Keeping this short and sweet like our trip to Egypt!

A pleasant border crossing from Israel to Egypt (despite the short bomb scare) a mucky toilet (which frankly we both feel represents a nice middle ground in the spectrum of nasty toilets that we have seen: click here for a photo of it if you are not eating) a bus ride to Dahab, some diving, eating and chilling was a great start. We indulged in Thai, steak, beer and doing nothing when not in the water. I managed to do experience some excellent diving on the Thistlegorm Wreck. This is someone else’s footage…

Diving on the outside took a lot of effort as unlike in the video above we had a very strong current trying to whip us away into the blue. Inside was easier….

After a week of this though we were ready to move on to pyramids and mummies and all the usual madness of Egypt.

We booked some tickets to Cairo for Thursday but had asked if the planned demonstration that Tuesday wouldn’t turn into something bigger and cause traffic chaos. Everyone assured us that in Egypt these things are half hearted and would fizzle out fairly quickly. Sure enough after 9 hours on the bus and 11 checkpoints later, including a luggage search at the Suez canal we arrived in Cairo got a taxi to the metro fairly easily and to the 14 stops south to stay with a friend of Andrea’s in a nice leafy suburb. As there was a further protest planned for the next day, Friday, we bought some fruit and veg for assuming we’d stay indoors for the day and on Saturday we’d all visit the pyramids together. As the night went on it became clear on TV that it was a little more intense than expected although we all felt that the news was exaggerating the scale of the protest somewhat. The next morning we got up and saw they were still protesting, our phones stopped working and then the internet was shut down. Things were getting more serious. We spent the day watching movies and in between checking out the news. The protest were continuing to grow, the army had been called out and we started trying to ring embassies to find out what the deal was. Bravo Embassy of Ireland for having nobody answering the phones and only leaving an unreachable mobile phone number as an emergency contact. It’s not like anything was happening…. /sarcasm

The next morning the protests were larger still, buildings and cars had been set alight and we thought about leaving for the airport. Bear in mind though we never felt in any personal danger (despite hearing gunshots at night) and this was just a decision based on the fact that tourism would have been nearly impossible.  At that state the protests were still largely peaceful and tourists were in no danger whatsoever.

So we headed off with our backpacks and found a taxi and were offered a trip to the airport amazingly at the normal tourist rate, more or less. We were expecting to be fleeced! We started off trying to head up the motorway but had to turn back and drive against the flow of traffic due to the fact that protesters had blocked it which meant we had to drive through the middle of the city and past all the tanks and burned out cars and buildings to get out to the airport. The most surreal thing was the way normal life was underway despite the madness. Shops were open, buses were running and the army took over traffic and policing tasks since the police had all fled.

At the airport it was very busy and there was semi-chaos in front of the Egypt Air office because they were the only airline with a functioning booking system. By a stroke of luck the phones started working again and even though we were out of credit Andrea’s mother rang us and was fairly relieved to hear we were ok and at the airport. We suggested that she get Tomi, Andrea’s brother, to book a flight for us and ring us with a booking number. Sure enough this worked out great and by 8pm we were boarding a flight to Istanbul. Once there we booked a flight to Vienna which we caught the next morning and now we’re back in Vienna experiencing freezing cold weather and a bit of culture shock 🙂

Here’s some photos and a clip of the trip to the airport…

A bit of eight months and it took a revolution to send us home. A weird end to a weird journey. We couldn’t have enjoyed it more!