How much cash to take to Egypt, and what to bring it in

Build the number from the bottom up

On a guided trip the large costs are settled before you arrive. Hotels, transport, the entrance fees written into the itinerary and most meals are already paid, so day-to-day cash goes on tips, drinks, taxis, small shops and the occasional site or camera fee. That is less money than most people expect. What it is not is occasional: it is a steady drip of small payments all day, every day, and running out of small notes at four in the afternoon is the failure mode.

So do not pick a round number and hope. Tipping is the largest predictable part of your cash spending and the only part you can calculate in advance, so start there and add a float on top. Everything else — the taxi you did not plan, the bottle of water, the man who steadied you onto a boat — is noise around that figure rather than a separate budget.

One thing this page will not do is give you an exchange rate. The pound has moved sharply in recent years and any figure written here would be wrong by the time you read it. Check the Central Bank of Egypt, linked at the foot of this page, a few days before you fly and again when you land.

It will not give you a single total either, and that is deliberate rather than evasive. The right number for a fortnight of private guiding with four nights on the river is not the right number for a week in a Red Sea hotel, and a page that averaged the two would be useless to both. What follows is the method instead: the categories that genuinely consume cash, the rates our own tipping guidance describes, and the order in which to convert and carry the money. Work through it once and the figure falls out of your own itinerary.

Work the total out from the tipping

Tipping in Egypt, baksheesh, is part of how people in tourism are paid rather than a bonus for good service, and it is the largest single line in your cash budget. A guided day with a private Egyptologist and a driver runs to 15 to 20 euros per person, and each cruise night adds 5 to 10 for the crew box. Over ten days with four nights on the river that is roughly 180 to 220 euros per person. Multiply your own days by that and you have the backbone of the figure you are looking for.

The breakdown matters, because the money does not all move at the same time. A private Egyptologist guide is the largest single share at 10 to 15 euros per person per day, less in a group. Drivers take 5 euros per person per day. On a cruise there is usually a communal crew box handed over at the end, at 5 to 10 euros per person per night. Hotel porters and housekeeping take small notes rather than coins, and restaurant service is often already added to the bill.

Two adjustments before you write the number down. Guides, drivers and boat crew are normally settled at the end rather than daily, so that share has to survive the trip intact instead of being spent down on taxis. And the going rates shift with inflation, so ask your operator what is current when you book rather than trusting a figure from an old article, this one included if you are reading it some years from now.

One more correction that halves or doubles most people's estimates: the daily figure applies only to the days that actually have a guide and a driver in them. A trip with four guided days, four cruise nights and two days of your own in Cairo does not cost you the full daily rate ten times over. Mark each day in your itinerary as guided, on the water, or independent, and charge only what each category earns. That is the step almost nobody takes, and it is why the totals travellers quote each other vary by a factor of three.

A ten-day trip, added up line by line

Take the standard shape of an Egypt itinerary: four guided days on land with a private Egyptologist and a driver, four nights on a Nile cruise, and two days of your own in Cairo. The guided days come to 15 to 20 euros per person each, so 60 to 80. The cruise nights add 5 to 10 per person per night into the crew box, so 20 to 40. The independent days cost you small change — a taxi rounded up, a porter, a washroom attendant, a few payments at the sites — rather than a daily rate.

Add hotel porters and housekeeping across the whole stay, the handful of 20 to 50 pound notes that go out at the temples, and the fact that a cruise day usually carries a guide as well as a crew box, and you arrive at the 180 to 220 euros per person the operators describe. That is the tipping backbone for two people travelling privately for ten days: call it 360 to 440 euros between you, most of it handed over at the ends of things rather than spread evenly across the fortnight.

Now add the rest of the cash layer on top. A modest daily float for taxis, juice, water, a bakery and a market stall. Any balance your operator expects on arrival. A reserve for the separately ticketed sites you might decide on at the gate. Whatever visa fee you are paying in hard currency if you did not sort it online. That is four additions to one backbone, and it is the whole of the calculation.

Then carry a margin on top of the result. Not because the estimate is wrong, but because the failure mode in Egypt is never having tipped too little across a trip. It is standing in front of somebody at four in the afternoon with nothing smaller than a two hundred note. A float that runs twenty or thirty euros generous across a fortnight removes that problem entirely, and any surplus gets spent down in the final days anyway.

