The flight from Dubai and Cairo was about 30 minutes late leaving but we ended up gaining some time so we were only 15 minutes late landing. We got lucky with the seats and had the exit row bulkhead. More room than a downtown Vancouver condo!
When we landed, we were greeted with stairs off the plane, no sky walk. At the bottom of the stairs we boarded buses and headed to the terminal. On the way, we passed many empty sky walk parking spots so I’m not sure what’s going on there. After leaving the bus and walking up the escalator, we were greeted by our tour rep. He met us before proceeding to the passport and immigration areas. He took our passports and we headed to a currency exchange place where we paid for our entry visa. Not sure why a currency exchange can issue a visa, but I’m not going to dwell on it. Next, it looked like we had a bit of a wait to get through the passport control. But I was wrong. Our tour rep took us past all the lines to a special line. Again he took our passports, handed them to the agent, who basically swiped them and stamped them. Next was luggage collection, which took about 15 minutes. Then our rep helped me sort out an Egyptian SIM card for my phone. I paid £E 125, which is about $20 CAD. This got me the SIM card and a 7 GB plan…super cheap! Finally off to immigration where we were waived through as soon as the guy saw our guide. I need to take this guy with me everywhere!
Our guide led us to the parking lot to the van and our driver and we headed 45 minutes to our hotel. On the way we decided to participate in a day trip tomorrow to Alexandra since we are here one day early for our main tour. That leaves at 7am. We’ll get to meet 3 of the 9 people in our main tour then.
We’re at the hotel now, having a quick bite before bed. We’re sitting beside the pool getting eaten alive by mosquitoes! The photo is the pool we’re next to.
More tomorrow from Alexandria!
even mosquitos!! can't get away from them anywhere!!