MS Nile Festival Review

Overall Rating

Very friendly, amazingly patient, eager to please, totally honest and trustworthy (the bar bill was correct to the penny), efficient, clean, ample space (and sun beds), plenty of food, good air conditioning so temperature on board perfect, a great cup of tea in the afternoon, space age showers with unlimited hot water, rooms tended 2 or 3 times a day. Professional masseur, excellent value. We were very happy with our choice of boat.

Drinks are at UK pub prices, which starts to seem expensive when you see what the prices are on shore.
Out of 5 people we had 1 bad and 3 mild stomach upsets, but there were many possible sources and we ate lots of salads and uncooked fruits which was asking for trouble (but they were delicious).
Would never have known that the life jackets were under the beds if my father hadn't found them and told us.

I can't recommend an Egyptian Nile Cruise and the MS Nile Festival highly enough. Egypt isn't easy for independent travelling, due to the high levels of security for foreigners, so a Nile cruise is a painless (decadent) way to get around.
It's an incredible privilege to be able to look at (and could have touched) messages from the temple builders from 5000 years ago. The more you find out about Egyptian history, the more fascinating it becomes.
Our tours tended to start very early in the morning (4am), so sharing the ship with guests who weren't too rowdy in the evening was quite important. Our ship catered for mainly Italian, Spanish, South American and a few US tourists, who were all decent, friendly people.
The standards of service are amazingly high, since the competition for any job in Egypt is so fierce. Our tour guide was a graduate Egyptologist for example.
When leaving the boat to visit a tourist site there is the usual barrier of hassle, over-charging and petty dishonesty between the gang plank and temple entrance.
Scams: I got caught by the "10p to clean your shoes", but when he used polish it went up to £2. Slightly more serious was the 'change' scam of passing a 50 Piastres note as a 50 Pound note. Also, when I was walking on my own a couple of guys called me to say I had dropped some money, which was probably an attempt to rifle my backpack, but I didn't stop to find out. We should have followed the sensible advice of never dealing with any street vendors, only with shop keepers, which would have eliminated the worst offenses.
Security: Egypt seems to me to be safer than England. There are far more devout, honest Egyptians on the streets to protect you than there are criminals to target you, amazing since the level of temptation is so enormous (earnings less as £1 per day). The behaviour of the criminal element causes the Egyptians I talked to, much more shock and disgust than it would a Londoner. There are armed policemen as well as plain clothed policemen wherever tourists go. Tourist travel between towns is limited to 'Convoys' including police vehicles, although when we travelled in a 'convoy' the only practical difference seemed to be that we had to register our trip and start at a particular time. There are metal detectors at every temple ticket office. Most are switched on.
We met with polite, cultured and dignified Egyptians, who made our holiday a really wonderful experience.