Group trips, couples and families need different numbers

The single biggest variable is whether your guide is yours alone. On a private trip the Egyptologist's share is 10 to 15 euros per person per day. In a group it drops to 3 to 5, and that is not a lower standard of service — fifteen people paying five euros each is a considerably better day for the guide than two people paying twelve. It is the largest structural difference between a private trip and a group one on this line of the budget, and it is worth knowing before you compare two quotes.

Two people travelling privately face the sharpest version of the arithmetic, because 10 to 15 euros each is the whole of a guide's tip for the day between the pair of you. That is a real cost difference rather than a rounding error, and it deserves to be priced honestly rather than discovered on day one. If you are choosing between a private itinerary and a small group one, add the tipping line to both before you compare the headline prices.

Families get caught by the opposite trap. Every figure quoted here is per person per day, so a family of four sharing one guide and one car pays four shares, not one — the arithmetic follows the travellers rather than the vehicle. This cuts against the general rule that families travel more cheaply per head in Egypt, because on the tour price a family of four fills a private car and guide, which is exactly where the per-person cost falls. The two lines move in opposite directions, and both are normal.

It also explains why published figures disagree so violently. Some sources quote per group and some per person, and the gap between them is a factor of several rather than a matter of opinion. When you ask your operator what is customary — and you should — ask for it per person per day, so you are comparing the same unit as everything on this page.

What else genuinely needs cash

Cash covers everything the package does not, and everything is a longer list than it sounds: taxis and tuk-tuks, juice bars and bakeries, market stalls, village shops, boatmen, toilets, and every tip. Outside Cairo — in Luxor, Aswan, the oases and the Red Sea towns once you step off hotel grounds — assume cash first and treat a working card terminal as luck rather than a plan.

Then there are the extras that get bought at the gate rather than in advance. Several of the things people most want to see are ticketed separately and at a premium: the inner chamber of the Great Pyramid, the tomb of Seti I, Tutankhamun's tomb, and photography permits in some places. Check which of those are already in your package. The tourist visa is a fixed fee bought online or on arrival and is rarely included in a tour price.

Ask one more question before you leave home. Many Egyptian operators take a deposit by transfer or card and then the balance on arrival, in cash or by card at their office, and card payment frequently carries a surcharge. Paying a balance in cash is normal in Egypt and is not a warning sign in itself, but you need to know it is coming, because it changes the size of the envelope you are carrying through the airport.

A short list of the decisions you may want to say yes to on the day, because they are the ones that turn a comfortable float into an uncomfortable one. Nefertari's tomb in the Valley of the Queens costs several times a standard Valley of the Kings ticket. Abu Simbel, three hours south of Aswan by road or a short flight, is almost always sold as an add-on rather than built into a package. A dawn balloon over the Luxor west bank is a fare in its own right, and it is called off for wind often enough that a spare morning is worth more than a spare hundred pounds. None of these is a trap. They are simply the four places where a traveller who budgeted only for tips finds themselves saying no for the wrong reason.

The visa, and the hard currency you need before immigration

The tourist visa is the one payment on the whole trip where hard currency is genuinely required rather than merely accepted. If you take the on-arrival route you buy it at a bank counter in the arrivals hall, in your hand, before you reach the immigration desk — which means it has to be money you carried through the airport rather than money you are about to change. It is a fixed fee, and it is rarely included in a tour price.

The e-visa route removes the question entirely, along with one of the two queues. You apply on the Egyptian government portal at visa2egypt.gov.eg before you fly, and you land holding a document instead of looking for a counter. Print the approval rather than trusting a phone that may be flat by the time anyone asks. For most visitors this is the better of the two routes, and the saving is an arrival rather than an amount of money.

Whichever you choose, check first that the route is open to your passport. Not every nationality can use either, some must apply through an Egyptian embassy in advance, and no travel page is the right source for which applies to you. Check the official portal and your own foreign ministry before you book anything non-refundable. The cash question is irrelevant if the paperwork was never available to you.

The practical instruction for your envelope is simple. If you are taking the visa on arrival, count the fee as clean hard currency that is separate from your exchange money and separate from your tipping money, and keep it somewhere you can reach it one-handed with a bag on your shoulder. If you have the e-visa, that is one less note to worry about at the worst possible moment of the trip.

Bring euros, dollars or sterling, and bring them clean

The Egyptian pound is a closed currency in practice. Banks and bureaux outside Egypt rarely stock it, and where one does the spread is punishing, so you bring hard currency and change it after you land. There are also legal limits on how much cash may be carried in or out, set by the central bank and revised from time to time, so check the current figure if you are moving a large amount.

