Reaching Cairo airport was pretty eventful journey in itself, because I had plane tickets from Dallas to Cairo and had to take a bus to reach Dallas from Austin and then my plan was to take the public transport DART bus to reach the airport from the Greyhound bus station. I took an early morning bus on the 13th in Austin to reach Dallas. Because of some screw up I missed the early bus to the airport in Dallas and just managed to catch my Dallas-Frankfurt-Cairo flight. In the confusion I lost my Greyhound return tickets for Dallas-Austin!
Reached Cairo on the 14 the evening and as soon as you see the airport you realize that you are entering a desert dominated country. Unlike other runways, in the Cairo airport you do not have grass and shrub outside the concrete runway - you have sprawling sand!
Made it through customs and immigration clearance without a hitch and I was accosted by some supposedly "official govt. tourist" operators as soon as I got out of the immigration clearance gate. Since I had decided on what hotel to stay in I just told them that's the hotel I want to go to. After some haggling over whether there are better/cheaper hotels they agreed to "find" me a taxi to get there. I ended up paying 40 pounds for the taxi for an approximately 20 minute drive. (4 egyptian pounds make a US dollar). The taxi driver tried to sell me a tour of Cairo - and was pretty insistent until I said I am not planning to see places in Cairo!
I got a decent room in the hotel called New Palace Hotel , and the staff seemed friendly and I was informed that they people at the hotel, organized tours of Egypt. I decided to take a look and wasn't averse to an organized tour, this being my first trip alone and just the Lonely Planet travel book to guide me - at the end of the trip I learnt the economic folly of the decision.
The manager kind of guy at the hotel, then told me an itinerary for 2 weeks and said, they would take care of buying tickets, picking me up at train stations and make hotel reservations and gave me one price quote for the whole thing. Sounded ok to me at the time - I didn't fully realize how much bargaining should be done in Egypt. I ended up paying about $400 for the two weeks. The plan was a few days in Cairo, then Aswan, Luxor, back to Cairo and then to the Bahriyya oasis.
I started out the evening with a trip to the pyramids and to "see" the sound and light show at the pyramids in Giza. I was doing this trip with a german couple and we ended up travelling together for a lot of our stay in Egypt. We took a camel ride to trek through some parts of desert sand to get a panaromic view of Cairo and of the 3 great pyramids - Cheops, Chepren and Mycerinus. This was my first view of the pyramids from reasonably closeby and they were really awesome. The camel ride wasn't very pleasant and it takes quite a bit of effort to hold one's balance and not fall off!
After the sunset we trekked back on the camels and got to "see" the sound a light show. The pyramids are lit up with powerful and sometime colored lamps and a narrator describes some of the history behind the building of the pyramids. I didn't find it very interesting.
The next day(15th, Wednesday) we actually visited the pyramids and climbed into them. We first went to Saqqara - which was the necropolis when Memphis was the capital of the Egypt. Memphis was the capital during what is called the Old Kingdom - the first reign of the pharoahs. Saqqara has the oldest and the first pyramid ever built - the step pyramid - built for the pharoah Zoser by Imhotep. Although it pales in comparison to the pyramids at Giza, considering the age it was built it, it seems an amazing engineering feat.
From Saqqara we went to Giza and got to enter to pyrmid complex proper - where the 3 pyramids of Cheops, Chepren and Mycerinus and a bunch of other small pyramids of minor kings and queens. This is where the Sphynx is located also. I found the Sphynx unimpressive. I was expecting something humongous - it was smaller than what I expected. Still, considering it was hewn out of a single rock, it does look impressive. The pyramids of Cheops and Chepren is just awesome and they are unimaginably huge. I climbed into both of these and its just amazing to be walking in a structure that is 3500 years old. The passageways are narrow - about 1.5 by 1.5 meters and they end in the King's Chamber where the outer granite sacrophagus is intact. Most of the other tunnels randomly built by the builders to confuse people are thankfully closed - I suppose to prevent people from getting lost inside the pyramids!
Nothing much else on Wednesday - except that I got to sample more of Egyptian food and realized how cheap and good the falafels were. A falafel costs as little as 0.50 pounds and it tastes really good.
On 16th, we added to a new member to the gang of 3 - who stayed with us for most of the trip in Egypt. A very intersting guy from Vietnam who had been travelling around the world for the past 3 months. The four of us visited the Egyptian National Museum - which has a very impressive collection but very badly labelled. I suppose the star piece is King Tutankhamen's gold mask - a 11 Kg gold mask that contained the mummified face of the the King. The Royal Mummy room in the museum was also intereseting - this is where they have 11 of the mummies of pharoahs and queens in controlled temperature/humidity setting.
Wednesday evening the 4 of us set off for Aswan. The train ride was really comfortable - huge seats and the air conditioning was so cold that all needed to get our jackets! We reached Aswan around 10 in the morning the next day and visited the Aswan High Dam. There wasn't any visually impressive engineering display to be seen in the dam. However Lake Nasser - the artificial lake built by the construction of the dam was huge. From the high dam we went over to the Temple of Philae. This temple which was first started in 4BC has some parts build by the Greeks, some by the Romans and the early Christians. The temple itself was moveed from one island to another because of the original island was getting swamped every year by the water in the old Aswan dam reservoir.
