A Girls' Getaway: Exploring Cairo, Giza, and Jordan

There were four of us, a group chat that had said 'we should really do this' for two years, and a decision made at eleven at night on a random Tuesday that this was finally the year. Egypt first, then Jordan — a little over a week that we're all still talking about the following Christmas.

Landing in Cairo, Overwhelmed in the Right Way

Nobody warns you properly about the first twenty minutes out of Cairo airport — the traffic, the noise, the sheer size of a city of over twenty million people moving at once. It's a lot, and then it isn't, because by the time we'd checked into our hotel and stood on a balcony with the city lit up below us, the overwhelm had already turned into something closer to excitement. We ordered koshary from room service because none of us could agree on going back out, and it remains, unreasonably, one of the best meals of the whole trip.

Sunrise at the Pyramids, No Crowds Yet

We were up before it was light, which felt insane at the time and made complete sense about forty minutes later. The Giza Plateau at sunrise is a different place than the Giza Plateau at noon — no tour buses yet, no vendors, just the Pyramids catching the first orange light while the sky behind them was still half-dark. We climbed up to the Nine Pyramids View point and just stood there for a while, not really talking, which is not something four friends on a trip together do very often.

The Flying Dress in the Dunes

This was the one we'd all seen on Instagram a hundred times and half-doubted we'd actually pull off. A flowing dress, a stretch of open sand dunes outside the city, and a photographer who knew exactly how to time the wind so the fabric caught the light instead of just whipping around chaotically. It took a few tries — sand in shoes, sand in everything, honestly — and a lot of laughing between takes, but the shots that came out of it are the ones that ended up printed and framed, not just posted and forgotten.

One Last Egyptian Evening

Our last night in Cairo we did almost nothing, on purpose — a quiet felucca out on the Nile as the sun went down, the city noise fading out the further we sailed from the bank. After four days of being genuinely dazzled by ancient Egypt, that hour on the water, wind on the sail instead of an engine, was exactly the kind of ending the Cairo half of the trip needed before we packed for Jordan.

Crossing Into Jordan

The mood shifts the moment you land in Jordan — smaller, quieter, the desert reddening the further south you drive. We based ourselves for a couple of nights near Petra, which turned out to be the right call, because Petra is not something you rush through in an afternoon, however much a shorter itinerary might try to convince you otherwise.

Petra by Lantern Light

Walking the Siq at night is nothing like walking it during the day. The narrow canyon that leads into Petra was lined with hundreds of paper lanterns, the only light for most of the walk, until it opens out and the Treasury appears lit up ahead of you — the same building everyone recognizes from photos, but seen for the first time in candlelight instead of full sun. Bedouin musicians were playing near the base of it, and we sat on the ground in the cold desert air and didn't say much for a while. It's one of those experiences that photographs badly and matters enormously anyway.

Wadi Rum Under a Ridiculous Number of Stars

We added an overnight in the desert almost as an afterthought, and it turned into one of the best decisions of the trip. Wadi Rum at night, away from any real light pollution, makes you realize how few genuinely dark skies most of us ever actually see. We slept in a Bedouin camp, ate dinner cooked in the sand, and lay outside afterward picking out constellations none of us could actually name, which somehow didn't matter at all.

The Little Chaos of Traveling as Four

Nobody warns you how much logistics four grown women generate — whose turn it was for the bathroom mirror, who packed the phone charger everyone needed, who fell asleep in the van by 8 PM every single night no matter what time we'd started. There were small arguments about pace, mostly resolved by whoever was hungriest at the time, and there was a lot of laughing about things that weren't actually that funny, the way things only are when you're overtired and somewhere extraordinary at the same time.

Splitting the Cost, Without the Awkwardness

One of the quieter reasons this trip worked as well as it did: we booked it as a single private group rather than four separate bookings stitched together. One vehicle, one guide, one invoice split evenly four ways, instead of four people trying to coordinate separate itineraries that happened to overlap. It sounds like a small thing until you've tried to plan a group trip the other way and spent more energy on logistics than the actual travel deserved.

What We'd Do Differently

If we did it again, we'd give Wadi Rum two nights instead of one — by the time we'd figured out where the best stargazing spot near camp actually was, it was time to leave. We'd also build in one genuinely lazy day somewhere in the middle instead of stacking everything back to back, because by day five even the most enthusiastic person in the group was running on fumes by early afternoon.

• Comfortable, closed sandals or trainers — Petra and the dunes both mean a lot of walking on sand and uneven stone
• A light scarf or shawl, useful for sun, wind, and covering shoulders at religious or conservative sites
• A portable charger — between two photoshoot-worthy countries, phone batteries do not last
• A printed or downloaded copy of your itinerary and hotel confirmations, in case signal is patchy in Wadi Rum
• An open mind about sand getting into absolutely everything, because it will

Food We Still Talk About

Somewhere between the Pyramids and Petra we became fully unserious about trying everything put in front of us — koshary in Cairo, fresh-baked bread from a Nubian village near Aswan on a detour we almost skipped, mint tea in Jordan strong enough to wake the dead. None of it was planned as a food trip. Most of what we remember best from the meals wasn't even the food itself, it was sitting somewhere unglamorous with good light and no schedule for the next hour, which barely happened anywhere else on the itinerary.

None of us expected the Jordan half to hit as hard as the Egypt half did — we'd booked it almost as an add-on, and it ended up being half the reason we still talk about this trip. What stuck wasn't any single site, honestly. It was doing all of it together, four friends who'd been saying 'we should really do this' for two years and finally just did.