It's a great feeling landing in one of the richest cities in terms of cultural heritage. The Cairo we see on film is typically very busy streets with small shops at every corner and all Egyptians out to gyp you in every bargain. There IS an old souq like that of course, but as we drove to Sheraton from the airport at 9.00am in the morning, we passed through a huge modern city, chock-a-block with tall buildings and umpteen flyovers. It seemed almost like Mumbai without the jostling crowds! I was very impressed. Khartoum was definitely a small village before this. In fact, when I told one of our customers about this observation, he was shocked that I could even make the comparison: "Johannesburg, okay," he said. "But Khartoum! La, la..."
During the day, meeting customers and travelling through the streets, the city came through almost like home. The spread of regular shops and hawkers, the 'bindaas' people walking on the streets, the Calcutta-style driving -- all encouraged us to just take a walk in the streets, soaking in the bright sun and enjoying the 24-27 degC weather at this time of the year.
Cairo has a population of around 15 million, with maybe another 2 million floating (Egypt is 65 million). So it's a metro all right. Commuting modes include cars, buses, subways and trams! Yes trams -- I was thrilled to see them. There are ferries for crossing the Nile in a comfortable manner as well. The river flows right through the city and looks much more beautiful than it did at Khartoum. We have a good view of it from the 19th floor of our hotel and at night the lights on the river, as well as over the rest of Cairo, sparkle like diamonds at a candle-lit dinner. There are around ten bridges crossing the Nile and we crossed the water many times during the day.
Egyptians are in general a friendly, garrulous and 'drama-baaz' lot. But the city itself is very safe and tourist-friendly. There is a lot of European influence and people are dressed in the heights of fashion. This is one African country where there is money to spend and, as our customer said, shades of Jo'burg are there in the hotels and shopping plazas.
We worked throughout the day till 6 pm. Here people work 11.00 am to 10.00 pm in general, and only after around 9.00 pm, the evening is said to start. We went for dinner to an Italian restaurant decorated with wood-panelling, old pistols, anchors, ship's wheel and so on. The food was superb and in spite of this being the first day of the week, it was full. We left at 11.30 pm and there was not much of diminishing of cars on the road. We went to the university campus, which is huge, for some pictures, and got dropped after 12.00 pm.
Cairo/Alexandria: 17.10.2000
Quite a long working day today.
Planning time is very difficult here. To start with, people come to office between 10.00-12.00, and if we land up somewhere in between, we have to wait for an hour or so. Then there is no hurrying the business discussionl. After all the enquiries about families and weather, there will be at least an hour spent on how bad the business scene is, how regressive the economic policies and custom rules, how unscrupulous the competitors, how stingy the customers, and how ignorant suppliers like us to all these vagaries. If we are able to deal with three customers to there satisfaction, that is a very efficient day. Most days we are skipping lunch, or having something like pastries, and on all days dinner is outside. Time taken to complete meetings is also extended by the heavy Cairo traffic, the spread of the city, and consequently the considerable time that it takes to go from one place to another.
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Today we planned to go to Alexandria, a port on the Mediterranean, around 3 hours away by rail. We thought we'd leave by 2 pm and reach by 5 pm, still giving us an hour of daylight to let us see this beautiful city, after which we would meet our customers for 2 hours, leave by 8.00 pm, and be back at Cairo by 11.00 pm latest. But as usual, our morning customers delayed us so much that we could reach Alexandria only after dark and had to meet our customer immediately, a meeting that carried on to dinner and finished at 11.30 pm. The fleeting impression I had of Alexandria was that of a laid back city with a mixture of the modern and the ancient with the latest cars vying with horse-drawn carriages and trams (again!). In fact, here the trams criss-cross the city, unlike in Cairo where it is only in the suburbs and they are very long with three bogies.
We had gone to Alexandria by train, which was in this case a very well-maintained AC chair-car. Both the Cairo and Alexandria stations are quite big. The countryside is very much like 'graam bangla' -- green fields, cows, cottages. The tenement buildings near the stations have the typical semi-dilapidated look with clothing hanging outside.
