The first time we “fell back” out of daylight saving time in 2014 ¹ was on the morning we flew from Aswan to Sharm el-Sheikh, a Red Sea resort town on the Sinai Peninsula.

The situation was – to put it mildly – a bit disorganized. As background, Egypt had abolished daylight saving time during the 2011 Revolution, and the current government had only reinstated the time change in the spring of 2014. An exception (i.e., a temporary return to standard time), however, was made for Ramadan – since it fell during the middle of summer and an extra hour of evening daylight would have brought along with it an unwanted extra hour of evening daylight fasting. Because of this, Egypt was now undergoing its third time change in less than three months, despite having not changed it clocks at all for the preceding three years. Given the seemingly constant fluctuation, everyone we spoke with was somewhat hazy of the specifics of when, or even if, the time change was actually set to occur. Furthering the problem was an exceedingly confusing notice that EgyptAir had posted on its website, which seemed to state our flight would inexplicably be leaving an hour earlier than its scheduled 6:00 a.m. departure – already ungodly early.

Certain that chaos was unavoidable, we scheduled a taxi driver through our hotel. When he did not materialize at 4:00 a.m. to collect us, we were unsurprised. Luckily, Marc found a new driver on the street without too much difficulty and, after strapping our bags to the roof of the vehicle, we were off to the airport. We were so glad to be en route that we didn’t even mind getting stopped by the convoy on its way to Abu Simbel – we just marveled at the coordination it must have required to get such a large group of people organized at such an early hour on the morning of the time change. Continue reading Beaching It Up in Sharm el-Sheikh →

From Cairo, we planned to travel south to Luxor. Unlike other regions of Africa in which we had traveled, an overstuffed minibus was not the only way to reach our destination – we had options: road, air, river, rail.¹ After months and months of grueling overland travel, we quickly (and happily) rejected taking any sort of bus. Flying and cruising were both expensive options and therefore also out, leaving us with the train – which conveniently happens to be our preferred method of travel for medium-length distances.

We were looking forward to riding the train. The 671 kilometers (419 miles) route between Cairo and Luxor loosely runs along the Nile and would afford us the benefits of overland travel (watching the scenery change gradually from place to place) with a much greater level of comfort than a hot, cramped bus/minibus.