Si in Cairo, Egypt
Simon Lockington

The 12 hour stopover at Heathrow was not as bad as it could have been. We rented a room at the Airport Hilton for the day so we could shower and have somewhere to store our stuff. Every time I travel, I marvel at the rejuvenating effects of a nice hot shower.

We arrived in at Heathrow after a 12 hour flight from Hong Kong and I am glad to say I think the sleeping pills had some effect this time.

HEATHROW, LONDON
Heathrow is a busy place, it’s sort of like the cultural hub of the world I reckon. Here you’ll find people of all nationalities as they pass through on their way to their destination.

Going from 30 degrees and HIGH humidity in Hong Kong to 6 degrees was a fair bit of a change but I could deal with that better than the high humidity.

After my experience with the immigration people at Heathrow when I came to London after Amsterdam last year, I was kind of expecting to get the third degree again. However I’d obviously caught this lady at the start of her shift and she hadn’t quite got into Rottweiler mode and she let me through without any trouble.

As I said, we got a room at the Hilton to have a shower and change, and then went down to breakfast. Once seated Don pointed out a lady a few tables away who he said had complained at the front desk that one of the porters had accidentally hurt her hand somehow and had received a free breakfast as an apology. That ‘sore hand’ sure didn’t look like it was having trouble shovelling all those baked beans and sausages into her mouth! I hate that kind of thing.

I had organised to meet up with Zac, a mate of mine from school in London for lunch. I organised myself a ticket on the Heathrow Express which takes you into Paddington Station in the city. At ₤26 pounds return, that’s pretty steep for a 15 minute train ride I reckon! That’s pretty much a tank full of gas in my car at home…

When I went to Hong Kong I got AU$200 changed into Hong Kong dollars which came out to something like $1300, with which you can buy quite a lot in HK. I then got that changed into UK pounds and got ₤77 with which you can’t buy much at all in London. Everything in London is in pounds what it is in dollars at home. When it takes about AU$3 to equal ₤1 then things get real expensive, real quick...

CAIRO , EGYPT
We’d gotten our visas in Melbourne which was interesting. Don had gotten his no problem but as soon as the Egyptian Consulate people saw I am a New Zealander they looked up at me grim faced and rushed off to a second room out of ear shot. It turns out that all New Zealand visas have to be sent up to the Embassy in Canberra for approval. Luckily though, the large man in charge of the consulate granted me an exception and let me through… Left me wondering who Helen Clark has pissed off now. The Aussies are still a bit dark on how she vetoed John Farnan singing at Gallipoli…

The flight to Cairo was pretty normal, we touched down at about 11:30pm on Saturday night and we were met by taxi drivers on the air side of immigration! For a moment there I thought there was no immigration or customs to go through! Sure enough we rounded the corners and the queuing started.

Surprisingly there were no problems, the immigration dude just stared at me blankly and through I went.

We met up with our driver again and he marched us through the airport to the waiting car that would take us to our airport.

DRIVING IN CAIRO
I had thought that driving in Bali would be dangerous on account of all the congestion. The thing that Bali has going over Egypt is that at least in Bali, everything was at low speed. Here in Egypt, it’s congested and everything is happening at 100+km/h and the people are crazy.

Using your horn over here must be mandatory or something. At home, you use your horn as a weapon of last resort only if you’re REALLY ticked off at someone and you’ll just about always get an adverse reaction from the person you’re tooting at. Over here they use it as a matter of course, they’re always on the thing and nobody cares. If they’re coming up behind someone they’ll toot. If they’re coming up to an intersection and they have a green light (one of the few green lights that there are), they’ll toot. If they need to scratch themselves, they’ll toot also. They pretty much use it to say “Here I am!” in addition to the more common use in Melbourne of “MOVE YOUR ASS!”

Road markings over here must be just used as a general guideline cause nobody seems to use them. They mostly hedge their bets and drive down the center of the road straddling the center line which makes things interesting for those of us not used to it.

Speed limits also seem to be a guideline only cause there didn’t seem to be much compliance to these.

At intersections it’s on for young and old. He who has the least to lose wins. That’s why all the taxis here are BEAT up old Peugeots and equally nasty Ladas. All the cars have scratches and dents on them even brand new Mercedes Benz’s are all scratched up.

A lot of tooting is required at intersections. Especially if there’s a traffic jam and there’s no where for anyone to go, the tooting becomes a crescendo.

