Cairo - 8/1/08

Clive & Friend - Cairo
see all photos »

Last night I meet up with the first of the other riders, who like me had arrived nice and early for the trip. Rae and Ursula are from Canada, he is an ex fighter pilot now working for the Canadian air accident investigation authority, i was surprised when he told me that he had recently had both of his hips replaced, she works in I.T. Whilst in the air force Rae was involved in peace keeping in the Sinai, so had been around Cairo before and was interested to find out if it had changed much.

City of the Dead - Cairo
see all photos »

So we arranged to meet up and do some sightseeing today, after my experiences of yesterday, getting ripped off my the taxi driver, i was glad to have the company. Egypt is a land of opportunities. Opportunities for the locals that is, to con, rob, deceive, and generally get any tourists to part with their hard earned cash as quickly as possible. As the county as a whole, and Cairo in particular, has been on the tourist map for sometime, they are very skillful at getting you to part with your money, and are able to do it in ways that (a) you cant see coming, or (b) don't even realise it has happened when they do. No sooner had we hit the streets of Cairo then we were targeted, someone says "hi" and before you know it you are being guided in the opposite direction from where you were going to visit some shop that you didn't want to visit.

A City of Opportunities