Goodbye Cairo!

Our second visit to Cairo, and our last day in Egypt. We met up with some fellow travellers who were staying at Paris Hotel on our first visit.  We tagged along with Ashok & Jean to the Gayer-Anderson Museum and Mosque of Ahmad ibn Tulun.  It was a good way to farewell downtown Cairo.

 

Robyn shows off the fancy Mosque footwear required to wander around.  As always we had to tip the shoe-bag suppliers.  Worth it.

  

Tristan never quite got the hang of the shoe-bags.

Jean, Ashok & Tristan in one of the courtyards of the Gayer-Anderson museum – 2 affluent Islamic houses from the 16th/17th centuries, conserved and converted into a home and museum by British Major-cum-philanthropist R.G. Geyer-Anderson in the early 20th century.

  

The final Shisha, completed sans-vomit.

The next day we were off to the Airport to board our 7:30pm flight to Casablanca.  Unnervingly, the route to the airport takes us past the airplane graveyard – this was to be prophetic of the flight to come.  Typically, however, our flight was cancelled and rescheduled to 6am the next day.  After kicking up a fuss we were put up in a 5-star resort in Heliopolis Cairo.  Also just as typically, and as a fitting farewell to Cairo, our taxi driver attempted to extort extra money from us as he was illegally taking pickups from the airport (unbeknownst to us), and finally resorted to stealing our change.  After a screaming match we managed to retrieve half of what we were owed.  Luckily the hotel came with a huge gourmet buffet dinner – free.

Waking up at 2am the next morning was difficult, as was waiting 5 hours to board the plane due to irate Moroccans who hadn’t been given a room to stay in. It almost got violent. Anyway this was the least of our worries – on boarding the plane, from the “new fleet” we realised it was a kit-of-parts from various boeing and airbus planes. It was the longest 5 hours and 20 minutes of our lives. We had never been so happy to land as we were when arriving in Casablanca.