It’s a Small World

Getting from point A to point B and coming out alive.

Train

The comforting clunking of the rails and the gentle swaying of the train made sleep easy. At least for me. We were in the last car, so the whistle was a distant noise whenever we crossed a road. Occasionally other trains would pass us, with a loud rushing noise, but aside from that it was just us and the lingering smell of cigarettes from years past. Our group had five double cabins, ancient brown and beige rooms that were clean, but well worn. I could totally imagine Agatha Christie riding the same train back in the day when she wrote Death on the Nile.

We embarked just before supper. Finding the train station was a fairly complicated affair, with many false turns and stopping to ask directions multiple times. I’m not sure how many times we whizzed past the brand new station, staring up at the huge, inaccessible overpass that we needed to be on to actually get to the thing. Eventually, with much bumping on potholed dirt access roads and careening around a market, we rocked up to the door and were rushed to the train. We thought it was funny, but I don’t think the driver did.

Our friendly conductor got us sorted and then we waited. Of course the train left late, so we hobnobbed in the hall, compared cabins and examined the water closets that had no running water in the pot, just a flap that opened onto the track. Also they were square, not oval.

As the lights of Cairo and Giza faded behind us, our conductor brought us some clever tables that snapped onto the wall and proceeded to serve us dinner. It was plain fare, involving chicken, rice, a bun, and some other regular things, with small packets of salt and papper. (Not a typo). Each cabin had its own little sink and mirror, so after dinner and having our bed made up, Heath and I zonked out. The others went “clubbing”, aka hung out in the smoky club car till the conductor came and said it was time for bed cause their wake up call was at 4:30am. Very fatherly, that one.

4:30 was waaaay to early for me, and the breakfast presented simply didn’t want to go down. I had good hot tea and everything, but swallowing those tasteless bits of bread and cake were just too much. I wasn’t alone in this suffering. Oh well, what’s a little discomfort for a whole lot of adventure.

Plane

For Heath and myself, this trip included 14 different flights. For the record, that’s too many. I got very weary of security lines, and since four of those flights involved Africa, the security was indeed wacky. We all flew into Cairo, and by “we” I mean all ten or us Egypt tourists. Andrew, Lyndon, Garrett, Lonnie, Nette, Katie, Jane, Kari Jo and yours truly. They made an announcement on the Frankfurt plane that if anyone saw laser lights beaming or flashing at the plane they should report it. Incidentally, Andrew saw some pretty major flashing on our plane, and on some of our later Egypt flights to/from Sharm el Sheikh we saw them again. Green beams, flashing and blitzing against the plane. Dumb.

As a group, we flew from Luxor to Sharm el Sheikh via Cairo and two days later back to Cairo. Thanks to a small ticket booking error, Lyndon had two tickets and Andrew had none for the last leg of the journey. That took some fairly long winded sorting, but eventually they said it was all good and Andrew and Lyndon both boarded as Lyndon. At least they had two seats. Our flights were all late at night, so you can appreciate how exhausted, loopy and weird some of us were. Security offered endless sources of entertainment, with Jane smuggling full water bottles through the xray machine (not once but TWICE), having to enter our names and passport numbers into large ledgers, by hand mind you (?????), Andrew, not realizing that he had to slowly rotate in the body scanner since it couldn’t rotate, and being guided through a graceful 2.5 round swirl by the agent. We won’t even elaborate how Garrett got into a fight with a bidet and clearly came out the loser. I’m still laughing over that one. We still don’t know why one agent kept asking us “do you like Israel” or “are you Palestinian”. In fact, we can’t even agree on what he asked for sure. Needless to say he got a lot of blank stares and strange nods and shakes and “what?” Garrett is convinced he was asked about Australia, not Israel or Palestine. Could be. He also thought he knew how to use a bidet.

Vans

Most of the time we took to the road in a big van that said Magic Carpet in bold letters on the side. Of course this gave rise to many lame flying carpet jokes. The vans were quite plush actually, with one even having zebra print rugs on the floor. They all had lovely window curtains that got in the way of sightseeing, but also were sort of nice to keep the baking sun out.