[I've only written 12,000 words so far about the big trip, so I suppose there's no reason not to go ahead and slap on a few more and close this out.]

Our lame-duck tour company had, belatedly, offered us some options for our Cairo sightseeing pleasure on Saturday, May 31. We could have a tour guide, or a driver, or a tour guide and a driver, or we could do it all on our own using public transportation and taxis. After some hasty private consultation, Laura and I opted for a driver only. We figured it would be useful to have someone who could take us where we wanted to go, but wouldn't get in our way or try to drag us off on annoying consumer side adventures.

Laura Chavoen in the courtyard of the Mohammed Ali Mosque, The Citidel, Cairo We set off on our adventure first thing after our buffet breakfast at the hotel (which featured the best damn fresh orange juice I've had in a long time). We had three items on our sightseeing agenda: the Citadel, Islamic Cairo, and Coptic Cairo. Well, two out of three isn't bad.

Things started off well enough. Our driver whisked us away to the Citadel, that ancient fortress city built up by Saladin to defend against the Crusaders. We were especially enamored of the Mohammed Ali Mosque, a grand structure in the Ottoman Baroque style—even though Laura's carefully composed outfit was not proof against being wrapped in a green cloak as we entered. Our small playlist of five videos from the Citadel complex will give you an idea what we saw there. Or, if you prefer to see only one, try this video of Laura in the courtyard of the Mohammed Ali Mosque:


We wandered the streets around the Citadel for a while before the appointed time to meet our driver again, and that's when we received our first real baptism into the game we came to call "Cairo Frogger." Simply put, that's the way you cross most streets—like the hapless videogame character, boldly striding into the street and progressing from lane to lane as you see opportunities open up. The streets around the Citadel provided us our training round of Cairo Frogger. The expert levels would come later.

One agenda item down, two to go! But it was the next item that caused us problems. "Islamic Cairo" is a specific area of the city, filled with ancient mosques and markets. It's a common tourist destination. (We did not exactly realize it, but we were already on the edge of it.) But our driver did not seem to grok our drift. "Anywhere you look," he said, "that is Islamic Cairo. You want to see mosques. Anywhere you look, there are mosques."

Apparently the term does not translate well from English.

If we'd had a better idea what exactly we were looking for in Islamic Cairo, or maybe if we'd chosen guidebooks with better maps, we might have made some headway in this debate. As it was, we decided to curtail our mounting frustration and move on to the third agenda item. We figured we could always go back to the hotel, get some directions from the concierge, and take a cab to where we wanted to go later.

So it was that we skipped ahead to Coptic Cairo, where our frustrated driver parked and told us he'd meet us in an hour. The Hanging Church was marvelous, with elaborate cruciform woodwork all over the interior, and some of the more gruesome icons I've seen in a Christian church. Our driver had shadowed us from the car to the church, which creeped me out until I passed him lighting a candle and he sheepishly admitted to me that he was Christian and only got the opportunity to pray in church while squiring tourists around.

We saw some other cool stuff in the Coptic quarter, including the Roman Tower and the Church of St. George. In an underground market passage, as I was paying for a photographic print of a zeppelin over a mosque (possibly a Lehnert & Landrock bootleg, I'm not sure), I managed to knock a crocodile magnet off a wall and break it. The superglued croc is now stuck to our fridge.

After Coptic Cairo, we had our driver take us back to our hotel. We paid him and thanked him and sent him on his way. Then a very helpful fellow at the front desk assisted us in getting a taxi to the Khan al-Khalili, the ancient marketplace in Islamic Cairo we had hoped to see that morning. The taxi ride there was easy, and we spent an overawed hour getting lost in that complex, crowded maze of narrow merchant alleys. By now we had gotten pretty good at ignoring the hawkers' come-ons, so we actually had a fairly pleasant time.

