© 2009
travelogues: Egypt 2010
Preface
How did I get on a tour in the first place? Egypt has
always been on my list of “Places to See” but in the unfortunate
subcategory of “But I’m scared to go by myself.” It just seemed a little
too exotic: I didn’t speak the language, didn’t understand the culture,
didn’t look good in a head scarf… and the only recent history I knew
involved the Muslim Brotherhood, which peculiarly failed to bolster my
courage.
So when Mom called last May announcing that her next
sojourn was a tour of the land of lotus & papyrus, I invited myself along.
Ever gracious, Mom accepted my self-invitation and we booked ourselves on
a jaunt called “The Splendors of Egypt.”
[First side note to skip unless you’ve got time to kill: The tour company, Smartours, did not inspire confidence, despite being highly recommended by a friend who had just returned from the exact same tour. A company that doesn’t accept credit cards? Has no email? Sent no glossy promo brochures during the 6 months they had my postal address? Mandates cash (US, small bills) only to pay for the numerous optional side tours available? What year is this? Despite the ultimate low-budget approach on the front end, they totally delivered on the tour itself. I have learned, however, why people like me avoid package tours in the first place, a discussion of which follows.]
I had envisioned being held back during the course of the
tour by all the old folks (self & traveling partner excluded) dawdling,
and certainly expected there would be plenty of boring stuff that I could
sit out, devoting myself to my travelogue. Visions of leisure shattered.
We kept up a breakneck pace that left me barely enough time to sleep; a
sprint was absolutely necessary to even glimpse the many “Splendors of
Egypt,” and every optional side trip was more interesting than the last.
This was not, by the way, why people like me avoid package tours. In fact,
the exhausting schedule mitigated what would normally turn me off – I
simply did not have the time or energy to be bored or infuriated by my
inevitably obnoxious, low-caliber tour mates. In fact, some I quite
enjoyed.
Another way this trip was different was in how I
prepared. I figured the agenda was fixed, so why bother reading travel
books? I was paying for a tour guide, so why learn ahead of time the
significance of each landmark? I limited my educational materials to
fiction. I read “Palace Walk”, the first of a trilogy by Egypt’s
Nobel-prize winning author Naguib Mahfouz, set in Cairo during an early
20th century period of rebellion against the British colonists. And –even
more valuable – the first 7 of 20 mysteries by Elizabeth Peters set in
Egypt at the turn of the previous century. Skeptical of the value? The
protagonist is a British Egyptologist excavating at various Egyptian
sites! Where, of course, murder & mayhem prevail. In the meantime I spent
150 pages at 7 of the most significant locales in the country.
The Adventure Itself
The flight from NYC to Cairo was an
11-hour red-eye snooze, so upon arrival I felt ready to go. The Cairo
airport seemed pretty typical of an international airport anywhere –
modern, cavernous, with plenty of English signage, and a hurried (though
in this case sparse) clientele. We immediately made a connection & flew on
to the new resort community of Hurghada on the Red Sea. So far, Egypt is
feeling very first world.
I had initially felt irritated that we were to spend our first 2 days in the Splendor that is Egypt lounging in a resort, even if it was on the Red Sea. In fact, I really appreciated the time. We conquered our jet lag, started to get used to the culture, met our tour mates, and compared notes on being a tourist: Do women really have to wear capris instead of shorts, to cover their (gasp) knees? Do you really have to avoid any food item that might have been tainted by unbottled water? Can you get decaf? (Answers: Not in tourist areas , yes, & not on your life.) I got a sim card for my iPhone so Howard could call me on Skype (incoming cell phone calls are free in Egypt!) We met with our tour guide & learned about what was coming up.
After all the warnings of the conservative nature of the culture, it was something of a relief to be at this generically European-style resort where the signs were in English, women guests were in bikinis & the almost all-male staff would look you in the eye & chat you up in whatever language you chose. I could have done without all the German men in their Speedos, though. What is it with those guys?
One day Mom took a little submarine ride to view the
fishies, and the next I went snorkeling to do the same. The beach was
wrapped by the deepest reef I’ve yet seen (maybe 50’?) and there was one
silvery fish that schooled in giant swirls, swimming with its mouth so
wide open you could see out its gills!
