MONDAY – CAIRO We were up fairly early and after a showered packed our gear and left. We walked up to Midan Tahir, the transport centre of Cairo where buses and taxis whirled and roared in an endless stream , then up to Midan Talab Haab. After a bit of a search we found a hotel with rooms for E£11 and checked in. The Hotel Minerva was old and quaint, each room having a balcony and several pieces of timber furniture.
We relaxed for a while then went out to attend to some business. At the EgyptAir office we confirmed our onward flights to Nairobi on the 4th of November then we entered the formidable Mogamma Building to register with the police.
We spent the rest of the day in the Egyptian Museum after using the trusty old “student” scam with our YHA cards to get in for half price. The museum is huge. Its ground floor is filled with stone statues, tomb facades, solar barques and myriad things taken from the cities of the great civilization that ruled Egypt 4½ thousand years ago.
But on the second floor there is treasure! The tomb of the boy-king Tut-Ankh-Amun was excavated in 1922 and its incredible contents can only make one wonder about the fabulous, long-gone wealth looted from the tombs of far greater Pharaohs. The two main features of the 1,700 funerary items are Tut’s famous gold mask, inlaid with jewels and precious stones and the inner coffin (there were 3 coffins, 4 gilded wooden shrines and a stone sarcophagus) which is made of an incredible 110.4 kg of solid gold inlaid with precious and semi-precious stones.
When we left the museum, we wandered back up to the hotel and showered then went down to the restaurant where we had an unexciting meal and a few cold Cokes. We finished our first day in Egypt sitting out on our room’s balcony, talking and swatting mosquitoes while the orange ball of the sun subsided into the hazy pall of dust and smog hanging over Cairo.
CurseOfTheTraveller 