Toronto to Cairo

Today we set off on our Nexus Tour to Egypt and Jordan in extremely blustery conditions, which accounted for our tardy departure. But once in the air we were generally free of turbulence for the 9386km, 9 1/2 hr. flight. We did have one new experience - our Egyptair flight was as dry as a bourbon producing county in Kentucky - argh! To top it off, only one of our two entertainment centres operated and movie offerings were pretty lean. Because we took off shortly after lunch, we landed in Cairo at the ungodly hour of 5:53. This is the first time we have travelled with a Nexus handler - Robert Chung - because there appear to be about 30 people in this tour group - lots of names to conquer.

Our route to our Hilton Pyramids Golf Spa, took us through the residential suburbs of Cairo and Giza and we got a great look at how many of the 20 million Cairo inhabitants live. We would not be content with these living conditions. It’s entirely possible that the majority of 100 000 000 Egyptians live in sub North American standards.

Anyway, an hour from the airport we arrived at this oasis of opulence

We were treated to a fabulous buffet breakfast while we were checked in. Our room was on the pool level which was unfortunately closed for renos. I ordered a bottle of African Chardonnay to replenish after our dry flight and settled down to start my blog. This evening we are on a Nile River dinner cruise and I’ll have more about that in the next post.