Dec 27 - Cairo

First stop in the morning was the famous Pyramids of Giza, where we were thankful to encounter other tourists for the first time in two days (mostly Europeans and southeast Asians), though crowds we still quite light.

After lunch we were off to the airport for our flight to Luxor. (We were meant to take a night train but were told it was no longer running, though never told why; most likely lack of tourism has shut it down, but given the previous day’s event let’s not rule out drug runners, kidnappers, and alien abductions.)

Still worn out from our grueling drive across the Sinai and apprehensive about having to do a fourteen hour return in two days across what we had dubbed “the kidnap zone” to get back to Israel (we were returning to London from Tel Aviv), we decided it was time to “call an audible” and find different arrangements back to London. Unfortunately, the hotel wifi was broken and the “FreeAirportWifi” at Cairo International Airport wouldn't connect. Luckily I managed to notice that if you stood just outside the EgyptAir Lounge you could steal their wifi signal, so iPhone and credit card to the rescue and I managed to book us some Aegean Airlines tickets via Athens in the spare ten minutes before our flight, and we’d just cancel the Tel Aviv leg of our return journey and eat the costs.

In the end it was probably a zero-sum game: we could have spent that money on airfare changes, or we could have spent it as ransom in the Sinai.