Cairo

Dogs barking, car horns tooting, horses' hooves clip-clopping on tarmac, the whistle of the traffic police. 

Cairo is Cairo, ever noisy, ever hazy, ever warm. Underneath the easily distinguished high notes lies the bass line: the steady stream of car engines, the wailing of traditional music, the bumpy beat of Arab-pop from the brightly lit barges on the Nile below our hotel window. Cutting though the haze over the water the orange streetlights, decorative strings of fairy lights in blue, red, white, purple and green pulse with an inner rhythm. Reflections of hotel up-lighters shimmer on the rippled water surface below concrete facades topped by the names of hotel chains (Sofitel, Novotel, Four Seasons) and iconic penthouse restaurants. 

It is a pleasure to be stepping out of the air-conditioned airport arrivals hall into the sewage scented, heavy air, into my spiritual home - as Stuart calls it. "What is it about Arab countries that you like so much?" he asks me as the taxi weaves drunkenly between motorbikes, trucks and bashed-up cars through the dark streets. It's dark, yes, it's 9pm already, but wherever there is a flash of light there is colour: neon strips lighting fruit piled high on low tables, lurid packets of cheap goods teetering by the side of a tiny shop, car mechanic workshops, magazine and cold drink sellers. There are people talking by the side of the road, women walking arm in arm, some with and some without headscarves; there are broken down cars in the middle lane, some blokes gathered around peering into the engine bay, hazard lights flashing; there is washing hanging from rickety lines below high windows set into crumbling walls; heroic wall paintings depicting pharaohs marching with revolutionaries, a spray painted slogan: No to SCAF (the dictator-era military council); a medieval citadel rubs up next to a 60s brutalist housing development, ancient walls looming over water-stained wrecks. There is chaos and there is life. 

I have been feeling dull, leaving first Brighton yesterday and today London.  But then the plane descended into Cairo, the city laid out in orange lights under a misty night sky. Busy and calm at the same time, there is so far no indication of unrest, of demonstrations, of protest. I am suddenly gripped by a great interest in finding out how people here feel, how they think of what is going on in their country, how they see the future. 

Top blog posts of 2009

I guess everyone has a list of top this that or the other, so here is mine. I wrote a lot this year, what with all the travelling and moving countries yet again. You may have missed these, my favourite posts of the last year:

24th January: ...in which the cat is an Internet star

29th January: A milestone

7th March: Ruminations on the train

9th May: Photographers

12th May: Geography and Politics

10th July: Best day ever - since Tuesday

21st July: Bottrop Heimatmuseum in Namibia

1st August: When baboons attack

14th August: African Nights

14th September: Doing the Maasai Mara crush

29th October: The dreaded Marsabit Rd

19th November: More money lessons

12th December: How to ... Get your car out of customs in Egypt

27th December: GPS-less in the Middle East

The Best of Egypt

As promised, here are the selected highlights of Egypt. Enjoy!

Lost in Cairo

This sign on the way into Cairo should have given us pause for thought. You want to go to Cairo? Sure, all roads lead there, pick a road, any road....

Shame that the GPS co-ordinates for “The Great Pyramids at Giza" on the increasingly unreliable Tracks4Africa map were who knows where, certainly not anywhere near the actual pyramids. So after spinning round the scuzzy suburbs of Cairo’s West Bank we tried following signs for a change.

I think we had just forgotten they exist, as the last reliable road sign we had spotted would have been somewhere around Maun in Botswana.

Long story short, we got there, in the middle of a sand storm. Cairo hazy in the background, pyramids barely visible, we returned looking a lot younger, having been micro-abraded thoroughly.

Egypt Roundup

I think this will be my last roundup covering just one country, as we are now picking up the speed for the last leg through the Middle East and back to Europe. As you might have noticed, we have found ourselves suddenly tacking on a whirlwind tour of the Eastern Mediterranean, mainly due to our newly acquired horror of ferry journeys (I write this on the Nuweiba-Aqaba ferry, having experienced another fine example of streamlined government processes while leaving).

