I took a bus from Tel Aviv to Cairo, it was an adventure. Below is an account from an email I wrote a few days later, with a little cleaning up, detail added...

For visual enhancement you can open google maps in another window. Start with Tel Aviv, Israel.

So I left Jerusalem on an egged bus Saturday night, stayed at the venerable hayarkon 48 in TA (where my friend David and I had stayed earlier in the trip). I went and bought some good food items for the trip (bread, fruit, bissli, water, granola bars, and bresola which is like fancy Italian beef jerky). The bus was scheduled to leave TA @ 10a, remember the Mazada tours place was across from the Egyptian embassy. So I left @ like 8:30 or something (Mazada said to be there by 9:30a) I got there @ like 9:15, I was the first one there. I checked in, they had no record of my reservation but took my credit card anyway. So then I had some time to burn, I found a currency exchange that actually had Egytptian pounds! (I had tried throughout the trip to get some Egyptian currency), bought an IHT and a coke. Eventually I got back to the office where some backpacker types had shown up. We lounged around outside as 10a came and went. At about 11a the mini bus showed up. It was NOT a coach as pictured here

It was a mini bus/large sherut. And it already had a lot of people on it. The driver started trying to load our luggage in the back. There was clearly not enough room, so he left it in the street and went back to the drivers seat. I ended up squeezing the luggage in and barely getting the doors closed. So I walk back around to get on and me and this girl are standing, there are no seats left. She starts yelling at the driver, first in English to no avail then in Hebrew which worked better. They were going to try and make us sit or stand in the aisle but she got them to reconfigure things so there were two more seats (one had been folded under luggage). So I got the seat where luggage surrounded me on three sides. We were going to switch eventually but it wasn't so bad (and she was all the way in the front). As we start to go a Chinese lady (traveling alone and somewhat clueless) decides she needs to get out and go to the bathroom. This established a precedent. Now is a good time to go over the crew, but I would only meet people much later.

An African couple

An Arab lady with two young daughters. Later I learn she is from somewhere in the west bank but lives in Cairo w/ her husband.

3 young Arab ladies, one of which kept playing music out of her cell phone like she was the only one there ( they sat in front of me).

2 Swiss tourist dudes, one of which was wearing a t shirt that says "Egypt" and had the pyramids on it.

2 guys of Euro/latin American extraction (I forget even though I talked to them a fair amount).

David - American guy mid 20s, traveling w/ Rufus a british dandy also in his 20s. They were doing an Arabic program in Cairo somehow affiliated w/ the UK government. Rufus while cool was almost a caricature british dude, well dressed, witty, low key and prone to make threats involving his dad's connections to the UK ambassador in Egypt (seriously).

The clueless Chinese lady who always waits till the last minute to potty.

The American girl (I forget her name, It was becky or something ending in "y" I think. She had been to Israel a few times and spoke Hebrew.)

2 American dudes w/ thick southern accents of really ambiguous ethnicity (Samoan maybe?)

Brent. Canadian guy.

We leave out about an hour and a half behind. The drive from TA to Eilat is mostly uneventful. We stopped somewhere in the Negev where there is a Mcdonalds, gas and a snack bar. I had a surprisingly good prefab chicken sandwich. One American was asking if I spoke Hebrew cause the labeling was not translated, but I just said something like "It's a sandwich, how bad can it be?". We also picked up a dude by the highway in the middle of the desert, who apparently had prearranged his trip. I later learned that he is (supposedly) a publisher, and he's responsible for translating Harry Potter into Arabic. We don't see anything of Eilat but hotels and a big mall. The Red sea is, in fact, very blue. We arrived @ the Israeli border station @ something like 3:30p. We get off and some weary looking people get on. We are put in a line and enter the border station. I called the (hott) Israeli border guard "maam" which she thought was cute, she replied (in an American accent) that noone had called her "maam" before. I was a little disappointed I thought we would have to walk like 100 yards of desert, but you just walk through a duty free shop and a little bit of sidewalk and "welcome to Egypt".

