Egypt Holidays 2011

Exotic and exciting Egypt awaits your arrival. From the waters of the Nile to the Pyramids, to the exciting and bustiling city of Cairo, a luxury Kuoni tour to Egypt will be an experience you will never forget.

The Height of Luxury

It’s a little known fact that Virginia Wade and Valerie Singleton enjoy holidaying together in Egypt. For over twenty years they have been travelling together to Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, the Pyramids and the fertile Nile Valley to luxuriate in the splendid hotels on offer in the land of the Pharaohs. Their particular fondness for all things Egyptian was borne out of a chance meeting on the London Underground in nineteen eighty-five which was to lead to fun, adventure, conflict and a deadly roof-top fist fight in downtown Cairo.
Esther Rantzen

The ladies first meeting, over twenty years ago, was co-incidental. Valerie had been returning from the Live-Aid concert at Wembley Stadium on the late night Tube after being blown away by Queen’s legendary performance. Virginia was on her way to a late night dinner date with Cliff Richard and Esther Rantzen when they bumped into each other. It just so happened that Virginia had been reading up on Ancient Egypt as part of an Open University course, while Valerie had recently been obsessing over the film ’Cleopatra’ starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
Dental Floss

Virginia initiated the encounter by jokingly remarking on their mutual similitude. Valerie reciprocated and the rest is history.Once the two ladies realised their shared interest, there was only one thing to do - book a girl’s holiday to Egypt. Their first voyage was to the ancient sea port of Alexandria and was made particularly memorable when they shared a pedalo with Omar Sharif. The girls did all the pedalling while Omar sat wedged at the top of the slide for the full voyage while fishing for sea bream with a hastily assembled fishing rod made from dental floss and the wire from Virginia’s sports bra. Needless to say he ddn’t catch much. Then again, perhaps he shouldn’t have been using Werther’s Originals for bait.
Abrasive Manner

Three years later they decided to sample Cairo’s pleasures, and this time they were joined by Martina Navratilova. Martina insisted on getting the window seat on the way out and her abrasive manner rubbed the girls up the wrong way right from the start of the holiday.Things came to a head on top of a concrete municipal building in central Cairo. Virginia and Valerie thought it would be fun to re-create the fight scene from ’The Spy Who Loved Me’ with Wade playing Bond and Singleton as the portly bald-headed villain who takes a header off the top of the structure. Martina was to film the sequence using her then state-of-the-art JVC video camera. Of course, in the days before YouTube, it wasn’t so easy to freely broadcast home made videos, so a screening was planned for the following week when the trio had returned to the UK at a working men’s club in Hull.
Egyptian Government Building

Things were particularly stressful on the day of filming as the preceding three days had involved the ladies queueing for hours on end at the British Consulate in order to acquire the correct papers to allow them to film on the Egyptian government owned building. Anyway, they staged and filmed the sequence and were thoroughly chuffed with their performances.
Diamonds are Forever

However, trouble escalated when they got back to the hotel after filming only to realise that Martina had forgotten to put a tape in the video camera. In her own impromptu and inadvertent Bond homage, Virginia, in a blind rage, threw Martina out of the eleventh floor hotel window into the swimming pool below a la ‘Diamonds are Forever’. And that is why, any time you see Virginia Wade and Martina Navratilova commenting on TV at Wimbledon, that the atmosphere is decidedly icy.

On their most recent Egyptian excursion in 2006, Wade and Singleton visited the Pyramids. They were harassed incessantly by locals trying to coax them into riding a camel or buy all sorts of useless tat. They enjoyed their visit none the less, and both managed to climb to the top of a pyramid from where they surveyed the vastness of the Egyptian desert and reminisced misty-eyed about the good times they had enjoyed in this exotic and fascinating land.

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