Anyway, Egypt. Or should I say, Aswan, as we spent the bulk of our time there. Being pedestrians once again has been a new experience. We had to catch taxis and buses (and boats), which was not always a bad thing. The public bus to Abu Simbel turned out to be almost fun (as much fun as a three hour drive through a flat sand desert can be) with our breakfast box provided by the hotel and plenty of reading matter imported by Alex. Yes, Alex has joined us, and fitting right in, has become holder of the kitty and chef extraordinaire. We are now three again, and it feels good.

Being in one place had other advantages, specially somewhere like Aswan where most interaction between foreigners and locals is reduced to the level of selling/buying tourist goods and services. After a few days of passing the same spot the spice seller stopped offering his wares and started joking, the fellucca captains took us for granted and the souq touts offered karkady rather than hassling us. We started telling people we were Nubians from Aswan and found that behind the intense selling pitch were a bunch of friendly, hospitable and interesting people.

Egypt was, obviously, temples and tombs and ruins and pyramids. It was the magnificent temple at Karnak, where ruins are being reassembled by crane, to the envy of the pharaohs watching from the hereafter; it was hard sell from the guides and postcard sellers at every location, hordes of bus tourists crowding the sites and all the tack not being able to overshadow the bombast of Ramses II who was obviously so insecure that he needed colossi in his own image and self portraits as he smites his enemies and pals with the gods.

There were not as many temple visits as I’d liked, but they will have to wait for another time. Instead Egypt turned out to be about making new friends and meeting old ones: It was getting behind the facade and discovering a fellucca captain concerned with his colleagues’ hardline sales patter ruining business for all of them; a fixer who hates the local bureaucracy that is making his job of getting overlanders across the border so unpleasant; a waiter who loves the kitten that hangs around the restaurant tables begging for scraps, the hotel clerk who made sure we always knew the real price for things so we wouldn’t get ripped off. It was days and days of doing absolutely nothing, wandering from hotel roof terrace to Corniche to waterside restaurant, waiting for the day to end so that maybe, tomorrow, Inshallah, there would be news of the car. Eventually it was the battle with Egyptian bureaucracy, which everyone had told us was ridiculous, but which we never in our wildest nightmares could have imagined to be this inefficient. It was finally leaving Aswan, back on the open road, and driving, driving all day, the Nile passing by, people passing by, desert passing by and not stopping ever again.

Photos are here.

Hurghada explained: Sign Language

So the main nationality of visitors is German...

and Russian.

The age group is young...

but surely not that young!

Irony of the Day

Cairo suburbs are the filthiest, most disgusting areas of any metropolis I have ever visited. Heaps of sewage are piled alongside the irrigation channel, rubbish bags are strewn on the road side, and a scum of plastic bottles floats on the water near the bridges.

This guy, therefore, has the most futile job in Cairo.

Leaving Aswan

After two weeks of idling, waiting for the car to catch up with us, it was surprisingly hard to leave Aswan. We had found favourite haunts for dinner, sunset watching and beer drinking, we had made connections: Mahmoud, keeping us up to date with the non-progress of the barge that - Inshallah - would bring our car; Shahad, fellucca captain extraordinaire and his brother Shazy, hospitable Nubians serving karkady (hibiscus tea) on his boat; Mohammed from the Keylany Hotel reception, dispenser of information and correct pricing for all manner of things, and Hamid and his three brothers, wily sellers of tourist tack in the souq, who could also arrange for the sale of anything else required.

Still, the most friendly encounters since we left Sudan took place on our way out of the tourist metropolises of Luxor and Aswan. Attempting to buy bread, we stopped at a falafel cafe in a small village, where my request for “Eish" (my Arabic is obviously coming along in leaps and bounds) resulted in a group discussion by all other customers until we found an English speaker, who, after giving me a big bag of freshly fried bright green falafel, initially refused my attempt at payment, and eventually accepted a few Euros worth of Egyptian Pounds for six flatbreads, 25 falafel and a bag of tomatoes.

