Starting at the beginning .....

Trip Start Mar 07, 2006

Trip End Jun 07, 2006

Loading Map

Map your own trip!

Map Options

Show trip route

Hide lines

Flag of Egypt Cairo, Egypt
Thursday, March 9, 2006

Tuesday 7th March

Day One

Well starting from the beginning, boring flight to Athens, few hours stop over then onto Cairo, arriving at 2.50 am. Flying in it seemed the lights of Cairo were never ending, It's a city of 25 million people, the entire population of Australia so I guess they all must live somewhere!!. We hadn't slept much on the plane so boy were we glad to see a man at the airport waiting for us with my name on a little white card. Never had that before and it was definitely the best way to experience Cairo Airport at 3am, having someone lead you around, telling you where to go and what to do to get a visa. However while we were waiting for our bags, the hard sell on a trip to Luxor began!!.

The City was quiet but still people around even though it was so late

Carved Wooden Panel, Mosque of Mohammed Ali, Cairo

. Checked into our dingy hotel, complete with 15 ft ceilings, a tiled mosaic floor and an ancient birdcage elevator.. when you want to get off just open the door!!

Slept through till about lunchtime the following day and woke to a mixture of tooting horns, very loud traffic and of course our first experience of calls to prayer from the Mosque which start at around 5am and where to become a fixture of everyday we were here in Egypt.

When we finally got up sometime after lunch we just wandered around for a few hours tryinhg to get our bearings. Had our first experience of "Welcome to Cairo, where you from? What's your name? Come visit my perfume shop". Pretty easy to fend off though and it didn't take us long to learn Arabic for "No Thank you"!! In general, so far anyway, all we'd heard about the terrible hassle you can expect in Cairo isn't that bad and is easy to get rid of with a friendly smile and a polite "La Shukran" (no thanks). We took a walk down for a our first view of the Nile and past the Egyptian Museum. Very impressive building but we left going inside for another more organised day.