The Mysterious Cairo
This morning we were awakened at 5 AM for another early morning airport pick up. After the typical Nile cruise line breakfast, the porters hustled our bags up to the waiting van for the half hour drive to the Aswan airport. Aswan is actually quite a pleasant and slightly more modern city than others we have seen in Egypt. The airport was uneventful and efficient with the exception that we still had the multiple layers of bag handler’s expediters, ticket agents, security, men, and miscellaneous hangers-on that were looking for their baksheesh.
Mike tries to make sense out of everybody he is tipping, and I’ve tried to explain to him that in the developing world sometimes you tip people just because. Maybe it’s because they did something good for you maybe it’s because you’re annoyed by them and you want them to go away or maybe you just feel a little bit sorry for them because of the hardness of their lives having to scramble for baksheesh every day at an Egyptian airport.
Well, we had the normal hurry up and wait program. After we found our gate, we basically just sat and let Mike tell us when the gate seemed to be opening. When it did, we activated our Gold Pass boarding privileges from flying business class and we went right to the front of the line and simply got on the bus. The bus came to the plane and we climbed up the stairs to the plane and got in our seats. All very simple,
I have to comment that the business class seats on EgyptAir, while very much old school (as in old school first class), are the best seats I’ve sat in on an airplane in years. I actually said to Kim that I wish these were the seats that we had on every flight everywhere we went around the world. I also told her that my knees were feeling better this morning And that with the sun shining, the good air conditioning, and these comfortable seats under my keister, I felt like I was ready to travel for another 50 years. I know I won’t be able to maintain that sense of perfection, but it is interesting that a small national airline in the Levant like EgyptAir could make me so happy like I am on a morning like this.
The day we have planned includes a tour of Coptic Cairo and places, such as the cave church and the hanging church. I think it’s safe to say that we will be seeing a lot of churches and mosques today, and probably visiting some Cairo souks and bazaars.
I told Mike that I thought these two days in Cairo were like rest days in between temple hopping in the upper Nile and going in to see Petra, which happens on Sunday and Monday. It’s as though we specifically spent our first two days in Cairo like it was a headline, grabbing our attention with the Great Pyramids of Giza and then, after filling our antiquities bucket of interest with our visit down the Nile, We are now backtracking in time to see the newer side of Cairo with new being defined as the last 1,000 years.
We landed in Cairo without incident, and it all felt very familiar, because we were met by the same tour group expediter, who met us when we arrived here from Rome a week ago, and we then met the tour coordinator for Cairo for our tour, and indeed finally met up with the driver, who is the same driver who drove us around last time we were in Cairo. When traveling to challenging places like the Middle East, it is especially helpful to have people you know, and recognize meet you and work through the details of arrival and departure for you. I’m sure our tour group, Kensington, has figured that out and takes full advantage of it. It was a nice sunny day in Cairo, and we drove through a much more modern part of the city than we had seen going off in the direction of Giza the last time we arrived. The Boulevards here are wider streets that were cleaner and they are planted with Bougainvillea to make them all look very pleasant. It was almost like a different city than what we had come into a week ago. Again, I think Kensington organized this properly by bringing us first to enjoy the sensational aspects of Cairo, by being near the pyramids of Giza, where we could afford to ignore some of the rubble that surrounds that area of town. Then, after a nice long Nile cruise, they have brought us to the modern part of Cairo to see the rest of the city as it exists today.
When we got to the Ritz Carlton, we had to make a decision about what we wanted our two days in Cairo to look like. The four things that we were scheduled to see from a tour standpoint were Coptic Cairo, the Cave Church, the Egyptian Museum and the Museum of Civilization. Coptic Cairo is basically just the part of the city that grew up between the birth of Christ and now, particularly in the first 600 years of the first millennia A.D. Therefore, it was orthodox Christian, with a slight overlay of Arabic and Muslim influence, since the Arabs invaded from the direction of Saudi Arabia in 642 A.D.. When you think about that, that was only a few years after the reign of the prophet Muhammad, so it’s fair to say that Islam got off to a very fast start. Our guide, Achmed Aziz, spent the time to explain the Sunni versus Shia differences with the full awareness that the Muslim world is 90% Sunni and virtually all of Egypt is Sunni. That does not mean that the Shia influence doesn’t exist , quite the contrary, but it does exist in only a limited way.
In addition to decisions about the sites we wanted to see, we also had to decide about the meals that we wanted Kensington to buy for us. We had two meals provided by Kensington over the two days. We decided that we preferred to do lunches with our tour guides on both days And chose to organize our time seeing Coptic Cairo and the Cave Church first, with a lunch in between on an island in the Nile where there are restaurants on riverboats. It seemed a little funny going to a riverboat for lunch after having just spent four days on the riverboat in the upper Nile but we went with it anyway. That meant that we were leaving the museums and a late lunch for tomorrow so that we would have an early evening tonight and tomorrow since we were tired today and had to get up early (very early) on Sunday for a flight to Amman.
Coptic Cairo turns out to be a fairly small area of town where there are some old churches and fortifications from that early Christian era just after the birth of Christ. It’s not a particularly impressive area because while the structures in the sites are interesting, after seeing the pyramids and all of the temples on the Nile, it’s hard to get too excited about “just another church“ even if it is a very old church. After seeing the Hanging Church, and then the Crypt Church, the decision we made was that going to see the Cave Church (something we had been told not to miss) was wholly unnecessary (no pun intended). We were ready for lunch, so we went to the island that Achmed Aziz had told us of. To put it succinctly, it offered the best food we’ve had since arriving in Egypt a week ago. The food was fresh, tasty and served efficiently. We were all very pleased with our lunch on the riverboat.
After lunch, we sat and talked with Achmed Aziz and discussed the rest of our Cairo visit. In addition to telling him we didn’t wanna go to the Cave Church, we also told him that we would probably skip the Museum of Civilization tomorrow (since all it has of note is three mummies), in favor of going to the bazaar and having a late lunch. That would end our tour program in Cairo. Fundamentally that makes for an easier day for both Achmed Aziz and our driver Hani, so nobody was having any problems with this. It’s probably a sign of the stage of the trip that we’re in that we’re being a bit picky about what we want to spend our time seeing, but it probably is also an indicator that none of us is particularly enamored with spending too much time in churches and museums.
So there you have it. The mysteries of Cairo have been available to us and while we are enjoying the city, we feel like veterans of Egypt at this point and don’t feel that mysterious Cairo holds that many more mysteries that we need to unravel and we can just get on to Jordan.