How we got E-gypped out of a vacation

Trip of a lifetime

Chris came over to visit me in Maroc and I jumped on the possibility of having my favorite person in the world be my travel mate to see the treasures of Egypt! I had all but given up on going by myself while I was here, so imagine the excitement and thrill of it all for both of us. We caught the red-eye overnighting on Thursday, Jan 27^th and planned to stay thru Monday, Jan 31st, knowing full well there were peaceful demonstrations happening in the wake of Tunisia’s uprising, but we weren’t too concerned because we assumed the media was just hyping it. Wrong!!!!

We had a fun flight over, covertly drinking libations we bought in the terminal and making fun of the way the female flight attendants on Egypt Air have to wear dumpy apron-frocks (can you say “subservient"?), whereas the male equivalents were spiffily dressed like pilots with epaulets and gold braid. We got just a little sleep, hit the ground running on Friday morning in the customs/ immigration (for Americans only- there is a visa you buy at the bank in the airport for $15. It’s printed in English with dollar signs. ) / leaving the terminal with your baggage dance that we had been warned was going to be ridiculous. Negotiating a cab was another melee, with even more snake oil salesmen than in Maroc. They told us it was a holiday and that traffic was going to be smooth sailing once away from the airport. Egyptians take Friday and Saturday as their weekend, as do many Arab countries. Exhaustion from many sleepless nights had set in, and all we wanted was an early check-in at our lovely hotel, le Meridien Pyramids, in Giza so we could get some sleep and be ready to do some serious sightseeing.

That was the one and only day we could have visited national monuments, it turns out. All were closed for the remainder of our stay. Unbeknownst to us, had we arrived later on that same day, we might have had to wait out the 6PM curfew at Cairo airport. Although they probably still had food, water and toilet paper there on that first day of chaos.

When you come to a revolution, make sure you stay in a 5-star hotel

We came to Egypt to witness the fall of a government where the opposition had no succession plan. The opinion of the Egyptians we talked to was that the army could step in and control the situation until the new government was formulated. They had absolute distrust of the police and they appeared to be relieved once police had disappeared from the streets. All they wanted was President Hosni Mubarek out at all costs. He had been in power for more than 30 years, and the “election” results were always so much of a landslide that they could not have been anything but rigged. The phrase “Beware the anger of a patient man” was one of the media buzzwords we heard a lot of. And the Egyptian people were very, very sweet and hospitable to us and very optimistic that the troubles would soon be over.

Before curfew and after a sumptuous late lunch around the pool, we struck out for supplies, OK- for water and beer specifically. We were treated to a cab ride down into a very, very poor village less than 5 minutes from our opulent hotel where we felt extremely out of place, but that didn’t stop us from negotiating our Stellas. And we learned a new skill:

So for the rest of that evening, we obeyed the 6PM curfew, listened to events, coming to realize that there had been no internet or cell phone service that day, which meant no banks, credit cards or ATM’s were working. Even the on-site bank had a teller sitting there with nothing to do. All of the front desk staff was helpful, but harried and completely unsure of how to advise us, saying “this has never happened here before”.  Reality notwithstanding, we got info from the concierge on all of the fabulous tours we were going to take in the following days (as if), ate snacks, drank beer and watched movies in our room with the balcony overlooking the Giza pyramids. Never mind that it was only one story higher than and right next to  the security wall, so it also overlooked the street beside the hotel, which was complete squalor at ground level. As you may be already deducing, we were within striking distance from outside our safe haven.