Egypt Days 13-15: i could have sworn i had more stamina than this. did i leave it all in Dahab?

i'm sitting on the 6th-floor balcony of my (questionably) 4-Star hotel room sipping a beer while i gaze out on the Pyramids of Giza in the late-afternoon and i can hear the call to prayer echoing from the minaret a couple of hundred metres away. the dust and smog create a glow in the air which softens the sunset and gives the buildings a sepia tinge. the Hotel SIAG Pyramids advertises its rating behind the concierge desk, but i'm starting to realise that the stars in Egypt... they do not mean what i think they mean. much of the foyer is painted gold, with marble floors, a spiral staircase and red-upholstered chairs that look rather grand when you walk in the door, but you don't have to go far before the cracks appear in the facade. for starters, marble's cheap here. it's fucking everywhere, so i'm not impressed. the gold paint on the chairs started rubbing off years ago and it's well on its way now. the pool is an empty blue crater with brown sludge in the deep end (so much for our idea of sitting by the pool, chilling out). of the 3 lifts, i've only seen 2 work and even then they don't like coming up to the 6th floor (they're ok with the 5th though. maybe they got in a fight with the 6th and now they're not talking? who knows...) and the wireless internet in the foyer seems to actually be for the hotel across the road or something, so you need to sit just inside the doors to get a connection... and even then it drops out every few minutes which is hugely frustrating when you're trying to send a 3 meg attachment by email. it's not all bad here though. Louise and i have a queen-size bed each and true to the advertising the balcony does in fact have a great view of the Pyramids that we've spent a lot of time sitting and and looking at. the air con works which is good, not because it's particularly hot but because otherwise we'd have no fresh air. open the sliding door in the evening and you'd better have your mozzie repellant on otherwise prepare to be eaten. i've had my jabs, but typhoid is a nasty little disease which turns your blood to poison and is therefore not your friend.

a couple of days ago i was on the public coach from Dahab to Cairo. heading there we were crammed into a smaller tour bus which went direct. thanks to the extra night in Dahab, GoBus booked us onto the public coach which was surprisingly comfortable - better than the Mccaffrey's buses i used to take from Canberra to Sydney. it takes a more circuitous route, however, cutting across the Sinai peninsula to the west-coast and going through Sharm al Shiek and a couple of other places with immemorable names on its way to the capital. we had a 8:30AM start, but somehow were more shattered by the time we arrived at 5:15PM than we had been leaving at 7AM nearly a week previous. Louise slept most of the way, her head falling and snapping back every couple of minutes, while i drained most of my Eee's battery trying to make some amount of sense out of the days just passed.

Wally was at the bus stop to meet us and say goodbye - he was meeting his new group in a couple of hours, but still took the time out to see us off to our last tour-arranged hotel personally. i can't rate the service of the tour company highly enough - they've looked after us, kept everything tight, made sure we were always sorted and the moment we wanted to change the plan they accomodated us in a heartbeat. i was sad to see Wally go, just as i was sad to say goodbye to Soobie a week before. Soobie was our guide and our shepherd. Wally was our fixer and our friend. at the same time i was glad to be off the tour and off the map. now i do this thing My Way... Louise agreeing of course. i like to set my own pace and choose my own path. being on the tour grated a bit, but the reality of the situation is that i could never have completed as much as they did anywhere near as efficiently or cheaply, even given twice the time to do it, and even if i'd tried 80% of the detail would have been lost because they have the local-knowledge and know-how.

we get an early night in the Holiday Inn after finding the supermarket Soobie had shown us on the second day of the trip (conveniently, located just down the road from the hotel) and grabbing some fast food for tea, eating in our room and chilling out. we're met in the lobby by our jeweller Mr Sayed at around check-out time. he'd met us in our hotel in Luxor where he has a regular hookup through GoBus as their "trusted source" for jewellery which meant that when we ordered customised pieces he was guaranteed to deliver. we'd picked up our shipments on our second stint in Cairo, on our way to Dahab but my silver bling-bracelet had been too small and needed adjustment, and Louise'd necklace had broken in Dahab and needed repair. he came out to our hotel to pick her necklace up and promised to have it back to her at our next hotel in 2 days time. no mess, no fuss, no arguement, just an apology for the inconvenience. he didn't have to do that.

