what, two hours to check in maybe. yeah. he about two hours to check in. anyone who wasn t in a tour group had a difficult time though not getting through. right. and we heard that our flight was one of the only flights flying out of the airport. we re not sure how true that is. we got lucky to get out. and mick kayla, did you see any of the protesters while you were there? i know you were in cairo and went to luxor. what did you see? yeah. well, when we were flying back to cairo to, you know, take part of our tour, we got trapped at the airport because they were having curfew. we were stuck there till about 2:00 in the morning. then had he had to transfer us to a different hotel because we were staying at safir hotel about two blocks from the museum. so we lucked out. we weren t in the middle of it, but we stayed at the rad son blue instead. there were some locals out there
army thanks. soldiers have been deployed all around the stet and the thanks are even parked here at one of the ancient wonders of the world, the great pyramids of giza. an army officer insisted the pyramids are still open for tourists, but the soldiers wouldn t let us come any closer. on monday, the troop presence was dramatically increased in cairo. soldiers trained to defend their country from foreign enemies now taking on the duties of largely absent police. an effort to restore law and order in a frightened city bearing the scars of several days and nights of unrest. this is part of what has egyptians so scared right now. a number of hotels and cabarets and casinos like this that were toed and looted in the first days of the protests. most of the businesses in town are still closed. with the normal working day cut in half by a curfew that started at 3:00 p.m.
and i m quoting now from one era to the other. egypt s newly newly placed vice president says the embattled president hosni mubarak has asked him to start working on constitutional reform, and as the white house calls for an orderly transition, the state department hopes to have 1,000 americans evacuated from egypt by the end of the day. we ll have a lot more for you on this part of the story. the unrest certainly making it increasingly difficult for egyptians to live their normal lives with shortages of food, fuel and cash spreading. cnn s arwa damon has more from cairo. reporter: wolf, helicopters have been overhead for hours. demonstrators still defying the curfew, but away from the capital and tahrir square, what we re seeing is a city very much struggling to survive. this is not the capital that many egyptians recognize. nor is it one they want the outside world to see. residents line up at a popular
of the world s most priceless treasures now facing danger in egypt. looter have already damaged a statue of king tut and carted off ancient artifacts. now many of egypt s museums are frightened they could be targeted next. let s go to cnn s mary snow working the story for us. what do you know, pare? egypt s supreme council of antiquities said the country s major archaeological sites and museums are being prek the by the army. the top antiquities official wrote in a blog my heart is broken and my blood is boiling after reporting ten looters got into the cairo museum. he and many others are hoping national pride willpect the priceless artifacts. soldiers stand guard outside the egyptian museum in cairo, home to thousands of treasures. looters entered the museum on
makeshift checkpoint that was going on and they were stopping cars together. it seems as though the traffic police is one form of police that a lot of people here are willing to accept. in large parts of the city. there still really isn t anything in the way of law enforcement on the streets, especially if you get outside of the downtown area here in cairo and closer into the outskirts there. it still is quite a lawless and chaotic sort of environment, although i do have to say that a lot of these community militias that are forming, a lot of people who are banding together. they are actually doing quite a good job of keeping the peace and we were walking around some of these areas outside of downtown. i have to say we felt quite safe coming up to the checkpoints that were manned by ordinary people. wolf? the community militias, what kind of weapons? i understand that they just have the basic elementary weapons to protect themselves but really not many guns and things like that. re