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The days are passing quite fast and there is hardly any time for sight-seeing. We have reserved Sunday for the famous Cairo museum and the Pyramids of Giza. Plus the souq has to be visited to buy some take-aways. Hopefully, at least these will come through.
I forgot to mention the dinner at Alexandria. This port city is famous for sea-food and our customer took us for dinner to a roadside 'dhaba' sort of place which is his favourite sea-food joint. We chose the fish we wanted from a pile of iced fish and had a super dinner of grilled fish, lobsters (a heaped plate) and squid 'pakoras' (another heaped plate). I was having squid for the first time and quite liked it in the fried form.
Cairo: 18.10.2000
We had lunch at a small supermarket today and I tried out a chicken tawouk, which is grilled chicken fillets -- an Egyptian dish. It was served with rice. Excellent!
Today's highlight was a visit to the souq 'Khan-el-Khalili'. It's an amazing place - a maze of shops of all shapes and sizes, selling take-aways, jewelry, clothes, not only for tourists but for local Egyptians as well. But obviously the major focus is tourists. The place comes alive mainly at night, when the narrow passages are thronged with people and shop-keepers try to pull you into their shops! There are a number of stonework and silver shops, from one of which Ravi bought a lapis lazuli stone. Both this as well as the turquoise are very popular here among ornament-makers. I bought some hand-paintings on papyrus (which is far better than commercial prints on banana paper), negotiated down from 15 pounds to 7 pounds per piece! I also bought a ladies dress called 'galebia' -- a full-length cotton dress with beautiful papyrus work.
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In the narrow passages of the souq, people have set up restaurants and placed small tea-tables -- nothing but a big metal plate on a stand with a couple of small stools -- where people were generally sitting, having 'chai' or turkish coffee, and smoking sweet-smelling tobacco from 'sheesh', which is structurally same as the Indian 'albola'. The passage was so crowded that it was difficult to take a picture.
We had dinner in the souq at a small joint, five people squeezed into one corner, and were served Egyptian traditional food in a traditional way. The traditional food was mainly vegetarian -- kuboos with beans preparation, brinjal fry, egg-bhujiya, and crunchy veg chops (filafils). These were accompanied by some white chutneys with herbs which were very tasty (Egyptian cooking is not at all spicy; they prefer herbs). The kuboos is kept on the table and everybody takes food from the common plates.
We came out of the gullis to a courtyard outside at around 12.00 in the night. There were about a hundred small tables and chairs set up by the teashops. People were arriving all the time, often with big families, and immediately more tables and chairs would appear, spreading outward. Waiter-boys would come up puffing a sheesh to get it going and place it near the smoker. There would a number of small peddlers selling tissue ( a form of begging), plus serious peddlers with ornaments, carpets, stuffed animals etc would be moving around. A woman would suddenly appear, holding a small pot with burning coals and aromatic crystals (the pot hanging from a wire in her hand) and whirl the pot so near your face that you'll feel like ducking. If no 'baksheesh', she'll to drop the pot between your legs!
The best part was the number of singers going around with banjos and drums, who would sit at your table and sing for money. Between 12.00 and 1.30, while we were there, our companions called three sets of singers (the first solo with a violin-type instrument and the other two as pairs). They have very good voices and the tune & beat are very catchy.
The souq is open through the night. There is a very big mosque next to it and people often do their 4.00 am prayers and then leave, or come for prayers and stay on. It's literally vibrating with life all night through.
Cairo/Tanta: 19.10.2000
This morning I spent a couple of hours at the Egyptian museum. The collection is great, very well-preserved, and catalogued. One can see items and statues right from the Old Kingdom (around 2500 BC) to the latest Greco-Roman (100 BC). The whole place would take around 5-6 hours to see properly. I could not see the Mummy Room, but spent an hour with Tutankhamen, where almost a whole floor has been devoted to items found from his tomb as well as the coffins and body jewellery. The jewellery, mostly in gold with inlaid precious stones and coloured in various hues (red and blue being the favourite), show very fine craftsmanship. The handles of two knives found in his chamber have engravings that have to be seen to be believed! I saw the famous mask or head-covering of Tut that was laid over the head and shoulders of the mummy and weighed a solid 11 kg! The Egyptians apparently did not believe in 'Rest in peace'. Two of the three coffins were also there (the outer wooden one with the mummy inside is still in the tomb), with the inner one made of solid gold.
