Day 01
Cave Church, Garbage City and the City of the Dead
- Meet your tour guide, who will pick you up from your hotel in Cairo at 10:00 a.m. Start the tour with a visit to the famous Cave Church of St. Simon in Cairo. There are seven cave churches carved into the nearby Moqattam Mountain. The Monastery of St. Simon the Tanner is the largest and features an amphitheatre with a seating capacity of 20,000. It is well worth a visit if you are interested in seeing something different in Egypt.
- Pass by Garbage City, located in the very local neighbourhood of Manshiyat Naser. Better known as "Garbage City in Cairo," it is a slum settlement in southeastern 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 opportunity and land to settle on. Living in makeshift housing, they survived by recycling the city's compostable waste products and feeding them to their pigs. Today, Cairo's Garbage People make ends meet by going door to door to collect rubbish for a nominal fee, which is then brought back to their neighbourhoods for sorting and recycling into their own manufacturing.
Note: You will pass through Garbage City without getting out of the car, as the area is almost full of garbage and has a very bad smell that can cause illness. This passing-through visit is arranged with customer safety as the main concern.
- Continue to the City of the Dead, an Islamic necropolis and cemetery below the Mokattam Hills in southeastern Cairo.
- Drop-off at the location.
