Egypt in the Summer of 2011
The experience of seeing the pyramids was incredible. The rest of Egypt, and I'm sure most of the guests on the Silver Wind will agree, was a disappointment. Tuesday June 21st we docked very early at Port Said at the western mouth of the Suez Canal. As I dressed for the day, I watched a parade of immense container ships, oil tankers and bulk cargo ships sail past my cabin window. There is a LOT of traffic on the canal. Our tour guide to the pyramids later said that Egypt makes several million dollars a day in canal fees. In fact it is about the only thing on which Egypt makes money..
We were all required to carry our passports, freshly stamped with a stamp in Arabic for the two days we were to spend in Egypt. We had also been required to carry passports in Israel. The Israelis, however, stamped a separate paper that they collected as we boarded the ship for the final time. People have been known to have problems visiting Arab countries if their passports sport Israeli visas. Nowadays, if one wishes to collect an Israeli entry or exit stamp on one's passport, one must specifically ask for it.
As we exited the ship, three Egyptian Tourist Police inspected our passports and checked for the Egyptian entry stamp and perhaps a forbidden Israeli stamp. This activity seemed designed more to create jobs for the Egyptians than to satisfy any concern over illegal entry. We boarded our tour buses, left the port then halted a few blocks away. We were joined a few minutes later by a police car with at least three more tourist police aboard. They escorted our two tour buses through the city.
I heard an animal bray while we were waiting for our police escort. I looked out the window and saw a donkey hauling a flat wooden cart amidst all the busy city traffic of cars, trucks and motorcycles. This was the first real draft animal I had seen on this trip. In a number of locations, I had seen horse and buggy rides for tourists but not people using horses or donkeys for basic transportation.
Egypt was truly a land of contrasts. Port Said was a modern, mostly prosperous looking city with apartment buildings of a distinctly Arab style. Our tour guide, Mustafa, told us that Port Said and Alexandria are resort cities filled in the summertime with Egyptian vacationers desirous of escaping the heat of Cairo. Port Said is also the administrative center of the Suez Canal and has a bustling business district. Amidst the modernity, I saw a dead donkey in the street. Cart drivers and motorists were just detouring around it.
As our buses left the center city, we began to see agriculture. There is extensive irrigation from the Nile River and the region grows rice, beans, fruit and other vegetables. Mustafa pointed out "pigeon houses," cone shaped clay pigeon coops on the estates of prosperous landowners. Until recently, pigeons were used as messengers. I gather they are still used for sport and raised for food. Mustafa mentioned that the Egyptians consider them an aphrodisiac. I don't know as I believe this.
Green fields continued a few miles inland. At intervals along the highway, fruit and vegetable sellers had set up reed shelters, not much more than tents, from which they sold their wares. There were many more carts and donkeys. There seem to be two levels of prosperity in today's Egypt. There are lots of cars and trucks driven by men in western dress. Then there are men and women in traditional Moslem dress who ride donkeys and pull their few possessions on flat carts. One assumes they are very poor and may even live in the grass shelters that can be seen along the roadside and in fields.
We passed through a check point/toll plaza about thirty or so miles from Port Said. It's the first time I have seen toll booths guarded by young men sitting on tanks. Our police escort was replaced with a pickup truck full of armed soldiers whom we followed all the way to Cairo.
Green fields gave way to sandy desert. This was not the desert of movies. This desert looked more like a landfill. Plastic bottles and shredded plastic bags lay half buried in dirty sand. This went on for miles and miles. From time to time, military bases punctuated the desert. These walled compounds extended for long distances and had little one-man guard towers every quarter mile or so. A bored looking young man with an automatic rifle occupied each tower.
Eventually we came to a new industrial area named 10th of Ramadan City. Now we passed miles of new industrial buildings and offices. It was cleaner and there were some trees and grass. Next came the outskirts of Cairo. All the major businessesand schools had walls and guard towers too. It appears that most Egyptian young men are employed by the army, the police or as private gun toting security guards. They may be employed for the time being but they are not learning any useful skills. Unemployment will surely rise when these do nothing jobs go away. This does not bode well for political stability.
When we reached the outskirts of Cairo, our armed escort disappeared. The bus driver left the main highway and took back streets to the ring road around Cairo and Giza. I had a good view of dirty canals filled with trash and streets with broken pavement. Our guide said we were taking back streets as a way to avoid traffic but I wondered if this was a security measure or if there was something the Egyptians did not want us to see. I cannot imagine why I was so cynical about their motivations. And this before I even met the souvenir sellers at the pyramids!
As best I can tell, the ring road, a four-lane highway, took us south away from Cairo. We started to see apartment buildings of all sizes. The older ones were small two to four story affairs usually unfinished on the top floors. The larger ones seemed more like major construction projects that had been halted. Our guide said that the smaller ones were left unfinished on purpose to avoid property taxes. A building is not taxed until it is complete so no building is ever finished. Additionally, real estate is a family's prime investment. A family will buy a lot and put up a house. They will live on the first floor; grown children will live in the second and third floors. As a family expands, the house extends upward.
