O dear, what to do when the travel doesn't fit the travel crumbs chapters? I took my daughter to Egypt this month in search of instant post A level archaeological experience since she has decided to study the subject at university. We picked our moment well - nothing like post revolutionary conditions to clear major tourist sites and we had much of Upper Egypt, away from the easiest reach of the Nile tour ships, almost to ourselves. Prices were low and the usual purveyors of every sort of unappealing tourist tat had given up their strenuous attempts at sales in favour of grumbling peacefully over their shishas and waiting for greater stability and the winter season to restore the avid crowds of souvenir seekers and improved livelihoods. Times are hard but even charitable feelings hardly inspire spending on lurid galabiyas and pyramid printed tee shirts or the ubiquitous mass produced scarabs that have none of the delicacy of the tiny blue glazed handmade pieces I found so appealing in the past.
Revolution has done little to improve the Cairo traffic, links in an endlessly moving necklace round the city in which, once enmeshed, there is no law abiding escape, only break outs in bursts of anarchic speed followed by screaming brakes. Few cars or trucks survive unscathed. In high summer from the air, Cairo is a silent city of dust; once outside the pristine new airport buildings, it is a noisy, polluted and irresistible maelstrom where all roads lead eventually to the chaos of Tahrir Square. The solid red bulk of the Egyptian Museum whose antiquities, halls and stairs are coated, like the city, with the dust of decades continues for now to command the square where more modern buildings have been burnt out or, like the Nile Hilton, are being demolished to make way for something new.
The contents of the Museum itself are to move to new premises in Giza in the next year or two which may result in a more orderly experience of Egyptian antiquity with improved lighting and labelling of exhibits. One suspects that some of the current labels have acquired antique status themselves by now although the exhibits themselves, including the best known Tutankhamen collection, are breathtaking under any circumstances. The Museum is always busy and remains relatively so even under current conditions but many of its food, drink and souvenir outlets are closed due to lack of trade and we were able to appreciate the best of the exhibits unhindered by heaving busloads of overheated fellow tourists.
At Saqqara the new and blissfully air conditioned Imhotep Museum by King Djoser's step pyramid is perhaps a promise of things to come in the Egyptian museum world. It is hard to tear oneself away from so much ancient treasure so beautifully preserved, displayed and described in multilingual labelling. There is a short explanatory film in a separate auditorium that is so inky dark as to present considerable danger of falling into it. We had it completely to ourselves, the pyramid and rebuilt funerary complex too and the inevitable carpet factory where we drank mint tea and failed to buy our dues.
The great colossus of Rameses lay still in solitary state in his hall in Memphis, the peace unruffled by noisy crowds and the sphinx of Queen Hatshepsut toasted as she has for vast swathes of time in the sun outside with only a handful of bored guards drinking tea in the shade for company among the broken pillars and other, smaller, faceless sphinxes. Only by the great sphinx itself were there crowds to stare at the broken, mysterious face where pigeons perch like tears on broken cheeks. Camel drivers and horse hirers touted their trips to the panorama above the Pyramids themselves without much enthusiasm and it was possible to take photographs from there uncluttered by more than the odd caleche driving up the road.
In Islamic Cairo and Coptic old Cairo the streets and bazaars were busy only with Cairenes although signs of recent upheavals were unnoticeable beyond burnt out neighbourhood police stations and occasional other buildings that were more likely to be the victims of accident, fire being a regular hazard in a dry and overpopulated city. The great mosques are presently at least frequented mainly by the devout, the dozing or the studious; places of great peace, great majesty and extraordinary architectural beauty, their secrets and styles revealed to us by an architect friend who has spent half a lifetime renovating and restoring the remarkable buildings of the Islamic city. Gateways of ancient caravanserais, a barber, butcher or beauty parlour often tucked into the recesses, opened up visions of earlier lives, travellers and traders. Exquisitely decorated and renovated Sabils, founded by the charitable rich, often women, during Mamluk and Ottoman rules from the 14th to 19th centuries, offered glimpses of changing architectural styles and an echo of those who had drunk the water their cisterns provided, watered animals at their troughs or found free education for their children in their high cool halls.
