cairo – Adrian's Got The Moose

Leaving Alexandria

Having spent fruitless time and megabytes attempting to book a bus ticket to Luxor without having to book out an entire bus, I decided to wing it and do things the old school way. I arose at seven, dumping my room keys at the reception and took an Uber to the local microbus station.

The driver drove past the station two hundred metres before dropping me off, not quite believing this white guy was not on a tour. When I walked uphill to the train station, with help from a staff member at a nearby coffee shop, I discovered that no microbuses were heading to Luxor, but I could get one to Cairo, which I was trying to avoid, and then find something to Luxor. I hopped on the bus, which was nearly empty, and waited.

The deal with these decidedly tourist-unfriendly buses is that they leave when full, not to any schedule known to man or gods. I have been told you can pay for the empty seats to leave quickly, but I have never been asked to do this, and the suggestion seems to go against the whole principle of the situation. The fare must be paid in cash, and is handed to either the driver’s offsider or an elder customer acting as trip treasurer. This leaves the driver free to talk on the phone, honk his horn, and generally make life unpleasant for other road users.

This time, it took an hour for the bus to fill up, and as usual, I was the only Westerner on board, which made me happy. I paid 160 EGP for this uncomfortable trip, with my duffel bag shoved under my seat- they are not really set up for large amounts of luggage, but it didn’t seem like I was asked to pay extra- which was virtually nothing compared to the 500 EGP I was charged for shorter trips on Gobus coaches. I arrived in Cairo just before noon, which turned out to be the dusty lot I left Cairo from. Due to a confusing series of events, I walked in traffic to another station to buy a ticket to Luxor, which ended up being a Gobus service, leaving from the dusty lot of just walked from, leaving in six hours. The staff member assumed I was a rich American and sold me some kind of deluxe VIP ticket. I took an Uber back to where the bus was leaving, and left my bag there (another 50 EGP). From there I walked, had a very Western lunch, then a more traditional coffee on Meret Basha, overlooking the Ritz Carlton. Next to the Ritz was the old Egyptian Museum, formerly the grand jewel holding the majority of the Ancient Egyptian artifacts. Now it’s dusty and has been eclipsed by the brand new and very sexy Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza. Regardless, I was close and had time to kill, so I crossed multiple lanes of chaotic traffic, passed through security measures more stringent than most airports, paid the fee, and avoided the offer of a guide, and entered.

It’s still worth a look and displays some mummified remains and smaller artifacts. Additionally, the building itself has its own old-world charm.

Main Atrium, featuring King Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye.

During my visit, the place was somehow busier than the GEM during my visit, and I only stayed an hour, concerned I was going to be swept up in a tour group and suffer an existential crisis. I didn’t take many photos, but I did like this Sphinx depicting Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh from the Eighteenth Dynasty.

Crossing the roads again, I made the mistake of buying some mints from a gentleman sitting against a tree, and another man struck up a conversation, and next thing I knew, I was drinking coffee around the corner with him. I knew it was part of a sales pitch, but the path of least resistance led me to go along with it. After coffee and a chat, he led me to his handicrafts and perfume store, and I managed to leave without buying anything, but I did promise I would come back when I am back in Cairo.

When I returned to the bus company office and was reunited with my bag, I walked back over to the dusty lot that served as the overflow bus station where the bus was leaving. This is why I usually avoid expensive bus rides. They typically end up being much like the cheaper ones. The bus, once I was able to board, was very nice, with an LCD screen in front of me in case I wanted to watch any Arabic TV, a USB port for charging (yay), and a very comfortable reclining seat. I was also offered snacks, coffee or tea, and a bottle of water. I slept on and off for the entire trip, read and watched YouTube videos, and wished I had the budget for my internal flights.

At 2 am, the bus attendant woke me as we stopped at Luxor. I gathered my things and acted dumb as a different attendant tried to get a tip out of me for taking my bag out of the bus. I stumbled in the vague direction of my hotel. The first half of this walk I had to fend off the increasingly desperate taxi drivers. In the second half of the walk I had to convince someone walking with his family that I really didn’t want to book a tour while half-asleep.

