The Flying Cat Circus

My family grew a bit while I was in Cairo - it definitely got fuzzier. I adopted India in October 2007, and Zanzibar joined us as a tiny baby this past December. Cairo simply crawls with cats, so while adopting 2 cats was basically pissing into the ocean, at least I felt good that these two cats got off the streets.

As you might suppose, India and Zanzibar are mortal enemies. To be precise, Zanzibar is India's mortal enemy; Zanzibar's arch-nemesis is the washing machine. He's really not very clever.
















There was never any question of leaving the cats in Cairo when we moved back to the US. The question, of course, was we had to do to actually accomplish the fact. And there were multiple layers of strategy required - exiting Egypt, physical transportation, and entering the US.

Physical transportation seemed the easiest to take care of first. We booked flights on Delta - we had to get all the way to San Francisco, and we needed to avoid the UK and the EU because neither cat is microchipped. Delta has a pretty extensive website dealing with "jet-set" pets. My cats weren't headed to Monte Carlo; they just needed to get to the US in one hop. We could have taken EgyptAir to JFK and dealt with fewer restrictions, but I didn't intend to pay a pet fee for EgyptAir and then another pet fee for Delta - one $150 (per cat!) was all I was willing to shell out for those little beauties.

That's right. Delta charges $150 per pet ... the pet has to stay in the cabin between May and September (no baggage checking) ... and only 2 pets per flight (economy class) are permitted. KC had delayed in getting his flight tickets, so we ended up having to fly on separate days because the second pet space on my flight was filled by the time KC booked. Maelesh.

I took Zanzibar to the vet to get his rabies shot and to ask about the protocol for getting the cats into the US safely. Dr Rafik spent a long time explaining an incredibly detailed process to me that had appeared nowhere in the research I had done. According to Dr Rafik, I had to leave the cats' vaccination records (they have kitty passports) with him, and he would generate a health certificate for each cat. His certificate was only good for 15 days, and had to be taken, with the kitty passports, to the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture for exit papers. Those papers would have to be presented in Egypt and in the US to clear customs. Dr Rafik also wrote out a series of instructions, in Arabic and in English, with the names and office locations of the various officials we'd have to visit at the Ministry.

I picked up the certificates a couple of weeks later. Dr Rafik had gotten the year wrong on India's last rabies shot, so that had to be fixed (a simple typo that could have been catastrophic). We also had to be very careful that KC appeared as Zanzibar's owner, and I was listed as India's, so there'd be no question of proper transport of the cats. A few hours later I realized I'd forgotten to pick up the sedative that Dr Rafik had offered me for India, but I decided to just make do without it.

The Sunday after our aborted trip to Abu Simbel, we headed to the New Campus to take care of some final things. Then we decided to take the bus straight to Mohandesin to the Ministry, rather than go back to Garden City and then schlep back out to Mohandesin. By some miracle I had the kitty passports in my purse, but of course I did not have Dr Rafik's instruction sheet. We figured, how hard could it be? Dr Rafik had promised it'd be nothing like the Mogamma.

You can see where this is going. For that matter, so could we.

We easily found the Ministry of Agriculture. I'd remembered vaguely that Dr Rafik had said there were multiple ministry buildings (possibly four) and that the office we wanted was in the building perpendicular to the street, not parallel to it. Right.

We picked a building, I showed the doorman the vaccination certificates from Dr Rafik, I explained in my very simple prepared Arabic what we were trying to do. The gentlemen appeared to understand us and gave us a set of detailed directions (lots of arm waving) to direct us to the office we wanted. When we finally navigated the warren of the building and arrived at the office, we discovered that it was absolutely not the office we wanted, and the occupants of the office (usually a director) were completely puzzled as to why we were such idiots. We then explained everything again, showed the certificates, and were directed to another ministry building.

Take that last paragraph above. Repeat it four times with four separate buildings scattered among a few blocks in Mohandesin. Oh, and turn the temperature up to about 100 degrees fahrenheit and have four lanes of speeding traffic come straight at you, horns blaring. Then you'll start to get a picture of how we spent our afternoon.

At one point a puzzled director said to us, "This is the animal production department. Do you want more cats?" We also got into a huge fight with a guy who wanted to test the cats for avian influenza and couldn't figure out why we hadn't brought the cats. "Because we don't want the cats tested for avian influenza", we replied. "Then why are you here?" he responded. In his defense, it turned out that we'd been erroneously directed to an avian influenza lab. And so on.