In the City of the Dead, the living live their busy lives cheek by jowl with the dead as they have always done. These swathes of land laid aside and great buildings created to venerate the dead were always intended to be shared by living descendants and so it is in narrow lanes between great shrines where the village life of small artisans, glassblowers and wood carvers, goats, dogs and thousands of cats continues unabated, improved or not by electricity, trucks and motorcycles, piling plastic rubbish and now overloaded original sewerage systems. In other lanes of the old city, the metal workers and lamp makers, the carvers of intricate wooden screens, the suppliers of shishas and their accoutrements, of leather goods and even the milliners, if such a description can be applied to the makers of most desirable tasselled tarbushes, still worn by academics continue to ply their busy trade. In another tiny alley close to a multitude of mosques an aging Christian cheerfully displays shelves loaded with bottles of whisky and other spirits in his open shop front.
We stayed in the Flamenco Hotel, a rather exhausted business style hotel in Zamalek, part of Gezira Island in the Nile, where embassies and grander hotels cluster near the Cairo Opera House and art deco apartment buildings line the streets along the river. The Flamenco bar and its outside bakery supplying delicious bread and Swiss German pastries are popular with expatriates and Cairenes; the hotel itself verges on the gloomy especially in the cheaper rooms facing away from the Nile where the sun seldom penetrates. Taxis are easily available and cheap - £2 seems to cover a trip almost anywhere which is a treat after London fares and lures the traveller from the economies of the Metro.
We failed rather with restaurant sorties except on a visit to the wonderful early
20th century planned luxuries of Heliopolis where our hosts assured us diamonds were far easier to come by than bread. The Italian restaurant on the Le Pascha Nile boat, moored near our hotel, where the antipasti came highly recommended appeared to have given up in the face of reduced business and the antipasti was neither inspired nor inviting but rather slowly acquiring an air of age and mummification.
After an overnight sleeper journey, including entirely edible dinner and breakfast, to Aswan, we stayed one night in the dingy Marhaba Hotel where we appeared to be the only guests. Perfectly placed for access to Nile boats and feluccas the Marhaba produced a decent lunch but my daughter was propositioned quite determinedly by a receptionist which went some way to putting us off the hotel entirely and we hastened to a the gloriously local Sayida Nafeesa in the bazaar for dinner where more food than 4 of us could have eaten cost us £6 and came with no strings attached.
And so a feast of tombs and temples, blessedly for us only Luxor, Karnak and the Valley of the Kings much enlivened by fellow tourists; quieter areas such as the Valleys of the Nobles and the Workers deserted, to our delight. Once embarked on a comfortable Nile ship we failed to join the group congoing round the dining room on the 'Oriental' evening, to change into cocktail dresses for dinner or to attend the galabiya party in the bar and were a great disappointment to the staff who had me down as an alcoholic to boot with a 3 (minute) glasses of Omar Khayyam a night habit. At Kom Ombo and Edfu we were off the boat before the breakfast queues started and back on it before photography involved a shoulder or an elbow edging into every image of a good or vista of fields of magnificent pillars. The only difficulty these days is keeping the son et lumiere fittings out of any picture.
Our brilliant guide, Ahmed (hamadasa15@hotmail.com), had inherited the mantle of the traditional dragoman whose job for 19th and early 20th century tourists was to organise, interpret, arrange transport and money, guide and, if possible be something of a governess to sheeplike charges. Indefatigable himself, Ahmed was prepared to make some allowances for the lesser energies of youth and old age and promised air-conditioned car breaks between more distant sites although we were stringently tested on iconography and hieroglyphic knowledge and woe betide the one who forgot the difference between Hathor and Isis or failed to recognise Anubis as a dog. We did at least manage to take our own photographs. We met one large and bejewelled Italian woman in flowing galabiya, large straw hat and shades, teetering round the temple of Hatshepsut on her wedge heeled sandals with a small guide in tow being instructed on what should be photographed for her with her very small camera.
