FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF CAIRO

Gordon Harper September, 1996

John Burbidge and I arrive Saturday evening at the Cairo airport, after a thirty-six hour journey from Seattle (via Amsterdam). Airport fairly hot and sticky but clean and orderly. I change a minimal $50 to LE (Egyptian pounds)--about 3.3 LE to one dollar--and find our contracted travel rep, Joseph, waiting to help maneuver us through customs. The only thing they require be registered are video cameras; I am grateful that I can bring in my notebook computer and camera without having them recorded on my passport.

The streets of Cairo at midnight are very reminiscent of Bombay. Lots of traffic, horns blowing continuously, cars switching and ignoring lane markers, people crossing wherever--but no hand carts or bullocks on the roadways, thankfully. Our little van is air conditioned, and we decide en route to the hotel to leave the next morning free to catch up on sleep and schedule our pyramids and Sphinx trip for that afternoon. Sunday, after all, is a working day in Islamic Cairo, with Friday being the weekend or day off. The work week thus starts with Saturday.

The Shepheard Hotel turns out to be a quite decent four-star hotel, its best and most famous years well in the past, but still adequate and reasonably priced. Egyptian nightclub music in the air, grand high ceilinged restaurants, smoking allowed and being practiced everywhere, lots of marble, arabesque designs, recessed lighting, balconies and gleaming brass works scattered about. Good levels of English among the staff, who carry themselves with that special air of authority and directiveness, yet courtesy, appropriate to their standing. We are required to hand over our passports, to be returned when we check out, something that always makes me a tad uneasy.

The room John and I share is somewhat elderly but clean and spacious, with two double beds, working shower, towels (no washcloth--blast! I normally stick one in my luggage, but this time I forgot), even a bidet, suggestive of the French influence noticeable in the equipment and multi-lingual signs. After all, Napoleon was here in the old days. There is a decrepit but functioning small refrigerator and a delightful balcony overlooking Cairo's main street along the Nile, the Corniche el Nile. And of course, there in all its evening grandeur, the great river itself. The panoramic view awash with lights, with massive bridges spanning the river and connecting us to the large Gezira Island in its midst. River boats tied up on the shore, mostly the small sailing crafts called faluka, with one grand dinner cruise ship appropriately named the Scarabee. John and I shower and change, unpack a few things and decide, at around one in the morning, to start our time in Cairo by taking a little walk along the river.

Fond memories of our years in India flood in on both of us as we wander along the wide sidewalk and dash across streets amidst the traffic and horns. A few vendors accost us, one persistent young chap determined to get money out of us for roasted ears of corn, upon whom John employs his new Arabic from the phrasebook he picked up in Seattle. Before long, the forty-plus hours without a bed catch up with us, and we return to the hotel and collapse for six hours.

John is more security-conscious than I, especially as we notice on the morrow that the door to the outside balcony of our second floor room doesn't lock (it's supposed to, but its capacity has been greatly diminished over the years) and that we have a set of doors to the adjoining room which anyone might easily open with a credit card. My stance is that if I lose my computer, it's probably a sign that it's time to buy a new one, which makes John decidedly uneasy. He's packing more in travelers' checks than I, along with a fancy zoom camera, borrowed for the trip. We inform the hotel about the balcony door, a pleasant chap arrives to examine it, assures us that it will be fixed during the day and leaves. It never is fixed.

Breakfast is included in our room rate. Since we are early for the conference, there is some confusion as to which breakfast we are entitled to, and we get the staff's nod to helping ourselves to the grand buffet. I'm a bit wary of the fruit and salad offerings, with the health warnings about unpeeled items fresh in my mind from my Internet searches before I left Seattle, but we finally indulge in a bowl of fruit salad nonetheless, along with pastries, crepes and pancakes, sausage, fried potatoes, yogurt and coffee. No bacon or other pork products, of course. Drinkable water in Egypt is not a gratuitous commodity, and we buy a bottle. It's also available in our room refrigerator, to be replaced as used at a somewhat exorbitant price, so we decide to look for it on the street and bring it back for our future use.

After a photo session off our balcony, we head for the Cairo Museum, the great repository of Egyptian antiquities and a relatively easy walk from our hotel. Mobs of people beyond description unfortunately all have the same idea, most of them in tour groups, and the air in the museum courtyard is filled with the babble of guides trying to communicate with groups in a dozen different languages. We pay the ten pounds for our tickets, fend off all the offers of guides and, as required, turn in our cameras as we enter.

Once inside, we regret not accepting a guide, since markings on the vast collections are in short supply indeed. Huge mummies everywhere, towering stone sculptures, vases, sarcophagi, hieroglyphics, unearthed tools, papyrus paintings, scarabs and marble and granite works designed to proclaim the greatness of the rulers who commissioned them to all subsequent ages. We fight our way toward relatively unpopulated areas, moving on as the waves of visitors approach our locations. The museum suggests a cavernous and somewhat dimly lit storehouse of loosely organized treasures from the various dynasties of Egypt's incredibly long and diverse ancient periods, from around 5000 BC to the time of Alexander and the Greek era.

