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Exploring Cairo, the Pyramids and the Sphinx
by
Belkis Kambach
Shouldn't you start the Millennium with a trip to the oldest
travel destination in the world?
No country on earth boasts a longer recorded history than
does Egypt. This statement is as true today as it has been through seventy
centuries of Egypt's extraordinary history. The city of Cairo is young -- only about thirteen centuries old -- at
least when measured against the ancient monuments at nearby Giza or the Citadel, a complex of military encampments and mosques built in
1176 A.D.
"Salam alékum,”
greetings and welcome to my country," said our Egyptian tour guide Fahtma, who said she was a graduate of
the Egyptology department of Cairo University and immediately began to sell us cartuche’s and rattle off dates, eras
and royal lineages like an expert.
As we shuffled into the shimmering horizon, carried along by
loping spongy feet, we saw robed men wearing bright turbans just about
everywhere. This was the beginning of
our weekend adventure in Cairo. For our
butts' sake, we decided to pass up the opportunity of seeing more sights by
camel in Egypt, as taking a longer trek deeper into the desert would have
killed us both and this was the beginning of our Middle Eastern trip. We also
had a longer camel trek safari in Wadi Rum, Jordan scheduled after this
trip. We didn't regret a minute of it, but to be honest with you
any comparison to horse riding is faulty, especially if you have ever dreamed
of an obstinate camel deciding to take off running, leaving you bouncing along
on top of his hard back, like Timo’s did. It’s a sensation roughly akin to
repeatedly landing on a tree trunk or the pyramids themselves. Mustafa mentioned that hundreds of these camels
had been driven a forty day's road across the shifting sands from Libya, Sudan,
Aswan and Somalia only to end up hauling tourists at the pyramids and
throughout Egypt. We slid off our camels’ backs and confronted the mystery and
the grandeur. The Pyramids defy any attempt at coherent understanding. Having
dwarfed everything in its path for the last 46 centuries, Egypt’s loftiest
pyramid is a monument to Cheops and
consists of two million limestone blocks ranging in weight from 2.5 tons to 15
tons. Ten Kms from Cairo, it was built by 100,000 men and covers an area of 13
acres. Its original height of 146 meters has now become 137 meters after the
erosion of its summit. Until the construction of the Eiffel Tower, it was the
tallest structure in the world. I suppose we weren't any different than most non-Egyptians
in believing (until we saw otherwise) that the pyramids were three and lay
surrounded by desert. In fact, urban sprawl has made its way right up to the
Pharaohs' doorsteps, and the effect of the pyramids in the middle of the Cairo
doesn't seem real, yet there they are. But less than twenty minutes is all the
time needed to climb several hills and gain a spectacular panoramic view of
sweeping dunes, the pyramids and Cairo’s skyline. Built by King Khufu (Cheops in Greek), the second King of
the IV Dynasty who ruled 2551-2528 B.C., these pyramids and their guardian Sphinx have rivaled the world's
greatest cathedrals and temples as hallowed monuments. They unified life and
death, heaven and earth, gods and humanity, light and dark. Mustafa really had no choice but to endure the wait while we
daydreamed of ancient times. For us it was the moment we had waited over
twenty-nine years for: to see the great Pyramids of Giza. As we circled them by road, the sun had begun to fall, and an
eerie of geometric shadows lengthened on the sand. We drew closer and stopped
next to each monument in turn, trying to squeeze ourselves between busloads of
other travelers all lined up for that photo opportunity. As we kept trying to squeeze in, small children, the
youngest possibly as old as three, approached us. The first Egyptian we made
eye-contact with was an eight-year-old boy, also Moustafa, who spoke
surprisingly good English. He quickly attached himself to the day's last
visitors at the pyramids -- us. Not certain at first whether we wanted his
company, we ended up buying postcards and blue scarabs so that the junior
Mustafa would leave us. Travelers have complained for nearly a millennium about
Cairo's touts scams, camel and souvenir hawkers, so we'd been prepared for
Cairo to be an adventure. We read books about foreigners traveling in the
Middle East and followed the advice of many of our friends, who told us it
would be a hassle. It is simply the price one pays for traveling in Egypt. While Timo and I weren’t obsessed with security during our
first visit to Egypt, we certainly had
it in mind. But for us, traveling in
Cairo felt unquestionably safe, and the presence of the "Tourism and
Antiquities Police" was felt. We had no problems during our
stay. Before flying out of Helsinki that late spring, we told
friends we were "off for some rest in a warm quiet, peaceful place, and
here we were, Timo, me and 14 million
other people. I wore a wedding ring (and pretended Timo was my husband). I
covered my hair with a Nike cap and avoided glancing directly at men and strode
purposefully along streets just as I did in Finland. With no doubt the passage