Google maps: Taba, Shamal Sina' Egypt

So on the Egyptian side you show some guys yr passport, then you get your bags checked. At this point you need to know about baksheesh, a footnote is available if you don't (1). The border guard looked thrugh my bag manually and he took interest in my GPS unit. He asked "What is this?" I said "GPS" and he said "GPS?" and I confirmed and held on to it. He said "go to passport control and come back for this, I must talk to supervisor" and I said ok and moved along. At this point a 30ish guy in a nice white shirt and gold tie is snapping "MazADA? MazADA Tours?" at people and we all congregate with him and he asks for passports. We hand them over. Then I get a bad feeling that my GPS might become border guard baksheesh. So I head back to check on it. The guy is still there, still has it and says he still can't give it back. I was about to ask for his name (so I can at least say "Said has my GPS, can I have it back?") and he chats with another guy and then hands it over (to my surprise admittedly). So things are going great. A little time passes. The Chinese lady freaks because she has no visa, but she is able to buy one. And the Mazada guy goes in with the passport agent and calls us out by name to get our passport back and walk through. I used a pretty filthy but still modern bathroom on the Egyptian side. We then get our passports checked by another guy on the outside, then we are done. This is where our bus should be. Its not there.



The mazada guy leads us to a spot on the curb and tells us to wait. Immediately guys with trucks (and some without) are offering rides to Cairo. We are sitting in the Sinai sun in the afternoon. There are several other coaches there, they occasionally fill with sunburt, chubby, scantily clad Europeans and leave. A good hour goes by. We start talking. Someone jokes that the bus is broken down. After about an hour and a half waiting the Mazada guy comes over and announces that the bus is broken down, but it is "being repaired at a local shop". We will have to wait a little longer. He offers to let us stay in the Hilton lobby but the group doesn't trust him to get us all back OUT of the Hilton lobby so we elect to stay, searching for shade in the bus shadows, palm tree shadows ect. At this point some people start talking to drivers. The southern dudes are negotiating away but come way thinking it's a bad deal because they don't know the conversion rate. Rufus finds a guy who says he'll take us to cairo for 600 genay (about $120) which for 8 of us would be a damn good deal. But then he hedges saying he can only take us to Suez.

Google maps: Suez, Egypt.

But we demure thinking "that's not a bad deal but we ALREADY have tickets we should get to Cairo w/o paying anything". Some more time goes by. The Mazada guy comes back and says "OK so the bus is being repaired but it might be a while so we can either keep waiting or I can try to arrange local transportation." People groan and heckle. We go for the local transportation. So after a while he talks to the same guy we had been talking to earlier. They get two small minibuses for our 20 passengers. They load us in and put our luggage on top. There was much concern in my van that they were just going to toss it up there and hope fore the best. Noone could think of the Arabic word for "rope" as in "are you going to use rope?" But rope emerged. While packing the luggage the driver would jokingly call himself "Bedouin villain" whener his Kaffiyeh (around his neck) would cover his face. "Bedoui Villain" got in and started the vehicle. The Mazada guy got in and a burly, sharply dressed (he kept primping, adjusting his coat which he wore in the desert heat, or his tie which he wore untied around his neck. He had an uzi on his belt, but as I pointed out - no clip in it. Later Rufus told me he saw a clip on his belt). We sat there a while. It was uncomfortable, my knees were against the metal of the seat in front of me. Then the Chinese lady asked how long the drive was ( 5 hours to suez, 3 after). Then she asked to get out (of he window seat) to go to the bathroom. She went and came back and got back in. we sat in the running vehicle for a while (the mazada guy had left). After 30/45 minutes we got out. It's dark by now. The Mazada guy comes back and explains that the problem is that these guys can only get us to suez because of their permits, and he's working on arranging transportation to meet us in suez.

Some more time goes by. We learn that the Swiss guys have a 3 am flight they are trying to catch in Cairo. Poor saps. Eventually the Mazada guy comes back. The problem now is that he must arrange security including a police escort for us. People are freaking out, wondering if we will really get out at all.

We have sodas, use the rest room, hang out. Eventually Mazada guy comes back and loads us back on the vans. We wait a while. He tells us he has the escort and we start to leave at like 8 PM. Somebody asks "What about the transportation @ suez?" The mazada guy says that now these guys can take us the whole way.

We cover about ¼ mile, and get pulled over. Then the mazada guy pays some kind of fee for us. Then we are really off. Our police escort is a truck with police lights and a half dozen dudes in the back w/ guns (we also picked up another security guy. He appears to be just a big dude. He's wearing like a flannel shirt and has no weapon of any kind)


To be continued..

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12/13/2009

More than 2 years later I'm going to finish this story for posterity. So this is through the fog of memory wheras the above was fresh after returning.

The road from taba followed a winding canyon bed. Bedouin Villain flew down the road, clearly knowing the curves. At this point it was dead night, you could see the stars over the canyon rim, the light reflecting off the walls and the police lights of rou escort, which kept up with our furious speed. After a while we emerged and without stopping to talk the police escort just slowed down and eventually diappeared behind us. I later read in Cairo newpapers (and on the internet at home) that there had been hijackings and some political unrest in this general area, so maybe all the security was warranted. Or maybe it was all part of the Mazada scam.

