Where to start with my criticisms? Probably the maps. To say they were inadequate for Cairo would be a gross understatement. The city is complicated to navigate, and I would recommend that anyone travelling there and planning to spend time in the city itself should arm themselves with the best maps they can find. The ones in this book were absolutely awful. They bear little or no resemblence to what you actually find on the ground, the level of detail was wrong for any given situation (usually not detailed enough by a long way), they’re badly organised (you end up fishing around for the next map you need as you’re walking), and the only map that gives you an overview of the city is completely hopeless. The maps are also not contiguous, the gaps between the maps being just large enough to make long walks extremely difficult.

The next biggest problem for me was the advice on getting around. Before you arrive, the book appears to be particularly good on this subject, and was probably the main reason for my purchase since I was travelling alone and planning to arrange my own transport to the sights. Starting at the airport, their advice for finding a taxi was utterly useless. For getting to the various tourist sites, they appear to recommend the ubiquitous micro-buses used by commuters. Trying to use these is a joke, even for someone who took the trouble to learn some Arabic beforehand. The “signs” on the micro-buses are in Arabic, nobody on them speaks English, and when faced with roughly 100 of them in the bus station the situation is nothing short of hopeless. These are transportation strictly for locals, so don’t waste your time trying, despite what the book might tell you. If you did ever manage to get on the right one, you’d be taking your life in your hands anyway. Why on earth would a guide book recommend this form of transport when a taxi can be hired for a whole day for around USD40?

Buy a book with more photos. It helps beforehand to identify the things you want to see, and they’ll stick in your memory when you’re actually there (I’ve previously used many other guidebooks with better photos). They also help a lot when you’re lost or semi-lost (as I was most of the time when trying to navigate with the help of this guide).

The level of detail in the text was just plain wrong, wrong, wrong. It was ALWAYS either too much or not enough. Your choice is to spend a lot of time trawling through the prose before setting out and after that relying on your memory, or fishing through pages and pages of rubbish to glean what you need when you’re actually on site.

A horrible guide book, don’t buy it.
Rating: 2 / 5