US dollars are the most widely recognised and the most likely to be taken by a small exchange office in a provincial town. Euros are close behind. Sterling is fine in the cities, but there are fewer counters for it and the spread is a little worse, so if you are coming from Britain and already hold euros or dollars, take those instead. Ignore anyone offering a special street rate: since the 2024 float that gap has narrowed to the point where what you are being sold is a short-count, not a bargain.

Condition matters more than people expect, and it is the thing that goes wrong at the counter. Banks and exchange offices refuse foreign notes that are torn, written on, marked or badly creased, and older-series US dollar bills — the small-portrait designs — are often rejected outright or taken at a discount. Ask for new, clean, high-denomination notes when you buy your currency at home. Scottish and Northern Irish banknotes are frequently turned away, so bring Bank of England ones.

Order the currency a week or two before you fly rather than at the airport on the morning. A high-street branch asked in advance will usually hand over crisp new notes if you ask for them specifically; an airport bureau on a Saturday gives you whatever is in the drawer, at a worse rate, and a soft, creased fifty bought in a hurry in Britain is a soft, creased fifty that gets pushed back across a counter in Luxor. This is the cheapest piece of preparation on the entire list and the one most often skipped.

Change it in stages rather than all at once

There is no prize for arriving with a brick of Egyptian pounds. Change a small amount at the airport to cover the first transfer and a few tips, then do the rest in town, where the rate is better. Hotel desks are worse again than either. Changing in stages also means you are not carrying more than you need, and it is the simplest way to avoid the other end of the problem, which is a pile of pounds on the last morning.

Ignore signs advertising no commission, because the margin sits in the rate rather than in a fee. Look up the day's rate from a neutral source before you walk in, compare it with what you are offered, and keep your receipts: converting pounds back is possible at banks and airport counters, sometimes only if you still hold the original exchange receipt, and the rate going the other way is poor.

Count what you are handed, openly, before you walk away. The common moves are small and opportunistic rather than threatening: counting your change quickly and closing a hand around it, or handing back a twenty when you gave two hundred. Paper and plastic notes of the same value look different, which makes fast counting easy to get wrong, and that is exactly what the speed is for.

A workable rhythm for a ten-day trip: a small first change at an arrivals-hall bank counter, a proper change in town on your first full day, and a top-up before you board a cruise or head somewhere remote. Three visits, each of which takes ten minutes, and none of which leaves you holding a fortnight's cash on a bus. If a single change is unavoidable because your itinerary moves fast, do it at a bank in town rather than at the airport and split what you receive across the safe and your bag before you leave the building.

What the exchange counter will want, and how to compare two of them

Take your passport. Banks and licensed exchange offices generally want identification for a currency transaction, and the person who left it in the hotel safe is the person walking back for it. Take the notes flat rather than folded into a wallet, and take the receipt when it is offered rather than waving it away, because that slip is what makes converting leftovers back at the end possible at all.

Compare counters on the number of pounds you are actually handed, not on the rate written on the board and certainly not on a no-commission sign. Ask what you will receive for the note you are holding, in total, and then ask the place next door the same question. That is a fifteen-second comparison that removes every variable at once, and it is the only one that survives contact with a spread you cannot see.

Where to go matters more than when. A bank branch or a licensed exchange office in town is the standard answer, and both are ordinary, unremarkable places to walk into. An arrivals-hall bank counter is fine for a first small amount and worse for the rest. A hotel front desk is the most expensive of the lot, and its only virtue is that it is twelve feet from the lift. Street changers are not a fourth option worth exploring; since the 2024 float the gap they used to exploit has largely gone, and what remains of the business is the short-count.

Ask for a mix of denominations when the money is counted out, and say so before the drawer opens rather than after. A counter that hands you ten two hundred notes has done nothing wrong, but you now need a supermarket and a pharmacy before you can tip anybody. Asking for a proportion in fifties, twenties and tens takes one sentence and saves you the first two days of the note problem described further down this page.

The notes you will be handed, and why they confuse people

The currency is the Egyptian pound, written EGP, shown locally as LE or E£, and called the gineih in Arabic. You will meet all of those in a single day and they are the same thing. One pound divides into a hundred piastres, but inflation has eaten them, and the one-pound coin is about as small as money gets in practice. Coins are close to useless for tipping and offering them reads badly even when the arithmetic is right.