Eventually we got hungry, so we found an attractive-looking cafe in a relatively uncrowded plaza and sat down for some coffee and falafel sandwiches. We chatted with a pair of tourists at the next table, and then somehow found ourselves wrapped up in a conversation with the owner of the restaurant. He was a distinguished-looking older gentleman dressed neatly in pristine Western business casual. He looked as if the heat did not dare touch him. When we told him how much we loved his falafels, he told us it had been his grandfather's restaurant, and that the place was listed in our guidebook as having the best falafels in Cairo. (Sure enough, it was.)

Wanna buy a turtle? He also owned an import/export business, he said, and, as he was the designated collector of alms for the poor from the businesses of the Khan, he claimed to know all the merchants around. This was an assertion he proceeded to back up by taking us on a whirlwind backstreet tour of the marketplace, where he helped us acquire all the gift items that remained on our Egyptian shopping list. Alabaster, mosaic glass, saffron, hibiscus tea, he helped us buy it all—or in point of fact, purchased it for us from the merchants in question. Along the way, he led us up backstairs and through the dusty workshops of the artisans who produced filigreed silver and mother-of-pearl-inlaid wood and more. He slapped backs and shook hands all around, everywhere we went. He and I both sneezed and needed to blow our noses in the covered spice market, where a hundred exotic scents hung heavy in the air, puffed up from open barrels and burlap bags with the tops turned down in neat cuffs.

It was a magical hour, and at the end of it, back in the gentleman's own shop, he had all our purchases wrapped up for us, and we settled with him personally for the amount of 400 Egyptian pounds (a little less than 80 bucks, which still seems a bargain for everything we bought). He cadged an additional 30 pounds from us as alms for the poor, helped us find an honest cab driver to take us back to our hotel, and bid us farewell.

If we were fleeced, then we were fleeced with gentility and urbanity, and we were happy to let it happen. Laura still wonders why he singled us out. I look at Laura and I don't wonder.

That evening, after stashing our booty at the hotel, we played several harrowing rounds of Cairo Frogger in the process of hunting down a place to have dinner. On a pleasant side street that for some reason had a series of signs advertising Activia running down its grassy median (I guess even Egyptians need yogurt that makes you poop), we found a restaurant called Prestige and took a table at the sidewalk. Over the course of about three horus, we drank fruity drinks, ate a small pizza, and smoked some shisha (watch us toke up here and here), while colorful Cairenes filled in the tables all around us. Altogether, it was a fine and civilized way to close out our Middle Eastern adventure.
We knew that Friday, May 30, as another long travel day, was going to suck. We just didn't know yet how badly it was going to suck.

Over dinner the evening before, Ra'ed had broken the news to us that there would be yet another change in our travel plans. It seems the tour company had not booked our return tickets on the morning ferry to Taba soon enough, and the earliest ferry with berths still remaining would not be until 7:00 pm. That would get us to Taba far, far too late to make any bus that would reach Cairo at any remotely reasonable hour.

The solution foisted upon us—dreamed up by that same favorite benefactor of ours in Cairo who only days before had failed to get us from Hurghada to Sharm al-Sheikh by boat—was overland travel. It seemed fairly straightforward, if tedious, on the face of it. Ra'ed would drive us back to Aqaba, hand us seventy American dollars, and drop us off at the border crossing to Eilat, Israel. Once in Israel, we would take a cab to the Egyptian border, where a driver would be waiting to spirit us south to Dahab to catch our bus.

It sounds so simple, doesn't it?

As it turned out, the crossing into Israel went just fine. There was only one dicey moment, when a large and scary immigration officer demanded to know the origin of my family name. ("I—I don't know," I said. "We're American or Canadian on both sides going back two hundred years." Now, I do know that my roots stretch back to England, Scotland, and Wales, but who can recall that when confronted by a hulking Israeli who probably thinks your name sounds Aryan? Laura, obviously French in extraction, had no problem.) This, by the way, was the only man among all the border personnel we encountered on our adventure in Israel. The women were generally much more pleasant.

