Amma at Egypt – Part 1 – How did it all begin
Mom and Dad had been to Egypt this year. amma wanted to publish a travelogue on their travel…… Since she does not have a blogging space of her own…I offered to publish it in my –blogs. SO here goes the styory from the horses mouth:)
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My husband and I had been to Switzerland in Europe last year. The trip to Swiss was very good and so we planned that we should make one trip to a foreign country per year. So from April 2009 onwards we started planning our next foreign trip.
My husband and I discussed a lot and we decided that our next trip would be to Egypt Egypt. Why Egypt?…………
I have had 2 wishes from a very long time…1. To see pyramids…2. To travel in a ship
From a long time I have been fascinated by pyramids. I have studied about them in my early school days and have always wanted to see them.
I had also expressed my desire to go by ship. My husband always told me that it was not that easy. He said that without knowing anybody on the harbor side it would not be possible. So, I lost hope.
Now….why am I talking about pyramids and ships….and Egypt.
We figured out that Egypt had Nile river cruises and of course pyramids too!!!.
(Anyway, the cruise was a huge boat, but yes…it was just like ship).
It so happened that whenever we planned to make arrangements for the trip to Egypt, something would happen that would stop the planning. Either we won’t get time off from office, or they were not conducting the trip or we would have to attend some function at home…. This kept happening repeatedly. At one point I was fed up with the Egypt trip. I started to feel that Egypt was not lucky for me and maybe we should plan to go to some other country. But my husband said refused to make a different plan. He said he would get the luck to me 
.
This went on till end of November. We decided to give the Egypt trip one more chance. If it did not work out this time we decided to forget it as the climate condition in Egypt would not be very favourable in the next months.
We wanted to get the trip arranged through ‘Thomas cook’ who had arranged our Europe trip which was very good….. with all the well prepared Indian food. We had already tried booking the trip with them before…..once we had even blocked tickets after which we had cancelled. These kind of things happened many times within the period of April 2009 to November 200.
Again my husband went to ‘Thomas cook’ office. He talked to the person and he blocked the ticket for a customized tour because he was told that they were not conducting group trips for Egypt. He was almost convinced about the trip and he told the person that he would come over and pay him the cheque the next day. Next day he told me to come along to the office as they might as for signatures for some formalities. We went there talked to the person in charge.
As we discussed I found some points which would not work out for us because of many reasons. We told him that we would think it over and take a decision in a day’s time. We discussed with each other and decided that the customized trip would not suit us.
Suddenly a thought came to my mind. I had recently talked to my sister and she told me about the SOTC travels and so I asked my husband to give it a try. He was not very satisfied with that travel company. Still, he said he would check it out. If that did not work out, then we decided that we would drop the plan to go to Egypt itself.
The next day we went straight to SOTC office to talk to the person in charge. He said “yes, we have the group trip. Immediately this weekend. If it is ok for you”. My husband said “ok. But I want everything, the paper, visa done smoothly”. He said “that will be done. However, I will confirm the trip tomorrow”.
So from there my husband went to the ‘Thomas cook’ office and told that person that SOTC seemed to be more convenient and so we would go with SOTC. We also thanked the guy for the trouble he had taken for the past six months in trying to arrange a trip for us and we offered to pay him any processing fees. But the person was a gentleman. He said “no sir, you can make your next trip abroad through me. You don’t have to pay anything now”. My husband promised to do so and we came back.
The very next day my husband got a call from SOTC and the person said “sir, you are very lucky. We have only 2 seats for the trip you want and within the next 3 to 4 days I will make all the other arrangements like visa processing and other essentials”. On one side we were very happy that the trip was arranged. But on the other side I was not very happy about having only 5 days time for preparation. Even if we planned a year before, we always have last minute purchases. Now I had only 5 days. Anyways…it was my dream trip….so I decided to do my best in 5 days.
