Monday, May 26, 2003 (Cairo - Egypt)
Breakfast is NOT their best meal here. Out of the
Malaria zone but not yet out of danger. Using our newly acquired skills. And
they call this driving? They don't waste time with new arrivals. I think we must
look like walking money or something. Finding the backpackers' trail again. Our
man Mustafa. A car and driver for just a few dollars. Why did I leave them
behind in Botswana? At least we ca communicate. Memories of home life cropping
up from time to time.
Day 75. Breakfast this morning was meagre
compared to the rest of Africa and consisted of small, elongated roll with a
boiled egg, some jam and butter and a cup of tea. The setting, on the other
hand, was lovely and quite tranquil. This particular hotel is on the second
floor (very low to the ground by Cairo standards) and sports a long breakfast
balcony that overlook a quiet, leafy street. It was the perfect place to sit and
relax as we slowly ate breakfast and looked through our guidebook to plan our
day ahead. It also sits immediately opposed the French embassy and just up the
road from the Polish embassy.
During
breakfast, we each took another Mefloquin tablet, as has become the route every
Sunday morning. Our arrival in Egypt signifies the end of the Malaria zone but
the regimen requires that we continue with the tablets for four weeks after
leaving the Malaria zone. With approximately another four weeks to go before
reaching back home, we will be able to get tested shortly thereafter for the
disease.
We’ve learned that the
best way to figure out how to get to most out of a given place is to befriend a
local. Although there is a tourist guide right here at the hotel (they all have
them), I rather get the impression that these are not the best sources of
information for tours and such. We thought about what to do over breakfast and
eventually decided to simply take a taxi into the middle of town and soak up the
Cairo atmosphere for a while. Perhaps inspiration will hit us
there.
We had the taxi driver drop us
off at one of the main roundabouts in the centre of town after yet another
memorable ride. It was wasn’t long (about seven seconds) before a
‘friendly’ local latched onto us and insisted on helping us with
what we were doing. We were actually looking for an ATM to see if our bank cards
were working and so he lead us around a bit and to a couple of different
locations. As I have suspected for some time now, both our ATM cards have become
quite ineffective. Perhaps the magnetic strips have demagnetized or something
but neither of them have worked in any ATM for several weeks now. Reluctantly,
we had to turn again to the credit card to make a cash withdrawal from the hole
in the wall. We would incur another €7.50 charge for the privilege so we
maxed out the allowance and took out a whopping E£4000 (approximately
$680). Some expensive things like the train journey down to Aswan and back will
need to be paid for in cash so we will probably spend it all in the two weeks or
so that we plan on being here
anyway.
Our ‘friendly’
assistant was very eager for us to see his ‘bazaar’, which was
‘just round the corner’, and we reluctantly indulged him since he
did help us to locale a functional ATM – which we later realized are
absolutely everywhere. His shop turned out to be one in which perfumes (or
essences as he insisted that they were) were on sale. We tried our best to look
at least a little interested and soon
left.
Locals looking to convince you
to buy something from them will latch onto you here like flies if given half the
chance. As was the case throughout much of Africa, they always begin by asking a
benign question and pretending to be nice to foreigners but there is almost
always some commercial motive lying just beneath the surface. After a while, we
learned to pretend not to speak English. This at least slows them down a little
bit.
After wandering around the
streets of downtown Cairo for a while, we ended up back at the main roundabout
where we begun the morning walk and noticed an Internet café that I
remembered reading about in the guidebook. We went in and both sat down at a
terminal each to catch up on some e-mail. After about thirty minutes or so,
Sandy was near completion of composing a lengthy e-mail message when the power
suddenly dropped out. Oops! We settled up the bill and handed over E£3
(about $0.5) for the collective hour of time that we had
spent.
On a couple of the walls
inside the Internet café was a sign advertising a backpackers hostel that
just conveniently happened to be right next door. Our guidebook is unfortunately
very light on the subject of backpacker’s hostels in Cairo (they feature
very much more prevalently in South Africa). We’ve come to realize that
these are the best places to stay in for various reasons and I was keen to have
a look at this place for myself. The reason that we are particularly interested
in backpacker’s haunts is that they are full of other backpackers, such as
ourselves, for one thing. Other backpackers that we meet in these places have
often been in town for a while already and are a good source of good, reliable,
information. You can also buy your own food at the local supermarket and cook it
yourself in a hostel and this can cut costs
considerably.
We checked the place
over and chatted with the manager about tours and hiring a guide with a car for
the day to get out and see the sights. We had checked in at a couple of travel
agencies around town earlier but it seems that hiring a guide and a car for the
day is definitely the cheapest way to go for sightseeing in and around
Cairo.
