Michelles London Life

Egypt! - Part 1

In the last week of November and first week of December i went to Egypt with two friends. We joined the Oasis Overland tour.

I arrived with Anna & Rolly a day before our tour started so that we had a chance to check out Cairo first. Cairo is enourmous, there are approx 20 million people, and i reckon twice that many cars. It is an odd mix of east meets west - all the signs etc are in Arabic of course, i finally feel like i'm somewhere foreign and then you see a huge blaring sign in english for Pepsi, Cadbury, KFC...

There are some amazingly beautiful areas of Cairo, but most of it is what you'd expect a city of that size to look like. It seems as though there is a level of poverty here, but if you look closer, that's just the appearance in most cases. The streets need repairing, and there are no sidewalks to speak of, the buildings all look unfinished or falling down, but actually, we found out that if a structure is left incomplete, then they don't have to pay tax for it, and we're assured that the insides of the buildings are normal. There is a layer of dust over everything of course, and donkeys being ridden amongst all the traffic on the motorways. My god, the traffic is insane. It makes it really really fun trying to cross the road!.

Cairo is where the great Pyramids and the Sphinx are. I always thought i'd get to the Pyramids and get a sense of surrealism - they always seemed like something out of a story to me, not quite real. But when we got there, it was great to finally see them, but i think i had been well and truly introduced to the realism of Cairo by then. It's not a relaxing city at all.

We went inside one of the Pyramids, through tiny enclosed sloping tunnels only a metre high, only a couple hundred metres or so into the middle, and it was like stepping into an oven. I'm sooo glad we came in November and not July. It's been about 25 degrees here on average each day, but quite a lot colder at night time. Also in Cairo i went on my first camel ride! It's not that exciting really... a lot like horses :-)

The people in Egypt are interesting. Predominantly Arabic/Muslim - and even though tourism has been around in Egypt for awhile now, most people seem to be fascinated by us foreigners. There aren't a lot of women around, they're kept hidden away, and the ones you do see are covered from head to toe with only their faces and hands exposed. Pretty much everyone i've come across can speak english. In the hotels and restaurants we've been to we get excellent service, the staff are eager to please and to pratice their english. But out on the street it's a different story. We were told by our tour manager that just for our own benefit, rather than not to offend people, the girls should keep their shoulders and knees covered in the cities and towns. The culture here has the idea that all western/white women are easy and will willingly sleep with them or even marry them. It's the whole sex before marriage thing, the notion is that if your white then you think that's ok and if you're ok with it then you must be a whore.

It's such a different way of thinking, i can't get my head around it. Emily our tour leader is a British girl, and she says that its safer to walk around Cairo at night than it is London. All that happens is that you get about two dozen people staring at you every step you take, lots of people say hello and ask where you're from - just trying to get us to talk to them. A few of the younger or older ones will call out comments and offers! But no one approaches you or touches you, so it's a bit strange, but it's fine. There were only three guys on our tour (15 of us in total) and if we're wandering around with one of them, we're assumed to be their wives. All of us. Rolly has been told many times that he is lucky to have two such beautiful wives. And by beautiful they just mean white. That's fine as long as he doesn't offer to sell one of us for some camels...

It's different again in the market places and tourist areas, there they mostly just want your money and they know we're all a bunch of suckers that have no idea as to the true value of anything. It's a good place to practice my haggling skills - but after while you get quite worn out by fending off all the tradesmen trying to entice you into their stores. If you show the teeniest amount of interest then they get in your face hassling you for a sale and offering deals, following you down the street, asking questions to keep you there. And there's always three more a metre away to fight your way through. And after them are the children with post cards and crappy wee bracelets who follow you for ages and make you feel guilty. You're so busy either talking your way out of a sale, or rushing past the next guy to avoid the whole conversation again, that you barely get a chance to look at the goods. If they only understood how much business they're scaring away...

The obsession with white skin is strange. There is an ad on tv here of an Egyptian girl who tries to get a job as a news presenter but she gets turned down. then she gets the bright idea of buying some skin whitening cream - she uses the cream, reapplies for the job - and this time she gets it. But really - i suppose it's not that different to all the ads for fake tan. We just don't get told by the media that we won't get a good job unless we have a tan!

Anyway, after Cairo we took an overnight train to the much smaller city of Aswan. From here we left at 3am to drive through the Sahara desert to get to Abu Simbel. It was here that i finally ot that sense of bewilderment at being here. I was looking out the window at the black rolling hills of endless sand under a perfect bright starry night - and i just realised - i was in the Sahara desert. The Sahara desert! Who even goes there!?! I never once in my life ever thought i'd go to the Sahara. It hit me how far i'd come all by myself, to places i couldn't even imagine. I thought about how much i'd already seen and done in the past 8 months and how much more i've got left to do. Egypt is the fifteenth country i've visited this year... still a lot more to see though.

While in Aswan we had the awesome opportunity to visit a Nubian family in their own home. They are a native people that have kept their language and culture alive so that they are living almost exactly as they did 5000 years ago. With added extras like electricity, running water and cell phones! Haha, we came across one guy who lived in a grass hut on an island in the middle of the Nile and even he had a cell phone.

After Aswan we boarded a Felucca, which is a sail boat desined by the Romans way back when, still being used today. We sailed down the Nile for two nights. We lazed around on mattresses sunbathing and being served food and beer by the two Egyptian men sailing the boat. The man who owned it is amazing. He's been sailing for over 20 years and he has learned english solely by listening to and talking to the tourists he totes around. He has a really good memory and would stump us with puzzles and tell jokes. At night we'd sit around a camp fire with people from other boats and the Eyptians all brought out their drums and teach us songs and dances. They were a lot of fun. It was good to get the chance to meet the Nubian family and the sailing crew, beause you don't really get much opportunity to get to know other people here.

posted by ... @ 2:25 AM