When I went through the Old and Middle Kingdom section (Tut is actually New Kingdom - the last king or pharaoh), I also found very good work in wood. They were also famous for working on stone monolith (single piece) statues and there are some that are twenty feet high.
There was quite a crowd in the museum today (mostly Europeans) with the tourist season just starting. Guides taking the groups around were shouting at the tops of their voices and I could simultaneously hear lectures in English, German, french, Spanish (I think) and Arabic. One or two guides had accosted me outside but I had politely declined. Cost apart, I did not have enough time for lectures and stories, having only 2 hours to walk through the place. In fact, with a guide it would have been far more enjoyable as the amount of myths, beliefs and traditions or folklore attached to the exhibits is quite a lot and beyond the scope of the small tags attached to the exhibits.
Mind you, guiding is a serious profession here and all guides have to study history, geography and archeology for anywhere between two to four years, appear for an examination held by the Ministry of Culture, and only then obtain the licence for a guide or a tour operator. So what they tell you, whether on a museum tour or in front of the pyramids, has quite a lot of depth and they are willing to tell much more than the standard package if you have the interest and the time. They are quite proud of their 5000 year heritage and find Indians quite the 'brother' on that count.
That afternoon we had lunch with a client at his house in Tanta where we had intended to conduct some business but it ended as a purely social affair. We had lunch at 5.00 pm and the tea and coffee and "something else please?" carried on till 8.00 pm. We were supposed to meet somebody else at 7.00 pm and had to keep on ringing him up and telling him that we were still held up. Egyptians have absolutely no idea of the value of time. Whenever we would tell these chappies please drop us back at the hotel, we were already late by an hour, they would get very concerned and say "Yes, yes, we will go now!", but physically nothing would move! In fact, we just about got back, had a bath, poured a peg - and our next guest landed up at 9.00 pm. We made him sit with us while we cheered ourselves up - young chap of 26, doesn't drink, chain-smokes, Lebanese by birth, born in Cairo, but has no official nationality and no passport. He's very sentimental about the lack of belongingness and has decided to become a millionnaire instead! Owns a yacht, goes fishing on the Red Sea and hunts deer in the desert. Extremely street-smart. At midnight we went to a roadside fast-food joint and had a bun-sandwich of chicken-liver. Ravi and Hesham had sandwiches of 'gambhari' (shrimp) which is extremely popular here. Must be cheap. Went to sleep at 1.30 am.
Cairo: 20.10.2000
Today, while going to a customer's place, we took a ride on Cairo's metro or subway. It's five years old but very impressive in terms of size of stations, cleanliness and frequency of trains, which is almost one in two minutes. Today was Friday, a holiday for offices and for a lot of shops, but there was still a fair number of people travelling. Cheap too, at Rs 5/- a ticket.
We had gone to Hesham's shop and had a pizza lunch there. In the afternoon he took me to Khan-el-Khalili once again and I bought some knick-knacks. We returned to the hotel at 7.30 pm sharp, since the customer who took us for lunch yesterday wanted to take us out for dinner again (big show-off!). We reached the poolside restaurant directly at Hotel Semiramis but our host landed up only at 9.30 pm. Held up by traffic apparently. Possibly true in this case, because today and tomorrow the Arab summit meetings were being held in Cairo. I tell you, something like this happens on many of my tours. In Mauritius, it was Vajpayee's visit, in Arusha it was the Burundi peace accord, and now this!
Anyway, this evening was one of the most peaceful evenings we had had till now -- no drinking and wrapped up by 11.30 pm. There was one lady beltings out famous Arabic and Egyptian numbers and our hosts seemed quite entertained. In the end, one of the hosts sang an Arabic song (with translation) and Ravi sang some Hindi songs for them (at the table, not at the mike). They all liked the meaning of the lyrics.
