Istanbul, Türkiye

Another day, another plane. This part of the trip is rather plane-heavy, mostly cause of the return flight to Abu Simbel.

We’re on our way to Türkiye for a three week road trip. There’s not good connections from Cairo to Ankara (where we start our Türkiye road trip), so we have an overnight layover in Istanbul.

The Istanbul airport opened in 2019, and the surrounding hotel infrastructure has yet to catch up. We decided to stay at the Yotel in the airport, rather than try to get into the city.

So our journey today from Le Meridien Cairo Airport to Yotel Istanbul was walk-fly-walk :)

The EgyptAir flight to Istanbul was on another vintage 737. Our ears were popping due to our colds, as well as cause older jets don’t have good cabin pressure.

We lucked out with the immigration line in Istanbul - we must have hit a lull, it took us less than ten minutes to get through. After we retrieved our luggage, we had to visit a couple of Turkish Airlines counters to sort out our flight to Ankara tomorrow. Somehow our tickets showed us as on both the 11am and 1pm flights. They were super helpful, and got us straightened out for the 11am. I wasn’t concerned about getting to Ankara, as the Istanbul-Ankara route is as common as Toronto-Montreal, with flights every hour.

We then checked into the Yotel. We were super impressed with the whole setup. Check-in was quick and easy, the room was really well laid out, had fast wifi, outlets everywhere you’d need them. There was also no pamphlets nor promotional items cluttering up every available surface (my pet peeve in other hotels - I spend the first few minutes in a new hotel gathering all those up and sticking in a drawer).

The only downside with staying at the airport is that food is overpriced and average at best. We walked around both departures and arrivals looking at the dinner options. I like walking around airports when they’re empty like this - maybe it’s from growing up near Pearson.

We weren’t that hungry, so just split a couple fresh sandwiches and a salad. It tasted pretty good, and not too overpriced at 30 EUR.

We actually got in a lot of walking today - over 7.3km!