Cairo!

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<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Wednesday 18^th April 2012:

If it’s the 18^th then it must be Egypt and although we’ve been here several times before, we’ve never seen it look the way it did today: through the thick haze of a major sandstorm that reduced visibility by a long way. We had a 2-hour drive to get from the port of Sokhna through to Cairo and at times our coach needed to slow down because the sand completely obliterated the driver’s view of the road ahead. Once we got to the pyramids we could definitely see them but not with a clear blue sky background, just sand in the foreground, sand in the air, sand in your eyes, shoes, every pocket, everywhere. But the benefit is the smoothest skin on any bit of your body that was exposed today because we’ve been exfoliated all day long!

We’d heard all sorts of horror stories about how Cairo has grown to encircle the pyramids. Thankfully the stories were wrong. Cairo has always been close to them, and it still is, but it’s only visible round a bend in the road. The pyramids still stand majestically on the Giza plateau with the sphinx a short distance down the valley. We were able to walk right through the temple where the priests did lovely things like pull out the dead pharaoh’s brains, liver, lungs, intestine and stomach. If you didn’t dwell on that aspect of the temple too much, you could easily delight in the fact that the temple got you incredibly close to the sphinx. I’d never been so close before so that was quite exciting. But the real highlight of Giza, for us, was seeing the Solar Boat. They discovered a tunnel right next to one of the big pyramids back in 1954 and in the tunnel was a boat which the Pharaoh would use to journey from earth to heaven. The boat was intact and in pristine condition. They built a museum round the boat and today was the first time either of us had ever seen it. And it was staggering! The boat stretches over 40 metres in length and makes your jaw drop. It is stunning. They have since found a second tunnel with a second boat but they are still excavating it. If I was an Egyptologist, I’d be very excited.

After lunch we went to a Papyrus “institute” which is Egyptian for “shop”. But at least these are genuine papyruses rather than the fake banana leaf versions you get offered by the many street sellers. You can tell what a hit this stop was though when I tell you that every passenger was back on the bus 20 minutes early! Our Egyptologist guide didn’t bother to ask if we enjoyed that stop. I reckon the answer was easily determined without asking. It was one of those places where 20 minutes would have been fine but they gave us an hour!

In the afternoon we went on a Nile cruise but to be frank, that’s stretching the definition of a cruise rather too far: an hour going very slowly between 3 bridges whilst eating some weird little cakes, drinking the world’s worst cup of tea and watching a belly dancer who turned out to be a young lass from Edinburgh!

But even if we moan a bit about some aspects of Cairo, it still owns the only item in existence from the ancient list of 7 wonders of the world. The rest of the city is, I think, showing signs of its revolution. We saw at least one bombed out building and more rubbish and unfinished buildings than I have seen anywhere else in the world. Change in Egypt is clearly coming at a high price but it is still a melting pot of cultures and a chaotic city with the capacity to enchant and shock – both within the blink of an eye. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

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