The journey begins with a very long flight. Now, I’ve flown to Austrailia from the US and back once. That 18 hour flight for 32-year-old, in-shape me was brutal enough, but due to the time zone shifts, it made perfect sense to sleep most of the trip away on the plane, which I mostly certainly did.
Not so, Sacramento to Cairo. For starters, the trip had 3 legs (or possibly 4, if we want to count the hour-long surreal van ride through Cairo to the hotel — more on that to later.) We started in Sacramento and took a smallish jet to Seattle SeaTac, where we had a four hour amuse-bouche layover before the real fun began.
While I have to say that Turkish Airlines has very nice planes and crew, an 11-hour flight in coach is tough on out-of-shape me, and I had to get up every hour or so to stretch my insistent legs and un-numb my aching buttcheeks. The way this trip aligned, the proper time to get any rest on that flight would have been the first few hours, which were also consequently when they served the first meal, presumably so people could have uninterrupted sleep.
Sleep, however, was not in the cards. The *right* way to do this was to stay up all night, so that by the time we arrived at our final destination and slunk to our hotel room, time would be utterly meaningless — the circadian cycle just a construct of the hubris of man. So that’s what we did, some crazy how, pulling off the first true all-nighter I’ve had since graduate school; condolences to my friends with small children.
Ok, so we arrived in Instanbul, a place in which I would love to actually spend some real time on a future trip. The Istanbul airport is very nice and very modern, but with only an hour between arrival and departure, we didn’t have time to even have a much-needed Turkish coffee. Our gates were far apart, so we power-walked through a relatively empty international terminal. There seemed to a bit of a quiet oh-so-European fracas going on at the ticket counter, and it turns out our flight was very overbooked. Now, before the dread sinks in, allow me to say that for us, this was painless — we were not affected by the overbook. But we could tell there were a lot of folks that were, including a guy who said he was going to miss his own wedding if he didn’t get on the plane (!!). The Turkish ground crew did their best, but it was clearly not entirely resolved when we got aboard.
The flight from Istanbul to Cairo is relatively short — about 2 hours altogether and just a little hop over the southern Mediterranean and into the Nile delta. I opted for a window seat for this flight, which I almost never do because I prefer the extra space of being able to ooze out into the aisle a bit as-needed and, as demonstrated in the previous trip, I have to stand up a lot on long flights. But I wanted to see Cairo from the air at night.
Cairo is big. In fact, from the air, it looks like it incompasses the whole of the Nile River delta, though in reality its several cities mashed together in a sort of Delta Megalopolis. It’s big. Really, really big, and not nearly as illuminated as Tokyo, the only other city I’ve been to that I’m able to a draw comparison to for scale. 27 million people live in the Cairo urban sprawl, about 2/3rds the population of Tokyo. It is also estimated that 60% of Egyptians live in poverty, and 95% live on the Nile banks. So, there’s some slightly defensible numbers for you today.
But wait, we were still on the plane. The lady sitting next to me was also an American going on a Nile cruise, which goes to show you the popularity of this time of year for Nile cruising.
Delirious from lack of sleep, that flight was made in relative silence. As we arrived in Cairo, the plane *almost* landed, and I mean, I’m pretty sure I felt the wheels on the ground, when the pilot accelerated back into the air at the last moment. Apparently due to powerful wind gusts, he had to abort the landing, and we had to circle back around for another 20 minutes before actually landing properly.
We were greeted before immigration by our handler (!!) from Uniworld cruises, a charming native Cairo man with a great sense of humor who wanted us to call him “The Captain”, as his name is Ahab. He ushered us painlessly through Immigration and Customs and into the…I think I’m going to go with the word “circus” of the Cairo road system.
Cairo drivers are something really special. It’s hard to describe the calm but aggressive management of chaos that is driving in Cairo. I would not recommend it to anyone without the Cairo driving genes deep in their blood, because I’m sure we were moments from death multiple times, but it feel like a really lovely smooth ride the entire time. Ahab added his own color to all the night-illuminated sights we could see, while the driver coolly navigated cars flying in from all directions at once. Near crashes, horn blasting, and less-than-1” clearance between vehicles were common occurrences. The car horns were like a complex sequence of bird-calls — a language all their own. I was oddly at peace with all of it, but it might have been because at this point were were on hour 26 of the trip.
We stay at the Four Seasons, and all I can really comment on so far is that its a lovely hotel with big, clean rooms and soaking tubs. We’re on the 30th floor, so I’m hoping to get a good view of Cairo this morning when the sun rises a bit more.
One of the other members of the party arranged a private tour for today that we weren’t expecting, but it seems fun enough and doesn’t start until 10am, so we decided to go for it instead of spending the *whole* day relaxing. We’ll see later on if this was the right choice.
A desperately needed hot shower, and tat last o bed for what turned out to be seven pretty decent hours of uninterrupted sleep.
And so, readers, we begin! I don’t know if I’ll be able to spend this much time writing every day, but I will try to keep the news flowing.
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