it is, but Disney’s communication wasn’t great on this and they specifically did not offer any sort of priority rebooking for members of cancelled trips, you have to get back into the queue with everyone else. On the west coast that means getting up at 3AM to have any hope of getting a popular Disney booking. Disney, like every other east coast company, forgets that twenty-three twenty-fourths of the world lives in a different time zone.
After booking, Disney communication continued to be lackluster. The phone queue is impossibly long for working people, they take up to a week to respond to an email, some emails went unanswered, and they don’t have any chat or contact form. Often responses to emails with specific questions about the trip were answered with responses like, “you’ll have to Google that.”
The departure date finally arrived and it’s off to the land of the pharaohs. Flying to Egypt isn’t easy and our only option was to arrive a day early. Disney arranged for expedited VIP service at the airport. They say that’s part of the Disney experience, but it’s more a product of having spent a lot of money. Either way it was nice to not have to stand in line for customs and immigration.
With the extra day we booked a local cooking class and had our first experience with our ABD guides. The cooking class was an hour away, in Giza, and the address was unclear. Mostafa, our local guide called the class and got the address in Arabic, talked with our Uber driver to make sure everything was clear and arranged for him to call when we arrived safely. He went way above and beyond for a booking that wasn’t even part of the Disney tour.
What they call day two, is actually day one, (that’s something to keep in mind if you’ve never gone on an arranged tour, they count your arrival and departure days, so a ten day tour is really only eight days), we had the meet and greet breakfast, where everyone introduced themselves. The people on the trip were lovely people, and I enjoyed spending time with them, but this kind of trip attracts a certain kind of successful person from a certain social status. It’s my own insecurity speaking here, but I really didn’t feel like I fit in. So, if you’re like me, more comfortable downstairs with the staff than upstairs with the Crowleys, this is something to consider.
As we introduced ourselves, we each said what we were looking forward to. Many people said they were looking forward to experiencing the culture, this is my number one problem with Adventures by Disney. They have something they call the Disney Bubble. At Disney World this means never leaving the property, on an adventure by Disney it means keeping you totally sheltered from the real world. The only experience we had with real Egyptians was our service staff and the uncomfortably aggressive hawkers at each attraction. Never once did we experience the culture of Egypt.
From the hotel our first stop was the Citadel of Saladin and the Mosque of Mohamed Ali. I’m not going to talk about each stop in detail, just a few that make a point. First of all, I hate mosque tourism. I am, by philosophy and learning, an anti-religious person, but any time you visit the Middle East, they have to drag you through a bunch of mosques. Once again I turned to Mostafa. I had noticed there’s a police museum in the citadel, so I wanted to visit that. I didn’t think he would let us, but he did. This is when I had the most fun, the times when we got away from the tour to forge an adventure.
This brings up the most important point to my review of Adventures by Disney. There is no adventure.
The tour runs at an exhausting pace, keeping us out late and getting up before dawn. The guides explain this by saying, “this is Adventures by Disney, not Vacations by Disney,” but, there is no adventure in running people into the ground just to see more sites. Adventure is a product of chaos. Disney mitigates the unexpected by obtaining exclusive access or maintaining a tight schedule, rarely providing any time on your own or interaction with real local culture.
The next day was our trip to the pyramids. We got exclusive access to the site, after closing hours, which meant going inside the great pyramid with just 28 of us, not packed in with 200 tourists. Climbing inside of a pyramid is exactly what you think it would be - it’s dark and hot, cramped and scary as hell, and that’s why it’s so much fun. The climb is miserable and sweaty, but that’s the joy of it. The graffiti on the walls date from as far back as the eighteenth century making you feel like an old-timey explorer.
Inside the king’s chamber, I asked the docent if I could climb inside the sarcophagus for a picture he said, “it’s forbidden,” he looked around the room, “wait ‘til everyone leaves.”
As he helped me into Khufu’s afterlife vessel, I asked, “will I get the mummy’s curse?”
“Yes,” he said, “but it’s ok.”
As long as it’s ok.
After escaping the pyramid, I set off on my own, between the two largest pyramids. I was all alone in the Sahara, standing between the pyramids of Khufu and his son Khafre. This was a definite benefit of the Disney bubble.
The next day we flew to Aswan.
The amount of time this trip spent in airports and on airplanes is ridiculous. There is nothing adventurous about commercial air travel. It’s miserable, uncomfortable and Egyptian security assumes you are a terrorist with a bomb strapped to your balls.
In Aswan we dined at the Old Cataract Hotel. Being a mystery writer, this was a hilight for me. In the lobby I found the picture of Dame Agatha, grabbed a selfie with her and ordered a Sapphire martini. Word of warning - the Old Cataract can’t make a good martini.
Probably unfairly, I expect the Victorian colonies to turn out a good glass of gin, I’m usually disappointed.
That brings up drinks - ABD will usually cover beer and wine, but if you want a cocktail, waiters will waffle as they don’t know what to do. You’ll go thirsty until you’ve ordered it a few times and someone finally tells them it’s ok to bring a separate check.