When we started our journey proper, we 40-odd tourists climbed on a bus and drove west through the desert. What we call a desert in Palm Springs? Not a desert. THIS is a desert. It’s still inhabited by the Bedouins, who are still nomadic. The group we met at the one truck stop we hit in the Red Sea Mountains, however, seemed pretty settled. They’ve learned that US & European tourists will shell out greenbacks to pet baby goats trained to ride on the backs of donkeys. (I mean, who wouldn’t?) Better gig than roaming the sand dunes, I’m guessing. Especially for the donkeys.
Our destination was Luxor, on the Nile across from the
ancient capital city of Thebes. After hours driving through the
monochromatic and relentlessly empty sand, you drop down into the Nile
Valley. It spreads out in a sinuous green band to the north & south – kind
of like an Astroturf putting green in the biggest sand trap you’ve ever
seen.
[Side note on geography to skip: The Nile is, for all intents & purposes, Egypt. Even to this day, cultivation only extends as far from the banks as irrigation flows. The domain of the pharaohs expanded with time from north to south, from the Mediterranean coast to the upper reaches of the Nile. As a result, older monuments are closer to Cairo, and newer closer to the Sudanese border. Luxor, the point at which we embarked on our Nile journey, is about half way between the two. The first capital of ancient Egypt, Memphis, was just south of Cairo. Later, the capital migrated south to Thebes (modern Luxor.) Alexandria, however, where 3000 years of pharaonic rule ended with the (fictional) asp at Cleopatra’s breast, is along the coast, about 200 km northwest of Cairo.]
I really appreciated our bus driver’s skill as we entered Luxor, navigating incredibly congested streets clogged with all manner of traffic: pedestrians, donkeys, scooters, you name it. I was horrified to see a guy on a scooter with FIVE KIDS (hopefully his own) weaving through a traffic circle. At least he was wearing a hardhat. Suddenly, Egypt isn’t feeling so first world anymore…
First we visited the Temple of Luxor, with the city
crowded up against its edges in the same manner as the Forum & Coliseum in
Rome. An active mosque from medieval time drapes against the inside wall
of the temple gates; the mosque itself is built on top of a church that
dates from the start of the Christian era!
The Temple of Luxor is joined to the Temple of Karnak by
the Avenue of Sphinxes, a 2-mile boulevard lined with hundreds of sphinx
statues. Most is still under the active city of Luxor; the hope is that
the government will successfully buy out all the property owners along the
route and finish excavating by 2030. Sounds like a tall order.
Karnak was built over a period of 2000 years by 30 different pharaohs. Although the life cycle was particularly long here, many (if not most) temples were built by one ambitious pharaoh then added to over and over by subsequent (but not necessarily sequential) pharaohs. Hey, if a temple to Horus has already been built, why start again? Just embellish the original!
Temples had fixed floor plans; the deeper you went into the interior, the more exclusive, dark, and mysterious it became. The inner sanctum (called the sanctuary) was the province of the pharaoh alone. Since the statue of the god that resided there needed daily ministrations, however, the top priest would act in the pharaoh’s stead, bathing, feeding, and otherwise coddling the god.
Temples are extensively embellished – every inch of wall
space is carved with hieroglyphs telling the story of the resident god and
the dedicating pharaoh, and statues abound. When a pharaoh decided to
appropriate an existing temple for his own use, evidence of previous
pharaohs might be, umm, compromised. Ramses 2 (more popularly known as
Ramses the Great – what else would you call a guy who lived to over 90 in
that day & age, along the way fathering 100 kids?) in particular has been
nicknamed “the chisler” because he would chip away the identifying
cartouche (nameplate) on a statue, replacing it with his own. Even though
the statue looked like someone else!
We were lucky enough to be at the Temple of Karnak as the sun set, when the sky turned a beautiful peach and violet (reliably) and the muezzin chanted their calls to evening prayer (even more reliably.) Though we got kicked out, we returned a few hours later, in full dark, for a mysterious night tour of the temple, and a laser sound and light show over the temple’s sacred lake. (Sacrilege? You decide.)
Can we hide the dead in plain sight?
The temples of Luxor & Karnak were all on the east bank
of the Nile. The west bank, home of the ancient capital city Thebes, rises
up into a series of hills that are dramatically illuminated at night. Why?
This is the home of the famous Valley of the Kings & neighboring Valley of
the Queens. This is the Colma of late royal Egyptian burials (inside joke
for the SF crowd.) Here lies King Tut’s tomb.
