A: Winter.

We arrived in Aswan today at the end of our Nile cruise, a pleasantly bustling city that seems to be free of the hassle and harassment of Luxor.

Unfortunately, it was 40°C when we set out this afternoon to visit the souk. With our lily-white skin, we could scarcely be further removed from the Nubians who call this city their home. After a lunch of kofta, soup and vegetables, we walked the length of the souq and then had to recognise a superior opponent in the scorching sun. We beat a hasty retreat to the sanctuary of the hotel, where, in the dead of tonight, the temperature is predicted to drop to an altogether more human 25°C.

And so it is that we have Internet access again for the first time since leaving Cairo, some two weeks ago. That hiatus represents the single longest period that I’ve been without any kind of Internet access since, well, since I first acquired Internet access some fifteen years ago. Said suspension was apparently even long enough that Sarah’s folks had e-mailed our guesthouse in Luxor to ensure that we had arrived safely. No doubt they feared we had had our throats cut and been left as desert carrion or perhaps kidnapped and sold into white slavery on the African subcontinent.

Actually, it was nice not to blog for a while. We were doing so much in such oppressive heat that I scarcely had any energy left in the evenings. I didn’t even keep off-line notes for the purpose of tracking what we have done this trip. Many evenings, particularly in the desert, we have been going to sleep at 21:00. What else are you going to do when there’s no electricity or natural light and you’re completely knackered?

Similarly, we’ve had many a 06:00 or 06:30 start to the day, particularly on the Nile cruise, so by the time the sun goes down, it’s all we can do to eat, shower and fall into bed.

We’re here for the next three nights, after which we’ll return to Cairo by sleeper train.

I’m rather pathetically hoping for cooler temperatures in the days ahead, but the forecast is for a debilitating 42°C. On the bright side, at least it’s not summer. This is what the Nubians call winter!

This description, free of embellishment, accurately describes just one evening of our five day sail boat cruise along the Nile. Even Sarah was relaxed enough by the end of the day to give the sheesha pipe a try.

Typically, we’d visit a temple in the morning and go for a walk in the afternoon. One day, we did a particularly fun desert walk, working up a rare sweat on an otherwise totally undemanding cruise.

The dahabiyah isn’t the only (or the cheapest) way to cruise the Nile from Luxor to Aswan, but it is the best. The pace recreates the lifestyle of a bygone era and I’ve rarely been as relaxed as I was on that boat. Other options are the felucca and the large cruise ship, but the former has no amenities and the latter goes much faster, missing much of what is of interest along the Nile, because the ship is too large to moor along the riverbank.

We were lucky to be travelling on the same boat as a very nice Australian family. After five days and nights of eating and chatting with Alex and Amy, we had become pretty good friends. Their boisterous son, Lachlan, was a godsend for Eloïse. The two of them kept each other entertained for the entirety of the trip, which made things much easier for us, as we only had to keep an eye on Lucas.

The only other passengers on the boat were four Italians, also very nice people. We got to know them less well, because of the language barrier, but it was still good to get to know them. The entire party ate their meals together, which says a lot about how well we all got on.

The crew were fantastic, paying close attention to the children to make sure they weren’t in any danger. The deck had low railings, so Lucas in particular was in danger of falling over the side. Thankfully, he never really came close to doing so.

On the final evening of the cruise, the chef baked a birthday cake for Lucas (eighteen days early, but who’s counting?) and this was presented to him by the entire crew, singing, dancing and playing musical instruments. I was dumbstruck. It was truly an unforgettable moment and one I’ll cherish for many years to come. Our little boy didn’t really know what to make of all the fuss, but he did seem to like the cake.

All good things come to an end and so, too, did the cruise. It was a bittersweet moment. We said goodbye to the crew, tipped them generously for their hard work and fantastic service, and then bade a fond farewell to our new found friends, the Australians.

This was truly an unforgettable trip and I must give a plug for Nour El Nil, the company that organised it. If you want to cruise the Nile in style, I can wholeheartedly recommend this company.

