Author: david

After having taken the long way to the Egyptian Museum, we made our way along the back of the Nile Hilton past the stares of heavily armed, bored looking soldiers. Kathryn soon came to realise that she was being actively stared at wherever she went. A blonde, white woman was quite a novelty it seemed. Men would stop and stare, occasionally pointing her out to family and friends. We also noticed a lack of other obviously Western tourists around. Tourism appears not to have fully recovered from the massacre at Luxor in 1997, or the recent, nebulous fear of Al Qaida.

I decided not to buy the video pass for E£100, planning to leave my video camera in my bag. We bought our tickets from a little building in front of the museum and wandered throught the ticket barrier and up the steps of the massive building. Inside we passed through an x-ray machine, as did our bags. The bags were then physically inspected. This is where they discovered my camera and wouldn’t believe that I really was going to leave it in the bag and not use it. So I was forced to go back outside to the little baggage check hut and swap my bag for an little wooden tag with a number on it. I hoped I would see it again.

The Egyptian Museum contains some 100,000 exhibits. If you were to spend a minute on each it would take you about nine months to see them all. That’s without stopping for toilet breaks. The present building was built in 1902 to house the artifacts collected by Auguste Mariette, the French archaeologist who founded the Egyptian Antiquities Service. It is so stuffed full of antiquities that it is joked the storerooms will have to be excavated when the long-promised new museum is built.

The bit that everyone comes to see is the Tutankhamun galleries. The discovery of this relatively minor boy Pharaoh’s tomb in 1922 by Howard Carter was one of the greatest moments in archeology. Because of its hidden location it had not been ransacked like other, grander tombs such as Ramses VI. About 1700 items are displayed in the series of rooms/corridors. Although there are many treasures here, the one room everyone wants to see is Room 3. This is where the death mask is displayed, in what is obviously the newest and most expensive display cabinet in the museum. The death mask is made of solid gold and it weighs 11kg. The eyes are obsidian and quartz and and the outlines of the eyes and eyebrows are lapis lazuli. I spent some time gazing at this stunning work that was made solely to be buried and never seen again. The obsidian eyes of the young Pharaoh stared calmly back at me. Almost as stunning as the death mask are the two massive golden sarcophagi. These are the inner two sarcophogi, the outer one, along with the mummy itself remain in the tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

We paid a little extra to go into the Royal Mummy Room. This small, dark room was like a tomb itself. It houses the bodies of eleven of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs and queens from the 17th to 21st dynasties (1650 to 945 BC). They include Tuthmosis IV and that crazy boy Ramses III. They looked quite freakish, but then they were three thousand years old; I guess they can’t expect to keep their youthful skin.

I was pleased to discover my camera was still in my bag when I picked it up. We then headed up the horribly busy Sharia Ramses (sharia is Arabic for street) to the train station where we could book our tickets for the sleeper train to Luxor. In the musty little ticket office at the station we met a British couple who were also buying tickets to Luxor but for that evening. It was strangely comforting to speak to some fellow travellers, as it did feel as if we were quite alone amongst the millions of native Cairenes.

We attempted to explore some more of the city, but were beaten by fatigue and somehow managed to get ourselves into one of the thousands of little black and white Fiats that swarm like ants through the streets. After some discussion of the fare, including a stop to get some change from a guy in the street, our driver weaved us throught the crazy Cairo traffic to the sound of some loud Arabic dance music on the tape player.

The Cairo traffic is amazing. I have not seen anything like it. A Cairene driver would think the Arc de Triomphe an orderly little roundabout. For a start, there appears to be no rules. The lane markings are wholly optional, as are traffic lights. This could be because many of the traffic lights are not working and the intersections are controlled by police. Headlights are also optional, at least for providing illumintation. They actually seemed to be a dynamic part of the vehicle’s controls with a flash on the lights meaning variously: I’m overtaking; Don’t cut in; Please cut in; Get off the road; I’m coming through; I’ve accidentally left my lights on. But the most important part of an Egyptian car, something that the failure of would make driving impossible is the horn. This is sort of an audible version of the headlight system and is used with gay abandon by anyone who wishes to be taken seriously as a motorist.

There is also nothing like pedestrian crossings in Cairo and some roads are almost impossible to cross. We spent a harrowing 10 minutes in the middle of Tahrir Bridge road, cars speeding inches from us in both directions, vainly looking for a break in the constant stream of traffic to attempt a dash to the other side. In the end we gave up and ran back the way we had come to find a much longer cicuitous route around to the other side. The locals have no fear however. They boldly step in front of oncoming Fiats which inevitably slow and swerve around them. I never gained the courage to try this myself despite seeing it happen wherever I went. I was frequently amazed that people weren’t run down in front of me, the cars were passing that close to them.

That night we had dinner outside in the hotel’s restaurant by the Nile. At night lots of little party boats with coloured lights and loud music cruise up and down the river. They aren’t much more than dinghies with a sort of canopy over them. They seemed to be a popular thing with the locals.

I guess because the night is so refreshingly cool in Cairo, the city stays active well into the evening. I could see lots of kids playing volleyball and other sports from my hotel window at ten o’clock that night. Also the Tahrir Bridge seemed a popular place for couples to hang out. I think it was because there was always a nice breeze blowing across it and it was one of the few places in Cairo that isn’t surrounded by buildings. Sure there is a never-ending stream of cars rushing past, but if you ignore them it is one of the most open places in the city.

The Egypt travelogue is here. Sort of. I think it is going to be a fairly long one, so I have decided to try something different. Rather than taking weeks to write a huge entry that you will have to set aside a whole evening to read, I am going to serialise it in little chunks. Today’s episode finds us leaving the cool familiarity of London in Autumn on a journey to the ancient lands of the Pharaohs and the cradle of civilisation.

