I can’t say that Egypt has ever been on my bucket list. But when we were there just four weeks ago, I felt our short visit was one of the most fascinating experiences of my life. And my heart aches to see the chaos that has erupted.
It was one of many destinations on a Mediterranean cruise Ray and I took last month. Our visit was a few days after twenty people were killed in an Alexandria church bombing. Our cruise itinerary newspaper for the day quietly noted that we should avoid that section of the city, and we might reconsider touring Alexandria at all.
Two thousand excited cruisers disembarked the ship and clamored into a battalion of tour buses. Each bus was boarded by an armed tourism police officer, and the convoy departed for a two+ hour trip to Cairo. Gotta keep those tourists safe. Ray had made arrangements for our own private tour complete with van, driver, and guide. We didn’t have a dedicated police officer, but there were police checkpoints along the way, and our driver periodically called the Tourism Police to report our progress toward the Pyramids. They didn’t want us to come up missing either. Before our van was allowed onto the grounds of a posh hotel, guards held long poles with attached mirrors to inspect the underside of our vehicle. No bombs attached this time.
Traffic in Egypt is not for the faint of heart. “The lines in the road are just for decoration,” our guide Saul said, as a four lane highway morphed into eight lanes of honking, edging, dodging, bumper-to-bumper steel. Bumper to bumper at 120 km per hour. We were amazed to have spent five hours in that traffic without being maimed. Cairo drivers could knock out the general population much more easily than terrorists.
Tiny dented cars, miniscule trucks carrying massive loads, scooters, donkey carts loaded with crops, and horses all frantically converged from five directions into a rotary. Horn blaring, our driver edged into the din and squeezed our van into impossibly tiny openings. In well-rehearsed choreography, he dodged and inched through the din and emerged victorious on the other side of the rotary.
I was fascinated with the rawness of the landscape. There was garbage everywhere. Roads were flanked by shallow canals that were perhaps 40 feet across…all filled with garbage. No garbage pickup? Just dump the waste into the water. It appeared that they were dredged periodically to keep the water flowing, but the blackened rotted trash was deposited in unsightly mountains on the canal banks.
I asked Saul about the strange holed towers that seemed to flank every house. “They are pigeon towers,” he explained. “We eat them…they are like Viagra.” As a newlywed, Saul received weekly shipments of pigeons from his new mother-in-law. “She wanted a grandchild,” he said. It must have worked; Saul and his wife have an 18 month old toddler. I wonder if Saul is one of the protestors at Cairo's Tahrir Square who are determined to force Mubarak out. I wonder how he and his family will manage now that the tourist trade has evaporated for what could be years.
I wasn’t expecting my tears when I stood before the majestic stillness of the Pyramids. Even the most inspired photographs cannot capture their beauty. If you have experienced the Grand Canyon, you have an idea of what I mean. The Cairo vendors are “in-your-face” salespeople who have little concept of personal space, and they swarmed around the tourists to hawk their souvenirs like ants around a forgotten crumb. Our tour included a 4x4 ride through the desert, and the driver stopped for us at the top of the highest dune. In every direction as far as we could see, we were surrounded by pyramids. Amazing!
Ray and I feel very blessed to have been able to make what we hope is not a once-in-a-lifetime trip. Other than Canada, this was my first trip abroad. We agree that we have some catching up to do.
