It was another long cold bus trip - we left dahab at 10:00 pm and travelled through the night. Again stopping every few hours it seemed for various ticket and passport checks. It was very cold and uncomfortable, though the bus wasn't very full and we got two seats each which helped a little. Tim and I managed only a couple of hours sleep, Julian a little more.
We arrived in Cairo around 6:00 with a solitary taxi driver to deal with. We didn't really want to travel with him because he was bugging us - but we managed to get him down to a reasonable price to take us to the train station so we gave in. As usual it turned out to be much closer than we had been told and because it was so early there was very little traffic.
We had breakfast at the station (Ramses station)and were aboard the 8:00 am train to Alexandria in what seemed like no time. This is a very comfortable and inexpensive train - even in second class and we all dozed off.
We arrived in Alex, had a bit of fun haggling with the street vendors over a 15c twinkie, then walked to our prefered hotel near the beach front. The cheapest option - which was to have a third camp bed in a double room was unacceptable to us because it just wasn't comfortable enough so we got two rooms.
We had a snack for brunch at a cafe - it was nice enough but expensive and we nearly walked out after waiting what we considered was way to long for the food to come. We found a nice coffee shop afterwards then J. stayed on the Internet while Tim and I went for a long walk along the Corniche (which I assume translates to Esplanade).
We had a snooze in our rooms after that - turned into a sleep for Tim so we left him there. Julian and I just had dinner and another coffee and are finishing of updating our facebook and blog respectively.
