Day 1 - Flight to Doha & Cairo
Our Qatar airways flight was scheduled for 4:45 AM on the 20th of December 2008. We reached the airport early around 11:30 PM and started waiting. Once we were through with the ticketing, we had to go through immigration followed by security check. Then the waiting continued until finally we boarded. At 4:45AM the flight rose into the sky taking me on my first journey outsite India. Although i was excited about my first trip outside India, i soon fell asleep and woke up only when we were about to land at Doha.
Doha international airport was the biggest one i have seen till date. (The reason being this was my first international trip). It was 7AM local time and we immediately went to the transit area. Here i saw the prayer rooms, quiet rooms and a huge duty free shop in the centre of the airport. My god, the place was huge and definitely lots of time to kill. Qatar airways offered us an option of either having breakfast or lunch whichever people preferred. I was starving (i missed the 5AM breakfast in the flight, thanks to my sleep) and chose to have breakfast. We had french fries and sandwich. Then we went around the airport clicking pictures and whiling away our time to pass off the 6 hour transit. On our brief trip of the airport we found two browsing centres (free) and a gift shop (you can use ur dollars for this).
Our flight to Cairo was at 12:45PM and we promptly filled in the Egyptian immigration forms before boarding. The meal onboard the trip to cairo was really good and i watched a movie during the entire flight duration. We landed 6:00PM Cairo time and the sun was still out. We had a look at the new cairo international airport which was supposedly opened the previous day by the Egyptian president.
The tour manager (Sakkara travels Egypt) took us to the bus and we proceeded to the heart of cairo. Throughout the bus travel from the airport we saw a lot of paintings on the walls and lots of multi-storeyed apartments. We went by a 45KM fly-over supposedly the largest in that part of the world and saw a green coloured gigantic mosque, one of the three big mosques in Cairo.
On the way we took our tour guide Beshoy (we call him mottai) who carried a weird black stick which he claimed as his sign. Our initial plan was to go to our Hotel (Oasis Hotel), fresh up and then proceed for dinner. Unfortunately due to the traffic we had to directly hit the dinner restaurant first. The restaurants were already chosen by Sakkara tours India and we went to the Maharaja hotel. The food was OK. Following our dinner we had a brief photo-shoot and then proceeded to our hotels to rest. Thus day 1 had been fully consumed by travel. More on day 2's trip to Alexandria in a later blog.
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