Day 5 - Train Ride

I won’t go into the bathroom situation on the train. Let’s just say that after the first visit I’ve decided to not eat or drink until Luxor. At every stop a few men get on selling things. They walk up and down the aisles selling food, newspapers and scarves. We have had one “incident” thus far. Our seats are 4, 5, 6, and 7. Five and 6 are together. Four is in front of 5 and 6 and 7 is across the aisle from 6. We took the seats 3 through 6, figuring we could trade with whomever had 3 for 7. Make sense? Well, that’s hard to explain in Arabic. Especially when you don’t speak Arabic. The problem happened when the train people overbooked 2 of the seats. Some man and his wife tried to get us to move because he was holding tickets for 2 of our seats. We wouldn’t move and he was getting a little upset. I’m not exactly sure what happened but he finally moved away and hasn’t been back. He did argue with us for about 20 minutes in broken English that was obviously better than our Arabic. All I could tell him was that smoking was bad for him.

The next problem for us will be when to get off the train. It’s stopping every 45 minutes or so and we aren’t really sure how far Luxor is away from Minia (Minia is roughly halfway between Cairo and Luxor; Luxor is 721km or 448 mi from Cairo). The signs at each station appear to only be in Arabic. We are hoping someone will help us. It does appear that we have lost our police escort since no one came to our rescue with the man who tried to kick us out of our seats. So much for the tourist is always right.

Please don't be afraid for us. We laugh in the face of danger. We want you all to have the best education possible so we will go to the ends of the earth to help! Should I mention they also ran a mirror under our van yesterday to check for bombs?