Our cruise ship had two planned stops in Egypt: Port Said and Alexandria. Neither is close to Cairo. As a matter of fact, they and Cairo form almost an equilateral triangle: the land distance between any two of them is just a tad over 200 kilometers.
(The earliest Egyptian pyramids were step pyramids.)
Our research before the trip told us there wasn't much to see in Port Said. Port Said is a big city; of course there are things worth seeing there. But there are more things to see in Cairo; there are the pyramids in Cairo. We needed to get to Cairo and didn't have time for Port Said.
Human beings are strange in the sense that they almost always need some excuse for anything. Animals don’t need excuses for anything; just humans. We knew there must be things worth seeing in Port Said. But we needed to rush to Cairo. The writings on the internet that said there wasn’t anything to see in Port Said thus served as our excuse to not spend any time there. Human obsession with excuses may be just a mind trick that we play on ourselves in order to avoid regret; regret makes us unhappy; we don't like to be unhappy.
“To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts.” Roger Ebert should know; the guy made a living out of watching movies!
(The Great Pyramid of Giza was once covered in highly polished white limestone. A huge earthquake in 1303 AD loosened many of the pyramid's outer casing stones. These stones were carted away to be use as material for building mosques and fortress in nearby Cairo.)
Writings on the internet by those who had done the route also indicated that most people chose to go to Cairo from Port Said, stay in Cairo overnight and then rejoin the ship in Alexandria the next day. We decided to adopt the same strategy.
As always, we decided not to go with the ship-sponsored excursion, but booked our trip instead with a tourist agency on our own.
Ship-sponsored excursions can be highway robbery. We went to Aruba on our most recent cruise. Round trip bus fare between the harbor and California Lighthouse at the northern tip of the island, with that most beautiful public beach at the foot of the hill whereupon the lighthouse stands, cost the three of us a grand total of $15. A family of six we got to know on the trip went with the ship-sponsored excursion. They paid a ransom, maybe not a ransom but a lot more than us, just for their transportation to Palm Beach and back; and get this, they also had to pay an extra $20 apiece for entrance to the resort-owned beach. Aruba's motto is “one happy island”. We know we were one happy family when we were there; we aren't totally sure that that family was happy when they found out that they got ripped off.
We chose Nile Blue Tours as our travel agent for the Cairo trip based on comments on the internet. To those cruise ship passengers going the Port-Said-to-Cairo-to-Alexandria route, Nile Blue, for similar prices, offers two alternative Cairo excursion plans. The two plans share some major features, such as a tour of the pyramids, visiting the famous Cairo Museum and an optional dinner cruise on the Nile. But they also differ in that one is a bit Islamocentric, which covers such tourist favorites as the Mohammad Ali Mosque, while the other is Christian-flavored and concentrates instead on Coptic Cairo. We had seen enough Christian culture on our trips to places like Rome, London and Paris. Well, maybe we hadn't quite seen enough; but we really hadn't seen any major Islamic historical/cultural sites yet. We had been in Turkey, but our entire stay there was devoted to visiting St. Mary's little house in the hills, Ephesus and St. John's Cathedral, none of which had anything remotely to do with Islam. We were going to Egypt; we wanted to see Islam. So we chose Mohammad Ali Mosque over Coptic Cairo.