Notes in general circulation run from five pounds up to two hundred. The ten and the twenty exist as both paper and plastic versions with different designs, which is the single commonest reason a visitor miscounts a handful of change. Egyptian notes also carry their value in Arabic-Indic numerals on one face and Western numerals on the other, so there is always a side you can read at a glance — look at the corner numerals rather than the picture and the problem disappears.

Spend two minutes on this the first time you change money, sitting down, before you are standing at a temple gate. Get the two hundred and the hundred clear in your head, look at the plastic ten and twenty next to their paper equivalents, and fan the whole lot out once so you know what the stack looks like. It is an absurdly small piece of homework and it is the difference between paying a porter confidently and rummaging.

One more thing worth a glance is a price written as a bare number with no currency marked, which turns up occasionally in tourist-facing shops and menus. That is sometimes a dollar figure rather than a pound figure. Asking which is meant costs you nothing and settles it before the bill arrives rather than after.

Where cards actually work, and where they leave you stuck

Cairo takes cards far more than it did five years ago. Hotels, supermarkets, pharmacies, chain cafes and most mid-range and upper restaurants will run a Visa or Mastercard, and a growing number of major sites sell tickets by card at the window or online in advance. American Express is patchy. Contactless is normal in the capital and much less so outside it.

The catch is that terminals drop offline for hours when the connection goes, and in the smaller towns a card reader is the exception rather than the rule. Never run your cash to zero on the assumption that a machine will work. Treat the card as the thing that saves you from a bad ATM week, not as the way you pay for your day.

Two card details worth getting right in advance. The multi-currency travel cards British and European travellers carry do not hold Egyptian pounds, so a payment converts from your home balance at your provider's rate, which is usually fine — what is not fine is accepting the terminal's offer to charge you in sterling or euros, because that rate is set by the machine's operator and it is always worse. Choose pounds. And tell your bank your dates before you go, because Egypt trips fraud rules on plenty of cards; carry a second card from a different provider, stored somewhere other than your wallet.

The same decline applies everywhere the offer appears, not only at a restaurant terminal: a hotel checkout, an airline website, a ticket window, an ATM screen. Whoever asks whether you would like to be charged in your own currency is the party setting that rate, and they are not doing it as a favour. Pay in Egyptian pounds and let your own bank convert. It is one button, it appears perhaps a dozen times across a trip, and it is the only free money on this page.

ATMs are a top-up, not a plan

ATMs are common in cities and tourist areas, and they are the sensible way to replenish rather than the way to fund a trip. Use one attached to a bank branch where you can. Standalone machines in tourist strips, particularly those branded by international ATM operators rather than Egyptian banks, charge more and convert worse. Expect a fee from the Egyptian machine on top of your own bank's, and a per-transaction cap lower than you would like, which can mean two withdrawals in a row and two sets of fees.

Machines also run dry. Around long public holidays, Eid in particular, and across the Friday to Saturday weekend, popular ATMs empty and are not always refilled quickly. Withdraw before a holiday rather than during it, and use a machine during branch hours where you can: one that swallows a card in the evening leaves you waiting until the branch reopens, and there is nobody outside to open it for you.

That is the argument for carrying enough hard currency to be independent of them. A bad ATM week in Aswan should cost you an inconvenience, not your tipping money.

The arithmetic of when to use one is worth stating plainly, because people assume a machine is always the cheaper option. Two fees and a low cap on a modest withdrawal can easily cost more than the spread at a bank counter in town on a larger amount of cash you carried in. Use the counter for the bulk and the machine for the gap, rather than the other way round, and if a machine does swallow a card, note the bank and the branch and come back in opening hours rather than waiting at the slot.

The small-note float is the part that changes your week

This is the detail almost everyone underrates. Notes in general circulation run from five pounds up to two hundred, and the ten and twenty exist as both paper and plastic with different designs. Egypt runs on the small ones: a few pounds for the man watching the cars, the porter, the bathroom attendant, the person who fetches a chair. Nobody has change, or nobody admits to it, and handing over a two hundred note for a small service buys you a long negotiation or a shrug.

So build the float on purpose rather than hoping it accumulates. Break big notes where you are already spending — supermarkets, hotel bars, cafes — and ask for fives, tens and twenties. Keep them separate from your main wallet so you are not fanning a thick stack out in the street. Guides and drivers can usually swap notes for you, and most will, because they would rather you had them.

Carry roughly a day's worth and leave the rest in the hotel safe. You are also allowed to decline: a firm la, shukran ends most approaches without any friction, and Egyptians use it constantly themselves. Deciding your own limit before you land is what stops the constant small payments from wearing you down by day four.

