5th April - Cairo

Well I think we are starting to get into the right time zone, we didn't wake up till 5.30am this morning. Had our usual breakfast downstairs then headed off to the Citadel and Islamic Cairo. We went for a walk down the street to try to get a taxi. It took us 3 goes to find a driver who spoke enough English to understand where we wanted to go.

 

We had to go through 2 checkpoints to get in, the second one had a scanner and found the Swiss army knife I had in my handbag which I had to surrender and take a ticket for. (I picked it up later even though it was not in the hole that I had the ticket for). We had great views over the city. We wandered through the old palace and into the Salah El Din Mosque. I am glad I wore my buff so I did not have to put on a hooded robe other tourists seem to have to wear into the mosques. We bought an icecream which was tiny and cost 7 Egyptian pounds ($1.40Aus), we know it was a rip off but decided to get them anyway. 

David with his ice cream

After spending a while wandering around for a while we walked down to Islamic Cairo past Al Azhar park. Everyone seemed to be heading to the park as it is a public holiday Sham an-Nessim (the smell of the breeze). The maps we have in our lonely planet are not detailed enough and we were not where we thought we were. We went through a checkpoint and saw some restaurants and headed towards them. As usual a guy from one of them came out to get us to go into his restaurant. We were hungry and could not be bothered finding anywhere else so sat down and had a nice lunch. I noticed the people sitting next to us in the next restaurant had a lonely planet Egypt book so asked them if they could tell us where we were. It ended up we were sitting on the edge of Midan Al-Hussein right where we wanted to be for our walking tour of Islamic Cairo. We wandered down an apparently important medieval thoroughfare with many Mamluk-era mosques, madrassas and caravanserais. We headed out to the old Bab an-Nasr (gate of victory) and back in Bab al-Futuh (gate of conquests). This part of the walk was much cleaner and had many restored buildings.

We made our way over to Al-Azhar mosque just in time for the call to prayer, then headed back to the hotel.