A late night, followed by a dawn flight, is exhausting. Abu Simbel is cool, well the facade is cool, but inside is a crush of tourists. You visit a lot of temples on this trip, and they start to feel very samey. Was Abu Simbel worth the plane ride? At the time I was undecided. By the end of the trip I would have said no.
In Aswan we had moved aboard a cruise ship and spent the next few days drifting down the Nile, stopping at tourist attractions. The ship itself was relaxing and there was a party where we dressed in local clothes. I don’t get to dance as often as I’d like, and the Electric Slide was somehow removed from my memory to make room for something probably much less important, but it was great time. Word of warning - the MS Tulip can’t make a good martini.
The last night on the ship was a late night at Luxor Temple. We had exclusive access to the Temple after hours, but little free time, just the guided tour. And, once again, the late night night was followed by an early morning. It’s a consistent pattern. Every late night is followed by an early morning, late mornings follow early nights - it’s bad planning IMO.
This early morning was a bus ride to the Valley of the Kings. Was it worth it? This time, yes. The valley is so different from everything else we’d seen and the early morning gave us cooler temperatures and fewer tourists.
The Valley of the Kings was followed by a trip to the Hilton for lunch. The food on this trip was, in a word, bland. According to the guides, Disney specifically forbids the eating of street food on their tours. It introduces an element they can’t control. From my pre-trip research, I learned, the best food in Egypt is the street food.
On this trip the food was either generic resort buffet, or the same mix of grilled chicken, beef and kofta served with rice. The flatbreads that are normally used to eat meals, instead of utensils, were served to us as appetizers with the condiments that would normally accompany the meal.
The one dining hi-light was the rice-stuffed pigeon. The rice was savory and rich, like the best Stove-Top Stuffing you’ve ever had, and oily in good way, as the whole bird had been deep fried in butter. We were told that you ate it with your hands by tearing it apart. Again I felt out of place amongst my fellows by doing so. While my table mates daintily picked at their birds with forks and knives, I heard comments like, “look at him,” which made me feel self-conscious for eating it correctly. It was the most delicious meal on the trip, and the only one different than the others.
After lunch we went to the airport. This was probably the worst part of the trip. We were going to Sharm El Sheikh, a resort town on the Red Sea. Because of Disney’s contract with EgyptAir, there wasn’t a direct flight, so we had to bounce through Cairo. And this would mean double trips through the draconian Egyptian security. But, before we could get to Cairo, the flight was delayed several hours. This isn’t Disney’s fault, but it does speak to an over-dependence on air travel. This was doubly painful because we were going to Sharm for only 36 hours before coming back to Cairo for the final night. The whole thing didn’t make a lot of sense. Two miserable hops on an airplane to spend thirty-six hours at a luxury resort. Once again, this is the exact opposite of an adventure. If they want to give us a wind down after the go-go-go of the last several days, an overnight train to Alexandria would have been a much better choice, and trains are inherently adventurous.
The resort was just a cookie-cutter beach resort - laying by the pool, generic buffet, bottom-shelf drinks, in a word - boring. Word of warning - the Coral Sea Sensatori resort can’t make a good martini.
A few days earlier we had been given a couple hundred pounds to buy a gift for the white elephant exchange. We were told that if it was something we wouldn’t want for ourselves then we got the right item. I was actually embarrassed to have followed that advice. I did decorate the bag with a watercolor painting of Abu Simbel. IMHO I liked the painting so much that I considered it a better gift than the monkey ashtray. Later I was horrified to find out the painting was discarded as “just a bag.”
The final night was spent in Cairo, at the Ritz. We had a supposedly Mexican dinner, followed by a wonderful slideshow. The guides took pictures throughout the entire trip, so many that you could probably get away without taking any of your own.
The good:
I cannot say enough about our guides. They were friendly, helpful, treated us like family, and even when one of them got sick with the rest of us (it was sugar cane season, the smoke-filled air left most of us with respiratory ailments), they always had a good attitude.
They took enough pictures that you could go without taking any and still wind up with a great album.
Accommodations were very high-end, if a bit boring.
The bad:
An over-dependence on air travel makes for frustration and wasted time. The entire tour was two-hundred forty hours. At least twelve hours of that was wasted at airports or on airplanes. No one likes airports, and evidently Egypt has very good passenger rail service, so the dependence on airplanes is totally unnecessary.
The food was just boring. I did my research, I saw all the delicious dishes we could have been enjoying, but all we got was the same boring food over and over.
The pace was exhausting, to the point of being un-enjoyable. I considered skipping some things just to have a few minutes rest. I can’t imagine doing this tour with kids, I’m sure they’d be constantly crying and cranky - I was.
The ugly:
There was absolutely no social interaction with the locals, or introduction to local culture.
Tour buses. Tour buses are uncomfortable, they’re huge and have no way of getting through traffic. We should have rounded up fifteen tuk-tuks each day and moved through traffic like crap through a goose.
But, the biggest problem - there was no adventure. This was a site-seeing tour. We trudged from site to site with little expectation of something exciting happening.
Would I go on another Adventure by Disney? Probably not. We’ve gone on trips with other tour companies that specifically provide interaction with locals and plenty of chaotic adventure. IMO Adventures by Disney is boring and over-stuffed, perhaps it’s a good tour for people who want cushy site seeing, but that’s not adventure.
