Ultimate Guide to the Giza Pyramids, Sphinx, and Egyptian Museum // Egypt Travel Vlog

Good morning happy travelers. We are in a very special place today. We're in Egypt. We're gonna be doing a nine-day group trip in Egypt and we're super excited. Today is our first day. We're starting it off strong with a trip to the pyramids. Everyone is very excited as they should be. One of the ancient wonders of the world and definitely a bucket list item. Coming to the pyramids is one of the situations where it's handy to have a guide who knows what the heck's going on. Yeah a little crazy outside the gates. So our guide gave us a very good brief history of Egypt. There was a lot of information because Egypt has a really long history and now we have a little free time to walk around these guys right here. Yeah there's a lot going on here but it's kind of nice to just be able to explore a little bit on your own. We've actually visited Egypt one time before in 2016. It was a trip way before we did YouTube videos. We just thought it'd be really incredible to come back and visit here again and we couldn't think of a better way to do it than to travel with a group with Trova Trip. This is actually a hosted YouTube trip that we're going on for the next nine days with a big group of people. Egypt is definitely an area that is incredible to travel to but it's a little more difficult. So traveling with a group in this setting is definitely ideal. So you can visit the pyramids on your own but we recommend you do it with a guide just because it is very chaotic. This is obviously one of the most popular places to visit in all of Egypt and you're gonna have a lot of different people coming up to you trying to sell you stuff. So having a tour guide ahead of time just makes the whole experience a lot more enjoyable. Even when we came here before we weren't on a group tour but we did hire a guide directly from our hotel just for the pyramids and the sphinx because they know what the heck is going on and we don't. Yeah definitely. One of the reasons we recommend having a local guide at the pyramids but really anywhere in Egypt is because the vendors are incredibly aggressive here. This is probably the worst place for vendors we've ever been. They are very persistent and there are a lot of them so your guide will be able to tell you what's legit. We'll be able to negotiate with them if you do want to do something. If you can travel in Egypt and deal with these vendors you can go anywhere. The pyramids used to have like a nice smooth plaster over them but most of that's chipped off now. There's a little section where you can kind of see it right by one of the entrances and on the other pyramid on the other side the top still has that kind of nice plaster. You can actually go inside this great pyramid right here which is the tallest of all the pyramids at Giza. It cost 900 Egyptian pounds to do that. We decided to pass on this time. Tomorrow we're going to the pyramids of Saqqara and we're gonna be going inside those pyramids. Also there just seems like there's a lot of people kind of trying to get in and out of one really tight passageway. Also don't let anyone take your phone to take a picture of you or take a selfie because they will try to negotiate to get money from you to get your phone back. It can be a little overwhelming. You really just have to ignore them which really seems rude but they won't leave you alone unless you actually just don't look at them. Keep in mind these people are just trying to make a living so you really can't fault them for that but you have to be steadfast in your refusal. That is not a great way to describe it because it's more than cool but it's cool. It's really cool to walk around the outside of the pyramid and do some exploring but it's a little hard to have a genuine like authentic experience because any time that you really stop walking somebody's gonna approach you trying to sell you either a camel ride or some sort of souvenir. It's just a little difficult to kind of enjoy yourself and take a moment to just sit and relax. You kind of have to keep moving the entire time that you're walking around or else you're just gonna get bombarded by people. Alright now we're up at the top of the Giza Plateau and we are going to be taking a camel ride. The camel rides are a little bit controversial but our guide works with one supplier who has camels. He takes very good care of them and he said also that he does not ever recommend taking the horse carriages that are around because generally the horses are not well taken care of so if you're here don't do horse carriages. This camel's very tall. These are a little bumpy but we're making do. A little bit of scratch. So that camel ride was pretty short. It was pretty much just to get out a little bit into the desert, take some funny photos with the pyramids in the background but it's cool. I'm glad that we did it. It's kind of a fun touristy thing to do. There's a little area that you can walk up and get a better view of the pyramids so we walked up there and took a couple more photos. This is one of those places that's just a bucket list that everyone wants to see. It's pretty cool. Kind of the thing you have to do when you come to Egypt. Our adventure at the pyramid has come to an end but we are headed to another icon of Egypt, the Sphinx, and you can get a cool view of the pyramids from there too. Just spent a little bit of time in the valley temple that is at the base of the Sphinx and now we're about to go see the Sphinx itself. Our guide for this whole week is also an Egyptologist so he's very knowledgeable on all the different sites that we're going to. There's a theory among Egyptologists that there was a temple like this and a Sphinx at the entrance to every pyramid. But this is the only one that they found that's still intact at this