Amazing fun filled trip with fabulous accommodations. We even learned about New Orleans along the way. There was so much to see and do. Highlights were the Laura Plantation visit and the Joan d’ Arc parade. Our guide Jewel was always up for adding in additional activities like an after dinner adventure to the music and night art market on Frenchmen’s street, and a ghost tour which was really more of a history tour. We showed up a day early and Jewel took us on a street car tour of the garden district with great stops for lunch, shopping and a roof top bar for my first Hurricane. . Also loved the front row seats at the Preservation Jazz Hall. I’m still singing those songs.

My trip to Egypt with Cultured Travel was a profound experience for me. What I want from travel generally is to expand my sense of connection with the other people and animals that share this planet with me. I want to experience them not just as an idea or an abstract image in my mind built from words or pictures I’ve seen somewhere, but as a felt reality that I can experience viscerally. This stays alive in me ever afterward, deepening the way I experience anything I subsequently see or learn about these places I have been and my fellow inhabitants on this planet. But this trip to Egypt offered me an expanded sense of visceral connection that I had not experienced so profoundly before - not only with others with whom I share the planet now, but with human experience more broadly throughout (and before) history. It is one thing to see a picture of a pyramid in a book, to read about its enormous size and the weight of the stones used to construct it, wondering how this could have been accomplished even before the invention of the wheel. It is a whole different order of experience to stand at the foot of this gigantic, towering monument rising from the desert floor, to see with my own eyes the enormous blocks of stone somehow transported to this place from far away and shaped to fit together so perfectly that no other adhesive is required, one atop the other ascending so, so high above the ground - realizing that human beings created this FIVE THOUSAND years ago. It is AWEsome. Words can’t express it. Visiting the tombs and temples that people spent the time and energy of their generally much shorter lives to create, I was just amazed to see them covered throughout, from floor to ceiling and all across the ceiling, on every available surface with beauty and stories about their lives as they understood them or wanted others to understand and appreciate them, or prayers for what they hoped and dreamed the future could hold. The ingenuity, creativity, determination and devotion to matters of aesthetics, imagination, of what held spiritual meaning for them is truly astounding. And gazing upon these works that have survived for thousands of years, I wonder about expressions of the human spirit in other cultures, among other peoples who worked in materials that did not last the way that stone lasts, so we don’t and never will know about them. What might they have been? What other wonders have existed? I come home from this experience with an expanded sense of what it is to be human, in deeper connection with the human experience throughout time and across disparate circumstances. Humbled and grateful.

Our family trip with CultuED was epic. I cannot say enough about the knowledge imparted by out Egyptologist and the caring of our Karem crew, including the chef and staff, who served us 3 delicious meals daily. I highly recommend booking an adventure with this team…. Indelible memories for a lifetime exploring a magical place with an incredible 5,000 year history.

Great experience overall with no problems. S/S Karim and crew exceeded all expectations, and we were treated like family. Sameh was an outstanding and very knowledgeable guide! Sure appreciated the pretrip information not to mention the post trip assistance leaving Egypt.

I had a wonderful time on this trip. It was well organized so I was very relaxed and I learned so much about Churchill and its flora and fauna. The starting two days in Winnipeg were slow days but in a good way, which allowed me to unwind from the press of getting out of the office for the trip. Jewel is a joy, well spoken, thoughtful, and kind. Thank you.