Once the tour of the pyramids was over the next few days were quite quiet and were spent pretty much entirely in the hotel until it was time to travel to Alexandria. It wasn’t ideal to spend so much time in the hotel complex, but I hadn’t been feeling well for a few days, and the friend I’d gone with wanted to spend some time relaxing anyway.

In front of the Oasis hotel is the “desert road” that leads to Alexandria; it’s not a route we could take though as it’s pretty impractical to travel there by road. It’s quite a long journey in very dry heat by road, so instead we headed in the opposite direction back to the airport. Internal flights from Cairo International aren’t that bad, though it was a little confusing as there were so few people on our flight and we weren’t too sure where we were going in the airport to get to the gate. Eventually we made it to the plane and after a short journey we landed at an airport in Alexandria which at that time was the smallest I’d ever seen – it wasn’t very different in size to a small bungalow.

The trip from the airport to the second hotel of the trip wasn’t as easy as it was from Cairo to the Oasis hotel – we had to find a taxi to take us. Eventually we found a building around the airport that actually had people in it and with some effort of communicating what it was we were after managed to get a taxi booked. After a good half an hour we made it to the Montezah Sheraton – the hotel we’d call home for the rest of the holiday. It was very different to the Oasis hotel. I wouldn’t say it was bad as it was still quite a nice hotel by any standard, but it wasn’t as nice. It was probably due to it being a tall building close to the road (and the sea) that made it seem so different.

From the balcony of our room we could not only see the Mediterranean Sea, but also a lot of the nearby buildings. As with Cairo there were the good parts of the city and the bad. Walking down the street to the nearby Internet cafe gave a good impression of how poor the people there are – and their ‘net access is amazingly cheap at what worked out to be about 10 pence an hour. Considering it cost 100 times that for half an hour at the airport in London that is quite some difference.