site. The Sphinx was once completely covered in sand and obviously it's been excavated The base of it was badly deteriorated so they built it back up so the base is not original. Western tourism has been a little bit down over the last few months because of the conflict in Israel but Egypt is totally safe to visit but it's still really crowded here because all the locals are taking advantage of people like us not being here which is cool to see. Alright so we're doing a grab and go lunch because we want to have plenty of time at the Egyptian Museum and our guide stopped and bought us these local falafel sandwiches which have fava bean instead of chickpeas which they normally would in the States. Smells really good. So we are at the Egyptian Museum now in downtown Cairo. When we were here 8 years ago they said that the new Grand Egyptian Museum out in Giza was going to be open very soon but it's 8 years later and it's still not open so here we are at the Pink Palace again. Got a pretty sweet earpiece. Oh yeah. Gonna hear all the stuff. Tourist level activated. Yeah tourist level 100. Pretty much any antiquity that they have found in tombs or temples they've brought here to this museum so there is just a lot of Egyptian artifacts like an overwhelming amount of Egyptian artifacts in here. Unless another country has stolen it. Yeah that's true. Yeah so it was great. Our guide gave us an hour long tour gave us some information and now we have about an hour of free time. Last time we were here we didn't have a guide so we kind of just wandered around and didn't really know what we were looking at very much so it was nice to get a little bit of information but now we are going to go to King Tut's room. They have a really big section dedicated to King Tut here. Obviously King Tut is the most famous Egyptian pharaoh because his tomb was found in 1922 and it had been completely untouched. Most of the tombs that they find have been raided at some point or broken into so they got all the artifacts out like 300 some artifacts and a lot of that stuff is here. And you can visit King Tut's tomb in the Valley of the Kings which we'll be going to in a few days. Old sandals. Pretty cute. They do have bathrooms inside the Egyptian museum but you're not going to find any other type of services so there's no food or anywhere to buy water inside. However, right when you come outside there's a ton of different restaurants and cafes we decided to stop in one and get a coffee even though it's American prices. So we made it back to our hotel which is the Hyatt Regency Cairo West. It's actually in Giza but it's really new. It only opened two years ago. Since we were here eight years ago this Giza area has absolutely exploded with development. There are lots of new hotels and housing developments. It's really interesting to see. Alright, let's talk a little bit about hotels in Egypt. When booking this trip we wanted to make sure that we stayed in very nice hotels because Egypt is a really awesome place to travel but it can also be very overwhelming. So to have a nice, clean hotel room that is quiet and everything is very modern is really nice when you're coming back from a crazy day of exploring. When we traveled here in 2016 we learned that a three-star hotel in Egypt is definitely not the same as a three-star hotel in America. It's more equivalent to like a one-star maybe a two-star hotel. So when we were planning this trip we wanted to make sure that we stayed in five-star accommodation the whole time. We talked with Trova Trip and made sure we could upgrade our hotels just because we think it's really important to stay in those nicer hotels when you're traveling around a place like Egypt. So far I've been really impressed with the Hyatt. It's been a really great stay, very modern. They only built this hotel two years ago like Kelly said. As you may have seen from some of our videos before Kevin and I are no stranger to staying in little roadside motels but since we were inviting other people on this trip and we were kind of being the representatives for it we wanted to make sure that everyone else was going to have a comfortable place to come back to as well. I have a suspicion that some of the people booked this trip because of the five-star accommodation and you know what? I am totally fine with that. That being said, a couple of the nights that we have coming up are going to be very adventurous. We're going to be taking an overnight train from Cairo to Aswan so I'm not exactly sure how the accommodation is going to be on that night. Definitely not five-star and then we're actually spending the night on an open-air sailboat overlooking the Nile. And during that night we're all sleeping on the same mattress together on the deck of the ship so yeah, it's going to be a little different than five-star so at least we have the nice five-star accommodation for a couple of days while we're here. So this is the oldest pyramid in all of Egypt. From what I understand it's the oldest stone structure in the world. No big deal, just cruising through. We're in Egypt! Yay! Congratulations? No, that's not it. One of the reasons we recommend having a local guide One of the re... And you can get a cool view of the pyramids from there too. It's going to be so epic! Bean? That's fava bean? Fava bean. Alright. Fava. Fava. Do we have some candy? Fava bean. Western tourism has been a little bit... Western tourism has been a little bit... You singing? I'm trying to film here, bro. Yeah, right. He said that there's a theory that He said that there's a common theory that there was originally a sphinx at every pyramid. A sphinx in one of these temples. He said that there was a... He said that there's a theory among... Here you go. Yeah, there's a lot of gas. The camel's farting a ton. There's a lot of gas coming out of your camel right now.