PYRAMIDS PARK INTERCONTINENTAL
Eventually we made it safe and fairly sound to the hotel. The hotel we were staying at was about five minutes away from the pyramids and when you stood by the pool at night, you could see the lights illuminating the largest pyramid. Pretty cool.

The hotel was a resort type place with an awesome pool area in the center with bars and restaurants all around it. For the guys that went to Bali with me, it was much like where we stayed there.

The hotel staff were very friendly, they went out of their way to explain just how happy they were to see us (and our money I expect) and explained everything they could to us. On the way to our rooms the porter stopped five times to point stuff out.

After three days and nights of not sleeping in a normal bed (the flights meant we were always sleeping on planes) it was GREAT to finally lay horizontal again and I slept like a lamb. A very tired lamb.

Breakfast in the morning wasn’t too bad, the coffee was pretty crazy and I just couldn’t drink it. I’m pretty particular about coffee and I didn’t feel it was particularly good. Don thought the tea was not too shabby though. The breakfast was pretty western like although not much in the way of meats like sausages, bacon that kinda thing. Fair bit of fruit though.

We had planned on doing sight seeing today and Don suggested we go and hire a personal guide to take us round which I was all in favour of.

After breakfast Don went to organise that with the concierge while I went to change US dollars into Egyptian Pounds.

The guy at the bank obviously thought I was trying to pass off forged currency to him as he went through it with ultra violet light, held it to another light then finally busted out with the magnifying glass. Once satisfied he handed me a big wad of notes and I was off. Another country where to do anything, you need a great quantity of fairly worthless cash. US$1 = 5.8 Egyptian Pounds.

The concierge had organised us a guide who would take us around in his nasty old beaten up taxi. Our guide’s name is Gabriel.

GABRIEL
We got into Gabriel’s car. It reeked of petrol, had no seatbelts and was in a general state of disrepair.

On the way to the pyramids Gabriel was full of information. “You’re in paradise!’ he said and laid into all the history of the Gods and civilisation. “I’m studying ancient history at university!” I wasn’t entirely convinced of this, but it was a good story anyway.

Gabriel had the gift of the gab and could talk and talk. It was good though, he was always in for a laugh. He also had a lot of mates around the place. As we were driving down the street (tooting our horn and trying to avoid everyone else) he would yell out to the window at random people who would wave and yell back. Everyone was Gabriel’s mate.

PYRAMIDS
The first stop was the pyramids ofcourse where we had to get out and go through metal detectors in a vague attempt at security. Camels are cruising past and lots of guys with AK47’s are standing behind bullet proof shields. It’s ok though, they’re Gabriel’s mates.

We park and Gabriel begins the dissertation on how the pyramids where created and why each was done. There are three main pyramids and I’ve forgotten the names of them and why each was created. There was more preaching of “This is paradise! You are in paradise!” and then we were allowed to wander freely around the pyramids.

The pyramids are huge, the biggest one is about 147 meters tall and the second one is 137 meters. You can climb up and down the rocks but there’s a good chance you’ll fall and break your neck so you want to be careful. There are lots of dudes with guns and not much motivation in life cruising around.

Gabriel had lectured us about people who would try and sell us stuff there, “Pay no attentions!” he said “No attentions at all! Only listen to me!” That was fine. So I started climbing around the pyramids and only got a few levels up before I decided that I might fall and no one would actually care so I stopped and rang my parents from the pyramids to see what was up back in New Zealand. Not much was happening.

Gabriel took us to the second pyramid which you could (for a fee) go inside to the central burial area, so off we went to buy tickets “No attentions to anyone!” he was yelling as he lit up a cigarette and chatted to another one of his mates.

It didn’t take long before we got some attention; a narrow looking dude cruised up to us and started bleating on about how he wanted to GIVE us some post cards and some head dress thing that made me look like Yasser Arafat. To cut a long story short, Don and I walked away from that with our Yasser head gear, some post cards and Don even had some small plastic pyramids which cost us about 50 Egyptian pounds.

Down into the pyramid we go, having to bend right over cause the height of the caves going inside is very small. You go down for 30 meters then travel along for another 30 before you come to the burial chamber. All the engineering is pretty spectacular. The walls are very smooth and nothing has been ‘hacked out’ if you know what I mean. The floor is smooth and everything and they did this like 4000 years ago or something.

After that we went back to the car, when Gabriel saw what we’d ‘bought’ he was pretty furious at us “I said NO ATTENTIONS!” We meekly sat in the car and promised to be more compliant in the future.

Off to the third pyramid then down to the sphinx.

