Cairo airline terminals

I hate the kind of airline tickets that don’t tell you which terminal you’re leaving from. In Cairo that’s an especial pain, because Terminal 1 is fairly far from Terminals 2 and 3.

No problem this time, however; it’s Terminal 1.

The Cairo Airport has a more inconsistent level of terminal quality than I have ever seen anywhere else. The three terminals are three completely different travel experiences, and to some extent they even have different sets of rules.

When I first moved to Egypt, Terminal 2 was considered the blue ribbon portion of the airport. I’m not sure how old it is, but not that old. It was always a bit boring at the departure gates, with one boring, mediocre in-house café that has recently been augmented by a few new mediocre chain cafés. But given what has happened with the other two terminals, Terminal 2 is now the obvious armpit of Cairo Airport facilities. I feel a mild depression come over me whenever my tickets say “Terminal 2.”

As for Terminal 1… It is so far from Terminal 2 that at first I didn’t even know it existed. This led to an embarrassing disaster: my father came to visit me in Egypt at Christmas of my first year, and he was waiting for several hours at Terminal 1 without my knowing that there was such a thing. (I had never yet left Egypt, only arrived.) In those days, Terminal 1 was frankly a bit scary: really a low-class operation three tiers below the merely boring (but competent) Terminal 2. That changed several years ago with the beautifully executed overhaul of Terminal 1.

Terminal 3 opened recently: just last year, I guess. It’s a wonderful place, and a perfectly relaxing way to spend a few hours… a shiny new facility, excellently organized. Finally, Cairo doesn’t have to have a worse airport than Amman or Beirut or Damascus. Terminal 3 is also the only terminal where taxi drivers aren’t allowed to come in and hassle you when you arrive. That may sound like a good idea, but in many ways it’s disconcerting. None of us Cairo veterans were sure what to do at first, and it was actually fairly difficult to find a taxi at Terminal 3, until I learned the new tricks of where to find them.

But it’s Terminal 1 this evening.