Hi Everyone,
To get to Cairo from Rome we had previously purchased a one way ticket on Egypt-Air, because they had the best flight times. However, as often happens while traveling these days, shortly after arriving at the airport we learned that our flight would be delayed more than 3 hours, arriving after midnight the next morning. Our hotel had arranged for a car to pick us up when we arrived in Cairo. A three hour delay was going to compromise that ride. However, after a few text messages to the hotel, they were able to reschedule the pick-up to the later time. Having international phone service while traveling is an extremely handy feature. T-Mobile includes unlimited international data and texting at no extra charge on their standard plans [a shameful plug for T-Mo]. It has saved our “bacon” more than a few times while traveling.
Driving into Cairo at 1:00am does have one advantage. All the famous Cairo Traffic is sleeping. The roads are free and open. The 16 mile trip was very quick. We unpacked, went to bed and woke up the next morning ready to see Cairo. The way we like to see new cities is by walking around in them. I mentioned earlier that on one of our days in Rome we walked over 10 miles. When we mentioned this to the lady who ran our Cairo hotel, she laughed at us and said “good luck.” Undeterred, we headed out into the streets of Cairo. Yikes! The traffic was unbelievable! On two lane roads they drive 3 or 4 abreast, with motorcycles filling in any open spaces. There are no rules and almost no traffic controls. Cars fill up the streets from about 8:30am until about 11:00pm. They are so jammed that no one can drive very fast. They travel like schools of fish and all of them are blowing their horns constantly. The city is laced with large boulevards with circles at major intersections and then limited access highways built up above them, all of which are filled with cars creeping along and blowing their horns. Some have sidewalks [fraught with open holes and other hazards], but the sidewalks abruptly end, with no where to go but to cross the street! Crossing the street can be life-changing [or ending, as the case may be]. You either wait until the cars stop completely in traffic and then weave your way in between them, or look for an opening in the pack and run through it, all the while holding up your hand and staring the driver in the eye, daring him to run you over as he blows his horn. We were tempted a couple of times to hire a taxi just to cross the street.
Cairo has about 20 million people, the 5th largest city in the world. All the cars here, new and old, are dented and scratched. One of our guides told me that if she gets bumped or scratched while driving, she just keeps going because it’s a wast of time to argue with the other driver and get nothing anyway. With no traffic control, there is no way to make a left turn. If you need to turn left, the only way to do it is to drive straight a while until you come to a break in the median, make a “U-turn” and then drive back to make a right turn on the street you originally wanted. Sometimes you have to drive a mile or more out of your way to find a “U-turn” break. I’ll never complain about Seattle traffic again.
Despite all this we persevered and even recorded a couple of 10 mile walking days in Cairo. One morning we were walking in the city by the Nile River and came across a locked stairway. Down below were workers baking small flat breads at an outdoor oven. One of them called to us and asked where we were from. He grabbed two breads, ran up the steps and offered them to us through the locked gate. We accepted and then he wanted to take a selfie with us. Everyone here loves Americans and wants to come to America. For most it’s just a dream, but occasionally some succeed. One day we were visiting a museum park and sat on a bench to rest a bit. A few minutes later there were 20, twelve and thirteen year old school kids surrounding us, asking our names and trying to speak English with us. The school children are always fun to encounter because most of them are shy, but one will step out and then the others flock in to connect. They are very curious about foreigners. They don’t see them very often because most tourists travel in tour groups and remain isolated from the residents. Tour groups travel here in buses with a police escort and rarely mingle with the locals. I believe that most of the “security” here is actually “security theatre.” We often have to go through metal detectors to enter museums or areas of antiquity, but no one seems to care if the alarm goes off. The x-ray machines that Carol sends her purse through look like they aren’t even turned on. We are traveling “under the radar” mixing in as well as we can. It’s been great fun so far.
We had originally planned to get around the city by taxi, but negotiating with a cabbie, in a foreign language and exchanging the cash got to be a hassle. The hotel lady suggested that lots of travelers use Uber instead of taxis. So, we decided to give Uber a try. It worked amazingly well. The app communicated with us in English and the driver in Arabic. The price was set and a driver was only ever minutes away. Best of all, the cost was almost nothing, $1 to $3 per ride across town. It’s easy to see how it got so popular. The only problem was that the Uber app [which uses Google maps] did not give very good GPS directions to the driver. It often tried to send the car the wrong way down one-way streets. Fortunately, the drivers knew better and were able to find the way in spite of the Uber routing.
