Not sure what to say about Egypt, the small piece of it we’ve seen. Not easy. Not for kids. Not a fan. Not totally unexpected, though. We shortened our original plan of a couple weeks in Egypt following the guidance of a friend who visits Egypt for work. Three days seemed enough to fulfil a long-carried pyramid vision. It was. Happy we came. Happy to leave.
You know a place isn’t for you when you start looking at the details of your departure flight soon after arrival. You know you shouldn’t dwell long when complete strangers offer you stern warnings to watch out for your children. You know things are not well when your fellow humans look at you not with curious eyes or smiles of shared humanity but with hunger and detached calculation. You know you aren’t on friendly turf when you repeatedly watch bright smiles drop to lifeless stares. You know you are not connecting to the heart of a culture when the “Egyptologist” guide responds to your thoughtful questions not with engagement or delight in sharing their knowledge but with vacant, rehearsed answers that feel like the dismissals of fools. I’m thinking there is a reason no flights go direct from Vietnam to Egypt. The two countries could not be more different. One needs a transition to the harshness of this land. Our arrival felt like a smack in the face, a drop from a great height.
There is an ill mood in Cairo, at least the small pieces of it we saw. One gets the feeling of walking a gauntlet, like traps have been laid for your arrival, century-old traps caked with the blood and hair of the millions who have come before you. Heck, ancient Greeks and Romans played tourists here. You’re just the next helpless prey. That is common knowledge. You can sense there are strings attached to every human interaction, that you are a fly in the sticky netting of a community’s intricate web of scams. You can feel an electricity in the air, passing communications you are not privy to- instructions given in glances, assessments done in a blink, deals struck wordlessly. There is a pat-down done with a dozen simultaneous eyes. You aren’t a person. You are a commodity from which to extract monetary value. You aren’t a traveller. You are a carcass for the pack to share in shreds. Despite my earlier Indonesian advocation of assuming “purity of intention,” I can see sometimes this is just dumb. Not to mention, dangerous.
There is clearly an oppression that has made many people here stop caring – a lack of effort, a lack of connection, a lack of love. I suppose this is common on tourist tracks world-wide, but a pointlessness to genuine human interaction has taken deep hold in some parts of this ancient land, and it feels like it’s been here for a while. There is also an eery absence of women… and a noticeable abundance of men lounging and prowling about. There is a menacing energy to the atmosphere, a threatening lack of direction to this obvious pulse of masculine vigour- the unemployed talent, the inactivated potential, the unchanneled lifeforce of masses. It seems like an angry mourning flows beneath the surface. But maybe I’m just simplifying or projecting my subjective view on things I know nothing about. The vibe is clear though. This is not humanity in a thriving state. It’s a far cry from the gung-ho, pitch-in, lift-one-another-up energy of Vietnam. No. The energy here is quite the contrary. It siphons one’s Chi like the Dementors in Harry Potter. Expressions that come to mind: wheeling-and-dealing, dark underbelly, smoke-and-mirrors… “Time to get the heck out of Dodge.”
My impressions are based mostly on the area of Giza, super tourist land, but that said, there aren’t a lot of tourists wandering around. There are far too many warnings for easy blow-ins to happily explore in droves. Most people are ushered in and out under guard of paid tours. The free tourists you do see walking around have a striking resemblance to the mangy street dogs, the carpet-adorned camels, and the whip-scarred horses milling about the dusty lanes. All look brow-beaten and guarded, survival mode in full effect. You need to take on the local lifeless detachment like an armour to fend off the fiends. This absence of tourists adds to the ominous air of this most ancient of tourist sites. Again, I must admit that my assessment is based on very limited time, and thus, fairly limited interactions. And no doubt, some of our less positive interactions managed to soil what otherwise might have been happy encounters with others. It’s hard to disarm yourself of suspicions when you are repeatedly reminded to be on guard.
We started off with an accommodation issue. After arriving in time for a sunset drive through a pink-tinted Cairo, taxi music casting an Arab spell to soften our travel-weary moods, we found our hotel was part of some sort of name-changing scam. There were two different names at the entrance- Pyramids Express View Inn and Makadi Pyramid Hotel. And there was another on the room keys and doors- World Pyramids Hotel. None of which were the name we had booked the room under- Heaven Pyramids View Hotel. We were notified of a name-change via email just before check-in and were assured this would not cause any issue. The room cost US$80 for three nights, so we weren’t too surprised to find it falling short of the Booking.com description. I guess a good way to evade bad reviews is to repeatedly change the name of the establishment’s listing.