Mustafa never mentioned the abandoned construction projects. I suspect these large apartment complexes were financed by foreign investors. I doubt the investors are willing to continue until the political situation stabilizes.
Eventually we crossed the Nile River. It looked much like crossing the Tennessee River on the highway between Huntsville and Birmingham Alabama but with pyramids in the distance. We had to exit the highway, pass under it and reenter going in the opposite direction in order to access the exit for Giza and the pyramids. This seems to be a very Egyptian way of doing things. Most streets do not allow left turns. One must proceed past then make a U-turn and come back to the street into which one wants to turn.
We went a number of miles along dirty irrigation canals filled with garbage and dead animals, past fields and small estates. There were more donkeys and poor people too. Eventually we reached a place where there were numbers of carpet weaving schools. Mustafa said that this is usually a stop on the Cairo city tour. We reached an entrance to a kind of park down a side road. Suddenly there were sand dunes in front of us. We had arrived at the step pyramid of Sakkara and the mortuary complex surrounding it.
This step pyramid is the oldest stone structure in the world. It, various "mastaba" tombs, and smaller pyramids formed a wonderfully interesting complex. We were fortunate that we were the only tour group there. We were able to enter a tomb and a small pyramid and view four thousand year old decorations and hieroglyphics that retained much of their vibrant color. Our guide warned us not to take proffered camel rides, as the prices here were "30 times" higher than he could guarantee us at the traditional pyramids. I wonder if he was getting a kickback.
Following an exhilarating hour or so at Sakkara, we went to lunch at a marvelously ornate hotel right by the Great Pyramid. We spent several hours after lunch viewing the pyramids of Giza, walking among them (I even touched the Great Pyramid!) and viewing the Sphinx. A number of our party took the only $3.00 five minute camel rides recommended by Mustafa.
There were more tourists at this location but still far less than normal. Many people have avoided Egypt since the Arab Spring. This worked to our advantage. We were able to get wonderfully close to the monuments and spend time there relatively undisturbed. The constant harassment by souvenir vendors was the only negative. I tried to be philosophical, as they have to try to make a living with far fewer customers.
Our day in Giza ended with the obligatory visit to the tour sanctioned gift shop. In three floors of gifts, I saw nothing I wanted to buy. We eventually boarded our tour bus for the three plus hour ride back to Port Said.
The ride back past the same scenery was uneventful until we reached a check point/toll plaza about halfway back the 100-mile trip to the ship. After paying the toll our bus was directed to stop at the side of the road. The driver, our suit clad Tourism Board representative, our tour guide and his supervisor (more make work employment) all got out of the bus. They had an animated discussion with two toll employees and a military type. The military guy was the armed one. It's hard to tell how heated the discussion was. All conversations in Arabic sound like arguments. Eventually our tour escort from the Silver Wind went out to talk to them. She reported that for reasons unknown we had to wait for the other Silver Wind tour bus that had taken a different tour to catch up with us before we could proceed. I speculate that the pickup truck with the armed soldiers was supposed to escort both buses.
Eventually the officials compromised with the tour people: we could proceed slowly until the other bus caught up. It was initially 30 kilometers behind us (about twenty miles). We drove for half an hour at about 30 mph instead of 55-60 mph until another bus from Cosmos Tours blew past us. Our missing tour bus had caught up.
At our next checkpoint just outside the city limits of Port Said, we exchanged the army escort for a police car of the Tourist Police. For some reason they didn't use their lights, just the siren. They got little respect, hardly any traffic moved aside for our little convoy thus it was slow going back to the pier at Port Said. We arrived after dark and observed the nightlife of the port city. There were lots of bright lights and people walking in the streets. It looked festive. It's so hot during the day that people come out to shop at night.
Michael and I returned to the Silver Wind, took a quick shower and went to dinner in the main dining room. It was really nice to relax with a gourmet dinner accompanied by fine wine after a hot dusty day in the Egyptian desert. What a way to travel!
Early next morning we docked at the port in Alexandria. We were tired from the trek to the pyramids so chose to take the shuttle bus to the esplanade near the center of the city instead of a tour. People were out everywhere. Most of the men were in western dress. All the women had headscarves and were clothed to wrists and ankles even in the 95 degree F early morning heat. Yesterday our tour guide had made a point that Egypt was a "free" country where women are not required to wear traditional Islamic dress. None of the women I saw was choosing this religious freedom whatever their convictions. I suspect prudence dictated conservative dress. Michael mentioned that this was a big change from his previous visit to Egypt six or seven years ago. Then many women wore western dress. I wonder if they still have access to education.
That and the garbage everywhere. It looked as if the streets had not been cleaned since his Michael's last visit to Egypt. Apparently, the Mubarak regime had been paying young men to put on uniforms and do nothing and no one was paid to clean the streets. One could see that Alexandria was once a charming city of colonial era buildings and wide public spaces. Now it is run down and filthy. We were so disappointed that we did not even get out of the bus but went back to the ship. See Michael's blog at: http://cbu-med1106.blogspot.com for his comments on Egypt.
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