I wouldn’t go that far. Yes, its place in antiquity is beyond reproach, but the hordes of geriatric cruise liner tourists at the Valley of Kings, the pedlars, the nagging calèche drivers (“You know how much?”) and felucca touts, and the searing heat cumulatively amount to a pile of hassle that towers as high as the Colossi of Memnon, themselves.

The tombs in the وادي الملو (Valley of Kings) open at 06:00. If you’re planning to get up early to beat the crowds, plan on getting there very, very early. We arrived at 09:00 and the area was already a mob scene, with literally dozens of coaches already having emptied thousands of passengers onto the site.

There’s a relatively new system in operation at the site, which means that a ticket now buys you entrance to only three tombs out of all those currently open. Which tombs are open varies constantly, so you have to check at the ticket office. Once you know which ones are open, you can choose which three to visit.

Except, that is, for the tombs of Tutankhamun (KV62) and Ramesses V/VI (KV9), for each of which a separate ticket is required. Trading on the fame of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the ticket for that tomb alone costs more than the standard three tomb ticket.

No photos are allowed anywhere, either inside or outside the tombs, and you’ll be required to leave your equipment with an attendant, who will, of course, demand baksheesh upon returning it to you, even though you neither wanted nor requested his services in the first place.

The most popular tombs take quite a while to visit, not because they’re huge, but because there is limited viewing space inside. The line of queuing tourists thus descends all the way through the entrance tunnel to the inner chambers, where one can ultimately enjoy a few brief moments taking in the innermost chamber, before the queue U-turns and snakes back outside. The experience is akin to standing on a very slow conveyor belt.

A test of one’s mettle it may be, but the tombs themselves are more than worthy of the effort involved in seeing them. Nevertheless, and perhaps I’m a philistine, but I wasn’t awed as I had expected to be. Perhaps the Valley of Kings, much like the pyramids at Giza, is simply too famous, such that seeing it with one’s own eyes feels merely an enhancement, a reinforcement of an image already so familiar from decades of media exposure. One feels that one has been before, such is the familiarity.

Other sites we visited while in Luxor include Luxor Temple, الدير البحر (Deir el-Bahri) (site of the notorious Luxor Massacre of tourists in 1997, the Karnak Temple Complex and the Tombs of the Nobles. All in all, we crammed in quite a lot during our time there.

We also took the opportunity to go out on a felucca, but I ended up losing my rag with its captain at one point when I felt he was trying to scam us to pay a non-existent entrance fee for a brief visit to Banana Island.

Lukie absolutely loves the calèches. We took several during our stay, mostly just to please him. He loves to sit at the front and shake the reins and is clearly beside himself with joy. The downside is that he goes mental when it’s time to get down and continue on our way.

The experience has been too rich to describe, but going to sleep in the moonlight, with no ceiling over one’s head except the canopy of stars, was a very special experience, indeed.

Watching the moon plough a track across the sky, having the sight of the various constellations be the last thing one sees before being claimed by slumber, being woken by a new dawn’s sun bursting out from behind a gigantic sand dune… These are things that it is hard to put a price on.

Lest the poetic prose sweep you away, there’s also the more mundane reality of wearing the same pair of underpants until they start to creak, and squatting in the sand to defecate, trying to lean far enough back that the shit doesn’t land in your trousers, but not so far that you lose balance and end up with sandy sphincter syndrome.

These are minor inconveniences, though; a small price to pay for the absolute solitude and all-consuming silence that we city dwellers can otherwise never experience. An urban domicile affords one a lot of modern convenience, but it comes at a very real, perhaps too exorbitant price.

We spent several days and nights on our expedition in the desert, amidst landscapes of large limestone mushrooms, 20 metre sand dunes, springs and mountains. Scarab beetles left tracks around our sleeping bags at night and desert foxes approached our camp fire at supper time.

You can imagine the fun the children had, climbing the sand dunes and tearing down them again. The food has been delicious in a way that only food prepared fresh in such humbling surroundings can be. Similarly, every mouthful of water one takes out here tastes like nectar. You quickly learn to take little for granted in this environment.

