El Al 443, Tel Aviv to Cairo

Twice a week, El Al, Israel's national airline, sends an ageing 757 to make a late-night round trip from Tel Aviv to Cairo. It's a short flight, basically up and then down again, 250 miles in total. It's New York to Boston. Not many Israeli's know about this flight, several emphatically denied its existence when I told them I was about to take it to visit Cairo for the weekend.

The passengers were tourists, all elderly. A mix of Europeans doing the "Pyramids and the Holy Land" packaged circuit, and retired Israelis, feeding their congenital travel bugs with a short trip to an exotic place. Most, like the man I sat next to, would catch that same 757 on its return leg, exactly a week later.



Lobby of Fairmont Towers

I wonder what those packaged tourists must thing, when their Israel leg comes to a close, and they leave the gleaming highways and shopping malls of the Zionist state for this African megalopolis. Not that Cairo is unpleasant -- I'm writing this from my hotel room in the sparkling new Fairmont Towers, a super-luxury hotel which puts even my very fine Tel Aviv digs to shame.

Cairo is a fine town, with pleasant people, but it abounds with the sort of un-focused energy which comes along with being an Emerging Market, especially one with such an abundance of people. The airport, a massive, imposing building teeming with passengers and attendants alike, glitters with chintz but has a bathroom that is rancid with urine. The hotel doorman, heaps praise upon me during the entire 10 minute walk from my taxi to the check in desk to my room. "Oh, you are so very very smart for coming to Cairo for the weekend! We are having so many monuments for you to see here!" That would not have happened in Tel Aviv.