We took a day trip yesterday to see the sights of Cairo. Of course we saw the Pyramids, the Sphinx and the Ship of Cheops, the recently discovered funerary barge of on of the Pharoahs buried under the Pyramids.

The city itself is the biggest city we have visited on the trip, and the scale and the noise and the dust was overwhelming. The whole place seems to be choking on traffic.

The centre of the city however is quite modern (slightly reminiscent of Paris - there has historically been a big French influence here) and we found a small restaurant in the Lonely Planet Guide (an indispensable companion on our travels!) and had an excellent lunch before the highlight of the day, a visit to the Egyptian Museum.

This fabulous building contains countless astonishing antiquities, but the big attraction was the collection of treasure found in the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings. We gazed in amazement at the wealth and the quality of the workmanship that had gone into creating these wonderful 4,000 year old objects.

Then down to earth with a quick visit to a huge Carrefour supermarket (a benefit of being back in 'civilisation' - although no alcohol sold) to provision up for the trip to Crete.

Tomorrow we transit the Canal (unless they close it for warships to go through, which they regularly do!) and then we have 450 miles to Crete. The weather looks OK for a day or so, but the weather forecast also promises at least a day or two of strong NW winds which will slow us down a bit. However, we still hope to be there by next weekend (18th/19th) which is Greek Orthodox Easter.