Cairo round-up

I thought it was about time I wrote something about our time in Dahab, but then it occurred to me that there was still so much more to say about Cairo. Ben, Sam and I all agreed that our two days in Cairo seemed like a week. I thought time was supposed to fly when you're having fun.

While I do fully intend to stretch my fortnight in Egypt out for some time on this blog, I thought rather than write another four or five separate blogs about Cairo, I'd squeeze them all into this one, and try to be brief.

I could have written a blog about the taxi that took us around the Pyramids, and our driver and guide who introduced himself as "Mr No Problem".

Needless to say, nothing on the car worked. At every speed bump, it would stall. In fact, if he stopped revving the engine, it would also stall...once in the middle of a huge roundabout. In Cairo, people go around roundabouts in whichever direction they like. It was quite a nervous moment. "No problem" he reassured us, as he flooded the engine.

I could also have written a blog about my misfortune when my camera got stuck in my pocket at the Geezer pyramids. It wouldn't have been so bad actually, if our guides had failed to notice my predicament and left me to rip my pocket open alone, rather than insisting on trying to pull my pocket zip open with their teeth.

I could have written yet another blog about every Egyptian guide's cunning Pyramid photography technique, where they ask you to hold your arm out and position the camera in such a way that the viewer's perception of scale becomes questioned...like this:

However, Sam found it far more amusing to get me to stand like a tea-pot and then not even bother lining up the photo...

Although, I couldn't resist taking this one of Ben...

I could also have written about our trip to the Egyptian Museum, but it would have been pretty dull. We gave it a good go...Read the little placards and everything, for a while at least. But pretty soon the boredom started to set in. Once you've seen a few 5000 year-old artefacts, you've seen them all, it seemed. Ben feigned enthusiasm for a while longer, although I think he felt he had to to justify his history degree, somehow. Finally, he reached his limit:

"Shall we just go and see that Golden head and get out of here?"

Sam and I agreed, and it was indeed very golden. Unfortunately, I couldn't take any piccies as there was an airport style security scanner to ensure that no cameras could enter the building. I can only presume that they were also looking out for bombs.

Finally, I could have written a blog about our last night in Cairo when we went to the Islamic quarter and ate "Egyptian pancakes" (just like any other pancake) with some Americans we had met at the guesthouse. We then moved on to a little cafe in a very narrow lane to smoke a sheesha, mainly because someone had read in their lonely planet that some Nobel prize winner for literature had been stabbed there a couple of years previously. None of us had heard of him, or knew what he had written, or why he had been stabbed. It just seemed logical at the time, somehow...

There were some nerve-wracking moments when passers by came close to knocking the sheesha, topped with burning charcoal, into my lap. Oh, and the old lady trying to sell tattoos, brandishing a needle covered with ink that she had obviously just used on someone else, was also a point of interest. However, Ben's incredible sucking skills stole the show...