Friday 30-05 part 2- Buses and Trains

We made our way to a hotel. We weren't staying there, but of our group were, if they were doing the 10 days tour (we did 8 days). We dumped our bags in their rooms and went upstairs to the pool level and restaurant. Some swam, the rest of us ate. There whole menu was burgers. I had the beef burgers, which came out as two mini rolls, each with a mini burger inside it, plus chips. I hadn't eaten anything like this since London and enjoyed it immensely. I had a non alcoholic cocktail called a San Francisco, with grenadine, lemonade and some fruit juices. After the cruise, everything seemed quite cheap.



We found out from Raf that the trains were running 5 hours late in Egypt that day. He was trying to organise a bus for us instead. We all thought about the bathrooms on the last overnight and were happy with this idea. On the bus we would stop in Hirgaddah for a few hours. We also liked this idea, as in our original itinerary we missed out on Hirgaddah. We showered in the rooms and got ready to head off.

This is the part of the trip where we split. It was kind of sad, I had gotten quite close to some of these people. We were sharing the bus with another topdeck group we hadn't met before. The bus journey was last minute with everyone's destinations being different, so there was chaos. There were people moving around everywhere and shouting and throwing bags,as I looked for everyone to say farewell.

We entered into the bus convoy at 6pm. The trip took about 4 hours with a rest stop. At Hirgaddah first we dropped the other group off at their hotel and then went down town. Rafik found us an Italian place for food and half the group went there. The rest of us went with him to get local food. It was an Egyptian pizza at a small stall/restaurant. The base was a kind of puff pastry, then sauce and chicken, then a crispy cheese topping, then lots of veges on top. It was so tasty and well needed, as well as being 10LE ($2 AUD) for a big pizza.

Poor Rafik. He hadn't slept since the day before, at that point 46 hours. He had been busy organising everything on the tour. His eyes were glazed over and he couldn't really concentrate on anything for more then a few seconds. He was so completely drained. Yet he still found us both restaurants, liaised with the Arabic speaking stall keepers, organised taking our money and making the orders, finding Eeno somewhere to get a haircut (she really really wanted it for some reason) and later found us a cafe. He was a complete legend.





After the pizza we found the Italian pizza eaters and went to a coffee shop to had drinks and shisha. We had apple flavour and relaxed for a while. Then walked back to the bus. The convoy started out again at 2am. I didn't get much sleep.