In August 2008 I spent a week in Egypt. I've wanted to go since I was a kid, ancient Egypt, hidden tombs, treasure and the pyramids has always fascinated me. I was primarily in Luxor, checking out the Valley of the Kings and the surrounding area, but I spent two days in Cairo. Here's what happened.
You can read Day 2 here
5am
Woke up in my hotel in Luxor and dragged myself out of bed. It should be illegal to get up this early but I had an 8am flight. I'm staying at the Nile Palace in Luxor, one of the nicest hotels I've stayed in. The English receptionist had sorted out a packed lunch for me, which was full of all sorts of goodies. Definitely not your usual fare, but like I said, it's a nice hotel (I got lucky)
Mr Abuo, the driver who had been taking me around Luxor the previous few days met me outside and drove me to the airport, its deserted, barely open. Aaargh. I could still be in my bed. Its only 6am, and my flight doesn't leave for two hours. I scoff my packed lunch and promptly fall asleep.
9am
Finally get on the plane, its been delayed by an hour and I've been pretty much sleeping since I got to the airport. More sleep on the plane.
10am
Yay! I'm here. I'd arranged accommodation in advance and the hotel had sent somebody to pick me up. He was standing holding a card with 'Mr Darren' on it (what is it with people not getting my last name?) I always think it's funny getting met at the airport by drivers. I used to see people at airports standing with signs for people and think 'it must be for somebody important'. Well, I can put that one straight, I'm not important, it's just convenient getting picked up at and airport and taken to a hotel. Especially when you've only got two days and have had about 4 hours sleep the night before, most of it at the airport waiting for your plane.
One thing I noticed leaving the airport right away was the temperature. It was only about 30C. Soooo much better than Luxor and the oven-like 43C.
11am
Got to my hotel, the Hotel Longchamps in the Zamalek area of Cairo. I found out later back in Luxor this is one of the nicest areas in Cairo. Just on the banks of the Nile its full of private schools, embassies and posh townhouses where most of the wealthy people in Cairo stay, including a few TV and movie stars. A sort of Cairo Beverley Hills. I was completely oblivious to all this when I was there though.
The hotel was in the fourth floor of a big building with a tiny lift (think small rattley box) going up to an expansive floor filled with loads of old colonial antiques, and bizarrely an old telephone exchange in the reception. It was a slightly other-worldly art-deco place that felt slightly out of place, like I'd jumped back in time and it was really 1920. Really nice, and much better than my faceless could-be-anywhere-in-the-world luxury pad back in Luxor.
12am.
Time to explore. I'd already decided I'd leave the pyramids until the next day, and explore today and try and see the Egyptian Museum.
I should try and put Cairo into context a little bit. It's a huge city, with around 20million people living there. London has 8 million and feels massive, so you start to get the idea. I was here for two days, there was no way I'd even scratch the surface, the best I'd be able to do was dip my toe in to water (just don't drink it though).
Oh, and the other thing. Its nuts. Like insane. Cairo is crazy. I loved it. I'd heard about the legendary traffic but after visits to Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City I thought I'd seen everything there is to see about traffic overcrowding. Wrong. In SE Asia its normal for two lanes to be made into three, for cars to share the road with the occasional animal, and for most cars to have a few bumps or scrapes. In fact in SE Asia your car looks weird if it isn't beaten up a bit.
typical Cairo taxi, no idea how these things actually keep running
What I really wasn't expecting for people to enter the fray, crossing roads wherever, dodging traffic and dashing between seemingly impossible spaces between cars driving at over 30 miles an hour. It was a bit like a real life version of the old ZX Spectrum Game Horace Goes skiing (requires Java to be installed), where you have to get Horace across a busy road before collecting his skiing. Poor Horace was always getting squished by traffic. It was fun though. I hope Cairo never gets pedestrian crossings.
Any time I go to a new place I usually go walkabout. I just try to get lost, and see what happens. I cleverly used a local Cairean as a bodyguard crossing my first main road and walked when he walked - 10 minutes later I was completely lost. I had a vague idea of the direction I needed to go to get to the Egyptian museum but ended up in some small street with a market going on.
Cairo is a great city. It's a mixture of old and new, ancient history and quite a lot of reminants from colonial times. I found it really stylish and exciting and not what I expected at all. Egypt was the first time I'd been to a Middle Eastern country and in Luxor I felt like a walking wallet most of the time. Everybody seemed to want me to do something for an exorbitant price. This is the infamous 'hassle' that is in all the travel books and websites. Cairo wasn't like that. Nobody bothered me and I could wander around without getting pestered. After 4 days in Luxor first being polite ("no thanks") to being as rude as possible ("f**k off and leave me alone I'm NOT BUYING ANYTHING") it was great to actually wander around and not be bothered. There's a really magical sense of history here, you can walk down one street and it can be like any modern city, or get lost in some alleys and its like walking back in time.