[Side note on King Tut to skip: I didn’t know prior to this trip that Tut (officially Tutankhamun) is of note for a reason other than his awesome tomb (and I’ll comment on that awesomeness in a moment.) He was the son of Akhenaten and Nefertiti; they presided over a culture-wrenching change in the religious order of the Egyptians, discarding the millennia-long worship of many gods for that of one, all-encompassing god (sound familiar?) He even built an entirely new capital in order to start fresh. Citizens gave him lip service while he was alive, but when he croaked & Tut took over, everyone happily reverted to the old multi-theism. About Tut’s awesomeness – Tut was very young and only ruled a short time. No one took him very seriously during his reign. Pharaohs worked on their tombs throughout their entire reign; when they died, work ceased & the tomb was sealed as soon as the body was mummified (a few months.) Since Tut was such a nobody during his lifetime, we can only surmise that his tomb was only a half-assed job. And that the treasures left with him were fewer and of lesser quality than with someone more important. Gulp. How do you improve on a gold face mask & gold plated chariot? Oh, excuse me – THREE gold plated chariots?]
By the last centuries of the Egyptian empire, robbing of
royal tombs was already a huge problem. (Thieves had already had millennia
to perfect their techniques.) The solution? Forget the ostentatious
pyramids. Might as well put out a “Treasure Here” sign. Instead, dig a
(extensive) cave into the rock, decorate every square inch with carvings &
luminous paints depicting the life of the royal entombed there and, after
burial, seal it up & hide the location. It was too good an idea, and
collapsed under its own success. EVERY royal wanted to be buried in the
“hidden” Valley of the Kings (and Queens). Though the tombs were hidden,
the hills ended up so densely riddled with caves that robbers could pretty
much stick a shovel in anywhere and be guaranteed a payoff. One of the
reasons Tut’s tomb lay undiscovered for so long was because the entrance
was so close to another tomb’s, and their tunnels so precariously
interwoven, that after the first tomb was raided the area was given up as
cleaned out.
Even though these tombs represent the newest of Egypt’s
antiquities (New Kingdom, dating from the centuries before Christ,) all
this stuff is SO much older than anything I’ve seen in Europe – it thrills
in a way I just can’t describe. The tombs are hot (I expected deep in the
rock to be cool) and the humidity from all the visitors’ sweat saps your
strength while it corrodes the decorations. Access is strictly controlled,
there’s no photography, and (a bit late in the game based upon the amount
of damage evident) touching is discouraged by ropes & plastic screens.
Still, I was so captivated by Ramses VI’s tomb that I lost track of time &
kept our bus waiting 15 minutes.
The hills are also home to a temple built by Hatshepsut,
one of only a few female pharaohs, and an illegitimate one at that. Her
stepson – Tutmosis III– was supposed to rule, but since he was just a
little tyke when Daddy died, she sent him away to military school and
promptly usurped his power. Her temple is most elegant; originally there
was a loooooong promenade from the Nile, leading to this edifice that
seems to melt into the surrounding hills. Frank Lloyd Wright would have
been proud of her architect (who was also her lover, so maybe that’s why
it’s such a beautiful place.)
Since the Nile Valley is (and always has been) the only habitable part of Egypt, all the antiquities are within miles of the water. So most tourists (like us) travel by boat up the river, stopping at the best sites along the way. Now, there are a lot of tourists in Egypt, especially once the weather gets nice (as in, not hot enough to fry your brain.) At the monuments it is literally asses to elbows, which can seriously detract from the appeal of the site itself. And on the river? Tourist boats race up the river, prow to stern, stretching as far as the eye can see. Since there are so many trying to dock at these small towns at the same time, they tie up side-by side, an arm-width’s apart, and five deep into the river. If you are not the one at dockside, you have to step out of your boat onto the foot-wide deck edge, onto the deck of the neighboring boat, walk through their lobby, and through the lobby of the next, and the next.
The boats are like mini-cruise ships, complete with
cheesy dress-up nights, buffet meals, lots of cocktails and towel animals
on your bed at night. Our boat, the “Nile Symphony”, held about 100
people, I think. Based on what we saw as we climbed through other boats on
our way to shore, the “Symphony” was not very ‘luxe, though I can’t say
I’d have been any happier on a boat decorated like a cheap Vegas hotel.