Our book goes on at some length about the influence of tipping, or baksheesh, in Egyptian culture. It leads you to believe that you will be plagued all day every day with not-so-subtle demands for cash for all sorts of mildly helpful things like opening a door or answering a question. Until today we had hardly encountered these requests and I thought maybe the whole baksheesh thing had been overblown. However, until today we hadn’t really entered the main tourist trail. How things changed when we visited the only remaining ancient wonder of the world.

Today we went to Giza, site of the famous pyramids and sphinx, and Saqqara, site of some other pyramids. Today was one big exercise in avoiding getting ripped off and not trusting any information that anyone gave us. It was really quite annoying.

The day started with us hiring a taxi off the street for the day to take us to the various sites and wait for us while we looked. Ian made quick work of that because there was a guy standing right outside our hotel trying to rustle up taxi business. The book gave us a guideline of a fair price and the guy agreed to the top end of that range (200 pounds for the day, which is about 28 Euros). He took us to Giza and the fun started when he pulled up next to a place where we could “look at a map” and something about a horse. We immediately realized that the scams were beginning and asked to just go to the ticket booth, but some guy who spoke much better English than our driver was on at us about how far it was and how we would have to walk with our children, blah blah blah. I must confess that I was almost drawn in by the idea of taking a horse and carriage around all the pyramids and not having to walk at all, but luckily we managed to fight them off and proceeded with caution to the ticket booth. By this point we weren’t at all confident that it was the real ticket booth, but it did provide a ticket with a hologram seal, so we were good to go.

We went in and looked at the sphinx and then headed up the hill to the pyramids. On the way, we had many offers for vastly cheaper horse carts / camels / donkeys / what have you. We would clearly have been insane to have gone with the guy down in the parking lot.

On the way up the hill to the pyramids, many many men approached us with the camel rides or extremely crappy souvenirs and delivered their usual opening line “where are you from?” To which we replied “Holland” while continuing to walk along. Then comes the standard “Ah! Allemachtig prachtig!” or, perhaps “allemachtig prachtig tachtig!”, which translate to almighty gorgeous and almighty gorgeous eighty, respectively. We responded with a smile that weakened with repetition and continued along. Most people didn’t try much harder than that, probably realizing that the quality of their goods was such that only one in one thousand people would bite and that the ones who will bite will make themselves immediately apparent. Kind of like the Nigerian “I am the widow of a very bad rich man and I need your help getting my money out of my corrupt country” e-mail scam. However there are a couple of incidents that stand out in my memory.

We were contemplating going into one of the pyramids, but were running short on time. So as we stood outside the entrance debating it, a guy approached us, asked us where we were from, gave us an allemachtig prachtig, and began stuffing our arms full of goods. He began with me, shoving a headscarf into the crack of my arm somewhere that it basically would stick without me grabbing it. He asked Ian if he could buy me for one million camels because I was so beautiful (perhaps our most dedicated readers will recall that this same line was used on us many moons ago at a camel market in Al Ain in the UAE, if I recall the city name correctly). I tried to give the headscarf back but he wouldn’t take it, saying “no, it is a gift, no money, because I love the Holland people!” Then he stuck one on my head and told me that I looked like a queen. Hmm. Anyway, we started walking away. I kept trying to thrust the headscarf back to him, only to be greeted with his “because I love the Holland people!” line. As we continued to walk, he kept digging into his bag of goodies for gifts for the children and thrust a little pyramid statue at Ian. We kept saying no thank you and he finally, after what felt like forever, gave up. I handed him the scarf back and he said to Ian “give me the pyramid” and that was finally it. Sheesh.

As we walked along, several of the tourist police gestured to their camels to tell us to take a picture of them, only to then ask us to baksheesh him once we had. We chose to take one guy’s picture seated on his camel and gave him the stately sum of 1 pound, but then continued to see others who would gesture to their camels and say “it’s okay, (and pointing to the badge on his arm) police.” Of course, if we had taken a picture of the camel, we would definitely have been hit up for baksheesh.