THE SPHINX
The Sphinx is a fair bit smaller than I had anticipated and there’s all manner of other ‘structures’ built around it, you’re not allowed to climb all over it either which is fine cause it looked pretty slippery.

Word around the campfire had it that Napoleon used the Sphinx for target practise back in the old days and shot its nose off. They haven’t bothered to fix it. That’s pretty untidy of Napoleon to have done that I reckon…

There’s also a big night show that you can go to where they apparently tell you the story of the whole place in conjunction with a big light show. Unfortunately that night it was only going to be in German so we didn’t worry about doing it.

LOTUS OIL AND GLASS BLOWING
Gabriel then took us to see a ‘great tourist attraction’ where glass sculptures were constructed by hand in front of us using gas torches and all manner of other instruments. We were also promised a drink cause we were damn thirsty by then.

Sure enough, under a shady tree was a dude with a large stack of gas bottles shaping a glass balloon into a pretty cool perfume bottle. It was very impressive to watch the guy fashioning this glass creation. Once finished we were lead inside to have a look around. The walls were covered in all manner of glass creations from bottles to sculptures to trophies, everything. Also lining the walls were many, many glass containers of perfume, oils and other girly type stuff I’m not real familiar with.

Suddenly we’re sitting down and getting the hard sell on buying glass creations and/or (preferably ‘and’) oils or perfumes etc. Now some dude turns up carrying glasses filled with a ‘hibiscus’ drink which Gabriel had bleated on about and we were now to drink it. It wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t anything to make Coca Cola nervous that’s for sure…

I got bored of smelling perfumey type stuff and started looking at glass bottles for a bit before we managed to coax Gabriel out of the chair he was sitting in talking to the shop owner, who I can safely assume, was also a mate.

THE ONLY ‘REAL’ PAPYRUS PAPER MUESEM IN ALL OF EGYPT
Gabriel then took us to a ‘museum’ which he declared to be the only legitimate place to buy REAL papyrus paper in all of Egypt. Papyrus paper is what the pharaohs and people like Cleopatra used to write on before ball point pens and A4 paper came along.

Paper is not really the kind of stuff that usually turns me on, but we went and looked around anyway. I was starting to wonder about Gabriel’s motives when one of the museum ‘guides’ starts putting the hard word on us to buy something and we can pay for that with credit card or cash. He was all over us like a rash, you couldn’t move without him being three feet behind putting the hard word on.

Eventually I acted all naïve and hauled ass out of there with cash still intact. Was starting to get real suspicious of the so called ‘sights’ Gabriel was taking us too, and just how much of a kick back he was getting from these ‘attractions’.

THE MUSUEM OF EGYPT
I still think we were lucky to make it to the REAL museum alive. The traffic in downtown Cairo is nothing short of incredible. It didn’t seem to phase Gabriel who was busy waving and shouting at mates standing on the side walk.

He eventually got us into a parking lot and told us the directions on where to walk to get to the museum entrance. He told us to be no more than two hours, and he would be waiting right here in the car park with his mates.

So off Don and I went towards the entrance, avoiding the dudes with machine guns standing beside their armoured cars and bullet proof shields.

I was a little disappointed in the museum, there was a lot of stuff inside it, a LOT. It just hadn’t been presented that well and there wasn’t much in the way of information to explain what was going on. I was also expecting to see big diagrams of how they built the pyramids and that kind of thing. Nope. None of that action going on here.

We poked around in the museum for an hour or so and saw a crazy woman having an intense conversation with a mummy, but that was about it.

We cruise back to the carpark where Gabriel and his mates are laying back in his car having a smoke. He quickly kicks them out when we arrive.

By now we’re all pretty shagged and just want to go back to the hotel for a rest. We had to get up at 4:30am the following morning for our flight back to Heathrow before another five hour layover before heading to Tel Aviv on the famed El Al airlines.

Not really sure if I’m looking forward to Israel or not. We’ll see.

Egypt on the other hand has been great, I’d definitely come back again. The people are very, very friendly, things are pretty cheap, I always felt safe and there is so much history and sights to see. It was a shame we didn’t have more time to go visit more of the sights, but I saw enough to want to come back.

The only thing that really annoyed me was everyone wanted money from you. You go to the bathroom and the dude doing the cleaning in there hands you paper towels then sticks his hand out for some cash! Screw that, I just played dumb and thanked him for the towels. This kind of thing was common everywhere. Someone opens a door, they want money. Someone loans you a pen, it’s going to cost. It’s nearly worse than America!

Israel next. Shalom ya’ll.

Si