of non-Egyptians could be counted to attract attention of young men in jeans and dark color printed
shirts who stood, ready to catch foreign customers. "Gold, silver, papyrus, T-shirt,
gallabiya?” Our next stop was a papyrus factory to see the world’s
oldest paper, and then on to the oldest ancient Egyptian cemetery and the
temple complex leading to the Sphinx. The restoration of the Sphinx was completed, and the scaffolding that
obscured it for more than five years is gone. The new and improved Sphinx
measures 21 meters high and about 73 meters long. Rescued from the encroaching
sand, it stares out enigmatically over modern Cairo. And what a sight that is! Our second day, in a hunt for color and other Egyptians treasures, took us exploring the narrow torturous streets of Islamic Cairo. We passed by Sharia al-Muski, a medieval, dusty and crooked footpath worn rough by the traffic of seven centuries, adjacent to Khan al Khalili bazaar, Cairo’s largest souk. We wandered its labyrinth while Egyptian music played endlessly and the odor of sandalwood, mint tea and cumin drifted on the air. Peddlers stood by carts with mounds of olives, lemons and spices. We walked to the edge of the warren of streets and alleys,
spending all morning poking around the old Islamic part of town, weaving
through downtown Cairo's gantlet of vendors. However, almost instantly the mood
changed. Timo became ill. All the vaccines we had to endure in Helsinki to
travel this far apparently made him even more sick, and food or water didn’t
help this poor Finn. But we traveled on. At Khan el Khalili, tireless
salesmen hawked Egyptian carpets as well as passages from the Koran. Here you can find inlaid boxes,
cotton goods, glass hookahs, perfume bottles as well as beautiful gold and
silver jewelry I found an incredible antique silver necklace that I often wear.
It is said that in the old days it was worn by Egyptian women as a make-up case
in which to keep their powdered eyeliner. To any New Yorker like me this sharp
needle looks more like a weapon. In the spice market, cumin, caraway seed, sage, mint and
bright beans were displayed for shoppers' inspection. The scene was repeated at
other nearby stalls. Here you can see advertisements in fanciful Arabic script
and luxuriate in the noise, smells and colors that bombard your senses. We then headed outside the market into twisting streets of
narrow corridors that suddenly open up to give a surprise vista of a
centuries-old minaret. The area of
Islamic Cairo is a mother lode of architectural treasures, mainly old mosques,
domes, towers, minarets and palaces from the last five centuries. Some have
been restored to their original structure but most are in various states of
disrepair, perhaps because they are "young" in the context of Cairo.
That day we walked over seven miles, and I am sure you could easily do the
same. We arrived in Islamic Cairo during the month-long fast of Ramadan. The mosques there called
countless Cairenes and faithful Muslims in gallabiya robe (traditional cotton carfans)
to prayer five times a day. During ramadah,
our guide told us Alah answers prayers
to the highest men. All streets leading to the massive mosque were filled with
thousands of men who rose and fell in unison, and we listened to the endless
echoes of "Allaaaaah." El-Hussein, one of
the many ancient mosques, is the most
important one in Cairo. It takes up an entire city block and is closed to
non-Muslims. The mosque itself, a magnificent and enormous structure, dates
back to the mid-14th century. At Al-Azhar Mosque, El Hossein Sq. is the foremost center of theology in
Islam and the oldest continuously practicing university in the world built in
972. Because of its importance, the mosque has undergone a number of
enlargements and restorations, making it today a representation of all styles
and all periods of Cairo's history in its architecture. The minaret was removed
and replaced a number of times to be built larger. Waking us up to the
ululation's of the muezzin, for the same price we even had a ringside seat for
Friday prayers. By noon and six the sound was at times unbearable, especially
for Timo who had a high fever. Our walk through Islamic Cairo inevitably led to the fabled Fishawi's
coffeehouse, a
two-hundred-year-old café in the shadows of the Mosque, where tourists and
locals rub elbows. We stopped to sip Egyptian coffee and jasmine tea, and in a
blur of activity, waiters placed by the feet of other Cairenes pairs of two-foot-tall water pipes called
shisha. Their bowls were stuffed with tofah, an apple-scented tobacco in a nargilas mixed with herbs that is
filtered through long hookahs (water
pipes). The smoke as much as anything made my eyes teary, but Egyptians didn’t
seem to be affected; they just puff on
a shisha and watch the world go by. Anywhere else in the world, a sure bet for finding peace and
quiet is in the city's cemeteries -- except in Cairo. A half million squatters
make their homes today in what has become known as the "City of the
Dead," located in two separate cemeteries spreading north and south of the
Citadel. The bizarre city has even the
conveniences of electricity, running water and telephone services, an
indication that authorities have little intention of ever running the squatters
off. We were surprised with clotheslines that strung from mausoleum to
