Egyptian money?
 

Do I need Egyptian pounds etc for Cairo and a Nile River cruise or are American dollars OK?

US Dollars and Euros are widely accepted in Egypt and in fact most people would prefer that you pay them in a foreign currency(I believe that there is a black market for this). I would take lots of $1 bills for tips or "bakesh".

Another reason that you might want to carry dollars more than Egyptian pounds is that the Egyptian notes are very old and VERY DIRTY. Some notes are so disgusting that you will not want to handle them.

The strangest currency situation we ran into is that to enter Egypt they require the visa fee in US dollars - how strange is that for a country to require currency other than their own.

We found US paper money was fine - don't use coins as I have heard these are not readily exchangeable to local currency.

Second comment about the cleanliness of Egyptian paper notes - but try to think of it as all the fascinating places that paper money has been. It is also incredibly beautiful - with drawings of various historic sites on it.

I agree with Hanuman regarding using USD or Euro,especially in Cairo, Luxor, Aswan and on your Nile cruise boat. That said, we learned that those vendors in the small towns where you stop on your Nile cruise (Edfu, Esna, etc.) don't have easy access to banks to convert to local currency. They specifically preferred local Egyptian currency.

So it is still a good idea to change some of your funds to local currency (maybe $150) while the remainder can be in small denomination USD$1s (lots) $5s, $10s, $20s which can be used for tips on Nile cruise boat, your guide & driver, and larger purchases where you don't use your credit card.

We even found that many shopkeepers in the Khan el Khalili Bazaar preferred local currency. If you find you need more local currency you can find ATMs in Cairo and Luxor at competitive rates of exchange. Enjoy your trip.

It's true that most places prefer US currency, but we stayed at the Marriott Hotel in Cairo and found the small restaurants enclosed in the hotel compound would only accept Egyptian pounds. So you'll probably need a few pounds.

Enjoy, Egypt is wonderful.

Be careful not to exchange too much, or you won't be able to get it back into dollars. We exchanged money at the airport, and when we went to exchange back what we had left, they wouldn't take it - even though we had the receipt that showed we had exchanged it there. My husband ended up getting a new watch unexpected - it was actually a great value because we priced the watch for about 50% more back here, but still, we would have preferred to be able to exchange it back into American dollars.

We were able to exchange Egyptian pounds into US dollars after return to US at a Boston bank - in fact, our son just discovered a small pile of Egyptian money under a pile of junk in his room (3 years after trip) - and we just exchanged it here.