1pm
Finally found the Egyptian Museum after dicing with death a few times on the roads. Getting in is incredibly convoluted. It goes something like this:
- Queue at the gate to get your bag x-rayed
- Queue to get an entrance ticket
- Queue *again* to leave your camera - you can't take camera into the museum
- Queue once more to go through the ticket barrier
- And..... queue another time for more x-rays and your bag searched
- Lose the will to live...
Entrance to the Egyptian Museam
The Lonely Planet book I had said the Egyptian Museum can't be done in a day, well I did it in three hours, and I walked around twice. I'd just came from Luxor and had seen a lot of the places the museum artifacts had came from, and they were definitely better left in the desert than in what I thought was a fairly dusty old museum. Maybe I missed something but it was mainly cases and cases of artifacts, with no English labeling (there was some in Arabic) so you didn't know what you were looking at. The floor with all the mummies and sarcophagi was good though - most of these were removed from tombs years ago and this is one of the only places you can actually see the originals.
4pm
I'd been told the Citadel was a good place to go watch the sunset, and see some mosques. The Citadel was built in 1176 to protect against the Crusaders and looked like some sort of big castle/palace. But I got distracted in the Military Museum then fell asleep under a tree. Ooops. That's be the early morning start catching up with me. By the time I woke up the Citadel was closing so I never got to see inside. It looked very impressive from the gates though...
The Citadel, Mosque of Mohammed Ali
What was actually probably more fun than the Citadel was the drive to the Citadel. I got to experience the traffic from inside a car rather than dodging one. I hailed one of Cairo's classic black and white cabs - a dusty 30 year old Lada 1300 held together with bits of string and good will. I've sure the driver was just trying to faze me - 50 miles an hour on a busy highway, driving like a maniac. I've been on tamer fairground rides. There was one point when we were coming up behind a pickup truck and another car and a tiny space opened up. He just made a third lane and zipped in between the two of them, grinning at me with the two teeth still left in his head. I just laughed and gave him a big tip. Great fun!
6pm
I got another crazy/exciting taxi ride to the historic Khan al-Khalili area and wandered through the huge Mosque of Sayyidna al-Hussein. I kind of felt I was intruding a bit, but nobody seemed to mind and it a pretty amazing place inside. I've never been to an Islamic country before and the culture difference is noticeable. I'm not entirely sure how welcome westerners are at times. I was wandering around Luxor near the station and was told by a big Egyptian guy wearing a traditional galabeya that 'this road is closed, not for you'. Fair enough. And another time I was having a conversation with a bloke about my own age who worked in the shops below a pub I kept going to. He was nice enough but he explained there's quite a bit of distrust that our western culture, loose women and more importantly beer will have bad influences on Egypt and Islamic countries in general. I kind of agree with him too. Anyway, thanks Cairo for letting me have a look around one of your biggest and most important mosques. For what it's worth, I thought it was cool.
al-Hussein Mosque, al-Azhar
There was one other thing I had to do whilst I was Khan al-Khalili - make my own pilgrimage to Fishawi's. Its famous for being open continuously for 200 years. Presumably it's been painted a few times since then. It's a funny place, hard to find off a small alley, but then seems to take up a minor maze of outdoor and indoor locations. Waiters run about shouting noisily at each other bringing coffee, tea, cakes and food to tourists and locals alike. The place is also a constant thoroughfare for random dudes selling wooden pyramids, handmade um, everything really, and loads of tourist tat. Egyptian coffee is excellent, a few coffee's and a big sheesha was perfect after wandering around most of the day.
7pm
Right, sunset time. I read that there was a bar on top of the King Hotel in the Doqqi area that did good food. It turns out the food wasn't up to much, but the sunset over the city from the 9th floor of the hotel was spectacular, and a great way to get a birdseye view of the city. It was hard to believe I'd only been here for a day. I'd done a bit of a whistle-stop tour and see loads. I really wasn't giving Cairo justice though, its way to big a city to see even in a week.
Cairo at sunset, with the Cairo tower in the distance
9pm - beer time
Bars in Cairo aren't exactly ten-a-penny because of the Islamic culture (most Egyptians seem to prefer sheesha) but I'm Scottish, it was dark, beer was the order of the day. I got the concierge to write directions in Arabic to the 'Cafeteria Stella' in downtown. After another manic taxi ride and some wandering about I eventually found my Stella bar. It was a pretty dingy room with a bar at one end and a mixture of tourists and locals looking fairly guilty at drinking beer. Undetermined I eventually got a table (it was packed) and got served beer with loads of cucumber and some sort of tasty corn/nut nibble thing.
12am
Almost done. Another (!) taxi back to the hotel, but I was wired on strong coffee and beer and couldn't sleep, found a late-night deli by the Nile called Cinnabon where I got possibly the most artery-clogging chocolate pastry I've ever eaten. Yum.
Read about Day 2 here