Astrotrips Takes Travellers from the Desert to the Stars

For vacationers in Cairo, a city so deep and expansive it can be easy to forget there’s anything outside of it, the night sky is often the last place they’d look. Why gaze upwards when you’ve got the Pyramids of Giza in front of you? But even those very same pyramids were built to reflect the constellations, each one aligned with the three stars in Orion’s Belt - and AstroTrips, an Egyptian tourism agency with a focus on astronomy, is out to reignite a passion for the cosmos in locals and tourists alike by taking them far beyond the constraints of the capital.

Established in 2013, AstroTrips has continually offered adventures in various parts of Egypt’s deserts, where the sparkling night sky alights uninterrupted. Their outings come with astronomy talks that range from a starter’s guide to celestial navigation, to more involved lectures, star gazing sessions, astrophotography exercises and telescope observations.

For those eager to get an eyeful of the Milky Way, Astrotrips is offering a two-day weekend trip to the El Heiz Observatory in El Heiz, a quiet agricultural village found 417 km southwest of Cairo.

Taking place from September 3rd to September 4th, the trip will leave Cairo at 11:00AM and return to the city the next day at 5:00PM. The trip is all-inclusive with accommodation, breakfast and dinner, and entrance fees included in the ticket costs, with prices starting from EGP 1,100.

To sign up, you can visit the link in bio on Astrotrip’s Instagram page at @astrotrips. All visitors entering Egypt, including nationals, must be in possession of a negative PCR test taken at a maximum of 72 hours before their flights.