It was a very early start this morning, a 4am wake up call. Amazingly the hotel staff put on breakfast for us, because of this I felt I had to eat something even though I didn't really want to. I was up early because I was being dragged along to the airport in the same transfer as James and Clare as they were getting the BMI flight back to London. This is the one I couldn't get booked on, so I was going back via Cairo. No idea why I couldn't get on this flight, apparently James booked after me.
I was pretty concenred about one thing, our bags getting wet on the runway, as had happened to me at the end of my last trip in JFK, but I needed have worried. For although it was still raining heavily in Amman, and there was a lot of local flooding, when we go to the airport out in the desert, it was quite dry.
The one thing I am a bit disappointed in is that I never got to see any of Amman, which seemed like a much nicer place than Cairo.
The airport was a fairly standard one, with one exception, except for the quality of the women working in the various duty free shops. They were pretty stunning. The flight to Cairo was also fairly standard, and as I had a window seat I was able to look down on all the places we had visited.
When I arrived at Cairo they insisted on making me pay for another Visa, even though you are supposed to be able to get a 24hr one for free. You would think it is a local scam, but as I pay direct into a bank account the guys who are making me pay can't get their hands on it. Maybe it is just their patriotic duty to raise extra taxes. Anyway as I hadn't paid any departure tax in Jordan it wasn't too bad.
When I got out of the airport, the hotel I was staying at, the Novotel near the airport, had its own transfer shuttle, so I wasa able to turn down the advances of all the taxi drivers who had been one of the low points of Cairo. I'm glad I didn't try to go downtown. The hotel airport was said on Hotels.com to be 3k away, I reckon it was a 10 minute walk if you could have. The drive there in the bus took longer because of the one way system.
The hotel was a standard airport hotel. I had booked it thinking it would be nice to have a decent hotel for at least one night at the end of the trip, but to be honest it probably wasn't as good as half the hotels on this trip. Still it had a nice Italian restaurant so I had a nice meal, watched some TV and finished my reading.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amman
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