Walking like an Egyptian

We are still in Wonderland. Egypt is quite an incredible place, mainly because of the people but also in part because of its stunning sights.

Including the mighty Nile.

Perceptive readers of the blog may have noticed an at times negative view of India. One of the things that makes Egypt so special is the contrast to our earlier tour. There are scams, but they are tried on with a smile. When you say no thank you to a tout, they call out “You are welcome, have a nice day” (only one has called us “English bastards”), when bargaining they offer you sensible prices to begin with (the only truly unpleasant and dishonest person has been the hotel concierge) and only one person has grabbed us, and that was to shake our hand. Wandering through a bazaar is like running the gauntlet of pleasantries, and the friendliness can be fatiguing. It makes quite a change from small children putting curses on us, and alleging that we have “very bad karma”.

Our first day was spent wandering through Cairo, an alarmingly large, and not terribly Egyptian town. After gawking at Tutankhamon’s gold death mask in the Egyptian museum (alas no photos were allowed), the absence of street signs in English and large-scale maps necessitated navigating by the sun through backstreets towards the Old Islamic Quarter.

We failed, had a heated discussion about the merits of doing that, enthusiastically debated whose fault it was, and then took a taxi to the Islamic Quarter. It is home to the world’s oldest continually operating university ...

And a really nice bazaar, although certainly not the hustle and bustle you would expect from guidebooks because everyone keeps wishing you a happy holiday.

We again navigated by the sun (Matt got us lost again) around the outskirts of town, dodging peak hour traffic. Happily we managed not to get ourselves run over.

Cairo is where 1973 Peugeot 504’s come to die. They are everywhere, mainly used as taxis. We tried to get one for a day trip into the desert, but had to settle for the remains of an old Renault.

We travelled through an oasis of date palm crops ...

Which immediately yielded to desert and the oldest pyramid in Egypt, at Darshur. (Note, this is not the Great Pyramid - there are 118 pyramids in Egypt, apparently.)


Visitors can climb inside, which involved pushing past bribe merchants at the entrance and crawling down a narrow alleyway into the bowels of the pyramid.

We trekked onwards to Memphis, and saw a statue of Ramses the Great ...

And then braved the wild pharaohnic hounds

To visit Saqqara, a highly interesting pyramid site

With a funerary temple in the lengthy process of reconstruction.


We also got a chance to crawl inside another pyramid, fortunately one of the very few that still has hyroglyphics and death poems carved into the wall.

That night we were entertained by the Sufi dancers, who crazily twirled in costumes non-stop for nearly an hour without suffering a brain freeze.

Cairo has been a voyage of discovery. As a consequence of our crawling through ancient tombs, Penny is now suffering severe pyramid injuries in the form of strained thigh and buttock muscles. She is stoically keeping the whinging to a minimum, though her gait and pace about town are akin to that of a geriatric tortoise.

We saw the Great Pyramids and the Sphynx today, but that will have to wait for another blog, provided we survive tonight’s overnight train to Aswan ...