I guess the first thing to note about Cairo is that we did, in fact, manage to arrive in Cairo. After all the drama of the Tunisian Visa Crisis, we ended up paying 60 dinar each at the airport for the extra weeks we stayed in Tunisia, they stuck a bunch of what looked like postal stamps in our passports (thanks French colonial bureaucracy – Africa still loves a good stamp) and were ushered through to departures. We also learnt that other Kiwis and Australians paid a lot more than us when they had the bad luck to arrive in the country via the airport (pretty hard not to do this, Tunisia being surrounded by Algeria on one side and Libya on the other and all – I guess one could always get a boat).
Cairo is certainly a challenging independent travel destination. Particularly if you are female. While I was warned of this, it did not quite hit home until we got here. While this is obviously not true of all Egyptians, our experiences led us to conclude that as a generalization, Egyptians are a lot more aggressive and rude than other north African nations (I feel qualified to say this as in the past four months we have become pretty good at ignoring most things). Responses from touts we ignored in Cairo ranged from funny (“Oh, you very rude. You don’t deserve it.”) to blunt (“Hello. Welcome. Where you from? Fuck you. Kiss kiss. Whistles.” (and possibly something not very nice in Arabic)). In addition, I was the subject of walk-by groppage on our second day in Cairo. It did not exactly endear me to the people of the city.
All that said, Cairo is immensely rewarding once you ignore all the crap. We checked out the Egyptian museum, which was amazing but also overwhelming.
We also went to the pyramids at Giza. While these were crawling with irritating touts, we managed to ignore them and had a great time walking around the back side of the pyramids where there were very few people. Saqqara and Dahshur were the real highlights for us. Saqqara had fantastic tombs, hieroglyphs and reliefs with very few people. Dashur was also great as we were the only people there with two immense pyramids (not much smaller than the ones at Giza) to check out. We managed to go inside the red pyramid, which had a shaft that descended 62 meters down sloping ladder-like steps to three separate funeral chambers. It was also an interesting day from a transport perspective as this included a taxi (and a good argument on price), hitch in a ute, micro-bus, tuk-tuk, hitch in police van, massive argument with micro-bus drivers which resulted in us throwing our toys and hitching in a sweet vintage peugeot, another micro-bus and a metro ride back to Cairo. I don’t think we are really used to being in places where there are actual “attractions” as every day in Cairo left us totally shattered at the end of it. Read: it is definitely up for debate whether we smashed Cairo, or Cairo smashed us.
After indulging Thomas’s Star Wars fantasies in Tunisia, we evened things out by heading to Alexandria to indulge my Lawrence Durrell / Alexandria Quartet, pre-WW2, colonial fantasies. On arrival, Alex is all faded glory and one can certainly see how it could charm the pants off the bunch of expats who used to live there (apparently after the Suez crisis in the 1950s, about 100,000 permanent European residents of the city left, never to return). For those interested in the novel, we strolled the Corniche where the horse drawn caleches still ply their trade, went for cake at Cafe Delices, hung out at the Kom el-Dikka, went to Fort Qir Bey (feature picture above), checked out the Hotel Cecil and visited the catacombs of Kom el-Shafoqa. These catacombs were really excellent with great reliefs and labyrinthine passages that held hundreds of sarcophagi and tombs. Also great fun (and a bit hairy) when Thomas almost sconed me with a water bottle as I hid in a crypt and jumped out at him. I spent the afternoon giggling at this and Thomas spent the afternoon scowling at me. We also went for a couple of dives in the harbor where you can see the site of the Pharos lighthouse (one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world) and the ruins of Cleopatra’s sunken palace. This was pretty excellent as there were massive columns, old amphorae, some sphinxes and the bonus of a WW2 airplane that crashed in the harbor. The only downside of these dives was that (given the location) the vis was pretty average.
After Alexandria, we made a quick stop in Port Said because I wanted to see the Suez Canal. That is actually about all that we did there.
In terms of food updates, I will say this for Egyptian food: It is excellent. Certainly our favourite until we arrived in Jordan. I have a feeling it will be all downhill from here for Thomas, but I have heard some excellent reports on meat based Ethiopian food. In contrast to the food, Egyptian beer is really, really bad – and we had been subjected to Tunisian Celtia previous to this, which does not rate particularly highly either. We have yet to find a winner and are grateful that we had the foresight to splurge on the bottle of Johnny Walker that almost got confiscated on the way through Duty Free at Tunis airport.
