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The Egyptian pound, a habit of tipping that has its own name, and the reason no exchange rate is printed anywhere on this page.

A desert country with cold nights, dusty air, a modest dress code and more walking on uneven stone than most itineraries admit.

Sleeper trains down the Nile, a metro that is the only sane way across Cairo, and a river that has been the main road for five thousand years.

Which parts of Egypt the advisories rule out, which they explicitly do not, and why that second half matters more than the first.

Bean breakfasts, a national dish assembled from three starches at once, and a food culture built on feeding a lot of people well and cheaply.

A conservative, hospitable and very sociable country where dress, photography and the word for tipping are the three things visitors most often get wrong.

A lunar calendar, a Coptic one, a pharaonic spring festival everybody still keeps, and a sunrise that reaches the back of a temple twice a year.

Egypt sits at the join of Africa and the Arab world, and the Nubian south carries a displacement story that the monuments above it are famous for.

Ancient sites were not built for wheelchairs and most have not been adapted, but more of Egypt is reachable than the reputation suggests.

Ten forest sites along 200km of the Kenyan coast, holding the remains of Mijikenda villages. Sacred ground first, and a visitor site only rarely.

Dry stone walls up to four and a half meters high, laid without mortar in the sixteenth century, in the hills northwest of Migori.

Ten shrines near Kumasi are all that survives of Asante architecture. They are also working places of worship, which changes how you visit.

A granite range in the far northeast, sacred for centuries, twice stormed by colonial troops, and still drawing pilgrims to its ancestor shrine.