Hiring a taxi personal taxi driver…
Today was our best day in Egypt yet!
We met with some of the other Canadians we originally met at Ahmed’s wedding for breakfast, they’re ending their trip today and offered to take our suits home! YESSSSS, I’m so glad I don’t have to carry that along for my tour, it literally took up about half of my bag!
The neighborhood surrounding their hostel is SOOOOO much nicer than the one surrounding our hotel. It’s basically a European neighborhood whereas our is… well it’s different! We ate at a really nice restaurant (where Jimmy Carter once ate!) that had a stained glass ceiling and aquariums all over the place. The columns for the tables came out of the floor but where of the same material, it looked really cool!
After we dropped the girls back at their hotel we caught a cab to go to the Giza pyramids. Along the way we mentioned that we wanted to ride a camel around the pyramid. The taxi driver was more than happy to take us to “his guy”, he even offered to wait while we were gone and too drive us to a restaurant overlooking the pyramids (waiting for us again) and then drive us home. The guide he took us too was actually very good, we went out on the camels (man are they weird looking animals!) and toured around the pyramids, we didn’t want to go in since we will be doing that with our tour in 2 days. We refused offers to be able to climb the pyramids (in the morning and for a massive bribe I’m assuming) and to enter a different area of the pyramids. We took some great pictures, lame poses and everything! The dessert is so peaceful… especially compared to Cairo! After our tour was done we got dropped off in a papyrus store and perfume store (of course!) The papyrus store was actually very neat because he showed us the process for making the paper. Once it came time to tip our guide we offered him 100 EP (the tour cost 400EP for both of us), we knew he wouldn’t accept that but we figured 150EP would be the end…. nope, he made us to 400EP, the price of the EFFing tour, so an 100% tip. Whatever we gave it to him, it basically made the camel ride cost 80$ in the end, not bad.
The restaurant our taxi driver took us to was fantastic, we had extremely fresh pita and dip, prawn, calamari (I really enjoyed it, normally I hate calamari!), rice and a fish. DELICIOUS.
Our cab driver took us home and chatted to us the whole time. We had agreed on 120EP for the whole trip earlier but we gave him 150EP since we really thought he did a fantastic job.
At the hotel we met some Canadians (Alberta and Thunder Bay) and chatted to them for a while. It was a great time, we tried to pass on all the things we learned over our first couple days in Cairo.
Tomorrow our tour starts! … at 7PM
We’re going to take a relaxing day, go check out the zoo here and walk around Zamalek which is where there are many embassies and mansions.
