Nothing too much new happened during this past school week. We went back to Cafeteria Huria on Wednesday night and followed it with shisha at a coffee house nearby. Both of these places are located on Tahrir Street, off of Tahrir sqaure. This is the main square in all of Cairo and the center of Downtown. Near here are the Ramses Hilton, the Semiramis Intercontinental, and the Four Seasons. After a couple weeks of exploring Cairo, I've come to realize how amazing it really is to get 9LE Stellas (divide any price in LE by 5.5 to get the equivalent in US Dollars). On Thursday night a group of us made it over to the Cairo Jazz Club in Mohandesseen, across the bridge west of Zamalek. This is a fairly upscale bar/club, and that night they had a live reggae band which improvised and covered some Bob Marley. Supposedly you need reservations, but they let us hang out at a table until the group that reserved it showed up. The vibe was pretty cool, but unike Huria, Stellas were 25LE. The night concluded with teas, lemon juice, and apple shisha at Versaille Palace.
Saturday we made the trip out to Saqqara, the oldest stone-hewn structure still standing in the world. Cairo has a ton of sites such as this in the surrounding area, such as Memphis and Dashur. The problem is that there is no easy way to get to them. Most tourists see Egypt in organized tour groups that might encompass Cairo its surrounding areas to just about everything notable site in Egypt. They purchase packages ranging anywhere from a couple of days to over two weeks, and these packages provide tranportation by tour bus, hotel reservations, tips on where to eat and tour guides. Seeing Egypt on your own is a little more difficult.
We met at 9:30 in the courtyard and had a leisurely breakfast of pita, nutella, peanutbutter, and mango and pineapple nectar. Then we made the twenty minute walk to the Sadat Metro (subway) Station in Downtown. I had not taken the metro yet and was shocked at how clean and efficient it was (clean and efficient being relative terms). It cost 1LE each way, making it a 2LE round trip. We took the metro from Downtown to El Monib station, as far south as the metro would take us. From there, we had to catch a taxi for the twenty mintue drive out to Saqqara. Once at Saqqara, we negotiated a price to keep the cab with us all day. We had trouble communication the idea of "one flat rate for the whole day," but it eventually got worked out. Since we were idependent of a tour group, we didn't have gigantic air conditioned bus to take us around the sites, and the sites are fairly remote so catching a different cab between locations is difficulat. But now we had a chauffer for the day. On the way out we chatted with him in what little Arabic we knew and he got to practice his basic English. The drive was beautiful. If you imagine the Nile Delta as an upside-down triangle, Cairo is situated right at the southern tip. All the was north the south, the nile is line with lush, fertile ground; but since we live in the city of Cairo proper, our landscape only consists of the poorly maintained concrete facades of high rises. Here we got to tavel along the nile outside of the city and in the beautiful green farmland.
Saqqara is known as the step pyramid, for reasons obvious in the picture. Other than being the oldest stone structure still standing, we learned everything else we wanted to know about Saqqara from our collection of Frommer's, Rough Guide, Lonely Planet, and National Geographic guide books. Unlike the United States, most of the ancient monuments and ruins here are without information desks or salaried tour guides. You either bring your own guide, as with a package tour, or you make do by yourself. Of course, there are plenty of random locals willing to give you a tour for a tip, but these are more often a miss than a hit. Usually they will poin out such obvious things as "this is a hieroglyph of a hippo," and then ask you for money. We did our best to avoid this. We found early on in our stay in Egypt that standing in one spot too long draws an unwelcome mixture of people trying to screw you over. In Downtown, there is always someone willing to show you around and then either demand a tip or try to take you to his shop or give you his business card. At Saqqara and Giza, you can guarantee that not staying mobile means getting offered "authentic" bedeouin hair (I think the guy meant hat, but he definitely said hair) or a camel ride. At the catacombs in Alexandria, we had a very nice unofficialy tour and we tipped the man well. But he also wan't pushy about forcing us to follow him around. Gernerally, we are very wary of anyone trying to offer us anything.
We climbed around Saqqara for a while and found some black and red granite ruins. Then we toured an old temple filled with amazingly intact hieroglyphics, many still with their original paint. Here we ran into a problem though, as Mark got his camera taken away temporarily for illegally taking pictures inside the temple. After this we intended to got to Dashur to see the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid, but we could not make it there before closing. Instead, we paid the cabbie an extra 30LE to take us to Giza for sunset. But before we arrived, we were hounded by people hawking camel rides. They would run in front of the taxi and force it to stop and they would run along side the car yelling into the windows. They kept trying to tell us the Pyramids were closed (which was obvious) and that our only option was to ride their camels (which was false). Our driver did his best to shoo them away and it took the five of us yelling and gesturing angrily in Arabic to make it through. He dropped us off at the Sphynx and we parted ways. He was a very sweet old man.
Along the road running parallel to the Giza complex we found a restaurant and dined on the roof while we watched the sun set behind the Great Pyramid. Once it got dark, there was a cheesy sound and light show in which the Sphynx "narrated" the history of the pyramids while the story was projected onto the faces of the pyramids with lazer lights. We finished with some good, although pricy, food and some great photos.The cab we took back had a serious case of road rage and we blew through stand-still traffic the whole way from the Pyramids to the Giza metro station. He seriously shot some gaps. There is a reason everyone here keeps their side mirrors folded in all the time. If they have them. It was a good day of travel, although we still need to make the trip back out to see Dashur. Next weekend we are planning on camping in the White Desert. If there is anything specific you would like to know, just post a comment.
For further photos:
2 comments:
Paul - I was just wondering what "gesturing angrily in Arabic" means... Do you learn that in class?
hahah yes. its hard to get down the specific hand movements but after a while you catch on easily.
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