Big? I’ll give you BIG
When I wrote last, Mom & I had just gotten on our
mini-cruise ship to spend five days on the water, visiting sites and
watching the riverbank slide by. Water buffalos graze among the Nile’s
grasses, with shepherds living in little shacks made of reeds. Some are
even set up on islands in the middle of the river; our guide says they
take the animals over in boats. This won’t seem too surprising unless
you’ve seen the boats, which look like they were built, well, during the
reign of Cleopatra.
They must take care of them, though, as they’re all
floating and there are dozens in use on the river every time you look
(though I never saw one with a water buffalo in it.) The boatsmen are
extremely skilled at navigating, too. This became particularly evident
when we got to a lock on the river one night after supper. All the cruise
boats were queued up for their turn in the lock and the locals took
advantage – if we couldn’t come to the stores on shore, why, they’d bring
the goods to us!
The technique was this – and if our guide hadn’t explained it ahead of time we would have thought we were under a night-time terrorist attack: all the “vendors” crowd around the ships in their little boats, jockeying for a position near enough to let them throw stuff – unsolicited - on deck and through the windows. Doesn’t matter what it is (clothing, jewelry, scarves, tourist trinkets), they throw it loosely wrapped in a plastic bag. Often times it will smack some unsuspecting passenger in the head as they walk down a hallway; someone, say, like me. If it makes it onto the boat, you pick it up off the floor, open the bag, and if you don’t like it, you toss it back. Don’t bother to aim; it will fall on someone’s boat. If you do like it, you haggle for a price, put your money in the bag, and throw it out the window. How they figure it all out is beyond me. Who’s stuff got thrown? Who’s money is floating in the Nile? I would have enough trouble just to keep from capsizing.
Our boat ride ended at the city of Aswan, where two dams were built in the last century to control the Nile’s floods. The floods are a double-edged sword: they cover the floodplain with fresh nutrient-laden soil for the crops, but they also scour away homes & wreck infrastructure. Consequently, the dams are controversial, despite the hydroelectric power generated – power that electrified much of the country for the first time in the 70s. The lake created by the dams is huge, stretching into the Sudan and covering over 5000 square kilometers, and is named for former President Nassir.
[Note on Lake Nassir to skip: One of my earliest memories
of Egypt was looking at photos in my parents’ old National Geographics
detailing the international effort in the 60s to move ancient monuments
sure to be flooded by Lake Nassir. Egypt claims all the temples were
rescued, even though it sometimes meant giving the monuments to the
countries financing the rescue (the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art for example.) Still, many other structures were lost,
including all of the forts built during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom time
period, when there was military expansion from Thebes upriver to the
Sudan. And then there’s the small matter of having displaced the entire
Nubian civilization, which occupied the upper reaches of the Nile. About
100,000 people were relocated in Egypt & the Sudan, into planned villages.
Not surprisingly, there is a huge Nubian population in Aswan.]
A big (and I mean BIG) highlight of the trip was seeing
Abu Simbel – the monument everyone’s seen in photos – along the shores of
Lake Nassir near the Sudanese border. We had to fly in from Aswan to save
time, but I would love to have approached by boat. This complex includes
two temples built by Ramses the Great, carved deep into the rock cliffs of
the valley: one celebrating Ramses himself and the other his most beloved
wife Nefertari (he had 8 wives.) The temple entrances are flanked by
monstrous statues of Ramses & Nefertari and were designed to intimidate
any Nubians or Sudanese who might think about wandering north into Egypt
with ill intent. Despite its size, the entire complex was excavated and
moved up the valley slope 65 meters and 200 meters back from the river in
order to escape the rising waters of Lake Nassir.
We visited other temples before we got to Aswan, none as
big as Abu Simbel, but each unique. There was the Temple of Philae, on a
beautiful island, and two dedicated to animal gods. The Temple at Kom Ombu
was shared by the crocodile & falcon gods and easily had the coolest
reliefs – looked like the two gods spent a lot of time chatting. The
falcon god also had his own temple - the Temple of Horus – which was a
very complete temple, with stone roofs intact, letting you imagine what
the other temples would have looked like. Roofs are a weak point & first
to go when a temple starts to crumble; consequently, not many remain &
this was the only example we saw. We got to see paintings of the temple
when it was still filled with sand, after being “discovered” but before
being excavated. Locals had long occupied the abandoned structures,
building entire villages against the sturdy rock walls. The ceilings in
this temple are black, covered with soot from cook fires! It’s strange to
see graffiti way up near the roof, where you couldn’t possibly reach
today, but which was fully accessible when sand filled the temple.
