The following day we set out in the morning to explore Islamic Cairo. We started out at the Mosque of  Ibn Tulun. This Mosque is very photogenic, although different from others we’d seen. Most of the Mosque was outside – or at least most of the Mosque that we saw. It’s a very photogenic Mosque, with lots of interesting details, rows of columns, etc.

Next we headed to Rafai Mosque, and the Madrasa of Sultan Hassan. To be honest, we were really not impressed by these mosques after what we’d seen in Turkey and Morocco. They all charge expensive admission, there’s no one actually worshipping in them, they’re not well kept up… We should have just stopped after Ibn Tulun and gone back to shopping.

We walked to the Citadel from the mosques. Despite being RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER it takes about 1.5 hours to walk there because you have to walk all the way round the far side. They do this so they can funnel everyone through the same entry gate and charge admission. The admission gate itself is flanked by bank machines, and tight security. If you have anything that’s not allowed, they’ll store it for you, for a good price for you my friend. We visited The Muhammad Ali Mosque, which is a bad copy of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque.

We cabbed it back to the Khan-al-Khalili, and did some last minute souvenir shopping. We bought a huge hanging chandelier, and some other souvenirs.

We spent the next few hours trying to figure out how to protect the lamp for its long ride home. We asked someone on the street, and what happened next unfortunately summed up our experience with Egyptians. He kindly said his friend has a box and he would bring us to it. The fact that he spoke English fluently should have warned us he was not on the up and up. He brought us to his friend’s closed alabaster shop, and said he would go get the box, and to wait there. Meanwhile his friend started the hard sell on his crappy China-made souvenirs. During the course of the conversation, it was made obvious to us that he intended to *sell* us this crappy box, for $20 US. Once we pieced together this was yet another scam, we got out of there as fast as we could.

We finally got a box from a grocery store for about a dollar. While in the store, we had an interesting conversation with an Egyptian who was just visiting, on a break from his studies in London. He asked us if we had enjoyed our stay in Egypt. Not wanting to offend anyone, we of course lied. He seemed genuinely surprised that we supposedly had a good time.

We wandered around looking for a new hotel having left the Berlin Hotel when they switched us to a new room without asking while we were out during the day.  When we found the Lotus Hotel, a member of the ‘hotel staff’ followed us up to the reception.

We have learned that when wandering looking for hotels without a reservation, it is very important to fight off any touts that might want to take you to the lobby. The hotel will increase the daily charge to pay off the tout. Fortunately, in this case, the guy did actually work for the hotel so there was no problem. We had a positive experience at this hotel – it was clean, with a private shower (with hot water).

The hotel we had tried to book in advance, the Berlin Hotel , refused to give us a reservation unless they personally picked us up at the airport to guarantee we would keep our reservation, and also to avoid taxi drivers demanding a ‘finders fee’ for bringing us to their hotel. We didn’t want to use Berlin’s taxi service, as we had arranged complementary airport pickup from the travel agency which would take us to some outlying pyramids the following day. So, we ended up booking into the Victoria Hotel.

We tried to stay at the Berlin Hotel again. The outside of the building is grungy, and the elevator had long since passed away. 6 flights of stairs later, we were showed to a room which seemed ok. As we were checking in, another guest came out of another room, complaining how loud it was. The owner told him not to worry, that he would switch him rooms. He told us the room he showed us wasn’t available, and that we could leave our bags with him, and he would move our bags to the room (or one similar) when it was cleaned.  We specified with him that it would NOT be the room that the other guest had just complained about.

Fast forward to when we came back to our room at the end of the day. Of course, it WAS the room the other guest had complained about. Luckily, we hadn’t paid yet. We screamed and complained, and of course no other rooms were available. At this point, we only had one more night left, and we had really had it with being screwed over by unscrupulous businesses. We grabbed our bags and left the hotel. We wandered the area and eventually settled at the Lotus Hotel.

The next day we woke up early and headed back to the West Bank. Although we’d visited it already on our "tour" with Hamis Travel, we wanted to head back and actually see some things. We got a local ferry across the Nile (by the way, this is much faster than the long detour to get to the bridge we had done previously with the tour).

We were immediately surrounded by taxi drivers (as expected) and, as usual, found the quiet guy who wasn’t aggressive and haggled with him. Although we had been prepared to pay $50 for a taxi and driver for the day (given what the guidebook told us, and our terrible haggling skills), we managed to get one for only $10 US for 5 hours. It might have been so cheap because it was New Year’s morning, and there were very few tourists. He was reliable, always waiting for us at the sites we visited, and we tipped him 50% at the end of the day.  Getting around by taxi is really the best option for the independent traveler who wants to cover a lot of ground on the West Bank. The sites are spread apart, signage is not always there, and the prices for a taxi are cheap.

We visited Medinet Habu first. At the time (New Year’s Day) there was only a handful of other people on the site. This was one of our favourite sites on the West Bank. The colors in the paintings were extremely well preserved, and the site was pretty big with lots to explore.

Next up we headed to the tombs of the Artisans, with some great underground (very underground) tombs. We were lucky the site was pretty empty. It was VERY hot (even underground), and only small groups are allowed into a tomb at once. We can imagine that on busy days this would not be a fun one.

Next up was the Tombs of the Nobles, but we screwed this one up. You buy tickets from the main ticket office (all tickets except Valley of the Kings are bought from a main tourism office on the street leading away from the harbor, and if you fail to buy the tickets here, you have to go BACK there, tickets are NOT available on site!).

The problem was that they’ve divided the tombs up into groups and so to see the ones we wanted to see you needed two tickets, one to each of the tombs in that "group". Although there is only one ticket for the tombs of the nobles, once you visit one tomb within a "group" you can then only visit another tomb in that group with the same ticket. We didn’t understand this. So, we wasted our tombs of the noble entry tickets on a tomb we didn’t really want to see (cause we’d actually managed to find that one ), thinking we could still use it later for the other tomb. We still don’t really understand what happened, as none of the guards spoke English very well. Surprisingly, they couldn’t even be bribed.

We went back to the Valley of the Kings and tried to visit some of the tombs we were not able to see the first time. Unfortunately, most of the tombs we had wanted to see were closed. The good news though was that the tombs we did make it into were all pretty empty, so much so that we even took (flash-free) photos, without fear of suffering the wrath of the guards (or at least having to pay them off).

After re-visiting the West Bank, we wandered around Luxor’s street markets, and eventually ended up back at Karnak Temple. There, we spent some more time taking photos and hanging out, soaking it in. In case we had any doubt, listening in on other tour groups made it clear just how completely uninformed and useless the tour guide from Hamis Travel was.

We walked back along the Corniche and watched the sun set over the Nile. We thought about going in to the Luxor Museum, but the ridiculous price tag ($20, if memory serves) dissuaded us. The price had tripled from what our guide book listed (the guide book being 2 years out of date). Student discounts were not substantial.

We walked to the train station and boarded our night train for Cairo. We had reserved a 2 person sleeper cabin, which, while looking a little dated, was very clean. The linens were very nice, the in-room sink was spotless, and the included dinner/breakfast was passable. Not bad for $50.