Two Weeks Away

We started the actual tour today, with a trip to Giza to see more pyramids. Driving out to Giza was pretty surreal. One minute we’re in deepest suburbia, then we looked out the window and saw the outline of pyramids, right next to us!

We went into the second pyramid to have a look. Pretty freaky to think about all those tonnes of rock above us. There wasn’t much left inside to see, but it was certainly interesting to get the claustrophobia going for a while. Once again the place was full of touts offering camel rides, photos etc, but we avoided most of them.

Next stop, Sphinx! It was amazing to see all these icons up close. Wow!

Tonight we take the night train down to Luxor. Happy New Year!

In the Coptic district of Cairo we visited St George’s Church, a chapelet, The Church of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Family and of course, shops. Phew!

Before lunch we stopped at the Citidel of Saladin. Very cool – lots of wrought iron windows on the mosque, amazing views of the city, and a police and military museum!

Then we walked through the biggest mosque in Africa! Impressive, with lots of marble and columns.

In the afternoon we finally got to Khal El Khalili. Wow! A huge amount of people jammed into close quarters, all yelling at each other to buy, buy buy! We were pulled along by the crowd a lot, but managed to stop and buy lots of trinkets and scarves.

We had some great come-on lines from the shopkeepers. Some of the most imaginative:

“You dropped something!”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You dropped my heart!”

And the classic:

“You look like Cindy Crawford, but better!”

Yup, that didn’t sell them much.

After a long day it was lovely to relax on the roof terrace of the Salma Hotel with a cold drink.

Okay, so Cairo for two ladies on their own is a bit of a minefield. After being dropped off in the middle of “downtown” by our friendly taxi driver, we must have had “I am gullible” tattooed on our foreheads. We were befriended by men left right and centre,  who wanted to “show us the way” to wherever we were going, which always happened to be right past their brother/cousin/dog’s aunty’s hairdresser’s shop. Since we didn’t have anything planned, we generally went along with it, drinking tea, buying jewellery etc.

We only really had one which went a bit too far. When in a perfume/papyrus shop down an alleyway, the proprietors told us there was a “doctor” who was selling a special magic oil. He was only in Cairo for a few days, and lucky us, he was available to show us how the massage oil worked! Since he said he would massage the neck (and we were sore from our long-haul in cattle class) we acquiesced. However, he decided that the neck actually extends far below the t-shirt line and wanted to massage lower back and around to the tummy! We decided that this wasn’t on and wanted to leave, but ended up buying various items we’d already expressed interest in as the guys were a bit aggressive at this point. One even “escorted” me to the ATM as I’d run out of money already, and then to add insult to injury, asked me for baksheesh on the way back!

After this episode, we were pretty careful about where our “assistants” led us, and went to one more perfume shop, but on the main street this time! These guys had the best line in compliments ever – apparently we were worth millions of camels!

We stopped into McD’s to use the facilities and were amazed at the local speciality – a “McArabiyya”! Basically a cross between a kebab and a burger – bizarre.

We decided to see a bit more of Cairo by walking back to our hotel – a bad idea since a lot of the backstreets weren’t marked on our map! We took the scenic route – across the Nile and past the Eye Hospital. After being given directions to yet anther papyrus shop, we decided to admit defeat and took a taxi back to the hotel.

My first overseas trip and I choose the Middle East. Why? Because I’ve always been fascinated by the aura of romance that surrounds it. The fact that I’ve been taking bellydance classes does help a bit to add to the mystique of the place. So when K brought up the idea of visiting Egypt, I jumped at the chance!

After exhaustive research (re-watching The Mummy a lot, mostly) and reading many tour catalogues, we decided on Gecko’s Footsteps of Alexander tour. It ticked off all the big things we wanted to get out of the trip, plus took a detour into Jordan, which looked fabulous.

We arrived amongst the hustle and bustle of Cairo airport and followed the crowd to back collection and visa checkpoint, where we found our transfer. Phew! Glad we organised a pickup at the aiport as we were pretty zonked after two long flights, and negotiating the taxi touts would have been fun and games. The traffic is interesting too – a 2 lane road means at least 3 lanes of traffic, beeping and bumper-car-ing their way through!

We ordered room service for dinner when we arrived: moussaka, yummy! and had our first experience with Egyptian plumbing. At least there’s hot water!

So here we are in Cairo, woken at 5.15am by the call to prayer from the mosque we can see from our window. Beautiful, but we certainly don’t need an alarm clock.