Finally, at Saqqara, there was a guy with a donkey who basically abducted Eloïse and stuck her on his donkey. Ian was a bit ahead of us at this time and I told the guy that I didn’t even have a camera. Of course he said the usual “no money!” while putting her on there and telling me to take a picture. If you know Eloïse, you’ll know that she wasn’t at all keen on this plan and was looking extremely suspicious and reaching out to me to take her off the donkey. Ian finally took the picture because we just weren’t going to get away from this one without a fight, and baksheeshed him lightly.

Ironically, lots of people want to take Eloïse’s picture. They all think she’s the bee’s knees. Our day in Saqqara ended with an Egyptian woman approaching me, asking me where I was from (she seemed to nice, but my heart sank at that question) and then very politely asking to take Eloïse’s picture. Of course I said to go right ahead and she and every member of her party posed in turns with Eloïse, who is not sure what to think about all these pictures. In most of them she looks quite suspicious and has her fingers in her mouth (or nose). After she kissed Eloïse, thanked us profusely, and walked away, I commented to Ian that we should have demanded some baksheesh.

Our first stop of the day was the main reason that most tourists come to Egypt in the first place, the Giza Necropolis, home to the last of the seven wonders of the ancient world to remain standing and substantially intact, the Pyramid of Cheops, amongst others.

What can one say about the pyramids at Giza? Television and books do much to prepare you for them. Who hasn’t seen images of the wonders of engineering on a travel programme or a historical documentary?

We’d also been to the Mayan pyramids at Chichen Itza and other sites in the Mexican Yucatan, so their Egyptian counterparts came as no great surprise, awesome though they be.

The Great Sphinx was somewhat smaller than I’d imagined, and a little more crumbly, but still a marvel to behold. When you finally arrive here, after four decades of life on the planet and endless exposure to images of these behemoths, it’s hard, in a sense, to conceive of the notion that you’re actually here for the first time. Everything seems strangely familiar.

Nevertheless, we can now cross a major item off our list of things to see before we die. Although they’ve lasted this long, one wonders how much longer these remnants of an ancient civilisation can withstand the suffocating pollution of the current one. Perhaps all of this will have turned to dust in a few hundred years or less.

The hawkers of trinkets and other tourist tat are at their worst here. Nowhere on Earth have I had to endure the high-pressure sales techniques employed at this location, which include running after you and stuffing items into the crease of your elbow or the folds of your clothes, even as you hurry away. These items are ostensibly a gift: “Because I love the Dutch people! You are so good at football!”

After trying to hand back these so-called gifts with no success, I soon adopted to the practice of sincerely thanking my benefactor and then just walking away. I found that these thinly veiled salespeople would then invariably catch up with me and ask me for a small donation towards the gift. Aha! The cat starts to emerge from the bag!

I would then refuse, at which point all pretence slipped away and I was asked to return the very lovely head garment and miniature pyramid. Huh? But you said they were a gift! I thought you loved me! How could you? What an Indian-giver!

Even one’s children become unwilling human crowbars in the unrelenting effort to prise money from their tight-fisted parents. Before you know it, a cunning donkey or camel runner has swooped like a vulture, grabbed one of your children from your side and perched them on the back of a rather disgruntled-looking ship of the desert. You are then encouraged to snap away with your camera and, of course, the moment that you do, the game’s over and the not so subtle gesturing for baksheesh begins.

I make it sound worse than it actually is, as long as you are firm but friendly with these people. God help anyone not up to dealing with this kind of badgering and intimidation, because they’ll be stripped of their last cent by the time they get to the top of the hill and behold Cheops in all its glory. I even saw people pestering tourists for baksheesh without so much as the pretence of something being offered in return. A man was literally approaching tourists, gesturing for cash and — to my great surprise — receiving it from some battle-weary sightseers, who presumably just wanted to be left alone at any cost.

Even the police here will demand baksheesh for helping you. They’ll encourage you, for example, to take a picture of them mounted on their camel and then demand a price for it. The price for all of these services is never very much, up to about E£5, but it does get tiresome.

