Al Qahira, March 13

On Friday Nardeen, Ezzat, Bonnie, and Don "jumped" in the car for a trip to Cairo and Alexandria. The trip is about 2.5 hours from Port Faoud to Cairo, about 200 kilometers. The trip starts with a ferry ride across the Suez Canal. Most trips from Port Faoud start that way because it's basically an island in the Suez Canal. The canal has an entry and exit channels on the north end. This was an addition to the original canal design and Port Faoud is on the created island.

The destination for today is Al Qahira the Egyptian name for Cairo. Cairo's city population is about 6.7 million with 17.3 million in the surrounding area (Wikipedia). It's the largest city on the continent of Africa and the city proper is the 15th largest in the world. The trip goes through the fertile farmland of the Nile river valley with many communities "sprouting" up along the roadside to take advantage of the proximity to the northern end of the Suez Canal and Cairo. The major attraction along the way between Port Said/Port Faoud and Cairo is the Mubarak Peace Bridge. This beautiful structure was built with the cooperation of Japan who did the major engineering work and the construction of the center span of the bridge. The bridge spans the Suez Canal and connects the western mainland with the Sinai Peninsula without having ferry traffic in the middle of the canal. Unfortunately the pictures do not do justice to the bridge.

The first sign the you are getting close to Cairo is the increase in traffic. The traffic is staggering in this city. There seems to be little or no traffic control. It resembles organized chaos if there is such a thing. Unfortunately photos from the ground do nothing to show what I'm talking about. You really have to experience this traffic to believe that it could be so chaotic. 17 million people use a lot of cars, buses, taxis and trucks. They all seem to be on the streets at the same time and yet the side streets are completely parked full. Where all of the vehicles go and come from is a mystery. One of the highest points is Cairo is the Citadel. It sits atop a hill and has panoramic views of all areas of the city. There are structures that people live in as far as the eye can see. Unfortunately I neglected to take any pictures of the outside before we entered and really had no good vantage point to shot from when we left. The link to an appropriate place on the web will have to do the job. In some places even as the upper floors of a building are falling down people are still living in the lower floors. It is an amazing city.

There are many museums inside the Citadel of Cairo but unfortunately you are not allowed to take pictures so I have none. Many of the military things in the museums are amazing and if you are into that kind of stuff you should definitely take in the Citadel while you are in Cairo.

There are also two mosques in the Citadel. They are amazing inside and out and I do have a few pics of them that will be up on my photo site in Google. Since Egypt's population is about 90% Muslim you can imagine that there are many mosques in the country but you have no real idea until you are there seeing the minarets shooting skyward like a forest of giant redwoods. That is an amazing thing as well.

Much of the rest of the population of Egypt is Christian and they have many beautiful and huge churches as well. I am always amazed at the pageantry that is display in the churches of the "Old World". We went to a church in Cairo called the Church on the Mountain by the general Christian population. It seats over 15,000 people. I don't know where transport for all of those people would park but it is an amazing place. It's really a composition of a number of churches. We were able to get into 5 of them on this day and they were all very different.