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Thursday 8 March 2012

The First Twelve Hours

72 Hours of Chaos:

     This adventure is a story that is broken up into threeparts; as me and my friends go through a once in a life time experience. Everythingthat happens to us is through a period of chaos and then a period of calm onlyto be followed by a period of chaos . The first part of this story describesthe first twelve hours of chaos.

                                                                                The Frist Twelve Hours:

     Living abroad certainly brings a great sense of adventure.Having already travelled to two countries, I was about to add another two to mylist, Egypt and Lebanon. This was a greatly anticipated trip since we had twoweeks off, but what was to come for me and my friends was nothing we could haveever expected and it truly was witnessing history in the making.



Our trip to Egypt is a memorythat will last a lifetime. Our Chaotic adventure began immediately right at theairport in Kuwait. We arrived at least two and a half hours early for ourflight, which definitely was not early enough time. The best way to describewhat the airport looked like was a mass exodus of the entire country. The lineup to check in literally was almost outside the airport entrance. Needless tosay it is not a huge airport to begin with. However, the amount of luggagepeople had, you would think they were never returning back to the country. Ontop of that it literally was every person for themselves in that line. Everyonewas cutting the line pushing their way through to the front.  Due to this flights were all delayed includingours to Egypt, to ensure everyone made their flights. We boarded our plane anhour after it was supposed to take off. After stressing out wondering if wewere going to make our flight we made it and were in the air to Egypt!

     About three hours later we arrive in Egypt, at the Luxorairport around one AM. We make our way through immigration and proceed to pickup our luggage. This shouldn’t be a surprise but one of my friend’s luggage didn’tmake it, which took us about 45 minutes to realize once there was no moreluggage appearing. So we talk to the airport workers and give them our numberto call when it arrives.

     Now it’s about 3am, and the entire airport is completelyempty. We exit the airport doors and literally we see nothing. Not even a taxiso we start walking. Suddenly a white station wagon pulls up to us and a haggardold man insists we go with him; we don’t really have any other choice.  As usual we have to bargain the fare, he’sasking for 50 American dollars, we tell him no. Instead we say 15 Egyptianpounds, (which is about 3 dollars) he agrees.

     So there we are in a cab with our driver, finally thinkingthat everything has calmed down and the stress of getting Egypt has gone. Outof nowhere a car is speeding up behind us honking and flashing its lights. Thecar pulls up beside our cab and yells at our driver. This goes on for whatseems like a lifetime until the other car literally tries to run us off theroad and then our driver pulls over and stops. 

     The man gets out opens the front passenger door and tells myfriend we have to go with him. Apparently our driver is not allowed to drivepeople from the airport. He tells us it will cost us 50 American dollars to gowith him. We instantly tell him we’re only paying 15 Egyptian pounds and thenour driver lies to the other guy and says, “no I charge them 50 Americandollars.” During this point of chaos, we have no idea what to do, only thinkingthat we have to get into the other cab of the guy who literally tried to run usoff the road?! All of sudden my friend just gets out of the cab and said we’rewalking.  So we grab our bags and startto walk. Both men we completely shocked this is not how they thought it wasgoing to play out. For the next kilometer or so they just drove beside ustrying to get us to get in the cab with them. Eventually they took off as wecame across a police patrolled intersection. Apparently hassling tourists is abig no no.

     As we continued to walk down the main road to Luxor,vehicles kept stopping to try and pick us up and take us to our destination. SoI decided we should cross to the other side against traffic so we wouldn’t havethat problem. However that didn’t seem to matter, because the opposing traffic wouldjust stop, back up on the road and then try offer us a ride.

     Two hours and five kilometers laterwe made it to Luxor. Finally we are safe, so we thought. As we decide to walkup the main tourist road towards Karnak Temple. Behind us the last thing wewant to hear were growling wild dogs showing their teeth, and as we look behindus, yup two growling dogs showing their teeth. We stay calm and keep walking,making sure not to run, and the dogs do not pursue us.  As our luck would go another two dogs a lotbraver decided to make their way towards us, they were not backing down. Itcame to the point where we thought we would actually have to fight off them off,as they were as close as ten feet to us at one point. However, we quicklycrossed to the other side of the road and we were able to avoid becomingdinner. I suppose we were in their territory. 

       It’s now around 6am we have no place to stayand Karnak Temple opens in two hours, what was the point of finding a hostel?So we decide to save money and sleep outside on the ground beside the NileRiver.  As we are getting ready to sleepon the grass a security guard comes up to us and was about to kick us out, butI speak a few words of Arabic to him, impressed he decides it’s okay for us tosleep and tells us he will watch over us while we sleep. As we closed our eyesto sleep we had no idea our real adventure was just about to begin, and thatwas the first Twelve hours.

*****The background picture is the road that we walked five kilometers on after the altercation with the cab drivers. Also this is when we had decided to cross to the other side. If you notice on the right there are a lot of bushes that would block the cars from the other side seeing us, despite that they still managed to see us and sometimes they would stop their cars peek their heads through the bushes and try to offer us a ride!*****

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