On the plane, we had read aloud to the boys, “The fireplace and spa are the standout features of this room.” A soak sounded quite nice after a day of flight travel. Um. Yeah. Big surprise. No spa, and the shifty teenager at the front desk had never heard the word, nor had he probably ever seen one. It did have three queen-sized beds with clean sheets, as well as hot water and the promised pyramid view, so I was happy to call it a win overall, but the boys didn’t like the taste of this intentional deception. Injustice is not tolerated well in our crew. The tv didn’t work, the shower-head was broken, there was no source of coffee, and the door was so sketchy we instantly decided we would be carrying a backpack of all our valuables everywhere we went. There was also a pretty nasty scene upon arrival when a weak internet signal threatened a Duolingo streak. Having left our matchbox apartment in Hanoi at 4:45AM and flown 10 hours to arrive to our less-than-advertised accommodation, the loss of an 80-day Spanish practice streak was grounds for a total mental breakdown. Fair enough. We all have limits.
My husband had arranged a car and guide for the pyramids, as well as a felucca (sailboat) tour on the Nile. Overall, we found our guides were more like bodyguards, not true physical defence but buffers against the multi-lingual, persistent, and sometimes magician-like hawkers. Our pyramids guide was quite aloof, but she spoke English clearly if lacking in details and heart. Our felucca guide was a new grad “Egyptologist” who did not offer any knowledge of the Nile, present or past, but she was sweet and liked to chat with the kids. In general, two days was quite enough to get dragged through the tourist courses. A friend in Hoi An had told me a story about being drugged at a perfumery associated with a Giza tour. Sniffing the nice scents, her children all passed out, and she was unable to raise objections as her penny-pinching husband spent US$900 on bottles of perfume. As we were repeatedly offered trips to perfumeries and papyrus factories, this story was always singing in the back of my mind. We did do the papyrus showroom. But not the perfume.
The pyramids were spectacular though, the total fulfilment of a life-long vision. On the edge of Cairo, in the desert landscape thinned of tourist predators, the Sphinx and Pyramids of Giza did not disappoint. The area is bright, expansive, and offered many vistas to just pause and behold. A Wonder, indeed. Even without consideration of all the astounding facts of age, size, and architectural feats, there is a weight and a lightness in the presence of these structures, like the exposure of human rudimentary capability. The sum of unquantifiable human labour and ingenuity. The defeat time. There is immense power and incomprehensible durability. 4600 years of it. These are the feats of mortals who truly managed the indestructible immortality so many in history seem to have craved. It is grandeur. Total awe. It’s an echoing stillness of ancient origin, and it seems like it will go on forever.
It was a fine morning in the bright beige landscape, especially with a funny little camel ride along the way. I didn’t think these animal-loving boys would want to ride a camel as they are always worried about how animals are treated, but they were keen, and it was an unexpected delight to be on the backs of these “proud and majestic animals” (a Jumanji II description we kept quoting). There is something about the silhouette of a line of camels that seems familiar and beckoning. It’s the revisiting of a memory I have never actually created. Makes you wonder how much of what’s in our brains is planted there by media imagery, not a reality of our own. Or maybe I really have lived a past life in the desert dunes, swaying in a string of camels. The vast age of this site makes such things seem possible.
That’s all I have to say on our short stent in Egypt. It doesn’t seem fair to drone on in unflattering descriptions when I really didn’t get a well-balanced taste of the country. I’ll let photos finish off our family’s short tale. I have to say though, there is something very special in the fifty shades of Egyptian beige. It’s a stirring spectrum of colour to observe- tan, taupe, khaki, cream, almond, cappuccino, brown sugar, poo. So many shades patch-worked into a desert cityscape. From the dusty earth in rocky mounds and shifting dunes to the crazy, lane-less roads of seatbeltless drivers. From the packed stacks of apartments abandoned and over-inhabited to the cloak of polluted haze covering it all. This limited spectrum of desert tone is a new sight to my traveller’s eye. I see its beauty, but it is a beauty I’d never call mine.
We have arrived in Turkey now and are set for a week of road-tripping before spending ten days in Istanbul. The green of spring on the undulating hills here is a sight for these beige-blinded eyes.
Mapping the Gap 
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