Cairo Tonight

Getting from the airport was an adventure, as you can imagine.  The main highway is used by cars, trucks, donkey drawn carts and pedestrians, but also at one point stalls, tyre shops and just places to stop and tend to your derelict vehicle.  The horn must be used as some sort of 'I have travelled ten meters' celebration as, from where I am sitting on the deck of our hotel, they are a harmony of beeps, toots and honks.  This afternoon we were able to hear the call to prayer which echoed out across the old stone buildings and things seemed to go quiet for a time.

From our hotel room it looks like we could reach out and touch the Pyramids and tomorrow we are going there to start our day of touring Cairo.  The two Pyramids we can see are very smooth looking, either by design or by age and wear.  Doug said they were smaller then he imagined but they look pretty impressive from here.  To get here we followed a main highway on which housing runs down either side of the highway and one one side from the airport is rather new-ish looking, but it's hard to tell because it's all made from the same brick type material, but on the other side is a demolition site, that is mostly still occupied!  Parts of dwellings are lived in, while the other side of the same place is roofless and falling down.  We passed big areas that looked like demolition had occurred, but when I asked our guide he said it was natural 'it is desert'  (imagine this said in Egyptian heavily accented English) and politely he did not add 'dumbass"'

The sides of the highway (and I am talking side of highway! not grass verge ) that are not occupied by previously mentioned tyre outlets, stalls etc, are built up with paper and rubbish and quite frankly, the whole place looks like it needs a darn good inorganic collection.

It's amazing!  It's totally not what we live with and that is what makes it so interesting......