Later, looking for crisps and water at a roadside shop near Qena, my miserable Arabic had everyone falling about laughing. The shopkeeper eventually rescued me with stern looks in the direction of his son and daughter, who were wrestling over the privilege of packing my purchases into a bag. For some reason everything I did, pointing to things, getting out my money, even just standing there shrugging my shoulders, made them collapse into heaps of giggles. It still makes me smile now.

We stopped for lunch on a side road, and after convincing the soldiers at the road block - there is a road block at every junction on the Nile Road - that we were not going to get ourselves blown up or machine-gunned on their watch, we ate those lovely falafel with sweet chilli sauce, made all the more tasty by the fact that not one passer-by stopped to stare, and the old man over the road cutting fodder never even threw us a glance. Just as we got ready to leave a young man stopped his donkey cart next to our car and wandered off into a palm grove. He returned a few minutes later with a handful of fresh dates, just picked and thick with honey sweetness, which he offered us, smiling. Asking nothing in return, he got back onto his cart, waved and disappeared.

Photos from Aswan

On the occasion of having actually managed to get our car legalised into Egypt, including acquiring Arabic number plates and Egyptian insurance, circumventing attempted bribery and completing much form filling, I have posted some photos our soon-to-end stay in Aswan. It's been two weeks, so I feel like I live here. In fact, the felucca captains have stopped hassling us for trade, which is a sure sign that we are considered locals. Warning, there are quite a few pictures. There are ancient faces, cats, boats, foul bowls, graffiti in serif font, Nubian architecture, some sacred altars, as well as graphic images of smitings. If that's too much, wait a few days and look at the Best of Egypt album. I'll let you know. Enjoy

How to ... Get your car out of customs in Egypt

We managed to extract the car from Egyptian customs, but only after witnessing the most flamboyant display of ineptitude, corruption and disorganisation so far on this trip.

The setting: Aswan’s ferry port, witness to weekly passenger ferries and occasional cargo barges from and to Wadi Halfa in Sudan, and a suburban hellhole complete with sewage repairs and begging children, site of the Aswan traffic police department.

The actors: various overlanders, both amateurs like us and professional drivers of overland trucks; M., the fixer extraordinaire; K., his slow-witted taxi driver (employed by M. only because his uncle is the head of the customs department); a near-blind customs official and assorted policemen on the hunt for baksheesh.

The mission: to convince Egyptian customs, traffic police and various other unmentioned government agents to release nine cars and trucks from the customs zone of the ferry port so that we can bloody well finish our journey.

The backstory: most of us have been waiting to move on for more than two weeks, variously in Aswan, Wadi Halfa and assorted locations in the Sudanese desert. The barge carrying the cars (which runs on a separate schedule from the passenger ferry) was delayed due to Eid, weekends (Fridays) and other unexplained vagaries of Arabic origin. The barge had arrived on Thursday afternoon, complete with five Landrovers, two overland trucks, one MAN truck and a Landcruiser, as well as three dogs. It was now Saturday. Everyone was tense in a different way, everyone wanted to get out of Aswan as soon as possible.

The timeline:

8am - waiting for K. and a second taxi driver to pick us up. Fourteen people sizing each other up at the hotel; I don’t like what I see. Two stroppy Australians and a South African motorbiker who has been heard to call the locals kaffirs. Great.

8.30 - The taxis arrive. We drive to the police station. K. and two members of the group disappear inside with carnets, passports and money. The rest of us get acquainted while leaning on the bonnets of banged-up taxis (ours has done 750,000 km). The Dragoman driver is reading the Daily Express. She must be homesick.

9.30 - The others re-appear, the grand total of their achievements a collection of blank forms in Arabic. We pile back into the cars and take the bumpy road to the port.

10am - Arrival at the ferry port. K. takes the first group through to the offices, while we in the second group are left behind to fend off baksheesh attempts by the gate keeper, who is trying to charge us to pick up our cars.

