Anyone recommend an Egypt family adventure holiday?

[racingheart]

I want to save up for a real holiday of a lifetime with DC - riding camels, donkeys, caleches, seeing pyramids, sailing feluccas etc. I'd quite like decent hotels not rough camping and hostels, and not too many days by boat as DH hates the water!

I've looked at a few websites but they all seem to offer similar stuff. Some ride into the Vally at dawn by donkey, others use minibus.

It would be great to hear recommendations from anyone who loved their trip. (And who to avoid.)

We did the trip with Explore two years ago and it was fantastic. 13 nights in comfortable hotels with one night on the train down from Cairo to Aswan and one day/night on board a felucca. My ds was 8 and was the youngest of the kids in our group (4 families in total). We all got on brilliantly and the older children were happy to play cards with him and muck about in the hotel pools with him so it didn't matter he was the youngest/singleton as there was plenty of company for him and all the parents got on brilliantly as we were all pretty likeminded. The hotels were all comfortable and we did 2 nights in Cairo out by the Pyramids, then the night on the train, 2 nights in Aswan during which we went down to Abu Simbel, 1 night on the felucca, 3 nights in Luxor, 3 nights on the Red Sea coast then back to Cairo for 1 night before home. Brilliantly organised, lovely guide with us all the time and great local guides too. Previously we'd done Jordan with Families Worldwide and I'd recommend them too - they do a similar Egypt trip to Explore.

With Explore we didn't want to do the camel ride as we felt we'd DONE camels in Jordan and they let us go off to see Philae on our own and arranged for us to be met and taken to the meeting place for the camel riders so they are flexible if there is something you really don't want to do and apart from Cairo you are left pretty much to organise what you want to see and do. Cairo, understandably and possibly even more so now, is carefully marshalled.

I've travelled a lot on my own in the Middle East pre ds and I know it is possible to do all this independently but it was a great trip and ds still talks about it.

Mimble, thanks so much. I've done Explore trips before but not with family, so will definitely look into that. When I travelled with them we stayed in very basic, grubby hotels and slept out under the stars - no tents. That put me off looking at them again, as my DC are not good sleepers at the best of times and would be up all night if they had no bed, or found live cockroaches in the room. But hotels with pools sounds like a massive step up from what they used to offer!

The Families Worldwide co was one of the main ones I liked the sound of.

bump - anyone else been to Egypt to see the sights as well as or instead of Sharm beach holiday?