Finally, we did actually managed to find the Quarantine Office (we did not want the cats quarantined) in a building that lacked a Ministry of Agriculture sign. This office consisted of about six people sitting around in a stiflingly hot room. We spent the next forty minutes walking back and forth between this office and the office next door. The protocol went something like this: get signature from woman in office 1. Go to office 2 to buy stamp. Get signature from man in office 1. Go to office 2 and buy another stamp. Return to office 1 and get third person to sign forms. Bring forms to fourth person in office 1 (sitting right next to persons already visited for signature). Verify with another person in office 2 that another stamp was not needed. Help woman in office 1 (with apparently no function) read her English language newspaper ("What is 'cherish'? What is 'flora and fauna'?). And so on.

Eventually all the papers were stamped and signed and ready for departure. I swear I checked them before we left the office and I swear I didn't see any mistakes.

The next day, Monday, we had our smashing coup at the EgyptAir office and our final trip to the Khan al Khalili. Tuesday we had a last dinner with friends upstairs and I made a valiant effort to finish the alcohol we'd brought to share. It was really, really hot when we made our way back to down to our flat a half hour before KC was scheduled to be picked up and taken to the airport. One last time I checked KC's stack of papers -

And saw that the people at the Ministry of Agriculture had swapped the names on the cats' papers. KC was listed as India's owner, and I was paired with Zanzibar. After a frantic consultation, KC dashed over to the Four Seasons business center and had photocopies of all the papers made, so we could show Customs exactly where the mistake happened.

I didn't hear anything from KC the next day, so I assumed everything was fine. At 11 pm I wrangled India into her carrier and headed for the airport. As I entered the terminal, a military policeman barked at me, "Cat? Papers?" I responded, "Yes" and kept walking. Clearly I'd been in the country too long.

At Delta's ridiculously extensive security counter I forked over the $150 for the cat, checked my bags, and walked onto the plane. The flight from Cairo was one of those cattlecar planes (I think a 767). I was two or three rows from the back, on the aisle. Being on the aisle was good; it meant that India was subjected to more of the traffic in the aisle, but it meant I could get her in and out more easily. During the flight I draped a blanket over my legs and over the carrier, making a tent. We do this a lot at home - India likes sleeping under the covers. I think it helped keep her warm and sensory deprived. She really did not like take off or landing, but in general she was well-behaved during the flight. It was uncomfortable for me, and one of the flight stewards offered to move her up front, but I declined and kept her with me. The plane was noisy enough that I'm pretty sure I was the only person who could hear her when she cried.

Four times during the flight to JFK I took the bag into the lavatory and let her out. I tried to do this while most people were sleeping. She was shaking like a leaf and she looked like a rabbit, with big rolled up dewy eyes. She wouldn't drink any water and she would only eat a few bites of her dry food if I held it in my hand and put it right under her nose. All she really wanted was to be cuddled, which was really pathetic. She was trying to purr but she was shaking so hard she could only produce odd little sounds, but she constantly nuzzled me and made her scratchy paws. She didn't fight very hard when it was time to go back in the bag.

At JFK I checked the "transporting animals" box on the customs form. The passport control guy looked at India, looked at the form, and told me to keep walking and someone would stop me. The woman ahead of me in line had a cat too (she was the reason KC couldn't fly with me) and she told me that she'd never bothered to go to the Ministry of Agriculture; she just had the vaccination record and the certificate from her vet. After passport control I got my bags and went through customs. Nobody stopped me. I even handed my form - with the checked box - to a customs officer who waved me through.

I rechecked my luggage, then headed back through security. Here I had to put India's carrier through the scanner and walk through the metal detector with her in my arms, which I stupidly did with my cell phone in my pocket (so I had to do it twice). Everyone in line, including the agents, was cooing over India and so they helped me get her through (she still managed to scratch my arms up through my jacket). At JFK I tried to find a bathroom that had dividers that went to the floor, or a single-person bathroom, but I couldn't find any, and the janitors said they were all open on the bottom.

At the gate in JFK I got permission from one agent to preboard and then was told by another that I couldn't preboard with a pet. Again I was about 4-5 rows from the back on the aisle. Before the flight took off I took her into the lavatory and she drank a little water and ate a little food, but still wasn't interested in her custom-made litter box. People were always using the bathroom on the flight to San Francisco, so she stayed in the bag for 6 hours. At SFO there were still no separate bathrooms and no one asked for any papers on that end either. So we just walked out of there.

All told, India was in the bag for almost exactly 24 hours. She was unsedated, surprisingly well-behaved, and didn't create any biohazards during the flight.

All that effort, and the papers didn't even get checked once. KC said that his customs agent did look at Zanzibar's rabies vaccination record, but that was it. Yeesh. Now I have a contraband cat.