Egypt

Egypt

While the bike was being freighted to Jordan, we flew to Cairo. We felt quite sad, looking out of the window as we passed over Ethiopia and Sudan. We now planned to travel across Egypt and Jordan on public transport before meeting up with the bike in Amman in the north of Jordan.

I make a point of not expecting too much of any destination. It is easy to over-hype a place in your mind and then be disappointed. But with Cairo this happened in reverse. I had heard so many bad stories about the city that I was pleasantly surprised. It was much bigger and more modern than I had expected. We hadn't been in such a big city since Jo'burg. It took nearly 45 minutes to drive across the city to our hotel - a lot of the places we had been to recently you could walk across in that time!

Goose had been to Cairo before and had hated it so we treated ourselves to a luxury hotel to compensate. I knew that the city spread out as far as the pyramids, but it still came as a surprise to see them directly outside our hotel window! The romance of the pyramids in the middle of the Sahara has long gone but they are still striking nonetheless.

Camels in the mist

We went to see the recently introduced evening light show which told some of the history of the pyramids as they were lit up in different colours against the night sky. The following morning we got up at 'sunrise' to catch a camel. But even at 5.30am the sun was already up and thick smog from the city completely covered the pyramids! We rode around on our camels staring into the fog while our guide pointed at the place where the pyramids should be! Then, for a brief moment the top of one of them peered above the haze, one side lit in the morning sun. For one moment there was real magic.

Suddenly our guide rushed over, grabbed our camels and raced us back across the sand, hotly pursued by a bunch of tourist police also on camels! The scene became almost comical as we clung desperately to our camels, bobbing up and down - not your standard police chase by any means! - until we were eventually cornered and our guide and the police started shouting at each other. Apparently we weren't supposed to be there before 8am. A small bribe seemed to sort things out. The police smiled as if nothing had happened. "Welcome to Egypt!" they said warmly and our guide calmly led us back up to our 'viewpoint' to look at some more fog!

Cairo remained stubbornly smog-ridden so we booked ourselves onto a trip to Luxor. Goose was due to come back to Cairo again in order to fly to Sydney, so we decided to explore the pyramids then. In the meantime, we visited the Egyptian Museum which is filled to bursting point with the contents of the various Egyptian tombs, Tut-ankh-Amun being, of course, the most spectacular. What surprised me was the photographs of the inside of the tombs when they were first opened. Everything was stacked up in a rough pile rather like an old attic full of junk. Somehow I had expected the Egyptians to be more tidy!

The Nile

Having explored various travel agencies we decided to sod the expense and booked onto a 5-star cruise down the Nile. Well, you only live once (unless you're Egyptian of course!). We took an overnight train to Aswan where we joined our cruise ship which would take us up the Nile to Luxor. On the outside it looked like something out of a Mississippi musical, on the inside it looked like a small version of the Titanic! So this is how the other half live!

Aswan was a laid back town with a huge market and lots of character. We visited our first site - the Unfinished Obelisk - which would have stood 42m high if completed but a crack developed as they were cutting it out of the rock so they had to abandon it - all that work for nothing.

In the evening we walked through the market and were introduced to the Egyptian way of doing things! Their manner is much more aggressive than the rest of Africa but fortunately they still have the humour. In a desperate attempt to attract your custom, the stall owners make promises of "hassle-free shopping" while they stand in your way and tug your arm! We walked along to shouts of "Over here - Asda Price" with a quick slap on the back pocket, "Go on, make my day", "Why don't you stop, are you angry with me?" and, of course, "How many camels for your wife?" Some would rush out with a 'gift'. Every shop seemed to have a small basket of stone scarab beetles. One of these would be pressed into your palm with a sincere bow - "a gift for you" - trying to make you feel obliged to shop there. By the time we left the market we had enough beetles to set up a stall of our own!

Another method of shopping was introduced to us further down the Nile. Goose and I had met up with a family from Melbourne and were happily drinking martini's on the sundeck (as you do!) when we heard shouts from below. A group of small rowing boats had collected around our ship, each trying to sell table cloths. We leaned over the balcony as they threw plastic bags up to us (we were 4 storeys above the water!) containing cloths for us to look at. Every second another one landed on deck to be inspected and thrown back down. The air was full of flying bags!

Launa and Howard decided to buy a table cloth and napkins and the bartering began. Shouting to each other over the side of the ship a price was agreed and Launa threw the money down in one of the plastic bags. The traders then argued furiously between themselves over their percentage! It was quite a spectacular way to shop.

Our trip included a visit to Kom-Ombo and Edfu Temples as well as the Valley of the Queens, the Kings and Luxor Temple. In the Valley of the Kings, we visited four tombs including that of Tut-ankh-Amun. Apart from the striking colours of the carvings that had remained so vibrant after thousands of years, the thing that struck me was the lengths that they had gone to in order to hide each tomb from thieves. Ramses III had a fake tomb built in front of the real one. Then he set up false walls and pits as booby traps - not quite Indiana Jones but you could see where they got the idea! To get to Tut-ankh-Amun's tomb had originally required scaling a steep wall and crossing a deep pit - all by candle light (now, thankfully, made easy by stairs, a bridge and electric lamps). But it doesn't take much to imagine how incredible it would have been when they were first opened!

At the end of our cruise we took a bus to the Red Sea where Goose left me sunning myself while he flew to Sydney to get his passport stamped for his Australian residency. I met up with him a few days later back in Cairo.

Back to Cairo

This time we stayed in a slightly more modest pension in downtown Cairo. In fact, I liked it a lot more than our smarter (but soulless) hotel of the previous visit. The Pension Roma is situated on the 4th floor of an old 1930s building complete with dusty marble staircase wrapped around a wrought-iron cage lift. Since the staircase was unlit and windowless, the lift was the better option but not for those of a nervous disposition as it thumped and rattled up to the 4th floor. I walked out into a large lobby with high ceilings and narrow corridors closed off by heavy wooden doors that clanked. It was fairly basic but it had a certain old-world charm that appealed.

Goose and I spent a day getting lost in the Old Bazaar, drinking tea, smoking the hubba bubba and walking round the pyramids. The only irritation was the complete inability of the Egyptians to just leave you alone! All we wanted to do was quietly admire the grandeur of the pyramids and contemplate the enormity of building something that big before cranes and bulldozers. Goose was also keen to discuss his theory that the pyramids were, in actual fact, an alien spacecraft landing platform. But our peace was constantly disturbed by "You want camel ride?", "Only E£5 for you, I show you pyramids", "You want to see Sphinx - come on, ride my camel". The camel-owner's refusal to take a polite, then a firm and finally a positively vicious "NO!" for an answer was nothing short of exasperating. As we sat recovering over a beer, we concluded that in retrospect the only way to see the pyramids in peace would actually have been on the back of a camel!

The following day we took a bus to Sinai. We endured 7 hours of Arabic music at deafening volume (and that was with earplugs in) before arriving in the 'ghost town' port of Nuweiba. The ferry to Jordan didn't leave until the following morning so Goose and I spent the evening with Alf, a Swedish botanist we had met on the bus, drinking rip-off beer at rip-off prices while playing backgammon with the rip-off merchant who supplied them in the first place!

The next morning we waved a hectic nation farewell. I was looking forward to the more mild-mannered hospitality of Jordan!

Photographs

Click Here