Walk Like An Egyptian

You had to know it would not take me long to use that headline on this blog, and so I decided to end any pretense of suspense and get it out of the way quickly.

So, we are on an Odyssey Unlimited tour of Egypt and we are also doing the extension to Jordan.  Odyssey bills itself as “The Small Group Travel Experience.”  There are 24 people on the tour, including Neil and Mary Newhouse.  The group are all Americans, and we are led by our guide, Sameh, or “Sam” for short.

Mrs. Iron Tourist and I have a rule of thumb.  Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica we’ll do our own planning/self-guiding.  For Asia, Africa, the Middle East, however, we will go with a group.  We’ve done one group tour in Spain, but that was an REI Camino trip, so it was a bit different than the typical traveling through Europe.  We are considering Japan on our own, but we’ll see.  Anyhow, you get the idea.  No way we would do Egypt or Jordan on our own, so here we are.

The flights, Cairo via Frankfort, was uneventful.  I finally watched Jack Nicholson’s coming out party, “Chinatown.”  Ron Brownstein wrote his fabulous book, “Rock Me on the Water: 1974, The Year LS Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics,” built around four things – the changing music scene (Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt and others), TV (“All in the Family” and movies (exemplified by Chinatown).  After reading the book after it came out in 2021, I realized I had to watch that movie.

Another highlight of the flight to Frankfurt was flying over Bradford, England, which was the constituency of the Member of Parliament who I interned for in London, Geoff Lawler, who remains a good friend to this day (this will be a good test to see if he reads the blog!)

Killing approximately six hours in the Lufthansa Frankfurt airport lounge was fine, especially when I napped for an hour or so. 

Flying to Cairo was uneventful, although I got a good look at snow-covered Alps, including Alpine villages, as well as a beautiful sunset.

Arriving in Cairo, we breezed through immigration. The female officer was not the friendliest immigration officer we’ve ever dealt with, but friendly ones are hard to find, regardless of what country you are going into.

We were met by Sameh, and also met about half of the remainder of the group (others were coming in on other flights).  We went onto the bus and pulled out.  Riding on the bus was eye-opening, as Cairo traffic is as disorganized as I’ve seen.  Another observation is that billboards rule.

And, the media consultants in Egypt clearly have convinced their clients about the rule of three – I rarely saw just a single billboard.  Instead there were usually there were three of the same billboards one right after the other.  

We got to the hotel, the Kempinski Nile Hotel Garden City Cairo, feeling starved.  So we went straight to dinner, choosing the Italian restaurant over the Turkish restaurant.  After that, we headed to bed in an attempt to acclimate to the seven hour time difference.