DYLAN BICKERSTAFFE – STUDY/ADVENTURE TOURS

FUTURE TOURS

October 8th 2011 I shall be leading a 4 x 4 tour from Cairo to Bahariya,  Siwa, El Alamein, Alexandria, Giza and Saqqara for Ancient World Tours, which follows the theme of Alexander the Great in Egypt. See www.ancient.co.uk and contact 020 7917 9494 (INT +44 20 7917 9494) 

Further tours are in planning for both 2011 and 2012. Please contact me if you have any special areas of interest.

GENERAL/PAST TOURS

I have been leading tours of my own design to Egypt since 2000. The first of these were organised through Ancient World Tours (AWT) and, as a result of their success, I was asked to lead a number of ’standard’ tours from their brochure. This arrangement worked especially well over three seasons with the Luxor-based Temples and Tombs tour, where my intimate knowledge of specific sites of the New Kingdom particularly enhanced the experience. In November 2009 I led the very successful Shadow of Ramesses tour, and in March 2010 I am leading The Valley of the Kings, with a similar itinerary to Temples and Tombs.  
Tours of my own design have also been included in the AWT brochure, the most popular being Pharaohs of the Sun which recently appeared there for the fourth year running.

Latterly I have begun to run my own tours independently, working with trusted local guides and ground agents, and organising cheap flights from the UK. You will soon be able to read about the first of these, Desert Signs and River Shrines - which ran early in 2007 and was a great success - in an extended account on this site. If anything even more successful and enjoyable was my second independent tour Oases and Middle Egypt which ran in November 2008, exploring the oases and travelling off-road in the Western Desert in 4×4s, and visiting many rarely visited sites in Middle Egypt, as well as the better known ones such as Amarna, Beni Hassan and Deir el Bersha. An account of this extremely good humoured tour will be provided as soon as time allows, but a small selection of images from it can now be viewed here (see Gallery).

My tours are generally designed around a specific theme and combine exploration of more unusual and inaccessible sites with fresh insights into the better known monuments. With Pyramids and Faiyum (2000) the emphasis was on rarely seen monuments of the Middle Kingdom, together with pyramids from both Middle and Old Kingdoms. Amarna via Oases (2003) was designed to gain access to Amarna and other interesting monuments of Middle Egypt, travelling from Luxor through the spectacular western desert and seeing little visited sites in the oases. Aswan and the Upper Nile Valley (2004) flew to and from Luxor from the UK, calling at interesting and unusual sites on the journey to and from Aswan. The local monuments were all explored whilst based in Aswan, and day trips taken to Silisila, Kanais etc. Pharaohs of the Sun (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) examines the Sun Cult of Ancient Egypt with monuments of the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom with special emphasis on the Amarna period. For this reason the tour is based in first Cairo, then Minya (the sites of Amarna/Akhetaten extend over three days), and finally Luxor.

Future Tours will not be restricted to Egypt and will include Mycenaens and Minoans; Syria; Turkey; Libya.

Contact me if you would like me to organise a trip for you.