Customer Reviews

The Rough Guide to Egypt 7 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

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4 star:		(2)
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Let me mention a caveat before I go on to slate this guide. My trip was only to Cairo, and in the absence of any books at all that cover only Cairo, I used this guide which covers the whole country.

Where to start with my criticisms? Probably the maps. To say they were inadequate for Cairo would be a gross understatement. The city is complicated to navigate, and I would recommend that anyone travelling there and planning to spend time in the city itself should arm themselves with the best maps they can find. The ones in this book were absolutely awful. They bear little or no resemblence to what you actually find on the ground, the level of detail was wrong for any given situation (usually not detailed enough by a long way), they're badly organised (you end up fishing around for the next map you need as you're walking), and the only map that gives you an overview of the city is completely hopeless. The maps are also not contiguous, the gaps between the maps being just large enough to make long walks extremely difficult.

The next biggest problem for me was the advice on getting around. Before you arrive, the book appears to be particularly good on this subject, and was probably the main reason for my purchase since I was travelling alone and planning to arrange my own transport to the sights. Starting at the airport, their advice for finding a taxi was utterly useless. For getting to the various tourist sites, they appear to recommend the ubiquitous micro-buses used by commuters. Trying to use these is a joke, even for someone who took the trouble to learn some Arabic beforehand. The "signs" on the micro-buses are in Arabic, nobody on them speaks English, and when faced with roughly 100 of them in the bus station the situation is nothing short of hopeless. These are transportation strictly for locals, so don't waste your time trying, despite what the book might tell you. If you did ever manage to get on the right one, you'd be taking your life in your hands anyway. Why on earth would a guide book recommend this form of transport when a taxi can be hired for a whole day for around USD40?

Buy a book with more photos. It helps beforehand to identify the things you want to see, and they'll stick in your memory when you're actually there (I've previously used many other guidebooks with better photos). They also help a lot when you're lost or semi-lost (as I was most of the time when trying to navigate with the help of this guide).

The level of detail in the text was just plain wrong, wrong, wrong. It was ALWAYS either too much or not enough. Your choice is to spend a lot of time trawling through the prose before setting out and after that relying on your memory, or fishing through pages and pages of rubbish to glean what you need when you're actually on site.

A horrible guide book, don't buy it.

I got myself a Kindle a few months ago and as I had a trip to Egypt coming, I decided to buy the Rough Guide to Egypt (Kindle Edition). Not a good idea. First of all, it is almost impossible to see maps of any sort using the Kindle Edition (probably a limitation of the kindle format). It is very hard to look for things in this book also. For instance, looking for Luxor in the table of contents gives you...no match!!! You cannot go to the table of contents and read up on Luxor and things to do there. The content is somewhere in the book and through searching you can find it but it is not as easy. Another draw back was in the phrases they give you at the back of the book. It would tell you the basic english language phrase and you would expect the arabic equivalent but instead only a question mark is displayed. Yes, the kindle probably cannot display arabic characters but they could have included graphics to display them.
Overall, buying the kindle version will just be frustrating and not worth it.

I've been comparing this Rough Guide to the Lonely Planet Egypt and I must say I find it more interesting and readable with the info I need and not some folderol that I don't. I have found a few inaccuracies though which concern me since I have to pick one of these very shortly to take on my trip. It is amazing that I am considering doing without Lonely Planet because that's been my Bible on every trip I've ever taken, but I like the writing in the Rough Guide a lot.

I wanted a guidebook to help me plan a trip to Egypt and ordered this one. It certainly helped, particularly in selecting what we wanted to include in our sightseeing tours.

In addition to providing me with the basics of where to stay, where to go, etc. RG gave me all of the cultural/historical information I needed to have a deeper understanding of Egyptian culture and better enjoy my trip. The enhanced discussion of "baksheesh" was particularly useful!!

Great book!!! Very informational. Going to Egypt in May, '09 and have learned alot from this book.