After spending the day touring Cairo and finding that the Chinese drivers really are not that bad, we took a train to Aswan. Our original itinerary included overnight train trips on both ends of the trip, going to and from Cairo. Not being experienced train travelers we opted for only one overnight train trip. Traveling by train is very popular for tourists in Egypt and our travel agent and the website pictures assured us that the ride would be top notch. Well, top notch in Egypt is not quite top notch. In fact, I think we could describe the 12 hour train ride as one of our worst traveling experiences…and we have done a lot of traveling. Shall we do a top ten list for how bad the train was? Hmmm…that will at least keep the blog short since we it was that bad.
10. We had 3 separate cabins…2 on train 8 and 1 on train 1…very convenient…not
9. “Yes you have a non-smoking cabin”…right…we may be the only ones that have not smoked in the cabin
8. Food…dinner…disgusting…breakfast…5 types of stale plastic wrapped breads
7. Cleanliness…hasn’t been cleaned since the first day of service…and we had the “1st class car”
6. Brakes…the conductor could not get the braking right…could make you fall out of the bed if not careful
5. Train station smelled of coal and diesel, a great appetizer to a fabulous train ride
4. 12 hours? Could we have gone any slower?
3. Noisy…how many different rattles can a “sleeping car” make? We did squeeze in a couple of hours of shut eye
2. Bathrooms…worse than the days of fraternity living…after a long night of partying
1. Gotta love sleeping in our day time clothes with our jacket wrapped around the pillow
When some of our friends heard we were doing a train, there was wide speculation that we couldn’t hack it…well they were right. The train ride was horrible and we hated it. So glad we have a flight back to Cairo.
1 comment:
Sorry to hear the train ride was horrible!! But it sounds like your doing a ton of fun things!!
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