Cairo - 21st Jan 2002
Arriving in Cairo
Walking like Egyptians
Never Trust a Night Porter
The Elgin marbles are Better Off Where They Are
Roof Rack Who Needs One?
Pyramids - Just Another Tourist Trap
Suspicious Minds
The plan to arrive in Cairo during mid day prayer worked wonders and the traffic was fairly sane, in a Middle East kind of a way. The biggest hazard was the buses which just seem to stop at random points on the dual carriageway normally 20 ft from the kerb, to allow passenger to alight into traffic. Which means us! To pick up passengers the buses felt in unnecessary to stop as the old dears and children trying to get on have to run along side and take a leap of faith. Maybe Indiana Jones learnt the leaping trick in Cairo.
Navigation was not the problem it seemed. We took the tried and tested Scully approach to directions: head for the river and follow it. On arrival at our hotel a chap ran out from a nearby Hotel claiming that our hotel was full and anyway his was superior. He ushered me into an overpriced and dirty room whereupon I laughed at the price and went to our original choice, which of course was not full. The rooms and general ambience of the place has a feel of Paris about it. The lift was original with dark wooden panel and beautiful wrought iron work, a pity that someone has not thought to clean things up a bit. The wooden floors in the rooms were of wonderful dark wood, the like of which I have not seen since Guyana. And on top of this, the nice little man on reception insisted that we park the bike in reception.
That evening we bumped into Dianne, a Hot Rocker from Quebec, on her way back home with a little stop over Cairo. She seemed to have suffered a lot over the last couple of days in Cairo with all manner of people hassling her, with the old line, where are you from, what is your name, etc. She was pretty much at boiling point and it seemed if one more hustler hassled her she would blow her top.
While Hippy was checking out the hotel situation, I was soaking up some of the street ambience that is downtown Cairo. My favourite image, which I am sure will haunt me for years, is of a cyclist with an eight foot long tray of bread on his head riding no-handed down the middle of a four lane one-way street the wrong way! The cars were really quite nice to him and I am sure he follows this route every day, as did the last delivery boy who died last week.
With Dianne in tow, we were searching for a fax machine on which to send our passport details to a very nice man in Sudan, when we were approached by a friendly young man who assumed the role of bare foot guide. We were quite capable of looking for signs that said fax, but he felt that he had to ask all and sundry (from street ciggy vendors to policemen) none of whom were any help. Dianne was telling us about how she had had difficulty shaking off these friendly sorts and our mate agreed how awful that could be and then would not bugger off himself. He told us that we should walk like Egyptians to avoid hassle in town. It brought to mind and old Bangles video. Not what you would call inconspicuous, if I remember rightly.
We retired to the hotel having been unable to fax and lent Dianne our alarm clock so that she would be able to rise for her flight in the morning. Did not sleep too well. We have arrived in mosquito zone and have yet to detune our ears to the incessant whine that pervades the night air. Besides, Cairo comes alive at about 10 p.m. and being the boring old fart that I am, that is when I begin to think about sleep.
Morning came far too soon and I headed out to find a fax service, post some parcels and stuff while Hippy washed some of our clothes. I stopped by reception to get our alarm clock back only to be met with puzzled looks. I feared the worst and assumed that the night porter had taken it on his toes with our prized 3-pound alarm clock. Not really financially pained, just a bit porked off that he should be so annoying.
Fax service found in the Egyptian phone HQ, the number required in Khartoum failed to respond to the fax noises and so I had to give up on that one. The central post office in Cairo does not accept parcels for slow post. The rates quoted for airmail were exorbitant so I accepted their council and left in search of the other post office. Stopped by at an Internet gaff and emailed a jpeg of our passports to Khartoum in the hope that they had the technology to cope with this method. Back to the hotel and I felt that I had achieved very little.
Hippy was most upset about the clock, not the fact that I had traipsed about Cairo on pointless errands. This cheered me up. We left together to search for the other post office and found it nestling on a busy roundabout overlooked by a charming statue of Rameses the second. Finding the building was not tricky, but finding the right department was. When we eventually found the second floor office (labelled exports) we were sent on the usual merry go round of visiting every desk in the room for no apparent purpose. At least the postage (for airmail in the end) turned out to be half the price of the main post office airmail option.
The Elgin marbles are Better Off Where They Are
Down the road (Rameses road, of course) is the Cairo Museum. I am sure that those of you that have been will concur that this is a fascinating collection that could do with a bit of modernisation. The Tutankamun section is everything I can remember from my childhood when the collection was in England. Recently they have added a new jewellery room that is filled with hoards of gold. Hippy was surprised at the amount of gold turned up from just a couple tombs and wondered what had happened to the treasures from the others. I, being the cynic that I am, was quite happy that these items had been melted down to make a fortune for someone along the way. It would be nice to think that the grave robbers would have recognised the value of their booty, but I fear that the colour of the gear was all they were interested in.
Middlesboro 1 Bolton 1 the scarf has not reached its full potential yet. Sounds like a dirty hack on Frandsen and so we have been robbed once again. Hippy has offered to make additions to the scarf to enhance the luck. I think it merely needs to mature. More worryingly, she threatened to wash it, obviously unaware that luck is washed out of scarves, as we all know.
Walking in the evening, we came across another serious road hazard. When you next go to MFI, or I suppose we all shop at IKEA now, and you ask them to deliver a bed for you as it will not fit in your car, I don't suppose that it would occur to you to take it on a moped. I mean it's obvious really. You get as much load space as you like on a moped limited only by low bridges, I guess.
HOT NEWS Scully is still in Aqaba. Or so it seems from his email that arrived with us about four days after he sent it. He is still weighing up his options re. Importation of bike to Egypt. As we discovered, there are no cheap alternatives to travel to Egypt, etc. It would be a shame if he gets beaten by the system, because we rather look forward to more mad, chance meetings along the way.
After hearing the football scores, we caught a bit of international news on the World Service. Sudan has signed an internal peace deal with rebels and so things should be mellow. At last, a bit of international diplomacy that has broken in our favour. Glad we are not going to Nigeria as a state of national inurrection is breaking out because
Glad we are not going there, then.
Pyramids - Just Another Tourist Trap
We went to the pyramids. You've all seen them. Huge great piles of rock. Could bore you but wont. We managed to quiet the camel hasslers by claiming that we suffered from a camel allergy. To the general request as to where we come from, the response that we are Guyanese had them flummoxed. Not a single one had the geographical acumen to be able to follow up with Oh, really, anywhere near Georgetown.
We felt that we had pulled of a masterstroke by taking local transport over to Giza. Instead of forking out a total of one pound 30p of English money for two of us to get the return trip on the air conditioned tourist bus, we in fact paid 40p for two return. This economy was false. We in fact ended up walking the last mile back to our hotel after the bus ran out of diesel on the main overpass into Cairo. We were a bit miffed as we felt that we had been overcharged by 10p on this leg of the journey anyway. Yeah, tight or what?
STOP PRESS: Our man in Khartoum has come up trumps and, for the princely sum of nothing, had our visa request processed in 24 hours so that we can pick up our visas at the Sudan consulate in Cairo tomorrow. Watch this space.
Not a bad day, really. The night watchman did have the clock after all.