Sinai was our next intended destination. It turns out that the travel information about the police being a touch jumpy in this area is indeed correct. After a couple of rides (and passing through Ismailiya, the birthplace of the Muslim Brotherhood), we ended up being left at the rest stop that buses pass through just before heading across the canal into Sinai. Here, the army guys in charge made a VERY thorough search of our luggage. This included the delightful gentlemen taking my diazepam out of the container and touching all the pills (thanks guys, will not be using those) and ferreting through and smelling packets of tampons to establish what they were. I have to admit, this last actually caused me much amusement because they did look pretty embarrassed when they figured it out. Things took a bit of an ugly turn when they almost confiscated a pretty much full bottle of whisky. This resulted in Thomas getting very excited and almost having a full on fight with the army guy searching his bag. After a bit of fuss, they clearly decided that we were not terrorists, or that stealing our whisky was just not worth the effort, and we were given back our stuff – only to realize that we had now missed the bus. As a result, we ended up hopping on a bus to Nuweiba, rather than Sharm el-Sheikh as initially anticipated, and crossing the Wilderness of Wanderers. This is apparently totally off limits for tourism at the moment (although you are allowed across on bus) and there were heaps of military stops along the way. It is always greatly comforting when they insist on checking your passport, but have no idea where New Zealand is and attempt to read the thing upside down.
All this aside, the spontaneous move was a good one as not only did we not get kidnapped, but while Nuweiba and Taba used to be massive tourist resorts, after a bombing in 2011 and the change in government, no tourists come here anymore. As a result, we had our beach camp to ourselves and we managed to wrangle a discounted chalet. The gulf of Aqaba is amazing with massive desert mountains giving way to a small sandy strip that runs into the clearest blue waters I have seen. Across the gulf you can see the mountains of Saudi Arabia which make a pretty excellent background and turn purple, orange and pink in the sunset.
We decided to fast track our side trip to Jordan due to having ended up being in the town from which the apparently fast boat departs for Aqaba – although, as it turned out, the fast boat was not in fact running. Accordingly, we booked a slow boat for 3pm. We then ended up waiting until 5.30pm for the boat to actually leave, which was the estimated arrival time in Aqaba. We eventually got through customs and to our hotel at 10.30pm. There is no system in these places. For example, just before the boat docked, things got a bit intense and one door was locked with a chain to keep people from running out (needless to say, us and the few other foreigners on the boat did not love being chained inside a boat). A major crush developed with everyone trying to push the one unchained door open. This inefficiency and behavior is typical. No one on the boat was the least concerned as they never anticipated that the boat would actually leave at 3pm. Luckily, given that we have been in Africa a while, neither did we. Thankfully, we did not have a repeat of the whisky confiscation argument as things may have gotten ugly (we did take precautions though by putting it into blue Pepsi bottles in case of inspection).
Fun travel times aside, as we were only going to be in Jordan for a week, we went directly to Wadi Musa and Petra the next day. Petra is just as incredible as one expects. As a nice bonus, after being in Egypt it also seemed pretty empty – even once the bigger groups began to arrive later in the day.
I cannot really describe it better than the pictures that everyone has already seen. I guess the main thing that came as a surprise to me was the immense size of the site and the natural beauty of the place. I would have gone hiking there even without the ruins. We spent three days at Petra and absolutely shattered ourselves hiking as many of the trails as we could get to and checking out all the structures. An intense experience, as things are getting pretty hot here at about 32 degrees during the day. At this point I am getting fairly stressed about how I will cope with the south of Egypt and Sudan which are currently clocking in at about 42 degrees and rising.
Our only other stop in Jordan was Amman. Largely we went to Amman to meet up with a couple of friends who are currently living there. With this in mind, we spent most of our time eating, drinking, smoking sheesha and generally socializing. Not a bad thing to do in Amman, as the food is incredible and it was great to see friends after 4 months away. We did manage to get to the Dead Sea for a day – which was fantastic. Possibly a highlight of the trip for me. Being able to sit there floating on top of the water was the most fantastically strange feeling and we were both stoked we splurged on the outing (the public beaches are not such a nice time in these parts – partly due to pollution and partly due to my not really being able to swim there – so it was necessary to spend a bit of money to access the beach at a fancy resort – damn!).
We have now managed to get back to Egypt after another slow boat ride. This time round, we arrived in Aqaba from Amman at the scheduled departure time of the boat. While this would have killed any hope of catching the boat in another country, we managed to get to the ticket office, buy a ticket, get to the terminal, pay departure tax, go through immigration and sit on the boat for an hour before it actually left. We always really enjoy it when the inefficiencies work to our advantage. SMUG.
June 2013