the business of the morning sorted we haggled with the concierge and arranged a taxi out to Giza and the hotel we'd booked ourselves for the last week in town. an hour later we were sitting on our balcony enjoying the view.

feeling appropriately chilled out, we hit the street in search of adventure, exploration and food. we've landed a bit of a ways off the beaten track here in Giza - the hotel is a kilometre or so off Pyramids Rd, opposite a new freeway overpass which is under construction. we've got no idea where the fuck anything is around here and no direction looks particularly obvious so we decide "fuck it" and head right, spending the next 2 hours doing a bog-lap around and through a mixture of suburbia and strip-malls, eyes of the locals tracking us (mostly Louise) as we pass through back-streets where english is something that generally happens to other people. it's hot and dusty but our limited Arabic successfully buys us cheap-but-delicious felafels and no one gives us any lip. i'm liking this - away from the tourist traps and the bazaars, seeing how these people live in the real world. a bit of a rest back at the hotel and we're out the door again. the hotel's Taxi-Pimp introduces us to Omar who will take us to the Pyramids Sound & Light Show, wait around for us then show us somewhere to get a bite to eat. the show's just as cheesy, lame and overly dramatic as advertised... but it's fun. i don't even mind when it loses the plot half-way through and goes off on a wierd tangent because at least it's interesting and tells stories i've not heard before. it IS actually worth going and paying to see, even if just to see the pyramids light up in pretty colours with lasers tracing out patterns on the flat wall of the Embalming Temple. true to his word, Omar takes us not only to an Egyptian fast-food place (FelFela - a greasy snack-joint selling felafel sandwiches and Shwerma Kebabs for LE1 and LE12 in that order. at that price i get Omar a felafel sandwich for being such a good sport. tipping is a big part of the culture here and i want to try something different) but a hole-in-the-wall grog shop where we stock up for the coming week.

Cairo's a dusty, dirty, smelly hellhole of a town. don't let anyone tell you otherwise, but don't take this as criticism either. areas like the one i'm at here in Giza are only a couple of kilometres from the Western Desert and therefore dustier than an octogenarian's lingere collection. rubbish arrangements are both serendipitous and democratic - anywhere that isn't currently being used has a pile blown in by the wind, then people just use that. they seem to get cleaned out every once in a while, but not until every man and his donkey has a pick through for anything of interest. the only clean cars you'll see were washed this morning, and spent most of their time since covered up. i've seen cars under bridges with a coating of dust so thick i couldn't tell what colour they started out, but now they're brown. the rubbish in this place makes me despair sometimes. i swear Bangkok was cleaner, although with the lack of humidity Cairo wins on smell. dry shit don't stink so much (although with the impressive donkey population even in the centre of Cairo there's plenty of donkey-shit around). seriously though? fuck it. that's just the way it is. YOU try keeping shit clean when the desert dust whips up and and a new load settles in the stillness of the night. it rains here so rarely it barely even counts and it'd take at least a week of downpour to give this place anywhere near the cleaning it needs.

this is what the PC-crowd like to call a "developing country". for every rich person is Cairo or Alexandria there are hundreds of peasants living a rural life up and down the Nile. the average Egyptian earns less than LE1000 a month. that's ~AUD$250, or ~GBP£100. and that's the average. i've been blowing something like that each week i've been here. for every dole-bludger sitting on their corpulent arse in Lakemba whining about how hard it is in the current economic climate, all i can say is come meet Mohammed. he works a field of garlic and carrots on the edge of the desert. he sleeps in a mud-brick hut with his wife and 3 kids. his 10 year old son just started working in a carpet factory and he's glad for it because the money Amir earns means he can take english-classes in a couple of years and maybe get a job in tourism as a tout selling dodgy-papyrus, driving a taxi or maybe even as a guide if he's lucky. the daily live of these people is dust, dirt, prayer and hard fucking work and if you still think your life is hard after seeing the gratitude in his eyes after you hand him the equivalent of a quid when you need to pull your head out of your fucking arse because it's completely full of shit.

