Cairo, Aswan

February 13, 2010

We finally arrived in Cairo from Jerusalem after a very long bus trip. We planned to spend a few days in Cairo, visit Aswan, then go to Alexandria before coming back to Cairo to fly out to Istanbul. After the first night we checked into the Roma Pension, which was a cute, if a little cold and mosquito-ridden hotel in Downtown. Downtown is full of fantastic colonial buildings, something almost like a soot covered Vienna, but the Egyptians don’t like going there if they have the money to avoid it, and now the well-off live in little communities outside the city surrounded by huge walls. Nevertheless, Downtown was fantastic. The food in Cairo is incredibly cheap, and you can eat their delicious Koshary for something like $1 per serve (and trust me you need just one). We had it on a few occasions, most memorably on the first night when we all put way too much chilli in and couldn’t eat it. Koshary is basically a mix of macaroni, other pasta, rice and lentils with a tomato-like sauce and lemon juice and chili; it sounds horrible but it’s rather tasty.

The first few days we spent doing some very touristy but worthwhile things. We visited the Pyramids, which were nice, and we were chased around by a thousand camel sellers trying to get us to ride around the carpark on their camel. Morgan bought a paperweight pyramid that doubled as a pen holder and was a snow-globe with the snow replaced by shiny gold glitter. It was a stunning work. Next we went to the Egyptian Museum, where the actual museum is as much an attraction as the displays. It seems to be a huge storehouse, everything dumped atop each other even though we’re talking about 3000 year old mummies and the like. The room with Tutenkahmen was really cool, as everything was made of gold. I ran out of patience after a few hours and left to go to the American University of Cairo, where they wouldn’t let you in if you were not a student.

We also met a wonderful friend of our family there, Kohar, and her two daughters, who took all four of us to Islamic Cairo one evening. We spent a lot of time walking through the market and then past the old courtyard houses in the area, till we got tired and sat down at Fishawi’s, which is a famous ahwa (pipe-smoking and coffee drinking) place. The next day we left to go to Aswan. Getting a ticket for the train was absolute hell in Egypt; no-one actually wants to sell it to you, and you are told to come back later, or that it isn’t for sale, or to buy it on the train, or that we should have bought it before, all while fifty people try to barge in front of you in the queue. Finally something gives and you start yelling and they produce the tickets. Unfortunately for us, the idiot train guards decided to put all the tourists (who can’t sit with the Egyptians) into a second or third class compartment although we had all paid for first class at a hugely inflated price from what the Egyptians pay (but still came to about $12.)

Aswan was fantastic. It’s basically in the south of Egypt near Sudan, and sits on the Nile. The main attractions are the felucca’s, sail boats that go up and down the river as far as Sudan and Luxor. We were there for a few days and managed to take a few trips, first to the Botanical Garden built by Lord Kitchener (I think) on a small island in the middle of the river, and then up the river for three hours lazing around in the sun and walking on the uninhabited bank. There are some large banana and mango plantations there, and sometimes people take animals to feed there, but its far less populated than Aswan, and much prettier. It’s hard to explain Aswan’s appeal, since the food was awful, the train there and back was long and painful, and the hostel wasn’t exactly nice. See pictures below.

Finally we made it back onto the train (same ordeal as before, but it helped that the guy working in our hostel was station-master on his days off) and up to Alexandria.

Cairo also had some interesting cinemas around the town.