Coming to Cairo

It's called the Egypt and Jordan Adventure. It's our third tour and John is coming along for the ride.

We actually decided to arrive a day early. The group tour in Cairo was going to be limited to the Pyramid and the Sphinx, so we though we'd do our own exploring the day before, but of course it's never that straight forward.

So we arrived in Cairo with the most budget of British Airway flights, landing in the afternoon and managing to get to our hotel, the Pharaoh Hotel soon after. Checked Google Maps quickly to see where the busy areas were and then set out shortly after.

Not even 100m from the hotel a random guy stops to talk to us in the middle of the intersection, and sadly I don't remember his name. He insists on teaching us a couple of Arabic phrases then insists on walking us to his tourist office just a few steps away.

Imagine if you are electrocuted and you get a...?

Now what do you do after this happens?

Shock-Run, it means thank you! Well officially its 'shkran'.

At this stage of course, suspicious tourism guy became known as Ahmed Ali the legitimate Tour Operator. In return for his unexpected hospitality, we decided to arrange for a driver to take us around Cairo for the day before the start of our official G Adventures tour. We agreed on Papyrus and Egyptian Cotton store, Coptic Cairo, the Citadel and the Bazaar, but didn't want a guide.

First stop was the Papyrus Museum. Another one of those 'local industries/tourist trap stops' that we love. John and I went in with sceptical minds, listened to the materials process, heard the spiel about fakes and buying papyrus anywhere else, rolled our eyes and then left having paid for 6 items. We sure showed them.

Our guy was full of charisma and officially we actually bought one item each and managed to get gifted another pair.

The Egyptian cotton shop was a different thing. We walked in, into an actual clothing shop and left 5mins later having bought nothing. We were learning, evolving.

Abdullah was always ready to roll and took as across town to Coptic Cairo. This area is reserved for the stronghold for Christianity in Egypt. Abdullah made sure to tell us "walk to there to left and down stairs. Pay nobody, place full of cheeky monkey". We knew exactly what he meant. We are experienced in dealing with cheeky monkeys.

We had a peruse around the area, made sure we didn't fall for any requests to pay entry fee and kept an eye on the pick pockets and swindlers. We didn't have long so unfrotunately didn't get a chance/forgot to see the Hanging Church or the Synagogue of Ben Ezra, but we did pop into the Saint Barbara Church, the St George's church and also Mar Guirguis Church. St George's was clearly the star of this show.

We popped quickly into the oldest mosque in Cairo, Amr ibn Al-A'as Mosque, which unfortunately was under renovation and so I have nothing else to say on that place. But I did take a couple of phone photos.

After the mosque and coptic area we asked Abdullah to take us to a good lunch spot. We stopped into Bonne Soiree Restaurant. It was pretty bloody good and it'll set the standard for top class salads for the rest of the tour. Spoiler Alert: Every subsequent salad was just terrible in comparison.

After lunch was the headline act, Salah Al-Din Al-Ayoubi Castle or the Citadel. This massive site, I saw as we flew into Cairo from the plane and from the ground it was just as massive. Abdullah agree to give us a few hours and then drove off into the distance whilst John and I started walking uphill towards the main entrance.

Outside the mosque there were some pretty spectacular views of Cairo. Enjoy the panoramas...

The next building of the citadel was the incredibly underwhelming National Police Museum. Words cannot describe how pointless this museum was, so we'll leave it at that. Also, no photos so I can't even show you how terrible it was, except for this one, to show you where not to go.

Second mosque of the citadel was Al-Nasser Mohammed Ibn Kalawoun. Not as grand as the previous mosque but still very impressive.

Last stop of the day in the citadel was the National Military Museum Egypt at the North East end. The difference between the military and police museum was night and day. Took some photos outside, but inside was again prohibidado.

At the end of our time there, we walked back down to where we were due to meet our driver Abdullah, who with seconds to spare, managed to dominate about 8 lanes of traffic to come and collect us. He was fearless, even with all the beeping.

That evening we met up with our new travel companions for the G Adventures tour we were about to start and managed to stay up all night in the hotel bar, ready for a whole day spectacle at Giza.

I made a very quick and rough highlights video of this day...enjoy!