Holy Land – Why the Egypt leg of the trip is a terrible idea

This article comes with a statutory warning. It is not sugar coated and does not seek to convince those who romanticize or over spiritualize such a pilgrimage. So if you don’t have the stomach for the truth I suggest you stop reading here.

Let’s begin with the bare truth about Indian pilgrims/tourist (and of course I am generalizing)

Indian tourists or for that matter pilgrims have long been bitten by the bug to ‘see all’ and experience little. A good tour for many Indians is one where you have maxed the number of sites to see rather than the experience of being there, taking it all in. So tour operators have no choice but to sell what Indian pilgrims want, for if their itinerary has one pilgrim spot less they lose out to competition that are willing to sell a lie. So tour operators sell you the whole shebang as part of the Holy Land tour; Egypt included.

For   those who do little research before buying into a pilgrim trip here is a little ‘fun’ fact, your Egyptian part of the pilgrimage comprises five of the thirteen days. Now here is the catch. The tour operators sell you a thirteen day package by land. When you look carefully the first and last day are travel day to the airport and day thirteen is sold as ‘a day’ when in reality you arrive in Mumbai at six am. So the first thing you need to do is study the itinerary being sold to you.

Having said that, the ‘thirteen days’ dedicates five days to Egypt, that’s more than one third of your trip. So what is it that gets Indian pilgrims all excited about buying into this leg of the journey? As I said earlier, Indian pilgrims want to see more, so when they hear that they are traveling to one more country, that for them is the clincher even if that country is a hole in the wall ( with no disrespect to Egypt in particular).

So read on if you really want to understand why going to Egypt as part of the Holy Land pilgrimage is a terrible idea.