A habit that does the work for you: once a day, pay for one ordinary thing with the largest note in your pocket specifically to get change back, whether or not you needed to buy it. A bottle of water in a supermarket, a coffee in a hotel lobby, a packet of something in a pharmacy. Done every morning it keeps the float topped up without any conscious effort, and it means the twenty and fifty pound notes that make the day work are always there when a hand goes out.

Cash on a Nile cruise, where the tap is furthest away

A cruise is the one part of the trip where a working ATM is furthest from you. You are on the water between Luxor and Aswan, the temple stops are short and scheduled, and the boat is not where you solve a cash shortage. Draw what you need in Luxor or Aswan before you board — the crew box included — rather than discovering the problem on the final evening with an envelope to hand over and nothing in it.

Work out that figure before you get on. Five to ten euros per person per night for the crew box, in Egyptian pounds and in denominations that can actually be counted, plus whatever your guide is owed at the end of the cruise days, plus a float for the temple stops and the small payments that come with them. That whole sum has to survive the sailing intact rather than being nibbled away by cold drinks on the sun deck.

Ask what is not included before you sail, because that is where a cash budget quietly fails. Drinks are usually extra, and alcohol carries heavy duty in Egypt, so imported wine on a boat costs roughly what it would at home rather than what local prices might lead you to expect. Optional excursions, spa treatments and the boat's shop all sit outside the package too.

Whatever you sign for on board is settled before you leave, so check on the first evening which currency the account is kept in and whether card payment carries a surcharge. That is a five-second question at the start of a cruise and an unpleasant surprise at the end of one. If the answer is that cards cost extra, you now know to keep more pounds back than you planned, which is exactly the sort of thing it is useless to learn on the last morning.

Cairo hotels and the Red Sea resorts, where the cash question softens

Not every part of an Egypt trip runs on notes. Inside the gates of a large hotel in Hurghada or Sharm el-Sheikh, cards work much as they would in Europe, the bar and the restaurant go on a room account, and the whole cash question shrinks to housekeeping and the occasional porter. The same is broadly true of a good Cairo hotel. If your itinerary is a week of diving and beach with two days of sightseeing bolted on, your cash requirement is a fraction of what a fortnight of guided touring needs.

Step outside the gates and you are straight back into the economy described everywhere else on this page. A dive centre, a taxi into town, a market, a restaurant on the strip, a boat trip — all of them want pounds, and the resort's card-friendliness has no reach beyond the barrier. The mistake is not budgeting too little; it is budgeting for the hotel and then spending your week outside it.

Room accounts deserve the same question as a cruise account. Which currency is it kept in, and does settling it by card carry a surcharge? Ask at check-in rather than at checkout. It takes one sentence, and the answer occasionally changes how much of your hard currency you should have changed.

The practical consequence for your envelope is that you should size the cash to the shape of the trip rather than to its length. Guided days and cruise nights are cash-hungry. Resort days and independent city days are not. A fortnight that is half guided and half beach needs roughly half the tipping backbone of a fortnight that is guided throughout, and pretending otherwise just means carrying money you will convert back at a bad rate.

What a phone pays for, and what it does not

Get a local SIM or an eSIM on arrival. It is not obviously a money question until you notice how much of Egyptian spending now runs through a phone: ride-hailing, maps, checking the day's exchange rate before you walk into a counter, calling a driver who cannot find your address. Coverage in the cities and along the Nile valley is good and thins out in the deep desert. Hotel wifi alone leaves you stuck the moment you step outside the lobby.

Uber and Careem both operate widely in Cairo, and their real value here is monetary rather than logistical: the fare is agreed before you get in, the route is recorded, and the argument about change never happens. In a street taxi the meter is rarely working and the first number is an opening position, which is why you agree the figure out loud before the engine starts. Carry small notes either way, because a tip is still a tip and a street cab is a reasonable fallback when your data gives out.

The Cairo metro is the cheapest way to cross the centre of the city by a wide margin, and it is bought with cash at the station rather than with a card. It does not reach the Giza plateau or most tourist hotels, so it is a supplement rather than a solution, but where both ends of your journey sit on the network it costs almost nothing.

Do not expect the domestic payment apps and wallets Egyptians use to be open to you. They are built around local bank accounts and local numbers, and a visitor on a two-week trip is not the customer they were designed for. Your realistic toolkit is a card for the places that take cards, cash for everything else, and a phone for the apps that price a journey rather than pay for it.