11am - After a series of phone calls to M. and strong words with the various fixers he sends, we are let into the office as well. We spend an eternity watching the near-blind official painstakingly copying driver names, chassis numbers and registrations from the English forms to the Arabic version. This takes two hours for nine carnets, with multiple breaks for tea and smokes.

12.30 - The barge is now available, sort of. M. has managed to convince the crew that just because the normal pier is blocked by the Minister of Agriculture’s boat (he is returning from a visit to Sudan, and seen speeding off in a very shiny black Merc), we should still be able proceed with unloading. So in order to drive the cars off the barge, we have to manhandle the strangely engine-less craft to shore by all together pulling on a rope, while the captain and his crew shouts encouragement. Taking the trucks and cars off takes a grand total of 15 minutes.

1.30pm - We are still waiting in the port car park for something to happen. M. brings tea. Suddenly a customs official appears, spends 2 minutes peering through the door of each car, asking if we have knives (?!?), and vanishes. Silence returns. We haven’t had lunch. In desperation I spend some time cleaning the fridge and kitchen in our Landrover.

2.30pm - A policeman, ferried in by K. for the occasion, takes rubbings of our chassis and engine numbers before demanding payment for overtime. After collecting E£10 per car he is taken back to town by K. and ennui descends one more.

3pm - We are told to come back tomorrow to complete formalities, as the traffic police has gone home. Aargh!

The denouement: Stuart spent all of Sunday at the traffic police to arrange insurance and registration. He was finally allowed to leave, sporting Egyptian number plates, after yet another official tried to extract a bribe for not doing a proper check. Our fixer, to his credit, called his bluff and told him they’d be happy to unpack the cars so he could do a more thorough search. Luckily the official decided he valued knocking off on time more than the money and let them depart at 4pm.

How to ... Do Nothing in Aswan

We’ve been here for nigh on two weeks now, and while Aswan has many attractions (Temple of Isis! Nubian Museum! Tombs of the Nobles!), two weeks is a long time to be waiting for your car to arrive (and your spare clothing, and, yes, stationery - I can’t last long without my stationery bag). But we are still here, so I thought I’d give you an insight into our day and how we stave off boredom:

9.30am - Roll out of bed and climb up to the roof terrace for breakfast - it’s the same every day but at least you don’t need to brave the streets in search of nourishment. We have pancakes and fruit, lemonade, tea, toast with butter and jam and triangles of cream cheese. It took us a few days of trying to change some parts of the order (cold milk instead of hot, scrambled eggs with the toast) to realise that it’s not worth the trouble explaining this to the Manuel-like waiter every morning. Now we just eat what we’re given. Thanks to Alex we have a supply of magazines to read over breakfast, and there is wifi internet, so Stuart can get his fix of email.

11am - If the weather is hot (not that it’s ever really cold, but on occasion we’ve had cloud and the temperature drops to a chilly 20C) someone might sunbathe on one of the two loungers, and there is even the possibility of jumping in the plunge pool on the roof. It’s freezing, so perfect for an overheated holiday maker. The roof terrace sits above the busy Salah-en-Din Road, so there is an orchestra of toots and shouts to listen to. It’s easy to while away most of the morning here.

1pm - We are rationing ourselves to one item of touristing a day, so by this time we may get on the ferry to the west bank of the Nile for a visit to the Tombs of the Nobles, or take a fellucca boat to visit the botanical gardens at Kitchener Island. It’s not hot through the day, so practically any amount of wandering round ruins is still a pleasant activity. Unfortunately going to a tourist attraction always involves a huge amount of bargaining with the local 'business men’, fellucca captains or ferry ticket sellers, guides and assorted vendors of food and tack. It’s still hard work, even after our varied experiences throughout Africa, and here bargaining is much more a normal part of the day, unlike further south, where bargaining is mostly part of the tourism infrastructure (i.e. locals pay a fixed price and mzungus/faranjis are charged as much as possible). So we tend to start with a certain amount of hesitation, because we know that the first price we are quoted will be massively inflated compared to the prices charged to locals. Still, with a bit of good humour we normally manage to keep relations civil, and we spend a few hours acting as if we were the average tourist.

