We spent a night or two in London, enough time to send a box home and have a bit of a birthday soiree (on the ground this year) for Nato, who turned 21 while we were there. Nato, unfortunately, seemed to be developing some kind of London allergy and spent much of the two days sick.

We also picked up Lara for the next leg our trip, another foray to North Africa, this time to Egypt. We decided to make this one a package tour, just to show ourselves what we had been missing out on….

I know it’s a little unlike us, but we decided to take the cheapest flight we could, which always seem to have adverse ramifications. Our departure time was quite agreeable (4:30PM), helpful cause otherwise it’s 50 pounds in a cab to Heathrow, nullifying the effect of the cheap airfare. We did however get to spend 4 fun filled hours in Athens airport, from around 10 pm at night, Drinking expensive coffee and watching the latest in Greek POP! Then it was off to Cairo. Now we knew it would be a little harsh arriving at 3am in a new city, but we figured we had a transfer from the airport. We were met by a rather excitable little man as we came through customs who immediately started shouting demands for money and passports. Being too tired to work out if we were being robbed or “guided” we handed over fistfuls of cash and our passports. He eventually came back with them and yelled at us in his customary tone to go and collect our bags, and told us to be smart about it. Now the baggage handlers I’m sure at the best of times work to their own pace, and at 3 in the morning, I don’t think they were in any hurry. So it was that we waited, much to the dismay of our new little friend… At one stage he came over to ask us if we had our bags, this was while we were watching an empty carousel revolving. Are you sure he asked. We were pretty sure….

Anyway we made it to the hotel after a lovely little tour of Cairo in which we had to take the guide home first. Where we collapsed onto our beds…

We managed a few hours sleep before getting up to meet our Cairo tour leader, and the fourth of our tour party, a nice Western Australian girl (living in London of course) called Jess. We also found out we would be spared the rest of our tour group for the first couple of days till we caught them up in Luxor. So the four of us let our tour leader Keren talk us into dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe Cairo which turned out to be quite an interesting cultural experience in itself, particularly the 7.30pm dance performed by the staff (some more enthusiastically than others it must be said). Keren assured us that actually it was a big hangout for young Egyptians not just gringos…

The next day we had a huge gringo day consisting of a trip to Egyptian Museum followed by the Pyramids and Sphinx. Plus the usual couple of gringo cross sell trips to the papyrus shop and to the perfumery. Being only four people and one bear however we managed to talk our guide out of a trip to the perfumery and only got the papyrus hawk. Along with all the camel ride, kick-knackery and drink hawks along the way.

First stop was the Egyptian museum where all the good stuff was (that is, the good stuff that was not in the British Museum or the Louvre), having long since been removed from the original sites. Our guide gave us an abridged version of the 5000 year history of Egypt along with some pretty impressive props. Then we headed for the pyramids, which aren't as far out as you would expect and are also, fairly surprisingly, a popular day trip for Carioans. This being Friday, the Muslim Sunday, they were all out and about with their kids and picnics and stuff. There seemed to be some kind of rock concert being set up at the site of the Sphinx too, which we had to admit would be a pretty cool place for a concert.

We took the usual gringo pics and copped the usual hawks and had just left the Sphinx to go get a drink when we seemed to be being followed by a pretty persistent hawker who was waving his mobile phone at us. We didn’t think the phone would be for us as we were pretty sure no one we knew had this guy’s phone number so we kept walking. Until we heard him yell ‘Wait! I am you’re driver’… which indeed he was. You can see we were already suffering from an excess of hawking… with so much more to go..

That night we ate some more Egyptian fare before heading to the train station for a night train to Luxor. We were traveling First Class which we were all pretty excited about until Keren told us that this was what most tourists traveled on and it was only just above the goat and chicken class of travel. Still, we didn’t think it could be any worse than our Spanish night train and indeed it wasn’t. The seats were pretty comfortable and the locals on board kept the noise level down to a dull roar. The only downside was for Lara whose neighbor (an Egyptian male of course) took the opportunity to stare at her boobs…. For the whole 12 hours. But we did have the luxury of getting picked up at the station in Luxor and taken to our hotel where we had a delicious breakfast of cold boiled egg, sweet bread and jam, then promptly collapsed in bed…