Carrying it safely, and the second card

Split it. Carry roughly a day's worth of pounds, keep the small-note float separate from your main wallet, and leave the rest of the cash and the spare card in the hotel safe. The realistic risk in Egypt is opportunistic short-changing and petty theft rather than anything more serious, and both are largely defeated by never having everything in one pocket. It also means you are never counting out a thick stack in the street, which is the behaviour that attracts the first problem in the first place.

Carry two cards from different providers and store them apart. Egypt trips fraud rules on plenty of cards, so tell your bank your travel dates before you go and make sure the phone number they hold for you receives messages abroad. If a card is frozen anyway, freezing and unfreezing it in your banking app often clears the block faster than telephoning a call centre from another country.

Know in advance how you would report a card lost without having the card in front of you: the app, a number saved somewhere other than your wallet, a note of which card is which. The awkward version of this problem is not the theft. It is standing in a hotel lobby trying to remember which bank issued the card that has gone.

Keep a small reserve of hard currency you never change at all, somewhere separate again. It covers an unexpected cost at the airport, it is a fallback if every machine in a town is empty, and it is still money when you get home, so it costs nothing to have carried it. Changing exactly the right amount is not a skill anybody has, and a margin in a currency that travels is the practical substitute.

Planning the last morning backwards

Work the end of the trip out in reverse. On the final morning you need enough Egyptian pounds for the last tips — the guide, the driver, the porter, the crew box if it has not already gone — plus food and small payments at the airport, and nothing beyond that. Everything above that figure is a problem you have created for yourself at a departures counter.

Converting pounds back is possible at banks and airport counters, sometimes only if you still hold the original exchange receipt, and the rate going the other way is poor enough to make the exercise annoying. There are also legal limits on how much cash may be carried out of the country, revised from time to time, which is a second reason not to be holding a large sum on the way to the airport.

So spend them down rather than converting. Pay the last hotel extras in cash instead of by card, buy the things you were going to buy anyway in the final days rather than the first, and treat whatever is genuinely left over as a tip. That takes ten seconds and beats a queue and a double conversion.

This is also the argument for changing money in stages that was made earlier in the practical rather than the theoretical register. A traveller who changed everything on day one arrives at the last morning with a decision to make; a traveller who changed in three instalments arrives with roughly the right amount and no decision at all. The stages are not about chasing a better rate. They are about not owning a currency you cannot spend.

What to ask your operator before you fly

Ask what they consider customary for the trip you have actually booked, per person per day. That single question resolves the per-group and per-person confusion that makes published figures unusable, and an operator knows what their own guides expect better than any article can, this one included. They also know what has happened to the rates since the last time anyone wrote about them.

Ask which staff you will meet. A trip where one guide travels with you throughout is a different structure from one where a local guide joins you in each city, and the second means several end-of-stay tips rather than one. The same applies to drivers on longer routes. Neither arrangement is better, but you cannot budget for the one nobody mentioned.

Ask whether anything is already included. A few operators build crew tips or a tipping kitty into the package price, and paying twice because nobody said so is simply a waste. In the same conversation, confirm which entrance tickets are inside the price and which are bought at the gate, because that is the other line that decides how much cash you carry.

And ask about the balance. Whether it is due in cash on arrival, in which currency, and whether paying by card at their office carries a surcharge. That is the single question with the largest effect on the size of the envelope going through the airport, it is entirely normal Egyptian practice rather than a red flag, and it is much better answered by email six weeks out than at a desk in Cairo on your first afternoon.

Putting a figure on it

Add four things. Your tipping total — 15 to 20 euros per person for each guided day, plus 5 to 10 for each cruise night. A modest daily float for taxis, drinks and small shops. Whatever balance your operator expects on arrival, if any. And a reserve for the premium tickets and permits you might decide to buy at the gate. That total, in clean euros or dollars, is what to bring.

Then plan how it moves. Change a little at the airport and the rest in town, in stages. Keep a day's worth on you in small notes and the remainder in the safe. Hold a card and a backup card from a different provider for the things cards are good at. If you overshoot, spend it down in the last few days rather than converting it back, because the rate going the other way will take a bite out of it.

If you want one sentence to carry through the airport: bring clean hard currency sized to your own itinerary rather than to a number you read somewhere, change it in stages, and spend the first day making sure you are never without a twenty pound note. The total matters far less than the denominations, and almost every story about money going wrong in Egypt is a story about the second problem rather than the first.