Final Day in Egypt

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Our big task today is to mail off some our excess weight and collections so that we can make the big weight check in tomorrow, so after breakfast Evy and I flagged a taxi to take us to the post office.

Our taxi drive was the usual crazy Cairo journey. The taxi was barely hanging together (I think the passenger door was about to fall off), the taxi driver didn't seem to know how to get there (in spite of the fact that we had the instructions written in Arabic and it was at the main trains station), and we were all over the road and narrowly missing pedestrians. The driver kindly offered me a cigarette ( I declined) before lighting up himself.

When we got to where the post office was, it turned out to be on the other side of a construction site. No problem, they simply waived us through the site. Try that at home with no green label safety boots !

We figured out the intricacies of the package mailing procedure (they actually wrap the parcel for you) and also mailed off no less than 35 postcards, many of ones that we had written in Thailand.

After returning to pick up the kids, we took a walk to the local Radio Shack (just to avoid having to haggle over prices) and picked up some extra memory cards. It turns out electronics are fairy cheap here, when you get the actual, not tourist, prices. Evy picked up some Egyptian scarves off a street vendor (not so fixed price).

When we returned to the hotel, I had an email with directions to the apartment in Athens so we printed that for tomorrow and began talking with a fellow traveller from Australia. He had been travelling through Europe since Christmas and we were able to swap advice and trade our Middle East and Egypt books for Lonely Planet Europe book (exactly the one we had been trying to find). I also gave him our Egypt cell phone card as there was still some minutes left on it.

With our bags now a bit lighter after todays mailings, we pulled out our digital fishing scale and weighed everything, moving text books around as needed to get each suitcase under the requisite 20 kg and carry on under 7 kg. We are getting pretty good at this and it is far better done in advance rather than at some crowded airport.

I spent the rest of the evening reading our new guide book and trying to get my head around the layout of Greece. We have the first week planned, but have only a vague idea of what the next three weeks will look like. Hani's brother Michael is to pick us up early in the morning, so we turn in at a early hour.

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