A party lasts an evening
By a certain birthday, most people have been given everything they need and a good deal they didn’t. What they have not been given is Egypt.
A marquee, caterers and a band can cost about as much as a private journey. One of them is over by midnight.
The birthdays it suits
Sixty can be a lovely moment to turn long-held travel plans into a journey shaped entirely around the person celebrating.
Fifty is often a gift from a partner, with the children chipping in — and can be the first proper holiday the birthday person has taken without organising it themselves.
Seventy and beyond is often a gift from grown-up children, for a parent who has talked about the pyramids for as long as anyone can remember. We plan these with particular care; see the note on pace below.
Celebrating on the day
If the birthday falls during the journey, tell us and we will mark it. Not with a cake wheeled out while strangers sing — unless that is what they would love — but usually with something quieter and better: a table laid somewhere unexpected, a felucca out at sunset, or their Egyptologist making sure they are in exactly the right place at the hour when the light does what it does.
We will ask you which of those they would prefer. The person buying usually knows at once.
And on the birthday itself, a professional photographer joins them for a private session, so the day is kept properly, not just remembered.
On pace, honestly
Egypt rewards energy. There are steps, heat, early starts and long days, and a journey designed for a fit fifty-year-old is the wrong journey for someone of eighty with a bad knee.
This is entirely solvable: fewer sites and more time at each, cars closer to the entrances, free afternoons, and a dahabiya instead of long road journeys. But it has to be designed in from the start, not apologised for afterwards.
So tell us frankly how the person gets about. It is not a delicate question for us. It is the difference between a wonderful birthday and an exhausting one.
Giving it together
As with retirement journeys, several people can contribute — siblings, a family, a circle of friends. Each can pay their share separately, by their own payment link or by bank transfer, towards one journey. One person stays our contact, and anything above the cost of the journey goes on upgrades that we will list for you.
Seeing Egypt has been a dream of mine since childhood.
Kirsten Wilson, October 2024 · Read on Google
We had been planning our trip to Egypt for almost 10 years. What an amazing trip we had.
Paula, 2023 · Read on Google