Casino Bar

During our trip in Egypt we found what I think is probably one of the nicest place to hang around in Cairo. This bar was called the "Casino bar" and is situated along the Nile waterfront on the Giza side (not far from the Zoo on Nile Street). We just entered there by luck the first evening and then we came back every single evening we spent in Cairo. Waiters were very nice, drinks excellent, food very good and abundant and all was quite cheap. So we just spent hours chatting, smoking narguile and watching the young egyptian crowd that was having fun here as we were the only tourists (or it seemed like it). One nice and original thing was that they were using jeans as seat covers, Jyby loved it and took a few pictures of it. More pictures in my flickr.

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).

Vacation to Egypt

Jeremy and myself are leaving for Egypt this morning. See you next week.