One day we made our way over to the Egyptian Museum to see the antiquities. There were no less than 4 security checks we had to go through to get inside to the collection. Theft and black market in antiquities is a huge problem here and there is security [or “security theatre”, as the case may be] everywhere, to try to prevent it. This museum is very old and rundown, and most things are displayed in dusty old wooden display cases. But, they are building a vast new ultramodern museum out near the Pyramids that looks to be about a half mile long. It was supposed to open this year, but has fallen about 2 years behind schedule. Some of the things in the old museum were being created up for movement to the new museum. However, they did have two large display rooms full of mummies. I’ve seen a mummy or two in the past, but never this many in one place. They were all royalty and their families, removed from the temples, Pyramids and tombs for preservation….. except that one mummy was a 25 foot long crocodile! Not sure how that fits in? The new museum looks to be worth a trip back sometime in the future.
One evening Carol arranged to have dinner with an Egyptian family at their home. The host who could speak some English, prepared several typical Egyptian dishes for us. Her husband was a local policeman. After eating they dressed us up in Egyptian cloths and we all took photos of each other. It was lots of fun spending the evening with them. Earlier that day we took a tour of “Coptic Cairo”, which involved visiting a huge new church built into a cave opening in the side of s cliff. It is said to be he biggest church in the country. The strange thing was that this church is right in the middle of “The Garbage City” and we had to drive through The Garbage City to the get to the church. The Garbage City, which has about 20,000 residents, is where most of the Garbage from Cairo is brought to be sorted and recycled. It has been a family run business for generations and they told us it was very profitable.
Oh, and yes, this is Cairo, Egypt, so we did go to see the Pyramids, too. What can I say that already has not been said? They are spectacular, and did not disappoint. We climbed inside the tomb of one of the small pyramids and got up close and personal with the rest of them. The Sphinx, protecting the burial grounds, was particularly impressive. We visited early in the morning, before the crowds built up. There was a 3500 year old wooden boat on display in a specially built enclosure right next to the large pyramid. It was discovered a few years back, disassembled and buried in a pit next to the pyramid. It took many years to understand how to reassemble it. It is truly amazing that wood could stay in this good condition for that long. There was also ropes that lashed it together that survived the years as well. Because the Pharos buried in the pyramids were considered “gods”, their tombs were not filled with precious things, because they would not have any need for them in the afterlife. They merely built the large pyramids, undecorated, as tributes to them here on earth. The later kings, no longer considered “gods”, such as Tutankhamen and Ramses the Great, were accompanied by jewels and gold objects and highly decorated tombs because they might need these things in the next world. These tombs are found upstream on the Nile at Luxor and Aswan, our next destinations.
Those of you who have been reading my travelogues over the years may remember that I’m always on the lookout for unusual plumbing fixtures around the world. Well, I found one here in Cairo in our hotel bathroom. It was a perfectly round toilet bowl and seat. It was so wide that, while sitting “on the throne”, you felt like you were falling in from the sides, but there was barely enough room in front for “the family jewels”! It just makes me wonder how this kind of “style over substance” design can actually get turned into a product and installed in a real bathroom?
The food here has been very good. We’ve mostly been eating an assortment of Mediterranean foods, but, there is a special “Egyptian” food that we’re never encountered before. It’s called “Koshary.” It is made with a mixture of several small pastas, rice, garbanzo beans, lentils and covered with tomato sauce, other spices and crispy fried onions. It is actually quite good. There is a chain restaurant here that serves only Koshary in three size bowls, no other foods, and it is always packed with people. Tour guides took us to eat Koshary twice on our first two days in Cairo. I think we have had enough now, for this trip.
There is so much more to tell, but I’ve already made this report too long as it is. Our next stop is Luxor. There are three ways a person can travel the 400 miles to Luxor from Cairo, by airplane, cruise boat or train. Tour groups are only allowed to travel on the special night sleeper train. But, there is another train that travels during the day that is mainly for Egyptians. Tourists are discouraged, but not forbidden, from traveling on it. They say it is for “security” reasons, but I suspect that it’s just not an appropriate ride for most tourists and it is so crowded there isn’t enough room on it for tourists anyway. I’m writing this travelogue on that train. We have been on it for 7 hours so far, with another 3 or 4 hours to go. We got our hotel manager to buy us the $11 tickets. It’s a packed train. We’re seated in “first class”, but there are still people sitting on the floor in the vestibule between the cars. We love taking long train rides. You can see the unusual countryside and mingle with the locals along the way. It’s the best $11 we have spent on this trip so far.
If the Internet is fast enough in Luxor, I hope to be able to post some Cairo pix to the photo gallery and Carol has just completed her Cairo travel blog post:
https://carolapucci-tips.blogspot.com/2019/03/cairo-getting-by-with-little-help-from.html
Later……… your favorite travelers, Tom and Carol
Cairo Photos
Click to enlarge and see captions