Although the manager at the
front desk was obviously a shrewd businessman, we got a good feeling about him
and the hostel in general. It’s a fairly new place and would not be listed
in the guidebook yet but I’ve come to trust my instincts in these matters
and I think we will relocate to this hostel after spending the second night here
in the Mayfair hotel. The other main advantage to this new hostel is that it is
right in the middle of town and thus is convenient to everything. It also has a
rather quaint little balcony that overlooks the square (roundabout). Of course,
this probably means that the rooms may be quite noisy but neither of us is
really bothered too much by noises in the night anyway so this shouldn’t
be a problem. We’ve certainly spent quite a few nights in some very noisy
places – such as the two nights we spent in the Parkside Hotel in downtown
Nairobi, which was right next to a bustling restaurant and bar. There is also no
air conditioning and no on-suite bathroom but these are also not entirely
essential to our needs. In fact, sandy prefers not to have air conditioning in
the room.
For a car and driver for
the day, the manager of the hostel will charge us E£80 ($14’ish) for
Cairo and Giza. For the outlying areas, such as some of the pyramids that are
slightly farther away, he charges E£130 ($26.50). We will have to pay the
various entrance fees ourselves but we will have the freedom and flexibility to
go where we want, when we want and always have a car waiting for us. We will
probably spend the next couple of days or so touring around like this before
heading out down south towards Luxor, Aswan and Abu Simbel later on in the
week.
For the past several weeks,
I’ve had to walk around in the one pair of short trousers that I’ve
brought along with me on the trip or in the plastic waterproof trousers that I
have for rainy or wet weather. The zip off trousers that I had originally
brought along has gone missing (we think we left them behind at the campsite in
Maun, Botswana after washing some clothes in the sink). I’ve been looking
for an opportunity to buy a new pair for a while now and we came close to doing
so in Arusha, Tanzania but the shops closed down for a rather lengthy lunch
break and we missed the opportunity. Since we are once again in a big city, we
took advantage of that fact this morning and spent an hour or so looking around.
The manager of the hostel had told us where the best place was to look was and I
very much enjoyed being the centre attention again at one of the small shopping
alleyways where a couple of dozen or more shop owners were vying for my
attention. Our hostel manager had also given us an Arabic newspaper to walk
with. This would give others the impressions that we were at home here and it
would prove an extremely useful tool in our arsenal to prevent touts from
bothering us. Once we had the newspaper, the hassling stopped almost one hundred
percent - another brownie point for the fellow. As was the case in the curio
markets in Nairobi and Victoria Falls before that, once it has become clear that
a potential buyer has entered the commercial zone, everyone becomes interested
at getting the purchase to take place within their store. An interesting and
marked difference with the dynamics of the situation here in Cairo, however, is
that all the shop owners cooperate with each other and I was lead around by
several shop owners to several other shop owners in search of whatever made me
happy. It didn’t seem to matter nearly as much that the purchase was made
with any particular shop owner but that at least a purchase was made somewhere
in the market. This theme of people helping each other and watching out for each
other has surfaced a couple of times already in subtle ways in the brief time
that we’ve been here. After looking over the wares of any number of
merchants, we finally happened upon one particular shop that had exactly what I
was looking for and the haggling commenced once I had verified the fit was right
and decided I was going to make the purchase. The hostel manager had told me
that the ultimate price I should pay might be somewhere in the region of
E£30 (he wasn’t actually too sure) but I ended up meeting the
merchant half way with the rather swank zip off trousers at E£50 ($8.5). I
might have been able to get him down a little further but I was already weakened
by the morning’s walk and it was less than $10 after all and for something
I might have paid well over $80 or more for back in
America.
Another pleasant aspect of
Cairo is that pretty much every person that we have spoken with so far has, at
one point or another during the conversation, expressed a genuine interest in
where we are from and has personally welcomed us to Cairo. It seems that the
people here are genuinely pleased to meet foreigners and we’ve not yet
come across anyone we don’t
like.
Having given our already aching
legs enough of a run-around for the day, we grabbed a taxi back to the hotel to
sit and rest for the remainder of the afternoon. We are in no hurry. Cairo will
still be waiting for us tomorrow and we have certainly earned a little rest and
relaxation after all the travelling we’ve done over the past week. It was
only the third taxi that ultimately accepted our E£5 offer for the ride
– which is actually the going rate. Finding a taxi driver to accept the
offer took all of about fifteen seconds altogether and we were swiftly on our
way with little fuss.
As I type,
sitting here now on the bed in the hotel room, I’ve got some music playing
on the laptop in the background. We’re currently listening to the theme
tunes to Star Trek and Sandy just commented on how we miss TV every now and
then. Hearing the music, she suddenly thought ‘Oh, star Trek is coming on
the TV right now,’ as if we were sitting in our living room, watching the
TV and waiting for our favourite programs to commence. The truth of the matter
is, though, that there is actually very little from our previous lives that we
really miss – with the obvious exception of family and friends. Aside from
the odd little bout of homesickness that Sandy has cured from time to time by
calling her mother, we’ve both settled in to the life of routine
travelling and rarely think too much of our materialistic lives that we’ve
been so engrossed in for the past fifteen years or so. Sustaining that
financially demanding lifestyle was becoming more and more difficult and
it’s that way of thinking that is one of the things I’ve been hoping
that this journey will cure us of.
Posted: Mon - May 26, 2003 at 08:24 AM