Nevertheless, the whole Egyptian economy seems to run on this basis and you quickly get used to it, developing a sense of when baksheesh will and won’t be expected. In a public toilet, for example, someone will spring from the shadows and turn on the tap for you to wash your hands. When you’ve finished rinsing them, he’s there with some paper towels. When your hands are dry, he’ll spray some scent on them. And as you leave, he’ll point to the pot of baksheesh for you to do your duty. Operating the tap oneself, finding one’s own paper towel and going without scent seemingly isn’t an option. Just be glad he doesn’t want to hold your cock while you piss.

But I digress. This entry isn’t, or shouldn’t be, about baksheesh. It’s about the glory of the pyramids.

We soaked up as much as we could of the Giza site and were getting hungry as we headed back to meet our taxi driver.

Our next stop was سقار (Saqqara), the necropolis of the ancient Egyptian capital, منف‎ (Memphis). On the way there, our taxi driver took us to a dodgy craft village to get a bite to eat, in spite of my insistence earlier in the day that we were not to be taken to any tourist traps along the way. We were starving by this point, however, so succumbed to his blatant attempt to earn a kickback and ate a filling, if overpriced and not terribly inspired meal there. It was better than the alternative of insisting on being taken somewhere else, with no guarantee that anywhere else would be cheaper or better.

At Saqqara, the actual site was less impressive than Giza, but it was also less busy and there were fewer touts to contend with. An hour was ample to get around the site.

When you’re planning your day, it always seems as if there will be time for more, but these two sites were enough to fill our day. We returned to the taxi and headed back to central Cairo. I paid our driver, baksheeshed him (naturally) for his services, and we crossed the road to our hotel for a short rest before dinner.

Said dinner was a fantastic bowl of كشر (kushari) at the venerable Cairene institution of Abou Tarek. It was completely vegetarian and absolutely delicious. For me, it came as a pleasant change from the conveyor belt of kofta and other meat-based dishes that I’ve been eating over the last few days.

As always, our pale-faced, red-headed children proved a big hit with the dining locals. Local ladies picked them up, kissed them and plied them with sweets while laughing and smiling at us. Lukie loves all of the attention, whereas Eloïse doesn’t really know what to make of all the fuss, but goes along with it, anyway, for the most part.

We’d promised Eloïse an ice-cream, so we stopped off at the perpetually mobbed Koueider bakery on the way back to the hotel. I forewent the ice-cream and instead had cake and coffee at a coffee shop just across the road from our hotel.

We have to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow for an early departure to the White Desert, where we’ll spend the next five days sequestrated from the chaos of urban Egypt.

That’s marks the end of our Internet access for a while, too, as we’ll be sleeping in a tent with no electricity or other distractions of the modern world.

With just us, our children and the sand dunes around us, this is going to be quite an adventure. Shitting in a hole in the sand may not be for everyone, but given the extent to which technology permeates our daily lives, I can think of no better way to cleanse our minds and bodies than to retreat from the madness for a few days in the solitude of the Egyptian desert.

For this year only, the Islamic calendar coincides with the Gregorian calendar to place Mohammed’s birthday on the same day as my own. And yet, whilst I could scarcely have failed to notice the hordes clamouring to celebrate the anniversary of their prophet’s manifestation on Earth this afternoon, I knew about my own birthday thanks only to a bunch of canned happy birthday messages from various discussion forums I’m a member of. How sweet of you to remember,

Apparently, I’m 43. Fuck that! How am I celebrating it? you ask. I’m not; I’m 43, for fuck’s sake. What’s on Earth is good about that?

Today, we moseyed over to the Egyptian Museum and blitzed the place before the children could complain too much. We saw the main stuff we wanted to see, such as the royal mummies and the Tutankhamun exhibition. Beyond that, we took in as much as we could, but then the inevitable wail of “Can we go now?” began to rise and we our time at the museum was done.

Outside, we agreed a fare and hopped in a taxi to خان الخليل (Khan el-Khalili), the souk in Islamic Cairo that we failed to locate yesterday. Prior to entering, we dove into Gad for delicious falafel, شيش طاوو (shish taouk) and strawberry juice.

