We could have gone on a package tour. We would still have seen the Pyramids, the Valley of the Kings, Karnak, Deir al-Bahri and the Egyptian Museum, and probably ridden a camel, drifted down the Nile in a felucca and snorkeled in the Red Sea. But Tricia and I were modern girls, 23 years old and doggedly independent. Wisely or otherwise, we dismissed all package tours with deepest scorn.

We bought a Lonely Planet guide, booked a British Airways flight (£300 with an under-26 card), exchanged a series of e-mails with the proprietor of the Berlin Hotel and, without being in any way prepared for the reality, found ourselves in central Cairo.

It is not a desirable place to spend any amount of time. At least not for a woman. Think the grottiest bits of South London, but hotter, smellier, shabbier, muddier and more crowded, with a driving style to terrify Parisians, and the creepiest men on Earth. Aside from the vast and bewildering, but unmissable, museum, we stuck to the outskirts.

And thanks to a general inability to distinguish between under-26 and student cards, we paid half price for monuments across the country: £3 in Giza and £1 each for Saqqara and Dahshur.

For £10, we spent a day sunbathing and swimming at the Oberoi Mena House hotel (slap bang next to Giza plateau and at least £150 a night). It was worth every piastre to lift my dripping head out of the cool water, open my eyes and re-register that, yes, those big triangular things really were the Pyramids.

The night train to Luxor (if that isn't an Agatha Christie novel, it should be) took 10 hours but only cost £12 first class. Smaller and quieter than Cairo, Luxor was also cheaper: £12 for a double room with - utter bliss - an en-suite shower-room.

We saw Luxor Temple at sunset for £12. Karnak, in the glaring light of day, was even more breathtaking - vast and unbelievable. We reached it by horse-drawn carriage for £1.20 and paid £2 admission.

Refusing overpriced hotel tours, we got around the West Bank by taxi (about £1.20 a journey) and did the Valley of the Kings (£2, another £4 for Tutankhamun's empty tomb) and Deir al-Bahri (£1.20) in one very hot morning. Then we paid £6 to be sailed inexpertly up the Nile in a felucca at sunset.

We reached Sharm el-Sheikh by bus to Hurghada and ferry across the Red Sea, £2.50 and £25 respectively. A surreal place, hotels springing up from desert and industrial wasteland, and a beach next to a building site. But three-star (ish) accommodation cost less than £30 a night for the two of us.

For three days, we sunbathed, swam and snorkeled with astonishingly coloured fish, before catching the bus to Cairo for £10. In the evenings, we explored the gloriously tacky tourist promenade at Na'ama Bay.

The pros

We saw what we wanted to see and changed our plans when we changed our minds. At the Valley of the Kings, we watched with incredulous pity as tour groups poured out of coaches, were hurried to the nearest tombs, squashed all inside at once, lectured in top-decibel Italian/Japanese/ English for a few minutes and swept out again. The tombs are not big; I don't suppose most of them saw anything other than a few (admittedly lovely) roof paintings. Various posed snapshots later, they were back into the bus and off to the next site.

We slipped in, as far as possible, between groups, and then abandoned the tourist trail altogether to hike to Deir al-Bahri. Five minutes' climb and we were alone; 15 and we were round the side of the hill, gasping with heat, exhaustion and amazement as the golden, desert mountains stretched out around us. And not another soul in sight, at least until an old man and a boy emerged from a cave halfway down to the temple, brandishing plastic gods and demanding Egyptian pounds.

From the sides of the valley, we had a terrorists' eye view of the temple, scene of the 1997 massacre - spectacularly lovely but terribly exposed - and reached the bottom just as yet another coach swept up. Recognising some of its occupants from the Valley of the Kings, we felt knackered, but complacent.

The local ferry across the river in Luxor was not only incredibly cheap (20p each way), but also a rare opportunity to be among the locals without being hassled. Although we were the only foreigners on the boat, we were completely and delightedly ignored, squashed in between a large woman with a basket and a young couple who were interested only in talking, shyly, to each other. They looked about 12.

