Couple of months after coming back home from Europe I started thinking about the next summer. The first weeks at home after interrailing in Europe for almost a month was really difficult time to me. I missed so much being free and going wherever whenever I wanted to. Now I was stuck at work and practising, the normal boring life. All the people we met in Europe were either travelling or living their lives like me and Saija did now in Finland. I had a huge travel fever! Saija and I discussed where we wanted to go and what to see next. Saija wanted to try snorkling and experience something other than Europe and all the cities. We first thought of going to Thailand but since I have my ringette season in wintertimes that wasn't possible 'cause we wanted it to be warm when we went there. Then we started thinking about Egypt. It would be a perfect destination for us. We could try snorkling, see the pyramids and the Nile river, swim in the Red sea, wander in deserts and see many historical sights and it would be really really HOT in there! That was it, we chose Egypt to be our next destination.
A song we listened a lot before our adventure even had started :)
Again, like before the trip toEurope, I spent so many hours reading about Egypt and its cities! We looked maps and compared plain ticket prices. I read about stomach flu and the safety in Egypt among other stuff of course. We ended up paying 222€/nose to Cairo, to the capital of Egypt on 30th of May. A flight to home was due on 20th of June from Sharm El Sheikh and it cost 307€/head.
We planned our route carefully and it changed many times from the original version we made. First we decided to fly to Cairo and stay there for 4 nights. From Cairo we were planning to make our way down the Nile river (later we learnt that the Nile river streams from south to north to the Mediterranean sea) by train and stop to spend time in Al Minya, Asyuet, Qena and Luxor.. The first change of plans happened when the revolution fights started in Cairo maybe around January and the situation in Egypt was really unstable. All the travel agencies in Finland cancelled all the trips to Egypt from the whole spring and summer. We had already bought our plane tickets and wouldn't have gotten any money back from them if we would have decided not to go. The fights in Egypt were mostly about that the Egyptians required the president Mubarak who had been in the office from 1981 to step down. We were terrifed watching the news that showed the riots on the Tahrir sq.. And when I googleted our WakeUpCairo hostel it was located only 100-200 metres from the sq. We decided not to tell that to our parents. My parents weren't happy at all for me leaving there even without the specific info about the location of our hostel. Cairo is a city of 20-22 (included the surroundings of Cairo) million people so it's huge and the chances of our hostel being near the place were the riots happened was, well our luck. :D
So our trip was 22 days + 1 travel day back to Finland. The dates were 30.5-21.6. Our route was looking like this before we left:
Cairo 30.5-3.6, 4 nights in WakeUpCairo hostel
3.6 at 10.35am-11.40am FLIGHT from Cairo to Luxor
Luxor 3.6-8.6, 5 nights
8th of June from Luxor to Hurghada by BUS
Hurghada 8.6-14.6, 6 nights
14th of June from Hurghada to Sharm El Sheikh by BOAT --> to Dahab by bus
Dahab 14.6-16.6, 2 nights
16th of June from Dahab to Sharm El Sheikh
Sharm El Sheikh 16.6-20.6, 4 nights
So if you had enough patience to read our timetable from above you can see that we turned down our plan to travel along the Nile river by train. We thought that it would be too unsafe and it would be much safer to flight as it turned out to be, with our own bodyguards.. ;)
Things we listed what we wanted to do on our journey:
- ride the camels
- to snorkle or dive
- see the famous bazaars of Egypt
- mini cruise or some boat thing in the Nile river
- hot air balloon!!
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