For this trip, Richard and I were lucky enough to get a flight on Turkish Airlines that left from Dulles at 11pm. Flying out of Dulles – Washington DC’s main international airport – is often a pain, because it’s anywhere from a 90 minute to 2.5 hour drive from our house here in Baltimore, but it’s also the largest international airport in the region, and one of the busiest in the country, so it’s often the cheapest option for international travel. But, since our flight left so late, we were both actually able to work almost a full day before coming home, throwing a few last things in our bags, and then heading down to DC.
Flight to Istanbul
Our flight had two legs – an 11 hour flight from DC to Istanbul, and a 3 hour flight from Istanbul to Cairo. However, between driving to the airport, waiting for our flight, the first flight, the layover in Istanbul, our second flight, and taking an hour long Uber ride from the airport to our hotel in Giza, we had roughly 24 hours of travel ahead of us when we left Baltimore to start our trip.
Getting on the Turkish Airlines flight was smooth, with both Richard and I each checking an almost entirely empty suitcase, and carrying two carry-on bags each instead. This served two purposes – one, so that when we inevitably would buy things, they’d have somewhere to go, and two, so that neither of us would risk lost luggage on the way over there, which would’ve been disastrous.
Our flight was very comfortable, with a great selection of in-flight movies, and three truly excellent meals of Turkish food (two of them are below). Richard has been to Turkey before, and turned me on to the concept of Turkish sour cherry juice, which is indeed quite fantastic. The plane was a bit too warm for me to sleep, but Richard was snoring like the dead next to me.
One detail we hadn’t realized before we boarded our flight in DC was one of the more surreal details about our trip: we were flying into Turkey on the very day that Istanbul was shifting all its air traffic from its previous airport to a brand new one in a different part of the city. We were, in fact, one of the very first flights to land at what is now the largest airport in Europe and one of the largest in the world, as it opened only 2 hours before we arrived. It was beautiful, shiny new, and…incredibly empty to almost a surreal degree.
After spending a little while in the airport, it was time for us to board our second flight, onward to Cairo. Our flight boarded from outdoors, which is something I hadn’t done in a very long time, but found to be pretty standard for most of our entire trip.
FLIGHT TO Cairo
Landing in Cairo was a pretty surreal experience, in that it was kind of my first moment of “Oh, we’re actually visiting Egypt. Right.” Everything was in Arabic and English, and thankfully both Richard and I are experienced travelers and used to visiting places where we don’t know the language, because things were a bit unclear at times. We managed to buy our visa, make it through customs, and pick up our bags. We had been told to get an Uber to our hotel across Cairo, as the easiest, safest, and most reliable way to get around without a driver. It was a bit tricky to know where to get picked up by the Uber, but we eventually figured it out and had a very sleep-deprived hour-long journey across the city.
Cairo at night is a surreal mix of bright LED billboards next to whole districts without electricity next to donkey carts next to people drinking coffee in street cafes at 1am next to workers heading home next to young people out for a night of fun. Like many global cities, Cairo never truly sleeps. It was really an excellent introduction to the city, but with my sleepy state and the utter foreignness of it all, it felt like a fever dream of flashing lights and arabesque patterns and dust and unknown smells. I mostly stared out the open windows of the car in wonder, because it was all so very much to process. That’s a feeling I love, and I’m so glad that it was my introduction to the country.