We also visited a still-active granite quarry where
there’s an unfinished obelisk. Workers abandoned it when a crack
developed, but of course this was millennia ago, not last week. The path
to the obelisk changes all the time, depending upon what work is being
done around it. I think I’d have to be here a long time before I got used
to the juxtaposition of ancient history & everyday life.
On to Cairo!
Ahhhhh… Cairo. Amazing. And, umm, apparently a little
more lively than when we left.
[Side note on deflated dreams to skip: When I started
writing this part of the travelogue, the Christian church had just been
bombed in Alexandria. I was prepared to explain that the city is over 200
km northwest of Cairo and Mom & I were nowhere near it – don’t you worry.
Now, of course, Cairo is full of protesters being beat up by police over
that silly old concept of democracy, and there’s a 6 pm to 8 am curfew - I
guess we would have been in the middle of that. I’d come back from our
trip planning on visiting again – soon – and spending most of my time in
Cairo & Alexandria. I’m rethinking my plans.]
But it was plenty exciting when we were there. Hell, it
was nerve-wracking just watching the driver of our huge tour bus navigate
the crowded streets when we entered the city! Cairo is one of the most
densely populated in the world at around 8 MILLION people, and it shows.
Traffic is abysmal, very congested, with pedestrians wandering everywhere.
I didn’t see many bicyclists or mopeds, which struck me as odd, but
donkeys are still popular, along with the occasional camel. In traffic. In
Cairo. Really. And cars in the city don’t seem to use their headlights at
night. Why, to avoid blinding the pedestrians wandering through traffic?
I doubt there’s a single place in the city where you can
get away from the press of people. Like many third-world cities, there’s a
lot of contrast between modern & not, western & not. There were NO
Starbucks (gads!), but our hotel had a 24-hour bank. Not just the ATM, the
whole BANK. All the women you see wear head scarves, but they make them
look fashionable, and they seem to be experts at applying makeup in a way
that makes you forget about not seeing their hair. Only a minority wear
burkhas – most just wear modest long sleeve blouses & slacks or long
skirts. Men also tend to wear long sleeved shirts & pants or the
dress-like gallibaya; you don’t see many t-shirts or shorts. Although I
never did find out what they wore UNDER the gallibayas…
Men everywhere seem to spend a big part of the day
hobnobbing with friends. This took place everywhere – from the tour bus
most of what we saw were clusters of plastic chairs in the dirt at the
side of the road. You’d see the same chairs in front of a shop, or outside
a café, or just next to a tree on a sidewalk. And these chairs were always
occupied, usually with other guys just standing around.
Land throughout the city is appropriated in strange ways,
and not just by guys with chairs. Tiny nurseries seem to occupy all the
territory along canals & under overpasses. The corners of intersections
might have vendors selling anything from shoes to sheep. I saw a whole
corral of sheep & several head of cattle nestled against an unfinished
building.
When they sell buildings here, they are left without
doors, windows, or finishings of any kind, with the expectation that the
buyers will complete them as they see fit. Which means that all the
windows in a condo building might be different. Since wood is so scarce
here, they primarily use reinforced concrete for the exterior walls which
makes for a certain monotony. Luckily, the hodge-podge of window
treatments breaks that up!
So there was a lot about the culture that frustrated my understanding. And that was BEFORE thinking about the oppression of women! OR how to work the toilets! Yes, the toilets. When Mom & I got to our first hotel – the resort on the Red Sea – the WC in our very spiffy room sported a polite sign “Please discard toilet paper in basket.” We figured there was some problem with the translation and did as one always does with TP – flush it. Later we learned that Egyptian sewage systems are not built to handle the paper load and so, in fact, you do NOT flush it.
You’re thinking, “What the…?” Ah, but they don’t use TP
like we do. All toilets, even public ones, have either a neighboring
bidet, or a built-in bidet function (like a jet of water that comes out
from under the rim), or – my favorite – a hose with a thumb-operated
nozzle (which, in public toilets, is usually languishing on the wet floor
between uses.) Toilet paper is only used to dab clean water from your
nether regions (a task to which it is particularly ill-suited in my
opinion, as it tends to dissolve with any significant amount of moisture.)