4pm - Hunger sets in. We seem to manage with two meals a day here, which might be due to the climate or just that we don’t actually do anything all day. Whatever, we retire to our local haunt, the Aswan Moon, discovered after a thorough investigation of the local eateries (we tried two other ones before settling on this one). The restaurant is set partly on the bank and partly on a pontoon set on the river. A fabric-covered awning keeps out the sun, so it’s a good place to spend the rest of the afternoon till sunset, watching the felluccas pass by, herons coming in to land and generally admire the light on the sand dunes on the other bank where they are not obscured by the hideous construct of the Mövenpick Hotel on Elephantine Island. Our late lunch consists of lentil soup with a squeeze of lemon, grilled chicken with rice, hummus, babaganoush and flatbread, strawberry juice and Om Ali for desert followed by a Turkish coffee. We have learnt to spin this out until it’s dark, chatting with the waiter or Shahad, the fellucca captain, and sometimes we get a visit from Mahmoud, who is arranging for the car to get here from Wadi Halfa (Inshallah) and who regularly gives us updates that turn out to be incorrect.  

7pm - Back to the hotel to watch movies (thanks to the blessings of iTunes, Pirate Bay and the hotel’s fast internet connection). There is more tea drunk while sprawled on the bed in the room, eating the chocolate Alex brought from England - thanks, Alex! Early nights are a given, since there are so many reasons to get up in the morning - not.

Views from the road - pedestrian edition

The view from the roof terrace includes the herd of sheep living in the ruined plot below us.

Two kinds of people you can depend on for constant hassle as you walk down the street: The caleche driver who will take you anywhere for 5 pounds and the fellucca captain with a good price.

The souq is split between selling glittery things for tourists and useful stuff, like these huge foul bowls for the locals.

We are close to the beginning of the high season in Egypt and many cruise boats are anchored here to be refitted and cleaned up before they go back to Luxor for the winter rush.

More random specialisation of Egyptian shops. This one concentrates on blenders and sewing machines, presumably on the premise that it doesn’t matter why things whirr round, as long as they do.

Mobile Data Update - Egypt

After multiple visits to both Mobinil and Vodaphone Egypt it transpires that there is no mobile internet for pre-paid phones in Egypt. To think how relatively easy it was to get mobile data in Sudan...

Bummer.

Here we are... what now?

Aswan: Lake Nasser, Abu Simbel, Kitchener’s Island, souqs, feluccas, temples, museums - the possibilities are endless. Most people who come to Aswan rush from sight to sight, aware that they only have a few days to see it all. They sit in a cafe drinking mint tea, for the experience. They stroll down the corniche, for the view. They drink in the sounds and smells of the city, because they are leaving far too soon.

We, on the other hand, are landed here. Of course we were going to spend a day or two, recovering from the Wadi Halfa ferry, taking a look at the temple of Philae, meet up with Alex. But basically this was our entry and moving-on point for Egypt. Instead, thanks to Eid al Adha (ironically a celebration of sacrifice), we are stuck here waiting for our car to catch up with us from Wadi Halfa. This gives us a whole different view on the town. Instead of an exciting holiday destination it has become a temporary home for our lost souls. Street vendors quit the banter and nod sagely when we tell them we are here for the duration, the hotel is promising a good room for the long-term tenants, and walking the streets we are more interested in the location of the cafe round the corner and the shop selling phone credit than the pretty view or the souvenir bargain.

Luckily the town has been quiet today, one advantage of the Eid holiday is the absence of cars and people. The few shops that are open cater to the tourists who have descended from the Nile cruise ships which throng the Corniche moorings belching diesel fumes. Other than the mzungus there are groups of rowdy boys on bikes and girls dressed up to the nines roaming the streets, trying out their meagre English on any foreign-looking passer by. We eat lunch, go for a walk, and back to the room to lose ourselves on the internet. Only ten more days...

