Travelogue - Part 1

Hi All,

Welcome to the first instalment of my travelogue for Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. Now, I know I said I was going to try to post updates more often this time, but unfortunately I didn't get many chances to get on to a computer, and the internet over here is a real problem when it comes to this site sometimes, apparently (and there were a few days in Syria where I wasn't even allowed to access it, or Facebook!).

(For those of you who don't want to read a lot of first impressions stuff, the short version of this post is that I left Melbourne, arrived in Cairo, got settled in, went to see the museum, met my tour group for Cairo to Istanbul, who seemed nice, and tried a Shisha pipe, which really did taste of strawberry, and didn't make me choke (I'm not a smoker!).

Leaving

First, I left. After a few hectic days of studying, passing the exam I was studying for (yay!), shopping, packing, and general organising, I arrived at Melbourne airport, and even managed to look mostly awake for this photo:

I met my friend, who's going to be travelling with me for all the time I'm over here, said goodbye to everyone, headed through customs and hopped on to our first flight (Singapore Airlines). Plane flights aren't very interesting to talk about, so I'll just say I ate far more than I should have, slept far too little and watched a movie or two, as flights, timelines, and stop-off points (Singapore and Dubai) all blurred into one (I really can't sleep on planes very well). Singapore Airlines is good though, both for the food and their very good selection of movies!

About 24 hours later, we arrived at Cairo airport, at about 5:00 AM, feeling more than just a little worn out. I breathed my usual small sigh of relief when I saw my bag coming around on the carousel, passed through customs without any difficulty (in fact, we'd fairly much been waved and/or processed quickly through everything), and got on to the mini-bus that was waiting to take us to our hotel in Cairo.

Cairo

It might sound unkind, but the first two things that struck me about Cairo as we headed away from the airport in the just-past-dawn light were "polluted", and "dirty". The smell, and the early-morning haze pretty much hit you as soon as you stepped outside. For anyone who lives in Melbourne, we have nothing to complain about when it comes to pollution. The highway into Cairo had very good lane markings: even have lane markings, if only the drivers would bother to pay attention to them! Straddling two lanes and only moving when you get beeped seemed to be fairly standard practise.

All that aside, it was very cool to see Cairo as we headed in, with its buildings topped with forest of satellite dishes, and their sides covered in air conditioning units. Yes, Cairo is pretty darn hot, even at that hour of the morning. The only unpleasant thing was slowing down to go past an overturned car on our side of the highway at one point. That was something that couldn't've gone very well. :(

Our first day was pretty much spent napping, orienting ourselves, and venturing out (slowly!) ınto the heat to see about finding some water etc at a local supermarket. We bought some water from a person who naturally insisted on giving us some friendly advice about where things were, then walking us to his brother's papyrus and souvenirs shop, where we spent a bit of time politely listening to the brother trying to sell us stuff, and having a browse. I actually ended up buying some papyrus bookmarks, which were pretty cool, but said no thanks to anything bigger, for the moment, at least! After that, we found the supermarket, then headed back to the hotel, where we decıded to have dınner at the restaurant on the top level, whıch had a vıew of the city.

Ramadan

One thing I should probably mention before I go any further is that we're currently in Ramadan, and will be for pretty much all of our trip to Istanbul. The practical implications of this are that shops and tourist attractions tend to close early, and alcohol can be very hard to come by, even in hotels. People break fast at about 6:30. On the upside, there appear to be less tourists around, making moving through places much nicer!

Okay, back to the story so far... The view from the top of the hotel was actually quite nice, even if this photo doesn't really do it any justice:

Cairo Museum

We had the next day to ourselves before meeting our tour group in the evening, so we decided to head to the museum. We asked at the hotel about a taxi, were given a price, then led down to the tiny little side street the hotel was on to a guy who looked like he'd be only to happy to be given something to do, especially if it involved paying customers. After a short drive, which gave us a chance to see more of Cairo, we arrived at the museum. Ignoring all the people trying to sell us stuff on the way in, we bought our tickets, walked through the metal detector, waited for me to get patted down by one of guards (it must've been that shifty look I've always got??), and headed in.

Cairo museum is impressively big, and it took us about 2 hours to look at everything only briefly. Sculptures, sarcophagi, utensils, jewellery, statuettes, and all kind of other things, including a section with mummified animals. Horses were fairly easy to understand, but I started looking slightly more amused/bemused as we encountered crocodiles (an adult and a tiny baby), fish, and even scarab beetles! The only real problem with the museum was the extremely limited number of explanatory plaques: most of the exhibits didn't have them!

We walked around a bit outside before deciding to take someone up on their offer of a taxi back to the hotel (although we had to keep saying "no thanks" to their offers to take us somewhere else on the way back). In the evening, we met our tour group: 5 other people and Chris, our guide. They all seemed nice, and we went out for dinner together at a hotel restaurant, which was actually willıng to serve us alcohol! I was going to go to bed after that, but thought I'd go out with Chris and some of the others to a local Shisha place to see what it was like. Anyone who knows me knows that I don't smoke, but I decided to give it a go anyway, just to see what it was like, and my friend and I ordered a strawberry-flavoured one to share.

Having had one puff of a cigarette years ago out of sheer curiosity, and with memories of coughing unpleasantly, among other things, the Shisha pipe was actually a pleasant surprise. It looked rather cool, to start with, and really did have a distinct strawberry taste to it. The smoke didn't make me cough at all, and even though it's something I'd definitely never take up, it was definitely an okay experience. We didn't stay long, which was good really, because I was still very tired and somewhat jet lagged.