It was not an auspicious beginning. Check- in for my Royal Jordanian flight to Amman at Hong Kong took over half an hour. The reason was that my follow-on connecting flight to Cairo (my final destination) had been made as a separate booking and the computer (or, perhaps more correctly, the airport staff) could not cope with producing a printed luggage tag that would send my luggage through to Cairo.
At one point, I had five staff (including one man whose uniform was clearly designed to express seniority by the epaulettes and four stripes on each sleeve) looking at my case. If there had been more than three other people waiting to check-in for the flight, it might have caused a disruption. In the end, my suitcase was sent on its way with a hand-written luggage tag, and I was told I would have to collect my onward boarding pass in Amman.
I need not have worried. I collected by boarding pass in Amman, and after a four hour transit had a great hour and a quarter flight into Cairo, where my luggage arrived safely (even though it was the third last suitcase to arrive). The flight provided me with some great views through the clear desert air of the Dead Sea (see left), the Suez Canal, and the harsh landscape of the Sinai Peninsula.
The guide book was right - the taxis in Cairo become cheaper the further you walk into the car park away from the airport terminal. I negotiated a great fare with the elderly driver of an old black Peugeot taxi, and off we started. The driver may have been elderly, but he hadn’t slowed down in his driving. Nor did he (like all the drivers in Cairo) take any notice of lane markings, speed signs, or even the presence of other cars on the motorway. I’m sure he just crossed the three sets of double lines in repeated S-bends (about eight times in succession, from one side of the motorway to the other) for the sheer fun of it. Cairo lives up to the Middle East’s reputation for having the most dangerous imaginable – insanely wild.
Because Cairo’s airport is to the east of the city, I didn’t see the Nile River from the air. I had seen the Nile River once before, but it was the upper reaches in Ethiopia. The sight of the Nile, which I saw after surviving the drive from the airport, was beautiful. After seeing the extreme aridity of the desert lands surrounding the long, thin Nile Vally from the air, the notion of the Nile River being Egypt’s lifeline was very evident.
I decided to get to know Cairo the intimate way, walking the exhaust-infested and urine-smelling streets, notwithstanding the hot temperatures that soared to 40°C today just as I was starting my four and a half hour ‘stroll’. My walk took me for a total of about 10 kilometres to an old part of Cairo known as Khan al-Khalili Bazaar.
This area was everything you might imagine that an old, exotic market in the Middle East might be - a knot-like maze of narrow alleyways, old stone shops selling everything useful and useless item imaginable, elaborately carved grand mosques (see the photo to the left). The walk was exhausting but wonderful, and a brilliant introduction to both Cairo and the Middle East in general.
It was probably a bit silly, but even though I had woken at 4 am this morning on the flight into Amman from Bangkok, I decided to ‘do the tourist thing’ this evening, catch a minibus, and go to the sound-and-light show at the Pyramids of Giza. It was wonderful to snatch my first sight of the pyramids and sphinx (which is my main planned destination tomorrow), but I did get a bit sleepy through the pretentious dialogue that accompanied the 50 minute presentation.
Matters weren’t helped when the minibus got stuck in a long traffic jam on the return journey, which meant I only returned to the hotel at a little after 10:30 pm – which is when I decided to start writing this diary entry :-)
As I finish this diary entry, it is almost midnight and I have an early start planned for tomorrow. It’s such a tension trying to decide whether to relax or explore when I travel.
Actually, the tension is not that great. Travel always wins!
