El Andalous - Visa Run

ISG Airport Hotel Courtyard

 

Well, I survived the visa run – this is what the expats in Egypt call the short flight there and back to Istanbul in order to get a new entry stamp in your passport so that you can apply for a year’s extension visa in Egypt. We have to leave the country once a year for security reasons. It doesn’t seem very secure in times of a pandemic, but it is what it is.

The first thing was to get a PCR test. For Istanbul, if you time your flights right, a single PCR will see you through for your journey there and back (not needed if you are fully vaccinated, although airline requirements may differ).

I dutifully booked in the PCR test in advance and the doctor checked that he had my phone number. Unfortunately, I didn’t realise he hadn’t confirmed the booking again the day before (as he promised) until it was too late.

We arrived at 10am for our appointment, and the clinic wasn’t open. I phoned after ten minutes and he said he’d arrive in half an hour. Eventually, we got in, but the doctor said he’d lost the record of our appointment and that the PCR person only comes when booked. We had ordered a taxi for 10.30pm for our flight, so we couldn’t postpone for another day.

Fortunately, the doctor discovered that the PCR guy was seeing someone else in Sahl Hasheesh and so could come over and do our tests in half an hour. After ninety minutes, the PCR guy arrived.

I’d been dreading the test, but actually it was fine (I told him to be gentle!) and the stick was thinner than I was expecting. I gave them my number again and asked them twice to check it, but they refused, saying it was fine. They promised we’d get the test results by 10pm at the latest.

Well, ten o’clock fast approached and the tests hadn’t arrived. I phoned the doctor, but he wasn’t answering. The guy in the pharmacy next door said that the doctor had left already. What to do! Our taxi to the airport was arriving in half an hour.

I struck upon the idea of phoning the hospital where the test would be analysed (that’s how desperate I was as I hate the phone). Fortunately, they were able to confirm that the test results were available and had been sent to the doctor (who obviously hadn’t sent them on). They sent the results to me directly when I said I couldn’t contact the doctor. Phew.

After some time working out how to get the pictures from WhatsApp to my laptop so that I could print them out, and after dashing outside to get the taxi to wait, we finally made it to the airport. What a load of stress! I even forked out an extortionate amount for a water to rejuvenate myself a bit. Safi asked the taxi driver to put his foot down (she was saying this to an Egyptian – what was she thinking!), so the drive to the airport was a bit hair raising. I’ll leave that to your imagination.

The flight (at 1.45am) went well. We’d booked an aisle and a window seat and the middle seat remained free (hurrah). I wanted to have a drink and a kit kat during the flight, but the airline’s  machine wouldn’t accept any of our cards (we tried about four different ones). The hostess kindly gave me a kit kat for free and they brought me a water (which I badly needed after sweating so much earlier on!).

We arrived on time and we’d purchased fast-track tickets beforehand from the airport website. This was the best thing ever. Massive queues snaked along for passport control and we walked past them all and went right through. Amazing. I felt like a VIP.

Everything else went smoothly. We’d booked a room at the ISG airport hotel (SAW airport; we flew with Pegasus) and I used the phone provided to call the transfer service. Our room was great (and they didn’t charge for early use of the room), but we had breakfast before crashing. The restaurant didn’t have proper menus (due to covid), so we just said what we wanted and they had most of it, apart from the request for brown sauce which turned up on our table as mustard. I had some lovely scrambled eggs with mushroom and sausage (not pork sausage, but hey ho).

After that, we went to the room to sleep. Then we ate again (mushroom soup and molten chocolate cake and a fresh orange juice), and then slept again. We decided to eat at the airport, although it turned out that all the eateries at the airport served pretty much the same thing (pizza, burgers), although I did manage to get some chicken tenders and French fries. Feeling hungry yet, dear reader?

Again, the flight went smoothly, and we landed without incident. The taxi driver collecting us looked rather tired, but he was there, and that’s the main thing. And that was the dreaded visa run, all done and dusted.