Guidebooks
The Lonely Planet is best for practical and useful advice and tips. The Footprint handbook is better for background and historical information. The Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness guide (lent to me by a friend) has great pictures and maps.

Useful and Practical
Bring a hat and sun block. And good walking shoes. And do check the weather (see weather forecast here and here) - Egypt may be on the fringe of the sahara desert, but it can get quite cool/cold, particularly in the evenings, and particularly in the north where Cairo is located.

Cameras
We brought two cameras - a Nikon Coolpix 4500 and a Canon EOS 300D. Lesson Number 1: the LCD screens on digital cameras are useless under blazingly bright sunlight. If your camera does not have a viewfinder, you can just about forget using your digital camera. Either that or aim and shoot blindly! We therefore hardly used the Nikon Coolpix 4500 - although it has a viewfinder, it’s a bit awkward to use. Furthermore, with the option of the fabulous Canon EOS 300D SLR, it was obvious we were going to choose the latter whenever we could.

A problem I foresaw before leaving for the holiday was flash memory for the digital cameras: how much memory (in MBs) would I need for the entire holiday and how many flash cards would I have to buy? Would I have to sacrifice the quality of the pics (in MPs) in order to save on memory space (MBs)? More importantly how much would it all cost?

I found the (near) perfect solution.

Since I already own a 40GB iPod, all I had to do was buy a Belkin Media Reader. This nifty device enabled me to transfer the pictures on the flash memory cards to the iPod. Once that’s done, the card can be reformatted and reused. Over and over again. Voila! No need to buy a zillion memory cards - all I needed was one. (And perhaps an additional one for backup.) And I didn’t face any limitation on the number of pictures I could take - since I had about 30GB of free space on my iPod, with an average file size of 2.5MB, I could easily fit more than 12,000 pictures on my iPod!!

In the event, I took with me a 16MB, a 128MB and a 256MB cards - fortunately for me both the Nikon and the Canon use compact flash cards, so the cards were interchangeable. I brought back exactly 1,028 pictures, using about 2.23GBs of space on my iPod (this excludes many shots which were discarded along the way). That works out to an average of about 100 pictures a day!

This is a much more portable solution compared to bringing a laptop while being equally effective. It was also very useful since I could listen to my MP3s along the way!

I bought the Belkin Media Player in Singapore where it costs SGD190.51. I believe it retails for MYR499 in Kuala Lumpur. However, Belkin has recently released a new but similar product called a Digital Camera Link. For all intents and purposes, it does the same thing as the Media Reader, but I’m not certain that it’s actually a better product.

Posted on May 11th, 2004 by jl
Filed under: The Egypt Holiday