Tonight had actually been slated as belly-dancing night, but because a senior brother with his son also decided to attend the dinner, they decided to keep it a sober affair.
Tomorrow we have to go to Tanta, where these guys are based, for actual order-discussion, which will of course be followed by lunch. Tanta is 1.5 hours away.
Cairo: 21.10.2000
We were in Tanta from 2.00 pm to 8.00 pm. We were, as usual supposed to meet Hesham at 7.00 pm, so we had pleaded with the Tanta chappies to drop us back by 5.00 pm, which would give us 2 hours time to catch our breath. What bloody breath! Marathon runners breathe oxygen in easy-chairs compared to us.
We gave some gin-mixture to the Egyptian helmsman, a young lad of twenty, and he promptly named himself Captain Cocktail and started acrobatics sitting on the tiller. He would sail the boat quite close to the riverbank and then turn quickly, tilting the boat like a motorbike, to our conternation and his great delight.
Today was Sunday and I had targetted to see the pyramids and the sphinx at least on a guided tour. I talked to a tour operator, whose number I had picked up yesterday, and told her that I wanted a car and a guide in half-an-hour for a 4-5 hours sightseeing of the ruins of Memphis, the Saqqara pyramid and the Giza pyramids with Sphinx. She told me that a one-day notice was needed to organise this and why don't I take it tomorrow.
I explained to her that I was here only for today and could she help out? After some hunting around 'outside', she finally sent me a small coach with driver and English-speaking guide and we were off around 11.30 am to see the ruins of Memphis, the Saqqara pyramid and the pyramids of Giza. Since I was alone in the coach, this would cost me $70/-. Well, this might be my once-in-a-lifetime visit to Egypt, so I didn't argue.
This portion of the Nile settlement is what is called the Old Kingdom, and this is where pyramid-building first commenced. The later dynasties of Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom (ending with Tut-Ankh-Amen) moved upstream to Upper Egypt, to Luxol and Aswan, for example. The capital of the Old Kingdom was Memphis, on the west bank of the Nile. The Egyptians had a very well-developed philosophy of death and resurrection, which is why they used to bury their dead with his favourite wordly possessions to help him cross the river of death to meet Osiris for the Judgement, after which the soul will come back to the body again. The west bank of the Nile was reserved for the dead and all cities were usually on the east bank. Memphis was an exception and was built on the west bank to provide a natural protection against Syrian invaders from the north-east side of Egypt. However, a major flood in the Nile is said to have submerged the city which was later discovered through the finding of a lot of coins which showed the presence of a major trading area. Most of the architecture had been destroyed in silt-submersion and a few of the excavations have been preserved in an open-air Memphis museum at the site. These include a 'stile' or tablet with inscriptions on 'Rules for visitors' to the city, an alabaster sphinx whose period is not known as it carries no cartouche or royal seal, a stone sarcophagus or coffin, and various small statues. However the most impressive statues are two ten-feet high ones of Ramses II, as well as a massive unfinished statue of his, that are carved from lime stone and carry a fair degree of detail of the dress of that period. Ramses II was said to be a very vain man and after he became king, he destroyed the statues of all earlier kings of Memphis. Moreover his statues are always quite muscular and the standard false beard attached to his face was straight instead of curved, indicating he had ordered all these made while he was alive. In the horizontal big statue, which, if the legs were finished, would have been around 30ft high, the carving details are very good indeed, including nails on fingers.
After Memphis, we visited the Saqqara Step pyramid nearby, which was built for the tomb of King Djoser and was the first proper pyramid attempted in Egypt. Till then, be it king or nobleman, they had their burial chambers deep under the ground and had on top a flat structure made of mud-bricks or inferior limestone called 'mastaba' or a bench. The same had been the case for Djoser, when the innovative architect Imhotep came to his court and decided that the structure needs to be taller since it could not be seen beyond the walls of the Great Court, on the north side of which the tomb was located. So he kept extending the base layers and raising the structure with limestone bricks till he was satisfied with its height, and the first pyramid was born, reaching a height of 62 metres. This pyramid had elaborate inner passages and chambers which have now collapsed.