All the vaguely remembered gods are here, Horus and Isis, and the pantheon of animal-headed anthropomorphic figures. I am struck by their postures and visages, neither fierce nor benign, simply present and watchful. Jaguars and ravens guard the sarcophagi, and pictograms in the flat old two-dimensional art still seek to tell the stories their inhabitants wished to have passed down to all succeeding generations.

Guards everywhere--we're starting to get used to seeing security forces everywhere on the streets and in all public places cradling automatic weapons. One of the young ones engages us in conversation and an offer of assistance. He shows us an urn with some of its owner's petrified body parts still inside, viewable only by climbing onto the display and peering down into it. He obviously considers it a great thrill and seems puzzled by our somewhat restrained enthusiasm. John inquires about a toilet, gets directions and returns to report that we need to be prepared with a few pounds in hand for the attendants, who are then glad to serve one with toilet paper, soap and towel. We leave after a couple hours, stopping briefly at the museum store, where we are pleased to find an attractive set of replicas available at government controlled prices.

On the street returning to our hotel, we wind our way through taxi drivers offering trips to the pyramids for considerably less than what we've agreed to pay our travel agent that afternoon and vendors with armfuls of colorful "papyrus" paintings. Since a trip to a papyrus factory is included in our upcoming tour, we decline all the rapid price decreases we are offered--a good thing, as it turns out, because these, we discover at the factory, are fakes made of banana skin and possessed of a decidedly short half-life. Caveat emptor continues to be the watchword for tourists in Cairo, as it is in other places.

A short nap, then up and into the travel agent's van for the amazingly brief--only thirty-five or so minutes--ride to Giza, on the outskirts of the city. As we approach it, we catch glimpses, between the buildings, of the top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, much as one might notice Mount Rainier in the distance while driving in Seattle. With shocking abruptness, the city is behind us, and we are in the desert, with the three pyramids now in full view on the sandy horizon. We stop on a ridge for our photo-op, with scores of colorfully attired camels and their drivers, amidst the tourist stall operators that cluster along both sides of the road.

While I manage to evade some very creative and determined hawkers and get off a few shots, I am in turn snookered by a small boy. He offers to take my picture with my camera in front of his reclining camel. While I have no intention of taking a ride on one of the ungainly creatures, having done that once in India and knowing that the going rate is around $10 for said privilege, I agree to this, thinking that it would indeed make a fine picture. Putting my hand on the pummel of the camel's saddle as instructed, I find the lad's older accomplice suddenly and deftly "assisting" me to swing my leg over the saddle so that, as he says, I can be photographed actually sitting on the animal. At this point, of course, the well trained beast starts its complex arising procedures, and I have all I can do to hang on for dear life. The accomplice grabs the tether and begins leading the camel on still another paying journey, while the boy records my chagrin and unanticipated plight with my own camera. I decide that I have been fairly caught and so relax and enjoy the experience. Upon dismounting--a delightful undertaking in which it takes all one's strength to avoid pitching headlong over the camel--I dutifully pay my dues to the beaming pair of rascals.

Virtually all of our group wind up astride a camel, either by decision or inadvertence, after which we make our way to the smallest of the three pyramids, where a considerable queue awaits its chance to enter the inner chambers. Even this smallest of the three pyramids is huge, the giant stones, we are told, weighing up to two tons apiece, with no cement or glue holding any of them in place. Irregularities and broken places tell of the toll the centuries have taken on these monstrous monuments, but what remains is impressive enough.

We are warned that anyone afflicted with claustrophobia should not attempt this journey --and rightly so. The passage requires walking in a nearly doubled over crouch along a small tunnel that seems to descend forever into the earth. The air thick with moisture, lights only an occasional relief, it is impossible not to bump into one's predecessor and be assaulted by one's successor, to say nothing of those squeezing past on their return climb. Even though I've never thought myself in the least claustrophobic, I seriously entertain the possibility of becoming so throughout this trek into the underworld. Finally, we reach the empty caverns at the bottom from which, alas, all residents and treasures have long since been removed and spend a few moments standing in awe at what must once have been. Having perhaps proven ourselves worthy of being interred in such a tomb, we reverse direction and, clothes sticking to our skin, jostle our way in turn back to the surface and the now most welcome Egyptian sun.

And so on to the Sphinx. Facing the East and intended to serve as ominous and eternal protector of the residents of these pyramids, the lion bodied face still gazes toward the great city of the living in the near distance. Unfortunately, the elements and those who over the millennia have braved the warning this crouching creature sought to project have rendered the once intimidating limestone features rather softened and indistinct. The powerful nose is gone, although our guide dismisses as highly unlikely the story that Napoleon's soldiers had used it for target practice. My mind goes to Shelley, and the line, "Nothing beside remains," from his poem, "Ozymandias." Such, however, is not the case in this spot today. Eminently visible to both the Sphinx and all those who stand in its presence, on the outskirts of the ever expanding city, one can clearly read a Pizza Hut sign.

-- GordonHarper - 06 Jun 2006