My least favorite part of traveling is the actual traveling. To make it even worse, in my opinion at least, both Heathrow Airport and Istanbul Airport make you wait until about an hour or less before your flight will be leaving to let you know which gate you will need to run to at top speed (this is because most international flights tend to start boarding roughly an hour before they take off). So, from 12:15am to 2:35am, I had to sit and wait for the gate to show up on the board announcing departures.
Istanbul Airport is the larger of the two international airports in Istanbul and has been the airport for all scheduled commercial passenger flights since 2019. It is also the largest privately-owned airport in the world and the second busiest airport in Europe after Heathrow.
The other times I had flown in or out of Istanbul (this was my first time with a connecting flight there) I had been at the Ataturk Airport. I did not realize just how enormous this newer airport was until I was trying to get from F13, where I had arrived from London, to C4 for the plane to Cairo. I found that it just went on and on and on.
I have included here a couple of photos of the interior of the airport, the sign that needed to show the departure gate (with a red arrow pointing at the flight involved), a diagram of the airport with red arrows pointing at the two gates involved, and a photo of the airport from the outside as the flight to Cairo was departing.
Immediately after I had arrived from London, I headed for the WC. The line for the ladies was quite long. It was going to take some time to get inside, much less into a stall. Many of the women around me were getting rather surly. Didn’t have a clue as to what they were saying, but they apparently didn’t feel that they should have to wait.
There was a cleaning lady working. I smiled at her. Shortly after that, a woman and some young children came out of the Family Room. The cleaning lady looked around for another family, saw none, and then came to me and motioned for me to use the Family Room. Very kind of her.
About an hour or so later when I was pretty much alone in the waiting area, another lovely cleaning woman smiled at me and said in clear English, “Welcome to Istanbul”. I didn’t know how to say “thank you” in Turkish, but she was wearing a hijab, so I said “Shkran”. She smiled even more broadly and so did I.
The gate was finally revealed and I headed down the long F gates concourse. The Cairo flight was scheduled to leave at 3:50am. Good thing as it took a little over a half an hour to get from F13 to C4. This was even with using the moving sidewalks and not standing still on them. Reaching C4 and seeing that they weren’t yet boarding, I visited the WC again and then found a seat in the Gate C4 area.
Eventually boarding began. Nobody was speaking English. But they were directing people towards signs that had letters on them. They were the group numbers for our seats. When I got to the airlines agent who was checking on the passports and boarding passes, the computer said that my boarding pass was invalid. I showed him my boarding pass from London to Istanbul and explained that I had been given both boarding passes at Heathrow by Turkish Airlines. I also said that my case had been checked through to Cairo and would be on the plane. He decided to wave me through. Thank God!
We were due to arrive in Cairo at 6:10am and got there about 20 minutes late. I was just happy to be there. I had also been up since 6am the prior morning, London time. My brain was getting a bit foggy. I was praying that I would find the Viking rep at the airport quickly and that I would be able to get into my hotel room without having to wait until 3pm.
We deplaned on the tarmac and then took a bus to the terminal. There, waiting for me at the door, was the Viking rep. I was it as far as any other Viking tour participants at that point, so he grabbed my carryon and led me towards the Visa window. As we were heading towards it, he asked me for my passport and my $30 USD Visa fee. He paid for the Visa, pasted it into my passport and off we went to where the Egyptian passport control was located. Instead of taking me to the very long line of people, he led me to a pretty much non-existent line marked for Business Class passengers. He said something to them, my passport was scanned and handed back to me.
We went on to where the cases from my flight were arriving. He was in a bit of a hurry because he did have another group arriving soon and my flight had been late. So, of course, my case was the last to show up. Once we had my case, we set off for the exit, where my driver would be waiting. He pointed out my driver to me and sent me on my way.
I remembered from my prior trip to Egypt that driving in Cairo was not for the faint of heart and that traffic tended to be in various degrees of standing still or totally chaotic and nothing in between. First of all, there are no stop signs or traffic lights. Lanes are a suggestion only. Nobody uses turn indicators. It is all by the various honks of the horn. The only thing different this time was that traffic, for the most part, kept moving. They had modernized the roads. There were still camels, donkeys, carts, etc., on the same road with the other vehicles, but there were many more lanes.
By the time we got to the hotel, there was another Viking rep waiting for me. He greeted me as I got out of the car. My cases went off with another fella. This Viking rep had my room key! I nearly kissed him. He then led me through the hotel to my room. The entrance was on the ground floor of the South Tower of the Sheraton Cairo Hotel & Casino. My room was on the 19th floor of the North Tower. I had Nile River views.
My cases arrived in the room just seconds after I did. I wanted two main things at that time – food and sleep. But the reps for the two river cruise ships that would be traveling together would be available back down in the lobby at 10am. So I did some unpacking for what I would need for rest of that day and the next two days in Cairo, as well as for when we would fly to Luxor to get on the ship the day after that. Then I went to do some exploring of the hotel itself and where things were before meeting up with the rep for my ship.
Another thing that I remembered from my prior trip to Egypt was that the water was not drinkable. It had stuff in it that my body would not take kindly to at all. But this hotel was set up for non-Egyptians and so the water and ice there were fine. The ship would also be fine as far as both water and ice were concerned. But anywhere else in Egypt, I would need to be careful to get bottled water, no ice, and nothing that may have been touched by water or mixed with water. So, if I wanted fresh-squeezed orange juice, I would need to watch that it was the juice of the orange only without any added water or ice.
Cairo was founded in 969AD and is home to more than 9.8 million people. The Greater Cairo metropolitan area has a population of over 22 million people. Areas of what would eventually become Cairo were inhabited from the pre-dynastic and early dynastic ancient Egypt roughly 6,000 years ago. The ancient cities of Memphis and Heliopolis, as well as the Giza pyramid complex, had been absorbed within the current city.
At 10am, there were two women sitting at Viking tables in the lobby area. One was for Viking Antares and the other for Viking Amun. I would be on Amun, so I sat down and had a chat with Hanaa. It turned out that she would be the Egyptologist/Program Director for my particular group. There would be 60 people on the ship, divided into three groups of 20 each. Our group was Amun A. We hit it off really well. I was the only Viking passenger down there at that time and so we had a very nice, unhurried conversation.
One thing about being an Egyptologist as opposed to just being a tour guide is that they actually have a university degree in Egyptology. They know the history, the mythology, the archaeology, and can read hieroglyphics. In short, they really know what they are showing you and telling you.
Hanaa gave me the Viking Daily for that day and the following day. This provided information regarding our schedule for the day and other information of interest. Information about where we were, what we were doing, local food, nautical terms, the predicted highs in both Fahrenheit and Celsius, and anything else that we might want to know was included.
The nautical term for that day was Land A’hoy. It said, “This interjection was shouted by the ship’s lookout to announce that land had been spotted. ‘Ahoy’ is also a traditional greeting for hailing other sailors, and was originally a Viking battle cry.”
After our initial meeting, I was certain that I was going to have a great time learning about all we were experiencing with Hanaa as our Egyptologist. I went back to the room to put what I had received from her away and take some photos plus a short video from the balcony of my room. Not only did I have some great views of the city and the Nile, but I could also see Tahrir Square and the pink old Cairo Museum.
I went to lunch (the smoked salmon sandwich in the photo was mine, plus one of the salads and the lemon juice with mint) and then took a nap.
Next – Exploring the Step Pyramid and other Sakkara tombs