With lunch out of the way, we had a look around جامع الأزه (the Al-Azhar Mosque) before entering the Khan el-Khalili souk. It was fun, but after the souks of Istanbul, Muscat and Dubai, we feel pretty spoilt. Before leaving, we popped into Qahwet el Fishawy to revitalise ourselves with mango juice.

Leaving was a little tricky, as a massive Islamic procession was arriving on Midan Hussein square. Women were ululating (how do they do that?), sweets were being strewn, the TV cameras were rolling and the men were marching with banners. This was clearly a huge event.

An Egyptian man informed me that my wife was showing too much flesh and, sure enough, Sarah’s shirt had ridden up where her sling was tied to reveal a sliver of her waist: definitely not the done thing in this most conservative of neighbourhoods. She quickly covered herself up.

We eventually burrowed a route through the crowds to the main road, where we found a taxi and headed back to our hotel.

I’m too tired to write any more and still struggling with sickness, which is causing headaches and fatigue. I feel as if I’ve done a day’s walking before I’ve even left the hotel. And then comes a day of walking.

Still, the temperature here is very reasonable. It can’t have been much more than 21°C today and the rain stayed away. Here’s hoping we’ll all shake the sickness by the morning. Tomorrow promises to be a very full day.

I’m grateful to her for covering for me, actually, because I’m still feeling pretty ropey. I felt fine yesterday evening, but have suffered something of a relapse today. The diarrhoea has gone, but I’ve been fighting off a headache and fatigue all day. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were due to, or at least exacerbated by, the fumes that I’ve been breathing in all day. As Sarah mentioned, Cairo has more than 20 million inhabitants. That’s more people in a single city than in the whole country back home. And we live pretty densely in the Netherlands. Well, wait until you see Cairo!

The downside of that is the emissions from the vehicles here. The pollution is incredible; we’re talking Bangkok levels, as least as far as my uncalibrated nose is concerned. If you could get high on diesel fumes, this would be a junkie’s paradise.

Whatever the reason(s), I was definitely not operating at full strength today, as we made our way along streets with pavements that were almost certainly not created with the comfort of buggy pushers in mind, to Cairo’s Islamic district.

My impressions of Cairo are best summed up by our guidebook. I really couldn’t say it better myself, so I’ll just quote from the book:

The crowds on a Cairo footpath make Manhattan look like a ghost town. Your life will flash before you eyes each time you venture across a street. And your snot will turn black from the smog.

Sounds bad, right?

But there’s more:

But it’s a small price to pay. This city has an energy, palpable even at three in the morning, like no other. It’s the product of its 20 million inhabitants waging a battle against the desert and winning (mostly), of 20 million people simultaneously crushing the city’s infrastructure under their collective weight and lifting the city’s spirit up with their uncommon graciousness and humour.

That about sums it up, really. The city has a vibrancy all its own. Egyptians who travel to Europe must think our cities are populated by zombies. They must seem as if they are run as hospitals. Here, anything goes. And although the city feels as if t’s on the brink of chaos, its people are very friendly, indeed.

We walked to dinner through torrential rain, leaping over the potholes that had now turned into wells of muddy, oily water.

When we got to our destination, we found it had been worth braving the rain. Dinner was a delicious meal of شاورم (shawarma), bread and salad. Egyptian food gets the thumbs-up from me, although I couldn’t really tell you what differentiates it from Iranian, Lebanese, Emirati and Omani cuisine, which all seem very similar to me.

Egypt feels very Middle Eastern to me, and it’s hard to remember that it’s actually in Africa. The culture betrays its location, though, which is as close to the Middle East as you can get, whilst still being in Africa.

Cairo in torrential rain.

As we walked back from dinner, the heavens really opened. Thunderbolts rockets across the city and flashes of lightning turned night into day for just an instant.

One street that we had crossed on the way to dinner was now almost completely under water. We stopped for a moment, while I took a picture of it with my phone’s camera.

