Luxor Tourist Trap Tips by NoodleT

A guy at Luxor temple offered to take a photo of us but his mate jumped in the photo too! When it had been taken, the guy who took it asked for baksheesh - not surprising I guess, but so did his mate, and all he had done was stand next to us!

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At Least Do This: Take your own photos or ask a fellow tourist to take one of you both.

This happened to us at one of the Papyrus shops at the back of the Mercure Coralia Hotel. An Egyptian stood outside the shop waving a piece of paper, he asked us if we could read it and told us that it was the address of one of his family’s friends in America. He wanted to write her a birthday card and so could we come inside the shop and show him what to write,
Naïve as we were, we followed him inside the shop and wrote a few pleasantries on a piece of paper – he had to search for the paper so you’d have thought we’d have realised then it was all a big scam. He was very grateful and in exchange he wrote our names in hieroglyphics and Arabic on some papyrus, as he did this he invited us to take a look round his shop.
We were actually going to buy some papyrus pictures before we let so we didn’t mind looking round too much and they were pretty nice. We chose one that we wanted and then the haggling started. We got him down to 50 Egyptian pounds (about £6) and then he asked if we could add on an extra 5 Egyptian pounds for him – he told us he had a large family to feed. We didn’t argue.
So we handed him 70 Egyptian pounds (A 50 and a 20 pound note), obviously expecting 15 in change, but he told us he didn’t have change so off he went to get some.
In the meantime his boss, who was also in on the plot, came to see us and told us that his colleague would be ages before he got the change and so why didn’t we choose a smaller papyrus picture that we liked and have that instead. Obviously the whole extra five pounds for his family story, though it may have been true, was a way of getting a sum of money from us that would require change, allowing him to disappear whilst we could then be persuaded to take another picture rather than wait.
I’m afraid to say it worked, we realised the whole thing had been a set up and just wanted to get out of there. We chose another picture and left.

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At Least Do This: Take some change and use your brain!