The Travels of the Agnew Family

the view from our room.

We arrived a day before the start of tour. Given winter weather in Ontario can cause flight delays and we had to change planes in Frankfurt we decided that it was prudent to leave a day early --- it would guarantee no problems. And it worked.

In case you haven't figured it out from the photo from our room we are in Cairo Egypt. On this trip we are spending 2 weeks touring Egypt and 1 week touring Jordan.

As usual we didn't get a lot of sleep on the plane and we were able to do catch up last night ---- went to bed at 9 pm and woke up at 9:50 am. Ok, Ed got all that sleep I was awake for about 3 hours in the night but managed to get back to sleep so I got my fair share of sleep.


The drive from the airport to the hotel last evening was interesting. Being a Saturday we were told that the traffic would be lighter ..... I hate to see it when it is really busy as it was stop in go in places. The accident we eventually passed probably didn't help matters.


The train station.

We drove passed a number of mosques, some new looking buildings and some older building. A google search indicates that there are 20 million people living in Cairo and more than 95 million people living in Egypt with 95% of them living along the Nile river. I guess that explains why the traffic seemed heavy.

Security is very visible. All vehicles driving onto the hotel property are searched by a dog (today's dog was a golden retriever that happily accepted pets from Ed). Bags went through an x-ray machine and people go through a metal detector when entering the hotel.

Our hotel is within walking distance to pyramids, so we decided to walk over and have a look. We didn't go in as a visit to the pyramids is included in our tour tomorrow. There's a visible police presence in the area which increased dramatically as we walked up the road towards the pyramids.


A view of the pyramids from our hotel. The top of the third pyramid is just visible.


We saw truck loads of tomatoes, a motorbike pulling a trailer loaded high, a donkey pulling a cart and several trucks taking some cows out for a drive.


Near the pyramids you can get a tour in horse and buggy ride. I felt sorry for this horse as it had very little traction coming down the hill and slid on it's back legs a few times.


A closer view of the Great Pyramid of Khufu.