The Ritz it ain't, but the Berlin Hotel in Cairo was a bargain at£16 a night for a double room. And it did afford us one glorious day in the outskirts of the city. George, the hotel driver, escorted the two of us and an Aussie girl to Giza, Saqqara and Dahshur for a mere £6 each, and proved a happy exception to the letchers and hustlers who made up most of our Egyptian male acquaintance.

Reassured by his urbane presence, we bartered with a large stable owner and paid £10 each for two hours on camelback. Our guide led us out into the desert until the tourists faded away and we had a glorious view of the three Pyramids in a row.

In the late afternoon, worn out by sightseeing, we drank tea in a perfume shop tucked down a side street in Giza. A place of half-light, dark-red plush cushions, multi-coloured glass and exotic smells, perfect for the opening scene of a Bond film, and run by one of George's friends. Scents were fetched and sprayed on demand until I had no space left on my arms. When Tricia weakened, George was on hand to request "special price" after "special price". She paid £30 for three deliciously-packaged bottles.

Later, while crowds below us paid more than £6 a head to witness the Giza Sound and Light Show from a coach-packed piece of Tarmac, we saw it for nothing from a stable roof at the edge of the plateau. Camels slept noisily in the yard below, George was drinking beer in doorway with the stable owner, and a man was selling watermelons in the street.

The cons

We paid a lot for our indepen dence - in money, which we didn't have, or in time and effort. We wasted a morning getting train tickets to Luxor, and once headed off to Coptic Cairo for an afternoon only to find the much-recommended Hanging Church closed for refurbishment. Our experiences of public transport were interesting, but hardly restful. And we were hassled. Constantly.

The hustlers swarmed around us at Cairo airport and Luxor station; we were chased up the road by felucca sailors and carriage drivers, and practically dragged into shops. The downside of having no tour guide was that pseudo-guides attached themselves to us unasked, pointing out the obvious, ignoring our requests to explore alone, and then demanding excessive baksheesh when we tried to escape.

We expended an awful lot of energy in not being cheated. A taxi driver in Sinai took us to a completely different hotel from the one we asked for, ignoring our protests and heading purposefully inside in search of commission. We jumped out of the taxi. He chased us. We found a friendlier driver and scrambled into his cab. Massive arguments ensued with the original driver, who stuck his threatening, brown-toothed face into the cab and demanded money. We refused, but were worried. A bigger row developed in Arabic, with several other taxi drivers putting in their two piastres' worth before he was forcibly removed.

And we were frighteningly alone. Women in a man's culture, our complaints were ignored, or dismissed. In the Palermo Resort in Sharm el-Sheikh, money disappeared from our (locked) room, and the manager did nothing until Tricia went to the tourist police. Then £16 was grudgingly handed over, on condition that she didn't make a formal report. Later that night, we returned from Na'ama Bay to find our door wide open. "No problem, this is a very safe hotel," the manager insisted. We didn't think so. After a tearful and unhelpful trip to the police station, we moved to the next door hotel in the early hours of the morning.

Worst of all was the incessant male attention. With their own women closely guarded, and an impression of Westerners fed by Hollywood movies, many Egyptians regard Western girls as available, to say the least. Especially two young women travelling alone. No matter how conservatively we dressed, we were shouted at and accosted whenever we stepped outside. It could have been funny ("I miss you like the desert miss the rain," one individual in Sinai informed us) had it not been so constant, and so intimidating.

We learned to avoid crowds, or ever getting within touching distance, because they took it as permission. We were followed through Cairo for half an hour on our first day and, even in Sinai, supposedly used to tourists, we couldn't put so much as a toe in the pool without staff emerging from every corner of the hotel to stare.

After two weeks, a BA plane, with its English stewards and English tourists, never seemed so inviting. I'm a modern girl, so I hate to say this, but I wouldn't go back without a big strong man. Or make that an entire rugby team.