Trip to Cairo

I have been a terrible blogger. All apologies. My Mayanot trip was so exhausting that I had no energy to blog, but suffice it to say the trip was incredible. Some highlights included jeeping in the Golan Heights, Tzfat--one of the most holy cities in the world for Jews--in which we learned about Kabbalah, rafting the Jordan River, spending Shabbat at the Kotel, camel riding in the Negev with local Bedouins, and of course getting caked in mud at the Dead Sea.
Pictures later!

I am currently in Cairo, Egypt, after an exhausting 20-hour trip yesterday from Jerusalem. This post is about that trip:

Janis, Hillary and I paid a tour company to drive us from Jerusalem to Cairo, a 12-hour or so bus tour including time spent crossing the border at Taba in the south. We spent a bit more money than I had wanted to spend but we figured it would ensure that Janis, who holds dual citizenship with Israel, would be able to pass without too many problems, and that we wouldn't have to negotiate taxis from the Egypt side of the border to Cairo, 7 or so hours away. The day's events went as followed (this is almost entirely reproduced from my travel notebook):

8:15 am, we arrived at the central bus depot, which is where the tour company told us to catch our bus. We discover that they meant another bus station somewhat down the road and are told to wait at a nearby gas station for them to pick us up.
8:50 am, a 7-passenger van arrives trying to usher us in. Driver and assistant do not speak English. The gas station attendant helps us ask if this is our "bus" to Cairo and promises we'll be safe.
We worry that we may have been kidnapped when we notice that the bus is driving Eastward toward Tel Aviv and not South to the border. Turns out that we were being driver to the company's Tel Aviv offices to pay in cash.
11 am, back on the road toward Eilat. Our van's A/C doesn't work and the three magnetic board games that we bought to pass our time turn out to be bereft of magnets.
4 pm, arrive in Eilat and discover that the two Chinese passengers and the one Korean girl in our van don't have visas or border fee vouchers from the company. They negotiate on the phone for half an hour with the tour company. The company, it seems, told that them that they could arrange visas at the border and that the border fees were included in their prices just like ours were.
5 pm, After fooling around the duty free shop still waiting on the Chinese and Korean passengers in our van, we cross the passport control. It is like a movie. The officer is sitting behind the counter painting his visa stamp with what smells like rubber cement, a burning cigarette flopping out of his fat mouth. Signs warn "no smoking." He does not know how to process my visa, and the tour company representative instructs him how to do his job.
6 pm, the three asian passengers have officially made it through to Egyptian soil, but the Chinese are not allowed to leave passport control. We should have been on the road two hours ago.
7:30 pm, they decide to release the Chinese couple. Passport control never questioned them or searched their bags, but apparently detained them for nearly 4 hours because sometimes Chinese people enter Egypt to illegally sell things on the street. So they kept our van for four hours to decide, I guess, without any inquiry, whether or not the Chinese couple was trying to sell burned DVDs.
12 am, we stop just beyond the Suez Canal for dinner at a rural restaurant of sorts.
2:30 am, we arrive in Cairo after a twenty hour day.

The moral of this post is: don't book with Mazada Tours in Tel Aviv.



Cairo is wonderful though. We spent the day in the Islamic Quarter haggling for scarves and tunics and climbing minarets and smoking hookah and drinking tea.