David Armstrong had no idea when he booked a trip to the Middle East that his trip home would include a nightmarish day at Cairo’s airport, just one of thousands of people desperately trying to leave Egypt.
The 70-year-old Littleton resident left Cairo for Luxor on Jan. 25, the same day tens of thousands of Egyptians took to the streets demanding an end to the rule of President Hosni Mubarak.
After visiting the Aswan Dam and other sites along the Nile, he arrived by boat at Luxor on Jan. 27. He joined some other tourists in hiring a guide to take them by mini-van to the Temple of Luxor.
“The police turned us back. There were a lot of armed people around and we saw smashed windows and we could see something had been broken up before we got there,” he said Thursday.
Somehow the driver found his way through the chaos and the reached the temple.
“We thought this is great, what we should have thought is we had better go home,” he said.
When they left the temple they smelled tear gas.
Armstrong, who was travelling by himself, flew back to Cairo on Jan. 29 prepared to take a Delta flight to the states. But that flight was cancelled.
The Cairo airport was mobbed – 18,000 people were jammed into a space never built to handle a crowd that size, he said.
“I spent all Saturday in this heaving mob trying to find any airline to take me anyplace” outside of Egypt.
To get anywhere he had to maneuver through the packed crowd. Moving several feet took five minutes, he said.
He booked a flight to Jordan – but he couldn’t make it to the gate on time and missed the plane. That night he went to a hotel near the airport.
In Colorado, his wife frantically tried to book a flight for him. She was able to get him a ticket on an Alitalia plane to Milan that was leaving the following day.
He arrived at the airport at 8 a.m. and found the crowd hadn’t diminished. Locating the Alitalia flight was tricky, since none of the information on boards throughout the airport was correct.
He finally found his plane and left Cairo at 5 p.m. Sunday. He arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport to find the city buried in snow.
“You get there and think, finally, I am home and then you look out the window and think, huh, not yet.”
He stayed with his son in Brooklyn and returned to Denver on Thursday.
“It feels very good. It was all kind of crazy,” he chuckled.
Tom McGhee: (303)954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