Mosque I spotted, the only well-lit building at that time.

Luckily, my host was awake, and, showing an incredibly non-Egyptian pragmatism, simply grabbed my bag, showed me to my room, and left me to dream of puppies and maniac pixie dream girls.

Pyramids and Poop

There are three things I need you to understand about the Pyramids of Giza.

It doesn’t matter how many photos, videos, blog posts, articles, and documentaries you have consumed about this place; nothing will prepare you for just how impressive they are in person.
Every bit of statue, carving, every sarcophagus, every column, every obelisk that can be dragged away and taken to a museum or private collection has been. This leads to visiting the Pyramids to be a stark experience, devoid of context.
You cannot escape the overwhelming miasma of horse and camel shit.

After managing to avoid my Uber driver’s efforts to have a tour through his brother-in-law’s, fighting my way through the touts, and paying the exorbitant entry fee, I passed through the security as if I was some dubious English lord looking for a nice piece to hang over his mantle, and was let loose inside the Giza Necropolis.

Just past the gate was a modest pavilion, and I stopped there to apply sunscreen to my delicate skin. This is where I saw my first glimpse of the Sphinx.

You kind of have to squint to see it, unlike the sunscreen on my nose.

The way to the Sphinx was unclear, which I suspect was on purpose, so I walked uphill to the tomb of Meresankh III, Queen and wife of Khafre.

It was a comparatively modest structure that I enjoyed exploring despite various touts yelling at me at all times.

I moved on to the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Correctly known as the Pyramid of Khufu, it has lost eight metres of its height due to the pillaging of its limestone shell, but the one hundred and thirty-eight metres left was still enough to leave me dumbfounded. This colossal structure was the largest man-made building for three and a half millennia. Even with access to modern trucks, cranes, loaders, and diamond-tipped saws, the logistics to recreate it today would be staggering. It’s also the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing to this day. After walking around the pyramid and taking in its majesty, I moved on to the Pyramid of Khafre.

The middle-sized of the Great Pyramids, it’s perhaps the most striking of the three due to the limestone cap that still remains to this day. Here I could have paid extra to go inside, but my claustrophobia and early-trip cheapness prevented me from taking advantage of this.

The third of the Great Pyramids is the very much reduced Pyramid of Menkaure.

It stands at sixty-one metres high today. The large vertical gash is the result of the Sultan of Egypt’s efforts to demolish it; luckily, after eight months, this act of vandalism was abandoned.

By now, I was getting worn out and baked in the sun, and I followed a group of tourists who seemed to be walking with confidence, hoping they would lead me to the Sphinx.

Too many horses, not enough people willing to ignore their condition.

This area seemed to be where the freelance horse carriage operators congregate, away from the Great Pyramid scammer bros. I managed to find the entrance to the Sphinx, which was through the Valley Temple of Khafre, who was also one of the suspected builders of the Sphinx.

Once I made my way through the temple, I climbed a causeway with a view of the Sphinx, which is the closest one can get without bribing a guard or jumping a fence.

Standing taller than the nearby Pyramid of Menkaure, the Great Sphinx of Giza (It’s certainly not the only one; it’s a common motif) has been the stuff of legends since it was carved from the bedrock over four thousand years ago. I grew up reading fairy tales featuring this enigmatic statue. Including ones where the statue is alive and poses riddles to weary supplicants.

I managed to hold off on taking a selfie snogging this ancient monument, which at least placed me in the minority of the crowd on that day. He or she deserves more respect than that. I sat on the stone wall lining the causeway for a few minutes, simply soaking up the view as much as I could while tourists milled around me, taking photos from every available angle.

Great Spinx of Giza, with the Great Pyramid of Giza in the background.