What did we actually DO in Cairo?
At
6 pm Egyptian time on 2/11/11, Mubarak announced he would resign & turn
over power to the military. Wow. Mom & I were there just 3 months ago. We
drove right by Tahrir Square (actually more of a traffic circle) on our
way to the Egyptian Museum – I remember it distinctly because there’s a
statue of an 18th century revolutionary, Sheikh Omar Makram, in the middle
of the main circle.
I am mightily confused by the relationship between the Egyptian Armed Forces, the Central Security Forces, and the National Police. Some of these guys were responsible for unlawful imprisonment & torture throughout the Mubarak regime. And somebody kidnapped that Google guy and others were beating up protesters a week ago. But on the 10th some of them (the same ones?) were declaring solidarity with the protestors, and now they’re going to be leading the country. What gives?
The
only ones I really understand are the Antiquities Police that patrol the
monuments. Tourism is a huge part of the Egyptian economy – maybe 5% of
the GDP – so the government became very concerned with tourist security
after the 1997 hijacking of a tour bus and killing of dozens of tourists.
Guards stand at all the monument entrances, throughout the monuments
themselves, at the entrances to hotels, and most are armed.
However, the government’s concern doesn’t seem to have quite made it into the training programs. Most guards paid little attention to the tourists, preferring to drink tea & argue while tourists touched & climbed on things that clearly were forbidden. The entrances to all the monuments, museums & hotels were also outfitted with walk-through metal detectors. Though the guards required everyone to pass through (slowing things considerably, as you might imagine) they paid absolutely no attention to the screech of the alarm. And everyone set off the alarm. I never saw anyone searched.
On
the roads around the monuments they’ve situated checkpoints, each with a
maze of police barriers, dozens of guards standing around, and a little
guard tower about 10 feet off ground. You might see a rifle barrel
sticking out, but I came to think the guard was probably asleep on the
floor. The checkpoints successfully snarled traffic as drivers slowly wove
through the barriers, but any SUV with a motivated driver could have
easily blown through unimpeded.
The
barriers constructed around Tahrir Square looked more substantial. The
Square is right next to the Egyptian Museum, where we spent about 2 hours.
I needed a bit more time to appreciate it – like, maybe, 7 months. It was
breathtaking. Heartbreaking, and breathtaking. Let me explain with a
story. When we walked in, our guide stopped us in the lobby to give us a
little orientation. One of our fellow tourists cried out, “The Rosetta
Stone!” and ran over to a large stone tablet. Which was a fake. Our guide
caustically explained, “The original is in the British Museum. They were
kind enough to give us a replica to display.”
My initial thought was, “Those Limey bastards! Stealing from their colonies!” Then I remembered seeing the Rosetta Stone in London, in a beautiful exhibit with excellent explanations & secure protection. And I looked around: I felt like I was in some old Victorian dude’s natural history collection – complete with dust, insecure exhibit cases (if there WAS a case), and old typewritten labels (if there WAS a label). The building is the “new” museum, built expressly for the purpose, but in 1902. The idea of climate control back then, and still in use today, is open windows, letting in smoke & dirt from the city. And I suddenly didn’t feel so bad about the current location of the Rosetta Stone.
As
distressing as it was to see the 19th-century quality museum setting, it
was really cool to wander through it. Whole (wooden) cabinets filled with
rows of ushabtis (small funerary figurines) - with no explanation. Mummies
stacked around next to papyrus fragments – with no explanation. I could
look at photos of the disarray of King Tut’s tomb upon discovery, and then
turn, seeing the real things. See that 1922 photo with the chest stacked
on top of the table in his tomb? Here’s the chest! Right here!
Another
cool find was a life-sized image of Osiris carved in wood with shallow
sides like a tray. Every spring, it was filled with dirt & planted with
grass. When the grass grew to about 10” high, priests wrapped the whole
thing in linen and stored it until the following spring. This symbolized
the potential for rebirth after death, associated with Osiris.
Off to the pyramids!
Just so you know...the Arabic name for Cairo, al-qahira...means
“victor.”
It
took a while to accept the bizarre fact that the pyramids are IN the city.
Sure, the city sprawls, but it’s kind of like Disneyland in Los Angeles.
Disneyland is FIVE TIMES the distance from LAX as the Pyramids are from
downtown Cairo, but you’d never say Mickey wasn’t in LA. On a clear day
(of which there are few) you can see them from downtown – they were only a
mile north of our hotel in the heart of the city.
