The morning of day 11 was spent at leisure. Our flight to Istanbul wasn't until 4 pm, but there was no sense going anywhere. So, we went swimming instead.
We arranged a taxi the night before, and we were pleasantly surprised at the price. The taxi ride from the airport to the hotel, using the airport "shuttle", was US$30, paid in dollars. The return trip, using the hotel taxi, was only 95 LE (US$19). Go figure.
TRAVELERS' TIP: If you're staying at the Oasis, and you decide to use the hotel taxi, always arrange it with the concierge the day before. If possible, arrange the taxi from the airport to the hotel before you arrive. You'll save some money and probably avoid the aggravation/confusion at the airport, too.
One of the sites we skipped was the Citadel. We were lucky that the cab driver took us this direction on the way to the airport. These photos are a little rough. I took them out a cab window as we drove past.Here's another condensed history lesson. I've talked a lot about the pharaohs (3100-500 B.C.), and you may remember the Persians (e.g. Darius I) and Alexander the Great from movies and history class (331-323 B.C.). I also mentioned the Ptolemies (323-30 B.C.) who succeeded Alexander. Their reign ended when Cleopatra committed suicide. Then the Romans/Byzantines came, and, with them, Christianity (30 B.C.-640 A.D.). But I haven't said anything about what came afterward. The Roman/Byzantine rule ended when Arabs swept through Egypt. And after that, most people tune out for about a millennia until the Ottomans come into the picture (circa 1500 A.D.), followed by Napoleon and then the British. Allow me to fill in the missing thousand years.
The first wave of Arabs were Shia Muslims known as Fatimids. They were the ones who officially founded the city of Cairo. The second wave were Sunni Muslims called Ayyubids. The Citadel was built by an Ayyubid named Saladin (or Salah ad-Din, depending on the guidebook) in 1196 A.D. as a fortress against Crusaders. The Ayyubids employed a large number of slave soldiers-called Mamluks. The Mamluks subsequently overthrew their lords in 1250 and ruled Egypt on their own. Eventually the Ottoman Turks defeated them, but the Mamluks enjoyed a nice long 267-year reign where everything flourished: art, science, architecture, trade, you name it. Then the Ottoman Turks pretty much ran it into the ground.
After the French left Egypt in 1798, but before the British took over in 1869, a contingent of Albanian Ottomans seized power under the direction of Mohammad Ali. During this brief detour from colonization, he built an enormous mosque inside the Citadel (named after himself, naturally). His mosque is what you see in the picture above.
The Citadel looked pretty nice from the outside.
There are two things I wanted to show you in this picture. First, you can see the impressive walls of the Citadel. This place was enormous. Second, you can see what a Cairo cab looks like. The newer metered ones are slightly different, but there are still thousands of these black-and-white kind sputtering around everywhere you look.