Imhotep also experimented with the first free-standing pillars of Egypt, the structure of which was copied from the structure of the papyrus stem. These pillars are found in the entrance passage to the great court. But his knowledge of pillars was so shaky (joke unintended) that each pillar was attached by a low strong wall to walls of the chamber.
This is the start of the season and I found bus-loads of European tourists everywhere with their guides giving very loud lectures. I think that together with their other papers, the guides must have been tested for their lung-power as well!
Today was a very clear day. From the Saqqara site, we could see the 'bent pyramid' as well as the Giza pyramids very faintly in the distance. This view of all the three sets of pyramids together, showing the evolution of pyramids through the Old Kingdom, is usually difficult to see.
From Saqqara, we proceeded to Giza, the site of the three famous pyramids and of the Sphinx. I have found that in all these cases of visiting historical structures, they are suddenly upon us without giving any hint of their hugeness. I mean, I knew that the pyramids were big, but the cars unload you almost at the foot of the biggest pyramid and you get a crick in the neck suddenly looking up a height of 140 metres! This consisits of around 200 layers of limestone blocks, each block weighing anywhere between 2.5 to 15 tonnes. Here I am talking of the biggest pyramid, that of Khafu. The other two pyramids, that of Khafra and Memkaura, are smaller. All the blocks are now bare but there was a smooth coating initially which has now been weathered away.
The pyramids had been subject to marauder's attacks. Mamoon of Syria had apparently tried to break into the biggest pyramid and accidentally discovered the passage. He had cleaned out everything except a 2-inch high statue! The inner passages and chambers were open to visitors, but the day's quota was already full, much to my relief. The idea of walking half-bent along a passage 150 metres long in order to reach an empty burial chamber did not appeal to me much.
The guide was giving me a lecture on the pyramids -- the Egyptian version. As per him, neither did ETs build the pyramids, nor were slaves employed under inhuman conditions. Every year, for around 3 months, the Nile would flood all the surrounding land and work in the fields would be at a standstill. During those times, the Pharaohs would ask the peasants to help build the pyramids, which they would willingly do. This way the Pharaoh would reduce discontent and the people would also have some income. This is also the reason why it took so long to build the pyramids.
The other interesting fact I learnt was that to get the blocks up, pulled on wooden sledges with the ground lubricated with milk, a huge ramp had been built around the pyramid. Apparently, building this ramp took as much effort as building the pyramid itself.
I had always imagined the pyramids and sphinx to be somewhere in the middle of the desert, to be reached by camels and all. In fact, till around 20 years ago, it was like that. But gradually the city has grown to within 200 yards of the structures. When I saw the sphinx, I was quite shocked to see the sphinx gazing upon a row of houses barely 100 yards away. I am sure he can see into all the bedrooms! This being the start of the tourist season, the place was already crowded with busloads of tourists elbowing each other around the statues and temples. There was a place called 'Panorama Point' from where all three pyramids can be phographed in one shot and the area resembled 'rather mela' more than anything else. There was a fair mixture of white, black and yellow skin-colours........
On the way back, we stopped at the Papyrus Institute and saw a demonstration of how paper is made from papyrus. Papyrus is still made nowadays for making artistic drawings for tourists, and the peeled-off skins are used for weaving baskets etc. The place also had a good display of drawings on papyrus. The quality was very good but the price was also very steep. the guides must be getting a commission out of every sale made to customers brought in by them.
I was finally back by 4.30 pm and quite tired. We left the hotel by 7.00 pm and Hesham picked us up. Ravi wanted to buy some Egyptian crackers for the coming Diwali at home and Hesham took us to a market where they were selling crackers and sparklers in the open. To our amusement, we found half the stuff was from Sivakasi! The crackers they make in Egypt are a bit different because they do not have wicks. We went to have dinner at a fast-food joint and even then, managed to reach the airport by 8.00 pm, two hours before departure time. Ravi said he had never been this early to the airport in Cairo before this.
It's a long journey ahead. We will reach Nairobi tomorrow morning at 6.00 am, and then go on to Johannesburg, from where we will jump to Maputo, reaching at 2.30 am. Ooof!
