We woke up on Thursday morning and headed upstairs to have breakfast on the roof at our Nubian Guest House. We were served falafel, fries, pita, cheese spread, and an omelet to share. It was fine, but we will ask for two omelets tomorrow and no falafels or fries because we want to limit the amount of fried food we have now given that we are getting past our colds. We met Giovanni, who is also staying at the guest house. He is an Egyptologist and is finishing up a project he has been working on for the last 20 years. We enjoyed learning about his background and career analyzing mummies. He has lived in Provo, Utah for many years and leads administrative work at BYU.
Our goal on Thursday was to hang out at a coffee shop with Wi-Fi and get some work done in a relaxed environment. There are two coffee shops in our area, but with Ramadan, they were both closed. Muslims do not eat or drink anything during daylight hours in the month of Ramadan and so these local kinds of places are often closed during the day. That led to our decision to finally tackle the microbus option for transportation. We did not try microbuses in Cairo, so it was going to be fun to learn this process. It was very simple and part of that is because Aswan has a primary north/south road that you can safely assume most microbuses are going to travel up and down. One waives their hand on the side of the road and keeps telling the tuk-tuks that one doesn’t want to ride in a tuk-tuk. Eventually a microbus stops and we told the driver where we wanted to go. There was a McDonald’s in the area we wanted to go and that was an easy enough destination to explain. He said to get in and we did – thankfully, there were seats available – they hold up to 14 passengers. If not, you just wait for the next one to come down the road – there are plenty. We had no idea what to pay, so for this first trip, I passed 20 pounds ahead (you pass it up via other passengers) and the driver seemed pleased. He should have been because I think I ended up paying twice the normal fare. 20 pounds is the equivalent of about 40 cents. It wasn’t a huge mistake. We are often the only non-locals when we use transportation options like this, but the locals are almost always very helpful and super entertained by us.
We arrived at Mickey Ds and found that they didn’t have Wi-Fi, so we walked further up the corniche to the Tolip Hotel. They had what we were looking for. We worked in the lobby bar with fresh juices for a couple of hours until we got hungry. We then went upstairs to the restaurant where we both had grilled salmon, veggies, rice, and more fresh juices. After our late lunch or early dinner, we hopped in a microbus, paid the right price (ten pounds for the two of us), and made it back to our guest house in time to see the sunset from the roof and to visit with Giovanni and a French couple who are also staying at the guest house.
Friday morning, we had our adjusted breakfast and did some exercises in the room before we left around 12:30 with the intention of going to explore Elephantine Island. Elephantine Island sits in the Nile River and is named this because of the boulders at the southern end that look like a herd of elephants. The island has quite a few Nubian guesthouses, several restaurants, and a couple of Nubian villages. We took a microbus to the public ferry and then paid 15 pounds each (30 cents) to cross over to the island. We were hungry and so the first stop was lunch and we chose King Jamaica because it was right at the dock and it had a good review in our travel guide. Great choice. Friendly service, good and plentiful food, and delicious tea and juice. I had camel tagine and Sandy had vegetable tagine. The camel meat is very close to beef in flavor. Especially when it is cooked in a tagine dish with the other flavors, I don’t think I can tell the difference.
After lunch, we enjoyed walking the island through the streets and alleys of the villages. There are no paved roads on the island, nor are there any cars. It was just an interesting small island to explore with the mud brick homes and quiet neighborhoods.
We caught the ferry and microbus back to our neighborhood and we were back on the rooftop for sunset. We got ourselves packed and went to bed early for an early departure tomorrow.
Today was travel day and we arranged with Abdo at the guest house for him to take us to the airport, leaving the guest house at 6:45. With speed limits seemingly unenforced in Egypt, it was a short 15-minute drive out to the airport. Check-in was very easy and we learned that our flight was delayed 90 minutes. Our travel plan today is a flight to Cairo and then figure out our plan to get to Alexandria. We intentionally left the Cairo to Alexandria segment flexible in case we had a flight delay. Aswan has a small but very adequate airport – lots of shopping options and some food options. Our guest house provided us with a couple of cheese sandwiches and juices, so we were set for the morning.
Our plane arrived to pick us up and we all boarded and wheels were up in Aswan at 11:15. The flight landed in Cairo at 12:30 and as we were coming in we had a nice view of the Step Pyramid that we had visited a couple of weeks ago in Saqqara. We waited for more than 30 minutes for our baggage to arrive and then realized some of the bags came out on a different belt and were sitting there waiting for us.
Once we had our bags, we looked at train and bus schedules and decided we would take the train from Cairo up to Alexandria. We ordered an Uber and after a little confusion on the pickup spot, Mohammed was there for us and we hustled off to the train station. We arrived at 2:30pm and our goal was to get the 3pm train. As we were walking in, the tourist police motioned for us to go into their office and have a seat. It was strange and we were unsettled. They told Sandy to wait and for me to leave my things and one of the officers raced me through the train station to where foreigners purchase their tickets. We hustled back to Sandy because we wanted to get some food before we got on the train. Back at the tourist office, the other officer told me to give my guiding officer something, so I gave him the equivalent of a couple of dollars. It was all strange, but I was grateful for the guidance because I don’t think we would have had time to make the train without that support. The one thing we forgot to consider is that during Ramadan, every outlet selling food would be closed until after sunset. With no option for food, we boarded the train and it pulled out right on time at 3pm.
We made friends with Ahmed as we were boarding the train and he sat behind us on the train and looked out for us the whole way. About an hour into the ride, one of the train personnel brought some sandwiches that didn’t look great to us and we had some walnuts so we declined. Then, Ahmed translated that they could bring us full meals and we had a choice of chicken and rice or beef and rice. We both selected chicken and rice and shortly thereafter we had a delicious meal. We felt guilty for eating at the time because of course everybody else is fasting. We pulled into Alexandria at 5:30 and Ahmed’s support continued. We worked on getting an Uber but Ahmed’s arrived before ours and he told us to get in with him. He had his driver take us right to our apartment. Sometimes it is hard to believe how kind people are. We learned more about Ahmed’s job – he is a judge for the court in Egypt that handles disputes between governmental authorities or agencies and citizens who feel they may have been wronged, for example in property disputes where the government took property for a public purpose. It was fun talking with Ahmed and his help was amazing.
We were tired when we arrived and we could not have had a warmer welcome to our home here in Alexandria. The primary host is a dentist who now lives in Maryland. His mom and his sister were the ones to come down and greet us and show us around the apartment.
They are amazing. They showed genuine happiness to meet us and have us staying in their apartment. Mom had made a juice from local berries for us and they left a fruit basket for us. It was one of the warmest welcomes we have ever had at an Airbnb location. We got ourselves settled and caught up on the current events with the military escalation in Iran and the Middle East Region. So far, everything is normal in Egypt and we will keep an eye on the situation in case we need to make any changes to our plans. We are looking forward to seeing what Alexandria is all about and hopefully finding some better air quality now that we have left the desert areas and arrived on the Mediterranean coast.
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