Once we made it through passport control, a border guard hailed a taxi for us, and we were on our way. The cab driver sped us through Eilat, pointing out with pride such consumer temples as Zara and Club Med. He seemed a little offended when I asked him if his accent was French, but I think I managed to smooth it over by saying we knew Israel was like our home in New York City, full of people who've migrated from all over the world. At the Egyptian border, the driver charged us $25 American. I gave him a fifry, and he gave me back 50 shekels in change. (Two shekels to the dollar!)

Our exit visas ended up costing us, much to the amusement of the woman at the exchange desk, 50 shekels plus 20 dollars plus 2 dinars. That meant our transit had cost us, thus far, approximately three dollars more than the travel company had spotted us at the outset. And there was still one more border left to cross.

Leaving Israel was perfectly pleasant. We crossed the long barren stretch of pavement between Israel and Egypt and entered the Taba border station. In all innocence, we strolled right up to the Egyptian passport control officer, handed him our passports ... and were denied entry to Egypt.

Let's back up over a week, to the day we flew into Cairo. The very first person to meet us there was a travel facilitator from our tour company. His job was to provide immigration with a "guarantee" for our stay in Egypt—proof that our travel was all prearranged and would be supervised by the company for the duration of our time in country. This allowed him to purchase our fifteen-dollar entry visas for us. Without such a guarantor, the only way for us to enter the country would have been for us to acquire visas at an Egyptian consulate before leaving the U.S.

The passport officer at Taba pointed to the visas in our passports, which had been closed out when we left Egypt for Jordan two days earlier. "If you don't have a company here to purchase your visas," he rather impatiently explained, "then you can go back to Eilat and apply for visas at the consulate there."

Of course, it was a Friday, and in that region of the world the weekend is Friday and Saturday. The consulate in Eilat would not be open until Sunday.

"We were probably in a rush, and missed our tour guide," I said. "We'll go back and find him. Sorry."

It turns out that in our hurry to reach passport control we had strolled right past a small group of tour guides inside the border station. We went back to them and asked which of them was from our company.

Ahem. None was.

The tour guides were as helpful to us as they could be, though. They got on the phone to our accursed travel agent in Cairo, who, when the cell phone was passed to me, seemed utterly mystified that we hadn't been able to waltz through the border like Fred and Ginger. "You don't need another visa," he said.

"Um, yes, we do. Now, where's the guy who can get it for us?"

I won't detail the further phone calls and mounting anger and frustration we experienced over the next couple of hours, stymied at the border as we were. A driver was waiting for us on the far side of the crossing, but he wasn't authorized to make the kind of guarantee required by Immigration. A helpful and friendly tour guide explained to us apologetically that there were guides who could be bribed to provide such a guarantee, but that his was a reputable company which could not assist us in that regard.

Eventually our nimrod in Cairo called with a brainstorm. "Do you have e-tickets for your flight out of Cairo?"

"Yes."

"You have your flight itinerary handy?"

"Yes." I had taken to a certain measure of curtness in my dealings with him.

"Take it to the passport control officer. Explain that you've been in Egypt already, and you need to enter again in order to leave."

Next to the currency exchange, there was an office marked "Immigration." The door was open. I shrugged, and Laura and I walked over to peek through the door. Inside was a tall, stern-looking man in an immaculate white uniform seated behind a desk. His hair was steel-gray and receding, and his nose was a thin curving blade. I sat down, laid the itinerary before him, and explained the situation—adding that our travel agent in Cairo was an obvious loser with a camel and a donkey for parents. (Okay, maybe I only said I didn't know why their man wasn't there.)

The immigration officer said, carefully, "I am only immigration officer. I am sorry, I can do nothing. But perhaps I have possible solve for you."

He went on to explain, as the reputable tour guide had, that certain companies would provide guarantees to tourists for a fee of $35 American. He pressed a button and went to the door. After a moment a fellow appeared in the doorway. The immigration officer raised his hands, palms forward. "I am only immigration officer. I know nothing of these things."