Chaotic Cairo Part II

After Tokyo, Cairo was a shock. No matter how crowded the train, street or shop, there was a certain minimal elegance to the behaviour of the crowd. If someone had to step on your toes, there would at least be an apologetic shrug. In Cairo, it was a much more dog-eat-dog attitude. An Egyptian will think nothing of stopping in the middle of the street to chat to a friend who is already half blocking all the pedestrian traffic. Foot traffic is often already being made harder by street vendors setting out their goods on the ground. A four-lane road will often be reduced to a single lane due to people parking on the road, usually blocking other cars in. Queuing for a toilet or to be served at a corner store, I would have people step right in front of me as if I had suddenly been rendered invisible. I made the mistake of visiting the largest and most famous market in Cairo, Khan el Khalili, and was almost injured numerous times as large motorbikes rode down tiny lanes as fast as possible. After walking around like that for an hour, I never even came close to starting to buy anything, which seemed to be a common theme. Silence is entirely unknown here, with constant car horns, constant yelling, and constant loud music. At some point, I gave up buying goods from corner stores, as the prices for my goods seemed to be twice or three times what they should be.

This is not to say I didn’t have pleasant moments. A perfume seller on the street gave me excellent directions to my hotel when I first landed. A head-scarved lady with startling blue eyes offered me some confectionery while she waited for her friend buying some costume jewellery from a street vendor. A dark-skinned lady told me I “said no beautifully” when I declined her offer of a henna tattoo before continuing on her way.

At least they are not selling sushi, which I did not trust.

Chaotic Cairo Part I

Cairo, the city of a thousand minarets. A city with both feet firmly in the past, trying to sway into the future.

I would love to claim that I booked my hotel in Cairo with deliberate care, with consideration for location, amenities, and reviews. In fact, I booked it after ten seconds of thought, based on price, while frustrated about my lack of progress on planning this part of my trip. My hotel was five stories above an alley dedicated to selling car parts. The staircase wrapped around the old elevator shaft, which had stopped working decades ago.

Would you believe it looks even worse in reality?

The handrails may have once been quite ornate, but any pretense of grandeur had long ago been given up. My room was small, being divided up from a larger suite, two walls made up of unpainted plasterboard, the ceiling peeling paint, and plaster dropping away from the wooden beams. I had to provide my own soap and toilet paper; the shared bathroom did not even feature a bum gun or bucket and jug. It was clean and safe enough, but I took care not to leave anything in my room worth stealing.

In the morning, I walked a short distance from my hotel and found a traditional cafe in an alleyway. There, I enjoyed my first Arabic coffee since COVID.

I think what draws me to these sorts of places is that in a world where you are never far away from a Starbucks, these cafes are largely doing business in the same way for the last hundred years. Cash only, coffee brewed by hand above flames, and barely any English spoken. Fully caffeinated, I completed my efforts in returning to full human status by getting a shave and a haircut at a tiny barber shop I passed earlier. I was, however, not feeling up to any serious sightseeing, so I continued walking aimlessly. I got lost in a series of streets lined with shops selling name plaques, name stamps and similar office supplies. When I managed to escape this enclave, I got lost in a series of streets focused on selling lighting fixtures and other electrical parts. Eventually I found myself in an alleyway where the focus was more useful to me; coffee and shisha. I spent a few hours here, drinking coffee, reading, and watching the tide of humanity, which seemed to be darker-skinned than what I expected to see in Egypt, which I assumed to be Nubian.

There was a lot of traditional dress, traditional three-kisses greetings between men, and, of course, mobile phone use, which was the single sign of modernity, apart from the noise of traffic.

Early evening, I found myself in a pedestrian boulevard, having eaten nothing in Cairo yet, I discovered a no-frills restaurant, which was something of a local favourite.

I wandered some more after my early dinner, finding some nice, more modern cafes down alleyways closed off to traffic.

Later, I was craving air-con and a place where I could do some writing unmolested. I walked to a nearby McDonald’s and ordered a tea from the kiosk before heading upstairs. After waiting half an hour, another patron took pity on me and sent a staff member to find out what was going on. Sarah appeared and commented on my handwriting being much like hers, then proved herself wrong by writing her name in my notebook much neater than I could ever manage.

When Sarah returned to me with my tea, I handed her one of my mini business cards, which delighted her, but she seemed to make a point in accepting it as a souvenir rather than any interest in contacting me. My hopes of gaining a beautiful Egyptian girlfriend dashed, I drank my tea and returned to my hotel to climb the stairs, alone and rejected.