there's not the money for garbage trucks in the burbs - they're focused on keeping the tourist sites clean (and they don't even manage that very well half the time) because that's what important here. Australia rode the sheep's back to prosperity before climbing on the Haulpak and hitching a ride with the resources boom. Egypt's riding the international tourist and the money we spend visiting the monuments and museums, shopping in the bazaars and the restaurants, taking tours and paying guides means freeways, water you can drink from the tap without catching dysentry, power with only the occasional brownout, hospitals and medicines, education and trades. i'd love it if they could keep the place tidier so that they didn't have to live in filth, but i understand why they can't. each day i come back to the hotel dusty and dirty and i don't want to know the colour the water'll turn when i wash my clothes back in London, but it comes with the territory. at least i know in a few days my clothes will be clean, and stay that way for a while.

Tuesday rolls in and we've both had something like 9 or 10 hours of sleep but we just manage to get down to the buffet in time to snaffle some chocolate-covered croissants and a sweet danish, along with a couple of mugs of the muddy water that passes for coffee in this town. it's either Turkish Coffee (WIN!) or Nescafe (FAIL!) around here, and the hotel doesn't do Turkish. shit together, we find the Taxi-Pimp and our new friend Mohammed agrees to take us around for the day. first stop is the Citadel of Salah Al-Din, perched over the city on a hilltop with a stunning view - a medieval fortress from back in the days before gunpowder when thick walls, a few thousand men and a decent stockpile of arrows could hold off an army. when the Turks and the Arabs finally took Egypt back from Napoleon and crowned Mohammed Ali (where do you think Cassius Clay got the name?) as the new king he had a grand mosque build at its peak: a majestic, but subdued place of worship. Ali and his dynasty ruled for the next 147 years, but the Mosque of Mohammed Ali remains.

i've been in churches galore - growing up with a quietly Roman Catholic mother and a father who dabbled in a few different christian sects before coming back to Orthodoxy with a religious fervour that would bring a tear to an Inquisitor's eye, i've seen the inside of more places of worship than i have Macdonalds restaurants. Catholic, Uniting, Baptist, Angligan, CoE, Orthodox (Greek or Russian), Buddhist (a couple of flavours), Hindu, Ancient Egyptian... throw in a Synagogue or two, Latter Day Saints and Scientology and i'll just about have the full set unless you want to get nutty and go Davidian (oh yeah - that burned down. shame). i've seen them big and small, grand like St Pauls in London, small and humble like St Margaret's (i need to check this) in Edinburgh Castle, sombre Orthodox churches full of gold-leaf ikons, colourful Hindus ringed with statues, halls with folding seats, converted warehouses and even an ancient brick temple overgrown by a Budda-Tree, tended by modest, peaceful buddhist monks. my first mosque was something new. light coloured stone walls a storey high giving way to dark coloured domes above, lights hung low on chains from a ceiling done in dark-olive green, deep brown and black, silver inscriptions and filigree and carpets on the floor for the believers to sit, pray and contemplate. a whispered story i overheard was that some local Jewish artisans were roped into the construction and decoration and when no one was looking they painted a Star of David at the top of the central dome around the mount for the main chandelier in gold, thumbing their noses at their Muslem task-masters. if you look up you can see it there to this day - apparently Ali could take a joke and let it stay.

it's peaceful and restful... none of the grotesquerie of the crucifiction, fire and brimstone, "do this or else", bleeding eyes or hearts. of course, i can't read Arabic so for all i know they inscriptions could be screaming "Death to the infidel" but somehow... i don't think so. we wind up sitting there for at least 10 minutes enjoying the serenity. even the american and Italian tourists near us take their shoes off and pay respect. back outside in the blinding sunlight we're back to our normal "get a photo of me in front of the " habits, but i'm starting to develop an inkling of why Islam spreads faster than an 18yo's legs at a toga party. later in the day we visit the Mosque of Sayyidna Al-Hussein near the Kahn Al-Kalili and i see people sitting, talking, praying, sleeping. fall asleep in a Catholic church and you'll be shoo'd out. sit on the floor and you'll be rudely prodded. here sitting on the floor is what you do. it's dark, cool, and thick stone walls provide a sanctuatry from the midday sun. seats? you sit on the carpet, fool! that's what it's for!