We’re told that Cairo gets about one day a year of weather like this, so I suppose we should feel privileged. On the other hand, the staff of our hotel inform us that the weather will remain like this for the rest of the week, which makes us feel that our luck is more of the bad variety than the good.

Whatever the weather, we won’t be able to swap it for better, so we’ll just have to make the best of it, rain or shine.

We’re staying in a nice hotel which is on the fifth floor of an old nondescript building downtown. You would never suspect that a nice hotel existed upstairs when you arrived. You enter the dark and dirty building lobby and go up via a truly ancient elevator, which is basically just an iron cage on a cord, but when you get upstairs, it’s lovely.

We spent the day today wandering aimlessly around Cairo, which is pretty enormous. Our cab driver last night told us that there are 25 million inhabitants. I thought it was 20, but you get the idea. It was raining this morning and we weren’t aware before we left our room because our windows face out onto a narrow courtyard such that you don’t really look out the window carefully. It wasn’t raining that hard, though, so we didn’t alter our clothing choices once we realized it. But Cairo seems to be permanently coated in a fine layer of black silt, such that the rain turned the whole place into a mud pit. Eloïse splattered a huge amount of mud onto the backs of her bare legs and the skirt of her dress. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get it out. Even Ian was embarrassed while walking around. He said that people were laughing at her. That’s the kind of thing that I would usually think and he would tell me that I’m ridiculous. As the person wearing a baby in a wrap all day, I’m pretty convinced that they were actually laughing about Lukie. Clearly a baby in a sling is an unusual sight.

Having spent the entire day walking in a very crowded city, I can still say that we didn’t see a single stroller of any sort all day. As with the people of Oman, Egyptians seems to prefer carrying their children. Last night when we were out seeking our dinner (late, it must have been 10:15 or something), I saw lots of women carrying their very small babies just as we had in Oman: wrapped up in a lot of furry blankets like little burritos with virtually no baby sticking out. It was interesting last night that children of all ages were out. That was also reminiscent of our UAE/Oman trip.

We had a tasty lunch at some random place on the street that had smelled nice as we walked by earlier in the day. They also gave us crackers made of fried pita bread as we walked by and they were yummy. So we headed back and enjoyed a large lunch. This seems to be one of those countries where they just dump stuff on your table and you’re not sure whether it’s what you ordered or whether it’s some freebie that comes with every meal or if it’s something that they’re giving you and will charge you for if you don’t refuse it. We refused nothing and ended up with way too much food. But still, when we were all finished and asked how much we owed, the guy said “50?” in a way that made it clear that he was just making up a number that seemed suitably high for the tourists. We didn’t complain since that is under 7 Euros for the whole large meal and drinks.

We had another similar experience earlier when we stopped for juice. Ian asked how much for a fresh orange juice and the guy said 3 (it’s 7.50 to the Euro). That seemed fair enough, although we realized that it was probably high, and we ordered two. Then two 11-year old boys came in and were practising their English on us. They had a nice fruit cocktail-looking thing and Ian asked how much it costed. The boy said 1 and in the midst of our confusion about what he was saying (first he tried to describe what was in it) the proprietor suddenly shooed him out and it was clear that he realized that the one finger being held up in the air was going to clue us in to the extent that we had been overcharged. Oh well, we got 50 cents of enjoyment out of our juice so we don’t mind.

Time to get these kiddies out the door for some dinner so we don’t have a repeat of last night’s late night. I’m sure Ian will blog more later.

To say that this place is a hive of activity wouldn’t be doing it justice. Outside the hotel, somewhere in the centre of Cairo, it’s like Picadilly Circus, even after ten in the evening. Every street is in gridlock; the traffic is mayhem. The pavements, too, are awash with people going about their business, all of the shops are open, eateries are run off their feet with customers placing orders… The place is bustling beyond belief.

It also has that nondescript exotic aroma to it, which reminds me of Muscat, Dubai, Bangkok, Istanbul and other such cities, where the senses are bombarded at every turn by a veritable barrage of impressions, especially the olfactory.

I can’t spend long on this entry, because it’s late and we haven’t actually seen much at all yet. You can tell already, though, that this is going to be good.