To truncate a long story, the man at the door wrote out a travel guarantee for us, purchased two visas from the bank, walked us through passport control where the same officer who had denied us entry stamped our visas with a cynical smirk, and walked us outside to the parking lot beyond. That's where I forked over 380 Egyptian pounds, the equivalent of 70 bucks—30 for the visas, 40 for the grease.

And that's what it took. We were back in Egypt.

And hopping mad.

We met our driver and set off south in his van. It was now 1:00 pm. We had missed our 12:30 bus from Dahab. The next bus would leave Dahab at 2:30. It was a two-hour drive from Taba to Dahab. By now we were impervious to terror on tortuous, twisting desert highways. Our driver got us there in ninety minutes. We barely had time to pee, and then our bus was off and rolling.

It was a large, comfortable coach-style bus, but with no restroom on board. We tried not to drink much water for the duration of the ride. We'd been told the trip would take six hours. Actually, it took eight. Having traveled south down the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba, we then drove west across the Sinai Peninsula, back north up the coast of the Gulf of Suez, and then through the tunnel back underneath the Suez Canal. There was one rest stop in the middle of all this, but it was only a quickie so the men on the bus (Laura was the only woman) could have a smoke and pee in the sand. I held it, in solidarity with Laura.

Here, Laura interviews me on the bus:


We reached Cairo at 10:30 pm. Our guide Shiko was there at the bus station—had been, for a couple of hours—with a van driver. Our dear friend the travel agent was waiting to meet us at the hotel. Believe me, when you haven't peed for eight hours, the man who put you in that situation is is the last person you want to find standing between you and the nearest plumbing.

The idiot didn't even realize that we had another full day in Cairo ahead of us. He tried to tell us that our van would be there at five in the morning to take us to the airport.

Koshary (yum!) in Cairo, Egypt Okay, let's fast-forward past the discussion that followed. It was past midnight by the time we managed to get rid of the tour people and get settled in our room. That's when Laura and I set out in search of food. All we had eaten since breakfast seventeen hours earlier in Jordan was a banana apiece and some of those crumbly chocolate-creme sandwich cookies that come in a tube. I had spotted a sidewalk cafe a couple of blocks away on the way to the hotel that looked inviting, and it wasn't difficult for us to walk there. Our waiter was funny and nice, and I ended up eating a dish called koshary, sort of a kitchen-sink affair built from lentils, chickpeas, tomato sauce, rice, pasta, chunked meat, and assorted other ingredients. It damn well hit the spot. Laura had chicken shawarma, and we took turns feeding bits of meat on the sly to the two stray cats that prowled up to our table from beneath a parked car.

It was a good way to close out an interesting but ultimately shitty day.
[Written Sunday afternoon in the Sara Hotel, Aswan.]

What's most distinctive about driving the expressways of Cairo by night, at least compared to the cities I've visited, is the number of minarets you see, all lit up from within in eerie greens and oranges, or from without by gaudy neon. What impresses you once you enter heavier traffic is how Egyptians can turn a three-lane road into a five-lane road just by willing it so.

We were punchy when we came off the plane from Rome. A travel facilitator from our tour company helped us acquire visas quickly and pass through customs, then our first day's tour guide, Shiko, took over and bustled us into a van. At 4:00 am, we were settling into our room at the Zayed Hotel, and we had only three hours of sleep to look forward to before the day would begin.

At 9:15 am, we hopped back into the van with our luggage and joined three Australian travelers. Our first stop was the Egyptian Museum. I would like to describe and lovingly linger over everything we saw and learned there, but that would take days. With this, as with the monuments and temples and other sights I will mention over the next few days, you can generally assume an inverse relationship between how cool and awe-inspiring something is and how many words I spend on it. You know what most of this stuff looks like already, and otherwise I'll never catch up.

