Preparation
 Booking
Ahead
We contacted Mr Mohammad at Egypt Holiday Tours in
Cairo and set up the itinerary according to what we wanted to do.
Then we booked the airfares and planned the stopovers to and from
Egypt.
This is our first time to fly on Emirates. There is
supposed to be a 34' spread in the economy seats. That from boltdown
bracket to next boltdown bracket. We will see what that means in
terms of space. Luggage weights are draconian. 7 kg for the carry-on
with no personal items allowed. This makes it very hard if you are
traveling with a computer and a camera.
The fares available at the time we bought the ticket from
Mebourne to Cairo were as follows:
- Extra Special - Melb-Sing-Dubai-Alexandria then bus to Cairo $1600
to $1800 AUD
- Two Stop via Singapore and Dubai- $2135 AUD (allows stopovers
in Dubai or Singapore)
- one stop Melb-Dubai-Cairo- $2500 - $2600 AUD
- All fares need fees and taxes added.
Stopovers in Dubai and in Singapore
I do not like to fly half-way round the world without a stopover,
so we always plan one on the way over to our vacation spot and sometimes
break the trip on the way back.
The Dubai Stopovers that were offered were not that cheap. Probably
the rate schedule looks a lot better when you are spending Euros
or British Pounds. Average for a reasonable hotel USD$360+ for two
night 3 star to 4 star Including breakfast and transfer.
The old hotel deal where you get a free room if there is a break
in your connection may or may not apply. We could have gone straight
through to Cairo. So while everyone said "Did you get a free
room and was the hotel cheap?" we had to answer no and no.
 We
choose to book the Hotel Ibis at the convention centre. Would it
be cheaper to book when you arrived in Dubai? Well, here we are
and we can do the maths. The placard outside the hotel says 425
Dirah per night for a room single or double. Then you add 90 dirah
for 2 breakfasts and then you add transfers from airport,50 each
way and local taxes of 15% for a local cost of approximately $650
dirah per day or $1300 dirah for two days/ two people with an exchange
rate of 3.6 dirah to the USD--$361. Exactly the same cost as if
we paid the rack rate here. Of course if we had booked only one
day, we would have paid more.
The Singapore stopover will be USD392, we are staying at the
old Westin Stamford now the Swisshotel for sentimental reasons.
We get breakfast but no transfer, may find that there is a
bus at the airport.
Anyway I get ahead of myself.
What we packed
For Egypt we packed mostly daytime "get dusty" clothes,
a hat, a sweater, sandals and runners, cameras, and chargers. A
few things that were life savers were saline nasal spray, hayfever
and colds medication, rehydration salts, small reusable water bottles,
2 reusable plastic boxes for lunches from breakfast buffet, small
bottle of dishwashing detergent, usual first aid stuff and headache
pills, sun screen +30 and moisturizers, cloth handkerchiefs, large
waist packs, camera bags for your waist, dark sunglasses, extra
computer disk storage, and extra camera disk storage. As you can
see we tend to go for the boy scout "be prepared" moto
and pack about half clothes and half other stuff. As you can probably
tell, we were very close to our 20 Kilo limit for checked luggage!
We carried two cameras, one computer and a light coat each onto
the plane, along with all travel documents and our financial stuff.
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