i'm not really sure what the Citadel's all about. we spent an hour or so wandering around it, following the circut of the somewhat-interesting (but poorly organised and a little pointless) Military Museum which had considerably more replicas and models than it had actual artifacts, skipping the Police Museum completely and generally enjoying the view of Cairo. like so much of Egypt, it's got a "thrown together" feel to it and i almost wish i'd had a guide to point at the interesting stuff i know i missed.

back on the street i give Mohammed a call to come grab us from the pickup point and we're off, but only after climbing into the wrong taxi and having to jump out 10 metres down the road. we're dropped off at Sayyidna Al-Hussein and after having a look around we cruise the markets for a while. Louise wants to look at jewellery. Louise wants to haggle for a shisha water-pipe. Mr Raven wants to gut-punch the next person who yells at him "Sir, Sir! How can I take your money?" walk softly, carry a big stick and pray i only break half your fingers. the first time i thought it was refreshingly honest, after which it got old really fast. Kahn Al-Kalili is Cairo's BIG tourist market. think of anything stereotypically Egyptian and/or Pharaonic, you name it: you'll find it here. two main streets linked by cross-roads and alleyways. keep your wits about you or you're getting lost. the unwary should carry a compass in their hand and their money in an internal body cavity... or maybe another set of trousers. which they left in another country. we don't get anywhere near into it on account of being tired, thirsty and in desperate need of a sit down. it's tourist-ville, so we even bargain down the price of our drinks and cocktail-shisha and enjoy a nice half-hour sipping sweet cold hibiscus while we watch the world go by, walking away with that contented feeling that too many things are right with the universe and anything that isn't is welcome to wait until i care again.

meanwhile we've lost Mohammed. i've burned through most of my remaining phone credit trying to work out where he is. he's in the carpark of the nearer mosque (there are 2 in close vicinity). no, he's on the street. wait, we'll meet him out the front of the farther mosque. we're going back to the car park? no, there you are! it's getting late and we've managed to hit rush hour on the freeway. oh. sweet. fuckery. somewhere in the middle of i-have-no-fucking-idea a 5-lane freeway hasn't just slowed to a crawl, it's stopped. people are getting out of their cars to see what's going on. after 5 minutes i'm sitting in the window of the taxi waving at the kids in the back of the truck ahead wishing i had my poi with me, otherwise i'd have given this Cairo Freeway an impromptu performance before running around the cars with my hat out asking for tips. turnabout is fair-play, after all. i'm SO pissed off - i'm never taking them out of my bag again. Louise is happy i left them in the hotel - she hates it when i make a spectacle. in the end we wait until the traffic mysteriously starts moving again and amuse ourselves by learning to read Arabic numbers (which came in useful today when we walked into a restaurant with an english menu but prices in Arabic. WIN!) by reading off licence-plates (they have both Arabic and Western on them, so they're like mini-Rosetta Stones). Mohammed gets in on the game and seems to be having a ball schooling the white kids. i get to the point where i can read all 10 numerals and say to him i can read numbers in Arabic! now i'm as good as an Egyptian 5-year old! and he loses it laughing. eventually we're dropped back outside the hotel. the bill? LE200 - the equivalent of AUD$50 for 6 hours and fuck-knows how many kilometres.

we celebrate in the restaurant next to the hotel which has an english/arabic menu and no other customers but us. the food's good, the staff hover around as if their heads are on the chopping block if we aren't completely satisfied and we while away our evening watching the Egyptian Top-40 and smoking apple-shisha while mosquitos mistake my legs for a free buffet.