mausoleum. Against all Islamic beliefs, in Egypt the living and the dead have
long been companions. On our last day we visited the Egyptian Museum of Cairo, a
repository of archeological treasures with more than 120,000 rare objects. Our
guide knew the guards and attendants at the various locations and steered us to
the front of the lines through the crowds of travelers and touts. The Egyptian
government established the museum in 1835 to halt the plundering of
archaeological sites and to arrange the exhibition of the collected artifacts
owned by the government. Some of the most important groups of objects are: The mummies of some pharaohs
of the 18th to 20th Dynasty found in
Thebes. Artifacts from the tomb of Tutankhamon, consisting of more than 3,500
pieces, of which 1,700 objects are displayed in the museum (the rest are in
storerooms). We also viewed collections of artifacts from the royal palaces,
such as the throne of Tutankhamon, his 110 kg. solid gold mask and gold coffin,
pectoral, head rest, accessories, jewelry, furniture and sculptures. There is
also the collar of Neferoptah, mummy of King Ramsses II, written documents, and
the book of the dead of Maiherperi. As we headed to the hotel lobby bound for the Israeli
border, we were genuinely sad to leave Cairo. Timo and I left with the feeling
someday we would return. According to an old Egyptian proverb, once you have drunk from the Nile, you will return. As we left we passed intensely green strips of cultivation
along the Nile, then abruptly moved into 420 km of stark, fruitless areas of
desert where we saw many more camels. On the road back to Eilat, through the
dry Sinai desert with endless stretches of shifting dunes, we took the same
route Moses and the Israelites are said to have taken on their journey from
Egypt to Jericho. The Sinai has always been a separate and sparsely traveled
world, a triangular peninsula that plunges like an inverted pyramid into the
Red Sea, dividing Africa from Asia. We
felt as if this desert, largely vacant since the beginning of time, will become
a tourists’ paradise one day. We both smiled. Timo was now feeling better, and the fact
that our fellow travelers in our group were not spies and smugglers but, like
us, young Germans, Dutch and Finns on package tours, didn't spoil our fantasy of Cairo. You ask me, was
Cairo worth the hassle? Oh YES! every minute of it. After we left Cairo we continued our trip through the Middle
East that took us through Israel, Palestine and Jordan. A few months after our
return to Helsinki we both watched in shock on November 17 as militants
attacked the temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, just 350 miles south of Cairo,
killing 58 tourists on the principle tourist artery of the Nile between Luxor
and Aswan. This is what terrorism seeks to do. Its victims are not only
those who are killed or wounded, but countless who suffer the effects of fear.
Terrorism that year grabbed the headlines. Today a huge security operation is
in place at major tourist sights in Egypt, and tourism has returned to normal. I believed I had to write about Cairo--particularly the
rewarding time we spent exploring the dense network of alleys and back streets
of Islamic Cairo. And the camels. I thought I owed it to the many Egyptians who
made us feel welcome there to share my experience with others. More
info can be found at: http://home.att.net/~travelwriter/ Belkis Kambach Travelwriter@att.net Photos:
Rob Kambach |
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Upon my first sight of them, I recalled when Historian Herodotus
visited and proclaimed them one of the seven wonders of the world. He described
them as “The eternal gift of the Nile.” They were already more than two thousand years old then, ancient even to the
ancient Greeks.
Cairo is known as the cradle of civilization, beacon of
religion and the gateway to Africa. It is the foremost capital on the African
continent lying at the center of all routes leading to and from the capitals of
the three continents: Asia, Africa and Europe. For over fifty centuries, Egypt
engendered the development of culture and civilization: Pharaonic, Christian
and Islamic.
Near the pyramids most visitors, including us, find
themselves trapped by peddlers of post cards, Egyptian blue scarabs and papyrus. These are a breed of ferocious
and persistent sales people. We tried avoiding them by driving in from the far
side of the vast complex nearest the Sphinx. There Egyptian turbaned camel drivers hawked rides, while elegant young
men in dark uniforms with patches that read "Tourism and Antiquities
Police" roamed vigilantly. After a
few moments of calm bargaining with the owner of two camels, we hopped aboard
our dromedaries for a little trek into the nearby desert. 
Mustafa, the
turbaned man, laughed behind his dark mustache as my friend Timo Alakoski and I
spread our legs wider than we'd thought was possible. Without warning, we
lurched forward toward the ground, then rose several feet into the air as our
full-grown camels stood up, snorting their oversized nostrils and batting their
beautiful long eyelashes. The imposing Pyramids of Giza were there facing us as
we watched the fiery red sun go down over the flat horizon. The sky turned
successive shades of pink, apricot, orange, and purple