Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the 23rd of August and that means I fear that many of us are already looking ahead to winter. Yet there's a couple of great developments involving Cairo, which I hope will put a bit of a spring in your travel step. Let me tell you about the first.

This is the Grand Egyptian Museum. Goodness me, it's running about a decade late.

From all the images I've seen, it looks a magnificent structure. The whole idea is that the contents of the Egyptian Museum, which was in central Cairo,

have been transported there to a site in a spectacular new structure that is very close to the Pyramids, to the sphinx, and adds to the sense of

antiquity, probably when it finally opens, it will become, I imagine, the greatest heritage collection on Earth.

A bit scandalous that it hasn't opened.

I've been trying desperately for years to figure out when it's going to open up.

It keeps being postponed.

There's a bit of a kind of well-meaning amateur who runs a website called

Grand Egyptian Museum.org that is he's doing his best to

keep everybody informed but it's been a shockingly badly managed project and they keep postponing

the date all the signs though are that it is

finally going to open in the next few months, possibly before the end of the year.

If not then, the first couple of months of 2024, January, February of course, great time to visit Cairo and the rest of Egypt,

because it's not so flipping hot. So the way you get there, well, if you look at the fares,

for instance, for September, as I've been doing for British Airways, 433 pounds33. That's for a five-hour flight on a narrow bodied plane, an Airbus A320.

Really quite a lot of cash. And Egypt air, they've got more comfortable, kind of

longer haul type planes, but similar fares.

So what are you going to do?

Well, you wait your entire life for a link from Newton to Cairo and then two come along at once.

That's the great news which has over the past 10 days or so become apparent.

So the first off was Whizzair.

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