After we came out of the canyon we where in what seemed to be open desert, just blackness and stars, and our vehichles barreling down the road. after an hour or so we had a rest stop. There were 2 buildings, a restaurant we stopped at and another a few hundred yards away on the opposite side of the road. The restaurant had a big nice tour bus parked in front of it that was marked as a Saudi bus. It was pretty lat at this point but the restaurant was open, and probably a regular stop on this route. And was pretty dirty and full of surly men. I went to the restroom which consisted of stalls and holes in the floor (painted though!). Later I was outside and the Arab lady with the children was telling the Mazada guy that she would not let her children use this restroom and was walking through the dark desert to the other building. Some of the passengers got food which they reported as being expensive and awful. I still had a reserve of my high quality snacks so I skipped it. We had been there 20 minutes or so and people started gathering around the van thinking we'd be getting ready to go when Bedouin Villain came out to the porch with fresh coffee, which he leisurely drank. Then he got a sheesha pipe and smoked it for a while. Then another coffee. The we see him get up and think we are finally leaving. He comes back with a prayer mat and does some prayers. We joked that we couldn't really complain about this delay, that having Allah on our side was probably a good idea (though it struck me as odd to do prayers randomly in the middle of the night, but maybe it was a make up prayer). Then he got another round of sheesha. We were shocked. Finally we got back in the van and went barelling through the desert. Hours and hours went by with nothing but blackness.

One topic of conversation was what was going to happen at Suez. Mazada guy had told us we were going all the way to Cairo. I didn't believe it. We had negotiated with this same guy who had told us he could only go to Suez. We had a small bet going on the question. Eventually a line of lights broke through the darkness. It was the Suez canal. It is a really strange thing to see at night because it sort of hovers on the horizon, a totally straight line. We got closer and eventually drive under it. On the other side we go through a checkpoint and into a parking lot. We are told to get out and get our luggage. I win the bet, gettting five Egyptian pounds (less than a US dollar) from all the losers. Mazada guy swears he has arranged for another van as Bedoin villain drives back to the other side of the canal. We all agreed we would miss the villain as he was a fun guy and an amazing driver.

There was a van in the parking lot that Mazada guy negotiated with to take us. He agreed but Mazada guy needed another van. While we waited wild dogs begged for food. Becky petted one and they all started following her, which evetually became threatening. One of our security guys threw a rock at the pack which got them to back off but they continued to pace a perimeter around us. Eventually and other van pulled in and Mazada guy worked out a deal. It was unclear if he had actually called them or if they were just coming to look for customers.

We got back on the road, in our new slightly more comfortable vans. Shortly the topic of conversation turned towards whether or not the Swiss guys would make their flight. Not long after Suez (it seemed) the sprawl of Cairo started. After seeing a little bit of civilization we crossed under a big highway. Then the vans abruptly pulled over. Mazada guy told the Swiss guys to get their things, apparently we were dropping them here for the airport. As they started to get their things a cab pulled over behind us. The driver got out and came over and talked to our driver. Meanwhile another cab driver got out and started helping the swiss guys with their luggage. When the first driver saw this he was furious and ran back there. They started yelling at each other vehemently. Mazada guy jumped in our vehicle and we spun out. As we started moving we saw the 1st cab driver start throwing haymakers, landing one or two on the other cab driver as the Swiss guys cowered by the side of the rode. The fight disappeared in the distance. I can only hope that upon the fights' conclusion the winner took them to the airport without further incident.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. We drove through the outskirts of Cairo, and eventually to downtown. We dropped one person off before the final destitnation, the Chinese lady. She had booked some kind of inclusive deal with Mazada and we could only pity her. Of course the hotel said they didnt have her reservation but took her anyway. Then we went to a Cairo hotel (I think the Sheraton but Im not sure) where we were unceromoneously dropped and told to find further transportation. Which I did, luckily, cabs are not hard to find in Cairo even though it was around 4 in the morning.

1. Baksheesh is an Arab and especially Egyptian concept similar to tipping. But it's also like charity in that poor/destitute/cripple/sick people will ask for baksheesh. Sometimes kids just randomly ask for it for no reason. I had read that people will do stupid crap like open doors for you and expect baksheesh, and like if you visit a free mosque you still have to give baksheesh to the caretaker. But I must say I had very little illegitimate demand for baksheesh during my stay.