Road trip to Cairo

Back from Egypt ! Here is a quick summary of our trip.

We left last tuesday with my car and drove to Eilat where we parked. We passed the border to Sinai at the Taba crossing, and everything went pretty smooth, actually too smooth. Once in Sinaï we start to ask for our visa to Cairo (no need for any Visa when going to Sinaï fro Israël) and they answer us that they don't deliver any visa for Egypt and that we have to go back to the Egyptian consulat in Eilat in Israël... So we spent one night in a nice Sinaï hotel with a view on Salah El Din fortress, and the next day we went back to Israël to get those stupid visas. This is the sunrise on the fort:


We almost got kicked out of the consulat when they saw Jeremy juggling to pass time while waiting for the stamp but we got it in a few hours. We passed the border again and took a taxi for Cairo. We loved that 5 hour trip through mountains, desert, a tunnel under Suez canal and finally Cairo. Here is one of our encounters on the road :


We stayed in a cheap Hotel right by the Giza Zoo and we were lucky to have a view on some green which is pretty rare in Cairo. Our next days are probably close to every (not really organized beforehand) tourist tour excepted our long evenings spent in a nice cafe along the Nil river drinking fresh juices and smoking chicha.

So I got pics of Pyramids taken during our 25km Camel back riding hike (I lost a few vertebras in this story :) :


Mosqs (in the Cairo citadel):


and Churches (In Old coptic Cairo):


For the trip back we took a bus from Cairo to Taba (5x cheaper than the taxi that was already not too bad). We woke up at 5 to wait for a late bus that happened to break after 20km... So we changed bus at the depot and the new bus lost air conditioning like 5 minutes out of the depot. We were the only non arabic speakers in the bus, but seeing the bus reliability I wasn't too suprised to see no other western countries tourists in it :). It took us over 8 hours to arrive in Taba, where we waited over 2 hours at the border because we came back at the end of a 4 days long israeli weekend (monday 13). After 5 more hours driving through all Israel and an automatic gearbox attempting multiple suicides (made in France obviously) we finally arrived to the term of a 17.5 hour travel.

Jeremy flew to France today so you might meet him pretty soon if you're near Paris (a dragon-clown carrying a unycicle in the airplane).