Aswan was very different from Cairo. It was much more pleasant than Cairo because of much less noise and people! We walked around Aswan quite a bit and spent some time shopping. The 4 of us bought the traditional dress called a Galabiya - its a flowing single peice dress and walked around in Aswan wearing it. Most of the people were confused on seeing us and especially me - they couldn't quite figure out if I was a native or a tourist! After a very eventful night we had to wake up the next day (Friday) at 3:30AM to leave for the Abu Simbel temple which was a 3 hour drive from Aswan.
The Temple of Abu Simbel built by Ramses II is carved out of a mountain face and was very impresssive and is almost full preserved including some of the paintings inside the temple. It is hard imagine it is 3200 years old. We came back to Aswan around noon and our tour guide told us we would immediately leave for the "felucca" trip and that we be provided with lunch in the felucca. So we walked across the one main road in Aswan from our hotel and reached the docking point of our felucca! There were already 2 Australians, a French couple and an Argentinian! Apparently they were just waiting for so we could all leave. And off we went on our felucca trip.
In my short life the felucca trip has been the biggest test of patience. Basically we sit on a sail boat trip for 2 nights and there isn't much to do - plus there are no toilets and you cannot walk around! The deck of the boat is about 25 feet by 15 feet! It was fun to start off but 2 nights is a bit too long. We were supposed to be sailing from Aswan to Luxor. After one day of sailing our boat was moored for the night and the next day we reached Edfu where we visited yet another temple. I suppose the French couple found the trip too strenous and decided to get off here :-) The remaining 9 of us set off for Luxor. What was very curious about the trip is that our boatman would spending very little time sailing and most of the time the sail we be down and we be just drifting around in the Nile!
The most frustrating part in all this was that every now and then we would see huge multi-decked ships with swimming pools and restraunts pass by! We did get to see the sunset from the Nile though. Our boatman was pretty resourceful and he did the best he could for our food also - cooking rice, pasta, lentils, potatoes and tomatoes in various permuations for lunch, dinner and breakfast. He was also extremely friedly and genial. If you do plan on doing this trip, see if you can get him - his name is Mohammed Oebly. And ofcourse we had the dry, crumbling bread that everybody eats in Egypt. We sailed the next day for very little time and just as we were all reaching our breaking point our boatman decided to dock the boat and we all got off the boat. We saw some local people nearby and asked our boatman if we could get any cold drinks nearby. It so happended that one of the locals was known to him and he offered to go buy them from a nearby shop in his bicycle! So after about 40 hours we got to taste something really cold! We asked him to get us 2 coke's each and it was really refreshing! Two other boats also docked along with us and there was a quite a crowd.
We collected some twigs, leaves and branches and built a bonfire and the boatmand from the 3 boats started singing some Egyptian songs and we all danced around the fire! This brought us to then end of our felucca trip. We slept on the boat that night also and our boatman told us the next day morning that a bus would take us to Luxor after going to Edfu! In Edfu we visited another minor temple, I mostly spent the time walking around. From Edfu we left from Luxor in a police convoy - a police jeep in front - a series of tourist vans and a police jeep at the end. Apparently, since the Luxor massacre of 1997, this is the heightened security protocol.
And finally we reached Luxor (noon on Sunday) and left at around 2pm to see the sprawling Karnak temple complex - which i should say was very impressive. The area it covers and the fact that the egyptian rulers just kept adding to it is just amazing and it is really well preserved. The Luxor temple was also pretty impressive considering although it was much smaller than Karnak. The truncated line of sphinxes that onces fully lined a pathway from Karnak to Luxor was very interesting.
The nine of us from the boat trip decided to get together for dinner and we had relaxed and long dinner. And then we spent some time walking around Luxor - which also seemed a much nicer city than Cairo. The next day (Monday) we visited the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens. The pharoahs decided after some generations that building pyramids and placing the mummified remains of the pharoah along with his treasure was inviting plunder - so they switched to the discreet tombs in the valley here. The tomb raiders plundered these also - but almost all of the paintings on the walls are fully preserved and they are really intricated and full of color even though the are almost 3 centuries old. I visited 3 tombs of the kings and 3 of the queens. Most of the tombs are pretty much identical. A very steep passageway that leads into the chamber where the outer sacrophagus is still present. The walls along the passage way are decorated with paintings and the main chamber contains a lot of heiroglyph writing. There are in total 60 tombs here! The visit to the tombs was followed by yet another temple visit - the Temple of Hatshepsut - the first queen who ruled Egypt as a pharoah. The temple itself is cut from the mountain and there are caves all around which were apparently used as dwelling places when the temple was built.
From here almost everybody else went to Dahab known for its beaches, snorkelling and diving - since I didn't know how to swim, I decided on going back to Cairo and heading out on a desert safari.
