The Oasis Cairo

We were up at a decent hour and on a plane headed to Cairo. Today was a nice and easy day where we actually got time to relax. After the flight we checked back into the Oasis hotel and our friend at the front desk remembered us from the week before! After dropping our stuff off we headed to the Bazaar Khan El Khalili, which is crazy! I wanted to find some fabric to give to mom, so Brandi, Aaron, myself and some others wandered off. We ended up getting to the other side of the bazaar and out i...

After about 24 hours of travel we finally make it to Cairo!!! The local time is about 4:30pm as our Alitalia flight was delayed about a half hour. We didn't yet have a visa so we were hoping everything would work out ok as we walked to the arrivals hall. We were relieved to see a Contiki sign as one of the few hundred tour companies that were picking up people off our flight. Our contiki member greeted us and pointed us in the direction of where to buy the visa. It was totally just a way for ...

Free breakfast at the hotel was great and actually reminded me a lot of the breakfasts we had in China at the nice hotels where it looked amazing but when it came down to it you really didn't want to eat 90% of it and just picked some eggs and juice out of the entire exotic spread. We were rushed through breakfast as well because we had to pay for our elected Abu Simbal trip, check out and pay our resturant hotel bill. We all made it on the bus just a little late and got scoulded by Shiriff f...

It was hard to wake up this morning to the man knocking on the door to serve us breakfast. We didn't want the gross train food and we were just so tired from the day before. We got up eventually and made it off the train for our final day in Cairo. We got to see two Mosks and Shirriff demonstrated to us how Muslims wash and pray 5 times a day. The mosque was beautiful and of course we took lots of pictures. We also had to remove our shoes before entering the mosque! The second mosque we went ...

Cairo - Aswan, 7 - 9 November We arrive in the evening and are transferred to our hotel, 'The Oasis', which is a top resort hotel. The next day is a free day that we spend lazing by the huge pool and generally doing not too much at all. Garmisch had taken it's toll! The next morning our Cairo guides pick us up and we meet our only other tour companion. Keith is a Kiwi, with as usual for a New Zealander, a wicked sense of humor. We're surprised that there aren't more people in the tour. Even t...

Arrived in Cairo and was met just of the plain by the On The Go guys who organised getting my visa then whisked us off to our Hotel. Dinner on a cruise boat on the Nile where I got to meet the rest of the tour.

Van, Nicole, and I boarded our plane from Athens to Cairo at 1a.m. Even though we were completely exhausted, we all shared our disbelief that we were actually going to Egypt! After a 1.5 hour flight, we arrived in Cairo and purchased an Egyptian visa for $15. It was nearly 4a.m. by the time we met with our Contiki rep who escorted us to our shuttle. He looked pretty cranky since our flight had been delayed by 2 hours. It didn't help that were the last ones off the plane and that he saw us tak...

Cairo was a gigantic city filled with over 20 million people - the majority of which are living in literally hundreds of thousands of apartment complexes across the city. These apartment complexes are 5-10 stories high and almost all of them were incomplete but have scores of families living in them. It was pretty fascinating seeing the housing situation out there. In Egypt, we booked a tour with a company called Contiki that was a group of travelers age 18-35. We had an opportunity to meet a...

On, our last day we went to the bazaar. We tried to keep shopping to a minimum although I had to get another Ankh pendant as the one I had was a bit too small. We also saw a huge prayer session with thousands of Muslims closing down shop in the bazaar to go to pray. Lastly, we went to the Step Pyramid which is the older pyramid in the world.