hardest place to get to from Egypt?

One of the pleasures of living in Egypt for the past 12 years is how well-connected it is to the rest of the world in terms of air transport. Egypt was my 21st country (most of the previous ones having been in Europe), and I’m now up to 64, which shows (among other things) just how convenient the Cairo Airport is to most parts of the world.

But for once, I’ve had to book a pretty ridiculous itinerary from here: to Estonia. I’m headed to the IAPL to speak on the panel about Lingis. And my routes are as follows:

Cairo-Paris-Helsinki-Tallinn

Tallinn-Copenhagen-Paris-Cairo

With small layovers in each, so I can’t even have the fun compensation of brief airport exits– like the day in April 2006 when I surely became the only human ever to set foot in central Reykjavik, central Glasgow, central Amsterdam, and central Cairo on the very same day. The layovers were just long enough in Glasgow and Amsterdam that this was possible.

All right, Cairo-Amsterdam-Glagow-Reykjavik is a long itinerary as well. But at least those are all going in the right direction, and you couldn’t improve on it too much, unless you simply went Cairo-London-Reykjavik.

In November I was on a flight with a very unfortunate Nigerian woman who had been booked on a Casablanca-Cairo-Lagos itinerary, which is admittedly worse than my route to Tallinn.

I’ve been to all the Baltic states, so Tallinn won’t be new. But I’ll be happy to return. My last time there was in 2005.