Cairo

July 19 was all about waiting. We got to the airport in Delhi at 7.30am and got through immigration super quick then had to wait 3 and a half hours for our flight to Dubai with nothing to do but eat Subway. Then a 3 hour wait at Dubai, but that was ok because there was heaps to look at, and magazines to read that you were pretending to choose between to buy. Then however was a 2 hour wait on our plane to Cairo when they discovered an engineering problem that took an hour to fix and then begging on the intercom when passengers decided not to take the flight, and the pilot had to beg them to stay otherwise it would take another hour to get their luggage off the plane. So they were guilted into staying and we all cheered!

When we finally got into Cairo late that night, we crashed at our hostel. The next morning we woke up to blue blue sky and the heat, but the good kind, where you walk outside and feel like you've walked into an oven...not the kind that makes you dripping wet with sweat. Trust us when we say oven heat is better...

After our delicious free brekky we headed out to check out Cairo.

Walking along the Nile we decided to go on a felucca cruise. Habibi was our captain. He turned his Nubian pop music and made us dance with him. The Nile is wide and blue, and the part we sailed on was surrounded by highrises. No reeds or date palms, or crocodiles, or little baby Moses's floating in baskets.



Habibi- our vey excitable Felucca captain

Cairo itself old and grand- lots of old buildings and statues. And men on bicycles with big trays of bread on their head, can you see the guy in the picture above???

After our felucca cruise we were just ambling along when we started chatting to this Egyptian guy who said he owned an art gallery and had just been to Australia, he then said to welcome us to his country he would invite us to his daughters wedding. We were like.....'oh um thanks, but we're sorry we are seeing the pyramids..' '' but it's Egyptian hospitality, please, it would be an honour, just come afterwards...' And he grabbed us by the arms to take us to a shop so we could right down the address. Only when we got to the shop he dissapeared and left us with Mohammad who was a papyrus artists (he copied ancient Egyptian paintings on to papyrus) who wanted to show us his work before we got the address, the door was closed and tea was brought for us and before we knew it we were being asked how much we would pay for his work....'Um no we are just admiring...maybe we will think about it' 'But what about as good luck for my sisters wedding'.. After tossing him a dirt cheap offer in the hope he would give up in disgust, he surprisingly took it up, and we walked out with two masterpeices on papyrus and no wedding details... needless to say we were a bit more wary of random strangers coming up to us with offers of Egyptian hospitality.

Midan Talaat Harb

Dahshur

We organised a day trip to the major pyramids around Cairo. The first and the furtherest was at Dashur built between the 4th and the 12th dynasties. The temple behind Jon is the Red Pyramid.

Inside you had to climb down a 300m ramp to get to the tomb.

Down inside it smelt horrible, it made your mouth and nose burn and eyes water. But we were in a tomb! You could see where people had left graffiti from the 19th century 'Henry Smith 1848'

Jon looking over to the Bent pyramid. It really was bent.. only we never took a good picture of the bentness..

Saqqara

Step pyramid of Zoster.

Camels







Giza