Cairo

Greetings from Cairo. Amazingly all that "stuff" fitted in my bag and I could actually lift it.

Cairo is fairly quiet from a tourist point of view at the moment with numbers well down from normal. The plus side for us is that we get the monuments to ourselves and I even managed to get the king Tut room at the museum on my own rather than shuffling by in a queue of people. However this is the ONLY quiet thing about the city. Imams calling via crackly tannoys at 3AM and 6 AM, the constant roar of the traffic and the incessant tooting of horns makes for quite a soundscape. Crossing the road is a dangerous sport here. A real case of “he who hesitates is lost”.

The Nile, our travelling companion for the next few months. In Cairo it's not so much Blue or White more Green !!!

Spent yesterday (was that Tuesday?) visiting the Khan Al-Khalili area in Old Islamic Cairo.
Maze of back streets inhabited by swarms of nomadic Keenex sellers. Exactly how many tissues does a tourist need ? Away from the tourist areas the wares are more authentic in the spice and
fruit markets.

The list of requirements to get a Sudanese visa seems to grow every week. The current red tape de jour is a letter of introduction from your embassy in Cairo. Amazingly Ireland actually have an embassy here (phew) and it only took 20 mins to issue and was free, huzza ! (The Aussies took 3 hours and were charged EG£350!!, EG£4050 for the UK).