Cairo is a big city, with a metropolitan population of around 20 million people. Many people zip through on tours, stopping at the pyramids of Giza and the Egyptian Museum and then moving on. We opted to spend four days exploring the city on our own sans tours or tour guides. It was a really interesting city, with both rewards and challenges, and the kids had a great time. Here are some tips and ideas for things to see and do when visiting Cairo with kids.
Safety
The first thing people ask and the first thing we want to emphasize is that Cairo is safe. Egypt gets a bad rep in the international press and media, but it isn’t deserved or accurate. The city of Cairo is full of warm, welcoming people. There are people (including women) moving around the streets at all hours (we know, because we arrived at 3:30 am and left to the airport at 1 am!). People there told us that no one will mess with you or try to take anything because everyone else around would immediately jump in to help you.
We felt very safe walking around, including with Paola’s camera hanging around her neck. We read that Cairo is safer than almost anywhere you are coming from, and we certainly agree with that assessment. (Not to belabor the point, but when a man attacked people in mosques in New Zealand, the press didn’t declare that New Zealand was a dangerous country; the media talked about the shooter and who he was as an individual. But if some crazy person does something in Egypt, the press talks about Egypt as a dangerous country. It’s a different standard and one that doesn’t accurately reflect how little crime there is in Egypt, a country with 80 million people.)
Friendly People
We’ll probably say this a lot in our posts about Egypt, but the people are incredibly warm and welcoming, especially to children. Of everywhere we’ve been, they may top the list for warmest to our children—and that’s a competitive list! Before visiting Cairo, we read many travel blogs complaining about touts and locals trying to aggressively sell things. We had a very different experience and perspective. We just kept a smile on our faces and answered people politely, and they reacted warmly to our approach. Sure, sometimes we had to say “no thank you” several times, but then people would say okay and “Welcome to Egypt” and wish us well. We never felt hassled or defensive, and we were really bothered by how negatively other travel blogs describe the people in Cairo.
Moving Around the City
Anyway, back to our travels… we moved around Cairo on Uber. It works—with a little patience and sense of adventure—and it’s incredibly cheap.
Uber drivers are everywhere and you’ll get one within a few minutes. But the traffic in Cairo can be intense and the on and off ramps of various roads are unforgiving—so if your driver goes up when he should go down or left when he should go right as the road splits, it can add fifteen minutes to loop back to where you were. It’s not a big deal, since our Uber rides ranged from 70 cents to about three or four dollars, but it can take a while to get from one place to another, especially if you want to cross a decent amount of the city in one go. Also it’s worth keeping an eye on your own phone as you ride in the Uber because sometimes the drivers aren’t exactly sure where they’re going.
Side note: Many travelers like to paint Cairo roads and traffic as insane, but there is a flow and there are rules of the road. Basically, you fit as many cars as you can across the road and you take turns squeezing and merging when the road narrows. You’re never going that fast so, in our opinion, it’s far less dangerous than the freeways of LA, for example.
Here are some ideas for things to see and do when visiting Cairo with kids:
The Pyramids of Giza.
Of course! We spent three days there, and wrote a whole separate post on the pyramids, available here.
Egyptian Museum.
This is the world-famous museum that houses the treasures of King Tut and many other Egyptian antiquities. We lined up about twenty minutes before the museum opened and made a beeline to the back of the upper floor where the King Tut room is located.
Most people visiting the museum do so on a tour or with a tour guide. Because we were on our own, we got to the King Tut room way ahead of everyone and had it entirely to ourselves (along with another solo traveler with a like mindset). It was truly amazing to see King Tut’s death mask, along with other spectacular gold treasures from his tomb, and the kids loved it as much as we did.
We then wandered through the museum and visited the room with actual mummies (which costs extra money, but we thought it was worth it). The kids quickly reached their limit on ancient Egyptian antiquities, as did we, and so all in all we spent about an hour in the museum. The guidebooks say you could easily spend two days in there, but that wasn’t how we felt… The museum could definitely use a facelift as there is very little signage and so it’s hard to learn very much while visiting—so you either need to do research ahead of time or hire a guide if you want to fully appreciate what you are seeing.
For us, with younger kids, we didn’t see the need to drag the kids through some kind of tour and seeing the King Tut treasures and the mummies was enough of a treat.
Tahrir Square.
The Egyptian Museum sits on one end of Tahrir Square, where the Egyptian revolution of 2011 took place. It was interesting to see the square itself, which is a huge open space dominated by an enormous traffic circle.
Khan el-Khalili.
Khan el-Khalili is the main souk/bazaar in central Cairo. It is a fun place for the whole family to wander around and look at handicrafts and souvenirs. The people there really loved our kids and welcomed them with smiles and high fives and even some free gifts.
Cairo Citadel.
The Cairo Citadel is a fortified complex sitting on a hill above the city. The walls were built starting in the late 1100s and there has been a continuous military presence of some form or other on the hill ever since. The medieval walls are imposing and impressive—there are huge round towers placed all around tall, thick walls. They also dug a deep well into solid rock in the late 1100s, which was an amazing feat of engineering at the time.
Today, the citadel area has three mosques and a couple of military/police museums that travel guides describe as underwhelming or under repair (we didn’t visit them). The main sights are the awesome view over the city and the Muhammad Ali Mosque.
Built in the mid-1800, The Muhammad Ali Mosque is quite large and impressive, with twin minarets and beautiful lamps hanging inside. It is basically a tourist sight now and is easily visited. The tour groups tend to pass through on a very linear line, and we were able to get away from everyone by walking just a little bit in a different direction. The view over Cairo from the citadel is really neat and gives you a great perspective of the city from above. On a clear day you can see to the pyramids—we were able to see them when we were there, but there was a fair amount of sand in the air so they didn’t show up in the photographs.
Overall, the citadel was a great place for our kids as they could run around freely without worrying about traffic or people. We spent a few hours there letting them play around.
Zamalek.
Zamalek, a greener and more upscale part of the city, is an island in the Nile river. It has many embassies, a private club, and the Marriott. It is also home to a burgeoning food scene. We were just across the river from the island and visited a few times, mostly for food. Some of the restaurants we’d recommend are Cairo Kitchen and Zooba.
Aquarium Grotto Garden.
This is an interesting little park on Zamalek. It isn’t actually an aquarium, but it’s a great place for kids to blow off steam in a rare green space in the city. It is a nicely landscaped park from the 1800s with artificial hills and caves, which make great exploring for kids. One of the caves has a big colony of very loud (and quite large) bats, which was a lot of fun to encounter. There is also a nice playground hidden away in one corner of the park. We visited this park on our last day in Cairo when we felt like we’d done enough sightseeing and it was a really nice place to just relax in the city.
Other things that one can do in Cairo with kids include a cruise in the Nile, visiting Al-Azhar Park, or visiting the Pharaonic Village. We didn’t get around to doing these, but they all sounded like interesting options.
All in all, the highlight of our visit to Egypt was the pyramids, but we also enjoyed exploring the city. If you visit, just go with the flow and keep a smile and positive attitude, and you’ll definitely enjoy yourself!
