Home » Egypt » Cycle to the Summit Part 8 - Cairo

Cairo is big, noisy and dirty but we leave it with many fond memories; the city where we met Owy, the forth member of our team, the fun times that we spent at the Dahab Hotel and the great people that we met there, the pyramids, the sights and smells of the Khan al-Khalili market, visits to the Sudanese consulate, the honking of horns, the vibrant market stalls beneath the flyovers and much much more.

Cycle to the Summit Part 8 - Cairo

Toby Hammond
2006-06-25 19:06:04

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in US$, you can only hand in applications between 9am and 11am, you can only collect visas between 2pm and 3pm and you require a letter of recommendation from your embassy in Cairo.
Having said all this, we handed in our applications at 1.30pm on a Thursday, along with the letter of recommendation from the British Embassy and some dreadful passport photos. The recommendation was a piece of paper which stated that the British Embassy does not issue letters of recommendation, and we paid 84LE (£13) to have this in writing (a photocopied piece of paper with a date stamp). The Sudanese seemed happy enough with this given that our visas were granted the following Monday.

Money

The first time that we realised there was a national dearth of dollars was when we came to pay for our visas. The consulate would not accept Egyptian Pounds (LE) so Ruth sped off to change some money. On the way she met Nazir, the former ambassador's son and he helped with the hunt for exchanges and banks. At present, the Egyptian pound is very weak so everyone wants to hold onto their dollars. Even banks and exchange booths are very reluctant to sell them - claiming not to have dollars despite us seeing piles of them, limiting the daily amount that they will sell, some banks will only sell to Egyptians and some will only sell if you have your passport and ticket for an onward journey. We never seemed to fall into any of these categories!
Although we changed enough to pay for the visas we had been warned that it would be difficult to get access to cash throughout Sudan and Ethiopia. With this in mind (and given that it is 3500km to Addis Abeba), the hunt for US$ continued over the following five days. Most attempts proved unsuccessful but Thomas Cook advised us that their branch at the airport had some. Ruth and Toby made the 45 minute journey to find that they had been misinformed. After visiting tens of banks, including a wild goose chase to the ...