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9/5
We arrived in Cairo at almost 11 at night. We went down about 3 flights of stairs to passport control. Just before passport control, there are about 7 offices that exchange money and provide entrance visas. The exchange rate was 5.64LE for a US dollar. We read that there was a restriction about how much Egyptian money you could bring in so we only exchanged 2000LE (but no one ended up checking) The visas were $15 US. There were no applications, we just paid our money and got the sticker. It took about 40 minutes to pass through immigration even though it was only one flight that had landed. There weren’t separate lines for Egyptians and non-Egyptians.
As soon as we exited passport control, the baggage carrousels were a few feet away-and so were the “department of tourism officials.” We avoided almost all of them but while I wasn’t looking and my partner was grabbing baggage one of them started pulling our bags off of our cart and rearranging them. He then said to my partner “Welcome to Egypt. Money.” We gave him a little money, but 2 of the other “officials” came over to yell at him about the English people.
We exited the airport and found our hotel guy with a sign with our hotel name and the name with our reservation on it (as our hotel had said). We hoped on a bus and got off at the parking area with him. As he was walking us to the car, 2 men ran over and tried to “help” with our bags. It seemed like he was telling them to go away but he wasn’t very forceful. As we were loading up the car (the taxi driver didn’t secure our bags on the roof, which made me nervous) they started grabbing baggage again-even though we told them we didn’t want help and my partner and the driver obviously had it covered. I got in the car and asked my partner to get in and shut the door. We didn’t give them any money.
We got out of the airport, paid the parking fee and started driving. Almost immediately when we were in a deserted area, the taxi driver pulled over to the side of the road. I was nervous about what he was doing because we didn’t know where we were or where we were going really. He opened the trunk and pulled out a cord-he was now going to secure the luggage for the highway! He told us lots of tidbits about the area as we were driving by and was very friendly.
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