A sad admission

We are having MacDonalds on the waterfront, I am afraid. Overcome with the need for some perverse familiarity - and free wifi as well as spotless toilets. At least the sunset is home made Egyptian.

Another milestone

We have boarded the Wadi Halfa ferry from Sudan to Egypt. The fact that it's a few days before an Eid holiday is good and bad. Good, because the ferry is quiet and we are avoiding the crazy rush of people and goods being loaded that everyone warned us about before. Bad because we had to leave Sally behind since she goes on a separate barge and that only runs when there is cargo coming from Aswan. Because of the holiday all trading has stopped so no barge. It's all very frustrating having to leave her parked in the customs compound, but Magdi has promised to look after her and drive her onto the barge when it finally comes.

The view from our cabin

As it turns out the ferry isn't so bad. The cabin has air con and is cleaner than some hotel rooms we've slept in, there is power and we are in the right side of the boat for Abu Simbel, which we should pass this evening. There's space on the deck to walk around, and we brought food and water to keep ourselves in good spirits. Now all we have to do is get to Aswan and wait for normalcy to return so we can get our car/home back.

Winter Calm

You know how winter is supposed to be the quiet time of the year, where apart from Christmas nothing much happens? This winter has been the busiest, most hectic and complicated ever.

I have been to India, Egypt, the UK and France while Stuart has travelled to Paris and Brussels more times than seems feasible, as well as Hong Kong, Mumbai and Stockholm. We went on holiday to Egypt, then we had visitors. We went to Chennai, then had some more visitors. In between Dubai staged a film, a shopping and a jazz festival. Soon we're off to Zanzibar. And through most of it Anna has been keeping us company. We thought we weren't sociable, but I guess we are more people-friendly than I expected.

Bring on nice quiet uneventful summer.

Easy to Miss

Now that my powerbook is fixed again, I have been able to add some entries from the end of last year. Check it out!

These are easily missed, as they are hidden among later entries. Look out for Wadi Amyiah Trip (14th Nov 2004), Film Festival (8th Dec 2004) and some Egyptian stories (12th to 19th Dec 2004). Unfortunately, due to the restrictions of the blog program I use, it is not possible to link to them directly from here, so you will have to go hunting round the front page (or search in the archive by date).

Also, there are some more Egypt pictures here.

Back From Egypt - Update

We are back from what could loosely be termed a holiday, if it weren't for the 5am wake up calls and the complete disorganisation of the trip which meant that we only saw half the promised locations. It's nice to be back home where people are nice and life is a bit more predictable.

Egypt is an incredible, infuriating, beautiful, strange, messy country. I am definitely hooked, Stuart less so, but always in small doses. More on this later.

Update

There are a few entries, in date order so as not to confuse later readers, from 12th to 19th December 2004. If you want to know how we fared, read it there.

Oh, and there are some more pictures here

Seeing the Sights

Our two week sleep-in-the-desert, live-the-archeologist-life trip turned out to bear little resemblance to the original offer.

On the first half of the tour nothing went as planned, we didn't get to camp, we saw few of the promised sights and we had to put up with annoying military convoys. The hard part was trying to work out which bit was lack of organisation on the part of our tour organisers, Ancient World Tours, and how much was just general Egyptian chaos. "Inshallah" is a most used word here, and the most appropriate. There is a mixture of arrogance and deal making (on the part of officials), welcome and total lack of responsibility, combined with inefficiency and a general state of disrepair that borders on dereliction. This makes for an often unpleasant experience, always teetering on uncertainty, often frustrating where it not for the occasional astoundingly wonderful sight.

Abandoned Pillar at the Roman Quarry of Mons Claudianus

Greek Inscription at an Ancient Rest Stop in The Eastern Desert

Statue of Pharaoh Akhenaten at Luxor Museum

Sunset at Nabta Playa, near Sudan

Dawn over the Nile in Cairo

Giza Pyramid Complex