Kathryn’s boss is a frequent flyer. His job is what frequent flyer miles were made for. While some of us scrape together a pitiful collection of points on credit cards and the odd intercontinental haul to cash in on, say, a £10 gift voucher from Marks and Spencer, it is not unusual for him to be on opposite sides of the globe every other week. This kind of relentless travel allows one to gather a simply staggering quantity of air miles; more than one could possibly shake a stick at let alone use up. This fact, combined with the fact that Kathryn’s boss is a top bloke, saw us boarding a giant Boeing 747 with a big Union Jack on the tail, bound for Egypt.

I had been looking forward to this for a long time. Kathryn had been lucky enough to be upgraded to Club on a previous flight, but the delights of the Upper Deck were to be a new experience for me. We climbed the stairs and entered the exclusive Club World cabin. The fact that the door to the cockpit was open and we could see all the flight controls just added to the coolness. The seats are arranged in two rows on either side of the cabin. They are like cocoons, supplying all the body’s needs (except waste disposal) for the duration of the flight. They are massive and convert into full beds at a touch of a button. A little video screen swings out to watch the extra channels you get in Club. The service was great and the food was delicious. It was unfortunate the flight wasn’t longer.

We landed in Cairo late in the evening and made our way past the people buying visa stamps. Unlike most visitors to Egypt, we had obtained our visas before we left, as this email I received from Kathryn relates…

‘It was a bit stressful in the embassy – the man behind the counter just barked ‘passport’ then ‘money’ then ‘goodbye’ this morning when I dropped them off, and this afternoon when I collected them didn’t bark at all! But he did bark very loudly at a woman who didn’t have 1 clear page in her passport – she had half a page clear, and you have to have 1 full page clear for the Egyptian visa… She was pleading with him to take pity and he barked ‘Enjoy your visit to Egypt Madam, you won’t be going!’ It was a bit tense with everyone else in the queue wondering if he would bark at them too!’

Why are embassies so invariably awful? They only open from 10am to 12pm, so you are forced to queue from 7am outside. Then when you get through the door there is only one surly clerk stamping passports. And there is always some dodgy looking character in front of you, who obviously has forgotten his passport or his last name is Bin Laden or something and takes forever to deal with. It is as if they don’t want you to visit their country.

Back in Cairo, we had been met before customs by our driver (we assumed) who checked our passports and directed us to the queue for customs. He said he would meet us by the baggage carousel as he had other travellers to deal with. He said his name was Mohamed, which I didn’t think would really help if we couldn’t find him again.

We were met at the baggage carousel by another Egyptian who knew my name, so we went with him even though it was not Mohamed. In the parking lot we were passed off to another man with a car and eventually rolled out of the airport, stopping on the way to write our names on a list handed through the window of the car by a policeman. This was an introduction to the work practises in Egypt. There always seems to be too many people doing the job that could probably be done by one or two people. But then, Cairo is the biggest city in Africa and one of the most populous cities on earth, so they don’t exactly have a labour shortage.

Arriving at the Sheraton Gezira we wandered past the metal detector to the reception to check in. The security situation in Egypt is a strange one. They are obviously in a slightly hotter, conflict-wise, region than say, Milton Keynes; they share borders with Libya and Syria, and they don’t exactly get on with Israel. But their attitude to it is strange one. It is over the top in a really half-arsed way. For a start there are men with guns everywhere. And not just handguns, but AK-47s. And not only guns, but big steel shields they can take cover behind. But none of them look like they could really handle a fight, or for that matter be bothered firing back. Not that I was the one to put that theory to the test, but they had that slightly uncoordinated look that baddies had in the old Bond films. 007 would merely have to step up behind them and clunk their heads together like a pair of coconuts. And there were metal detectors everywhere, but they were so arbitrarily enforced that I wasn’t sure what the point of them was.

Our room at the Sheraton was on the eighth floor and had a nice view of the river. I think all the rooms had some kind of view of the river though because the hotel is on a big island in the middle of the Nile.

The next day we hit Cairo town. We wandered up the road leading from the hotel, past the gazes of the bored soldiers in the watchtowers of the army barracks, to a major intersection. It was here we had our first contact with that favourite Egyptian pastime of getting money out of dumb foreigners. An Egyptian man was sitting by the side of the road and as soon as he spotted us he leaped up to introduce himself . I can’t remember what he said his name was, but I could tell it was going to cost me money one way or anther when he started walking with us over the bridge. The conversation was of a surreal cyclical nature with him repeating that he was learning English and offering welcomes alternating with me giving hopefully discouraging one-word responses. I kept glancing at Kathryn while trying to think of a way shake this guy off.

I figured the easiest way was to ask where the Egyptian Museum was, as we were planning to go there anyway. He then proceeded to lead us in a direction I was sure was quite a bit South of where we should be going. I wasn’t too worried at this stage, but that started to change when he took us to his shop. He led us into a little air-conditioned room with papyrus and perfume bottles on the walls. We were his only guests apart from his colleague (accomplice?) standing by the door. He offered us tea, which only made me more suspicious, and I started to size up the guy by the door, and tried to take comfort in the knowledge that there were armed policemen only a few metres outside the door.

I somehow managed to convince our guide that I really didn’t want to buy anything and just wanted to get to the Museum. He seemed a bit disappointed by this but reluctantly agreed. We followed him through some quiet streets and a minute later he was pointing out the pink, neoclassical edifice of the Egyptian museum. I knew this was our chance. I fished out a £E10 note (the smallest I had) and gave it to him. He left immediately.