I left for Cairo on Monday evening and reached Cairo early the next day and didn't much on Tuesday. On Wednesday I visited some parts of Islamic Cairo - this is almost like a different city from Cairo - this is where the old historic mosques are located. I attened a Sufi dancing performance in the night and to my surprise it was very entertaining. I was expecting something more mystic and sober!
Early on Thursday I left by bus for the Bahariyya oasis in the Wester Desert about 300 km from Cairo. I reached the oasis sometime around noon and found out that I would be travelling along with a travel guide and a mother-daughter pair from London. The desert safari was really good - after resting for about an hour we left in a pretty sturdy looking jeep. We basically drove out into the desert and every now and then stopped to take some pictures or hike up a small hill to take a panoromic view. We also got to see a bunch of the tourist doing a camel safari! We drove through what is called the white desert (called so because of white sand) and the black desert (the black ash from the rocks makes it look black) and the part called magic mountain. This is a part of the desert where there are crazy rock formations shaped by window erosion and with a fertile imagination you could see various shapes/animals in the rocks.
We camped out that night and walked around for about an hour. The silence of the desert and the huge number of stars that are visible is just breathtaking. Actaully seeing the vast stretch of nothingness makes you appreciate how easy it is to get lost.
The next day (Friday) we drove back and visited a few springs in the oasis. After lunch we visited the other attractions in Bahariyaa - a kind of fort the Britishers tried to build, driving around the oasis and splashed around in the cold spring! The oasis is not scening like it is shown in the movies. It is a old and dying village with a few natural springs. It is in the panaromic views from moutains tops that you can makes out a lush green area in the arid desert.
I took the bus back to Cairo on Saturday and reached Cairo late in the night. Driving on the desert roads quite an experience. And most interesting was the fact that for some part of the bus trip, they were showing WWF wrestling in the TV in the bus. That was when everybody would pay full attention to the TV and ignore everything else.
I spent Sunday walking around Cairo downtown and discovered that the city had a underground metro and took a test ride from one station to the next. They had the automatic magnetic coded tickets with the revolving gates to let people in and out of the metro. The metro trains themselves were pretty clean. I spent the afternoon visiting the most historic of Cairo's mosques - the Al-azhar mosque which didn't have anything special really. I then walked around in the sprawling market area called Khan Khalili - this is basically a huge area of small shops selling practically everything under the sun - from perfumes, to cotton clothes, to jewellery.
Monday was my safety factor day to make sure I could catch my flight on Tuesday morning (3 AM). I walked around the most expensive neighbourhood in Cairo - called the Zamalek area. Seemed really unimpressive and I did not find a single huge shopping center or a Albertsons/Randalls style grocery store.
Flight trip back home was uneventful except for the fact that I got a free upgrade to business class to fly back.
The most annoying thing in the Egypt is that practically everyone smokes and they have no concept of smoking areas or any such thing. I saw people smoking inside the air conditioned train coaches and buses. The national pastime I guess is for people to sit in a tea shop and smoke a sheesha (hookah). A sheesha is a big contrapation used to smoke a mix of tobacco, spices and some dried fruit (all kind of mashed together).
Travelling is a bit of a problem because very few people understand anything other than Arabic. In some places the street signs are written in Arabaic and this makes navigation with a map impossible! The language is really cool to hear though. Whenever the locals speak it is like they are fighting - the sounds are harsh - even the german people I was travelling with found it to be harsh :-) The only Arabic i picked up was writing the numbers from 1 to 10. and a very formal way of bidding goodbye. The locals get very excited when they hear it from a tourist! These people are really friendly though and they are all excited to meet someone from India. I have to mention also that almost everyone is called Mohammed - it is an extremely common name!
Economically the country seemed to be in doldrums. The downtown area did not have any major high rise buildings. The country seemed like India in 1998. Few people seemed to own cars and most people use the public transport and almost every taxi seemed like a 20 year old vehicle - Peugeot 504s. The traffic system is pretty much like India - people cross the road as they please and there is no major highway system. Credit cards did not seem very prevalent and apart from a few stores I hardly saw a visa/mastercard/amex sign on the doors and almost no restaurant seemed to accept credit cards. There weren't that many ATM machines either even in Cairo. The neighbourhood where the wealthy people lived seemed unimpressive also.
A very interesting thing I noticed and most of the people I travelled with also noted this - the number of men you see on the streets far outstrips the number of women! You are left wondering where all the women are. Also almost all the women wear a scarf and I did see a significant number of women wearing the full veil. Women dress very modestly exposing almost no skin and men can almost never be seen in shorts although the place is blazing hot.
The other peripheral pointer related technolgy adoption was that I saw very few Egyptian people using the internet cafe's unlike my experience in Peru and Mexico where the internet cafes would be flooded with local teenagers basically running some sort of chat client. In Egypt however the internet cafes were only occupied by tourists.
Seeing the lack of a technology, lack of adoption of a language spoken by the first world, this trip in Egypt has kind of made me ponder whether in the long run - economic plundering by the imperialist in the 17th-18th centuries had some postive effect in South America.
Finally I have to add that Egypt is perhaps the ideal place to travel alone - you get to meet a whole lot of people and it is probably more fun to travel alone than to travel in a group :-)