Every note QuickPass has published since March 2022, organised by region and linked to the section that holds the full text. All of it is free to read with no account and no paywall. The archive leans toward the Cairo-to-Aswan corridor, the route most readers travel, with Alexandria and the Sinai monastic sites covered more lightly. Each note carries the date it was last re-walked and the initials of the volunteer who walked it.
If a place you want is not here, tell us — every reader request is read and queued, and about half of the queue gets written within a year. We cannot promise to cover everything, because we are a small volunteer group and we only write about places we have walked ourselves. But the queue is genuinely a queue, not a wish-list we ignore.
The largest part of the archive — the Cairo museums, the Giza plateau, the Saqqara and Dahshur necropoles, Coptic and Islamic Cairo, the Khan and the Nile-side strip. Re-walked each season.
The Egyptian Museum on Tahrir, the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation, the Coptic Museum, the Museum of Islamic Art, and the smaller permanent collections. Each note has the ticket breakdown, the room worth your hour and the side door.
The Giza pyramids and Sphinx, the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, the Serapeum, the Dahshur Bent and Red pyramids, Memphis. With a half-day plan combining Saqqara and Dahshur from Cairo.
The Hanging Church, Ben Ezra, the Coptic walking quarter, the Citadel of Saladin, Sultan Hassan, Al-Muizz Street, and the Khan el-Khalili after dark with realistic haggle ranges.
Tamer's main beat. The Theban temples on the east bank, the Valley of the Kings and Queens, Hatshepsut, Medinet Habu, the Ramesseum, plus the Luxor museums and the east-bank logistics.
Karnak with the Hypostyle Hall, the Sacred Lake, the open-air museum and the talatat reconstruction; Luxor Temple morning and evening; the Avenue of Sphinxes; the Luxor and Mummification museums.
The general ticket and what it includes, the Seti I supplement (worth it), Nefertari (photography rules tightened April 2026), Tutankhamun (skippable), Ramses VI, and the tomb-rotation cycle the SCA runs.
Deir el-Bahari, Medinet Habu with the Sea Peoples relief, the Ramesseum, the Colossi of Memnon, Deir el-Medina, the Tombs of the Nobles cluster.
The far-southern beat. Aswan as a city, the temples reached by boat, the High Dam, Abu Simbel by convoy and by flight, the Nubian Museum, and the river-side cruise-stop temples at Edfu, Esna and Kom Ombo.
Philae (morning visit recommended over the evening show), Elephantine Island, Kitchener's Island, the Nubian Museum — one of the strongest single notes in the archive — the unfinished obelisk, the High Dam.
Both temples at Abu Simbel, the 04:00 convoy versus the flight, the equinox solar alignment (22 Oct and 22 Feb, sells out three months ahead), and the Lake Nasser cruise stops.
The river-side temples every Nile cruise stops at, plus Dendera as a day trip from Luxor for the painted ceiling. All reachable independently by train and taxi if you are not on a cruise.
Hala's regional beat. Alexandria with the Bibliotheca and the Greco-Roman Museum, the catacombs and the Roman amphitheatre, plus the Sinai monastic sites (Saint Catherine, Mount Sinai) and the practical area notes.
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina and its embedded museums, the Greco-Roman Museum (reopened 2023), the catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa, Pompey's Pillar, the Roman amphitheatre, Fort Qaitbey, and the Bahari fish evening.
Saint Catherine's Monastery with the icon collection, the Mount Sinai overnight climb, Dahab and Sharm el-Sheikh as base cities, and the Ras Mohammed snorkelling note.
The practical pre-trip basics — visa, SIM, money, taxis, dress code, water — and the month-by-month weather, crowds and closures notes. Re-checked twice a year.
QuickPass runs on a published re-walk rota, and the rota is the same internally as it is here. We do not hold a fresher tier of notes for anyone — every reader sees the same archive, because there is no paid tier to hold anything back from. High-traffic Cairo and Luxor notes are re-walked each season; mid-traffic regional notes twice a year; low-traffic specialist notes once a year. When the Supreme Council of Antiquities changes a ticket price or a tomb-rotation schedule, the affected notes are updated within a week and the change is logged where readers can see it.