What was it like to see these icons? Very familiar. When we saw the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, I was stunned – I’d never seen anything like them. But the pyramids… well, we see images of them all the time. They are beautiful, magnificent, and stunning. And comfortably familiar.
It
was not comfortable OR familiar to ride on a camel. OR descend into the
interior of the “third” pyramid. But both were about as much fun as
legally allowed! Climbing into the pyramid was particularly enchanting,
because it’s pretty primitive – you can add lights, and a crude wooden
ramp, but if you want to leave the monument intact, that’s about it. I
felt like Indiana Jones!
[Side note on pyramids to skip: I was surprised to learn that the pyramids on the Giza plateau are from the very beginning of Egyptian civilization. I figured that something so architecturally challenging would have required centuries of build up; in fact, pyramids constructed in the following millennium were always inferior and few survive. We also went to see the “step” pyramid at Sakkara, which predates those at Giza and, with its severely “stepped” sides, is clearly earlier on the learning curve. Though the Giza pyramids are mostly bare now, they were originally smoothly faced with stone.]
The
pyramids & the Sphinx are within walking distance of one another. The
Sphinx is below the level of the pyramids, though, because it was carved
in place out of the bedrock, requiring digging a pit. A BIG pit - big
enough for the Sphinx, a temple, and (thoughtfully) seating for the sound
& light show. At Memphis, the first capital of the empire, there is a
smallish (30 feet long?) alabaster sphinx on display that lets you see
what the big one would look like with its nose & other missing parts.
Marvelous.
While at the Sphinx, our guide showed us where a number of Temple statues had stood, and explained that they were later found inexplicably buried in a pit at the entrance to the Temple. Later, I saw these very statues at the Egyptian Museum - each had beautiful carving on the side like a heart-headed arrow.
[Side
note on dogs to skip: monument temples are also a reliable place to find
stray dogs. All the dogs we saw were astonishingly similar in appearance,
approaching the look of a generic dog: short thick light brown hair,
medium build, curled tail, and floppy pointy ears that went upright with
interest. And bone thin. I took to carrying around scraps from breakfast
in my purse, hoping to improve some poor hungry dog’s day. I think they’ve
learned that first-worlders are good for a handout so hanging out at the
tourist sites is a good deal. ]
And
what about treasures that didn’t make it to the museum? Where would
looters of days gone by unload booty filched from the pyramids and other
monuments? The Khan El Kahlili. This famous area of Cairo is full of
vendors of all kinds of stuff that has a flea market/bazaar feel to it.
Rumor has it that you can get anything there, if you know where to look.
The vendors are extremely pushy, but have a supernatural ability to ease
out of your way at the last minute after blocking your way to sell you
stuff.
A couple last thoughts on…
RELIGION
You
may have heard the church that was bombed at the start of the year
referred to in the news as a “Coptic” church, which basically means
“Egyptian”. However, the Coptic Christian church has its own pope, called
the patriarch, and paintings of the patriarchs hang in the churches like
past presidents in the local Elks club.
Of course, the majority of Egyptians are Muslims. I’ve already mentioned the clockwork-like swell of the call to prayer several times a day, broadcast from speakers at all the mosques. The mosques are not shy about advertising; most that we saw had the minarets & entrances outlined in neon at night. No kidding; I kept looking for the “Pray here! Free!” signs. One day we saw a decorated wooden casket getting loaded into a hearse. Our guide explained that Muslims in Egypt do not embalm; the body is cleaned, wrapped in cloth, then placed in a casket & taken to the cemetery. There, the body is removed from the casket & lowered into the grave. The casket gets reused! Very environmentally friendly.
THE ENVIRONMENT
In practice, concerns for the environment are pretty low
on the list of social concerns, as you might expect in a third-world
country. Well behind, I suppose, “How do I feed my family?” and “If I get
sick how do I keep from dying?” So the pollution is substantial.
And the trash! Our guide kept assuring us that in a country this poor, nothing went to waste. And the sidewalks were generally pretty clean (though there’s a lot of dust, understandably.) But the canals from the Nile that traverse the city were packed with floating garbage – a lot of plastic wastes. I never thought of an egret as a dirty bird, but when the local waterway is a buffet of refuse, you might find a French fry easier to catch than a fish (presuming there are any.)