Day 01
Garbage City, Cave Church of St. Simeon and the City of the Dead
- Your guide will pick you up from your hotel at 10:00 am to start your day tour to visit the famous Cave Church of St. Simeon in Cairo. There are seven cave churches carved into the nearby Moqattam Mountain. The Monastery of St. Simeon the Tanner is the largest and has an amphitheatre with a seating capacity of 20,000. It is worth a visit if you are interested in seeing something different in Egypt.
- Then pass by Garbage City in Cairo, located in the very local neighbourhood of Manshiyat Naser, a slum settlement in the southeast of Cairo. Its inhabitants are affectionately known as the 'Garbage People' because they have sustained themselves for decades as Cairo's unofficial sanitation crew. The Garbage People, comprising mostly Coptic Christians, first immigrated to Cairo in the 1930s in search of big-city dreams and land under their feet. Being very poor and without a solid plan, they lived in makeshift housing and recycled the city's compostable waste products by feeding them to their pigs. Today, Cairo's Garbage People make ends meet by going door to door to collect people's trash for a nominal fee, which is then brought back to their Garbage City neighbourhoods. There, they sort and recycle everything they can, using it for their manufacturing.
- Note: You will be passing through the Garbage Place without getting off from the car, as the place is full of garbage and foul smell that can cause diseases, and customer safety is our prime concern.
- Proceed to the City of the Dead, an Islamic necropolis and cemetery below the Mokattam Hills in southeastern Cairo.
Meals: Lunch.