| Section | Notes | Last re-walk | How often |
|---|---|---|---|
| Great Collections | 20 | April 2026 | Each season (Cairo) / twice a year (regional) |
| Temple Routes | 31 | March 2026 | Each season (Cairo/Giza) / twice a year (south) |
| Day by Day | 11 | April 2026 | Twice a year |
| Area Notes | 15 | February 2026 | Once a year |
| Before You Go | 1 master | April 2026 | Twice a year |
| Best Months | 1 master | March 2026 | Twice a year |
| With Children | 10 | March 2026 | Once a year |
Notes re-walked less than ninety days ago are current; the rest are fresh until their next scheduled walk. Anything readers flag as changed in between is checked and corrected within a working week. The whole point of the rota is that an unattended free guide becomes a stale archive within eighteen months, and a stale archive that looks current is worse than no guide at all. The rota is what keeps QuickPass honest about its own freshness.
Each note represents a visit by a volunteer who bought an ordinary ticket and walked the place, a second confirming visit a few weeks later where the photograph is taken, a fact-check by Salma against the running register of opening hours and prices, and a plain-language edit by Hala before it goes online. Nothing in the note is sponsored, nothing is comped, and the verdict is whatever the volunteer actually found. The total effort per note is roughly eight to twelve volunteer-hours across the two visits, the fact-check and the edit — which is why a small volunteer group produces a careful 106-note archive rather than a sprawling thousand-note one. We would rather cover thirty-two places well than three hundred badly.
The phrase appears on every page of this guide, and it is worth being concrete about what it involves, because it is the single thing that separates QuickPass from the affiliate-driven pages that crowd the search results. When a volunteer walks a site for a note, they buy a normal adult ticket at the gate, queue like everyone else, and spend the full recommended time inside. They carry a small notebook and a phone, time the visit against a watch, and write down the things that are not in the official signage — where the queues form, which desk sells the camera permit fastest, which room rewards the time and which one most people skip without missing anything, where the shade is, where the toilets are, and what the place actually costs once the supplements are added up. None of this is glamorous, and none of it can be done from a desk.
The second visit, a few weeks later, is the confirming one. The volunteer returns on a different day of the week and at a different time, checks that the first visit's notes still hold, and takes the single photograph that runs with the note. The two-visit rule exists because Egyptian sites change — a tomb closes for conservation, a ticket price moves, an entrance is rerouted around building works — and a single visit can capture a temporary state as if it were permanent. Two visits, spaced apart, catch most of that. The photograph is taken on the second visit specifically so that what you see in the note is what you will see when you arrive, not a stock image of a different season or a different decade.
A commercial travel site is rewarded for volume — more pages mean more search traffic mean more advertising or affiliate income. QuickPass has no such incentive, and the absence of it shows in the size of the archive. We cover thirty-two places carefully rather than three hundred badly, because the careful coverage is the entire value. A note that has been walked twice, fact-checked and kept current through a re-walk rota is worth more to a traveller than fifty notes scraped from press releases and never verified. The 106-note ceiling is roughly what a small group of unpaid volunteers can keep genuinely current, and we would rather hold that line than dilute it.
This also shapes what we choose to cover. We write about the places along the Cairo-to-Aswan corridor that most readers actually travel, plus Alexandria and the Sinai monastic sites, because those are the places our volunteers can reach often enough to keep the notes fresh. We do not write about places we cannot re-walk on the rota, however interesting they might be, because a note we cannot keep current is a note we cannot stand behind. When a reader asks for somewhere new, it goes into the queue, and it gets written only when a volunteer can commit to walking it twice and keeping it current — not before.
Each note follows the same shape, on purpose, so you can find what you need fast. It opens with the practical line — opening hours and the ticket breakdown in Egyptian pounds, including the supplements and the student rate. Then the verdict: what is worth the time inside, what is worth the supplement, and what is honestly skippable. Then the side door — the one practical trick that saves a queue or an hour. Then the meta line at the foot: the date the note was last re-walked, the date of the next scheduled walk, and the initials of the volunteer who wrote it. If a correction has come in since the last walk, it sits at the top of the note with the date and, where the reader agreed, their name.
The shape is deliberately boring, because a guide you read at the museum gate on a phone needs to be predictable. You should never have to hunt through a note for the ticket price or the opening hours — they are always in the same place. The prose is kept plain and short for the same reason. We are not trying to write travel literature; there are better writers than us doing that. We are trying to answer, in forty seconds, the four questions you have between the taxi and the ticket booth.
No account, no paywall, no advertising. Start with the section that matches your trip, or write to the desk if the place you want is not yet covered.
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