Among the big things we saw at the museum were Tutankhamen's gold masks and sarcophagi, the actual mummies of Ramses II and many other kings and queens of ancient Egypt, a collection of various royal jewelry, and a replica of the Rosetta Stone (the original being at the British Museum). What's staggering about the Egyptian Museum is not just the major pieces but the sheer size of the collection. There are rooms filled with arcane classes of objects only an archaeologist could love, but when taken together the number of artifacts boggles the mind.

We crossed the Nile to Giza, and suddenly there were the Pyramids, right on the edge of the city. Somehow I always pictured there far off in a remote corner of the desert, but no, there they are just west of town. The first view is breathtaking, but even moreso is to stand at the base, or a few levels up, and look up toward the apex. The angle is dizzying.

William Shunn and the Curse of the Second Pyramid We didn't enter the first pyramid—not enough bang for the buck, according to our guide—but three members of our little group, me included, ponied up the 25 Egyptian pounds to enter the second pyramid. Laura, who can get claustrophobic, stayed behind. I didn't think that I got very claustrophobic myself—I've been fine in caves like Timpanogos— but something about the exertion of duckwalking down an angled shaft for fifty meters or more with no room to straighten up and barely enough room for you to pass people going the other way, then arriving at a chamber in the bottom only to realize there's still a similar incline up ahead of you, and then to emerge sweating and gasping into the hot air of the bare chamber at the heart of the pyramid—well, despite the high ceiling and comparatively generous dimensions of that room, I could barely control the panic that had arisen toward the end of the ascent, and I couldn't stay in that room for very long. The shafts down and up were bad, but somehow not nearly as bad as that room.

Fortunately, the trek back out didn't seem to take as long as the trek in. I've never been so happy to see sunlight. Laura managed to snap a picture of me at just my moment of emergence, and you can tell.

We took a camel ride out behind the third pyramid. Camels don't look quite as huge when they're lying on the ground as they do when they stand up. I don't think I ever realized just how big the things are until I watched one rise to its full standing height. The process of standing is a fascinating one, too, at least from a position perched atop one's back. First the camel stands up, then it stands up again, and just when you think you're as high as you're going to go, it stands up one more time. At the end of all this elaborate unfolding of legs, your seat is eight or nine feet in the air.

There was some excitement on the ride when Laura's camel bit Holly's, but no bloodshed or injuries resulted.

After the Pyramids, we hit the Sphinx, which is smaller than I had imagined, but no less impressive.

One thing that makes all this sightseeing less than perfectly pleasant is the continuous hassle from merchants and entrepreneurs of all sorts. Like the one that comes up and takes your hat and starts wrapping his scarf around your brow so you can be an Arab in a photo. Or the one that wants you to change his British coins to dollars. Or the one with all the dancing camel dolls, and on and on and on. The constant harassment is wearying, and you learn some sticky lessons before becoming expert and ignoring their advances.

No less wearying is the constant need to tip this person and that. We don't really begrudge the money—well, not much—but the constant confusion about who deserves tips and who doesn't, and how much, gets to be a burden very fast. Oh, the difficulty of keeping sufficient single-pound notes on hand!

A less than thrilling aspect of our Friday tour was our stops at a parchment "museum," a jewelry store, and a perfume factory. Ostensibly these were all educational stops, but of course they ended with a hard sell to purchase their products (in the case of the parchment museum, very hard). Not that the demonstration of how papyrus was made, for example, was not interesting. Does the tour company get kickbacks from the merchants? I don't know, but by the time we reached the third edumerchant, we had a bad taste in our mouths. This is too bad, because the highlights of the tour are very high indeed.

That evening, our guide deposited us at the train station where we boarded our 8:10 pm overnight train to Aswan. We ate dinner in our compartment, enjoyed a whisky in the smoky, shabby club car (I'm not sure why I assumed we'd have no alcohol in Egypt), then summoned our attendant Mohamet to convert our seats to bunks. With the door secured, we joined that club I was talking about earlier, entry to which requires no small amount of gymnastic ability in the cramped space. There will be photos and videos to come later of some of the things we did and saw on Friday, but not of that.

April 2014

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