7/20/2015 - 7/21/2015 - To Egypt

After breakfast, we all finished our packing and hung out until check out at 11, then rolled our luggage downstairs to store behind the front desk until our cabs brought us to the airport. Maria, Erik and Miles were leaving at 1, and Leah, Nelia and I at 3. We decided to go back to the waterfront to shop and eat lunch together, but none of us was very hungry when we got there, so we just shopped a bit in a large Africa store Erik had found this morning. Around 12:15, Erik, Miles and Maria got hot dogs at a stand, and we said goodbye before they walked back to the hotel to get their cab at 1. They were all headed home. Leah, Nelia and I had lunch together overlooking the water. We were all traveling a bit more - Leah to England, and Nelia and I to Cairo for about three days!

 

We walked back together at 2:30, went to the airport, and shopped at duty free before hanging out until Nelia and my flight was ready to go. We said goodbye to Leah, and got on our 12 hour flight to Dubai. We had a 3 hour layover in Dubai, followed by a 3 hour flight to Cairo.

 

Rami, our guide, picked us up inside the airport and showed us where to wait on the line to get our passports checked. However, he quickly decided he might be able to do this faster himself, asked for our passports, and came back quickly, and had cleared us to skip the whole line, be approved, and leave to collect our bags. We were really impressed and felt a lot safer already. Rami spoke Spanish better than English (Nelia had written she was from Peru instead of the US), and so he spoke Spanish to her most of the car ride and she translated the bits of information he was giving us about the sights we were passing. He promised our guide tomorrow would speak in English. We arrived at the hotel, checked in, then sat down with Rami to review our itinerary - it would be a busy few days. We quickly noticed that people smoked in the hotel. There were ashtrays in the lobby and in front of every elevator on every floor. It was a problem we had not anticipated. We asked about our room, if it was nonsmoking, Rami said yes, and did we want a smoking room? We explained that we desperately did not, and were relieved, but we found that in order to get to our room, we had to pass by quite a few smoking rooms and cough until we made it. We mainly rested for the rest of the evening. We would have an 8 AM pick up tomorrow morning, and it would be a long, busy day.