Welcome to Cairo, Egypt's eclectic capital! In early 2020, after roaming around the sub-continent for almost two months, I made an exodus out of India and a flight into Egypt. This was my first time in Africa and the Middle East - and hopefully not my last! Anyway, here were some of the things I checked out... Tahrir Square Hurrah. My first morning in Cairo and I was standing in Tahrir Square, heart of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Except it currently seems to be under renovation? Something to do with a controversial decision to plonk some pharaonic antiquities in the middle of it. Rather odd symbolism given the forward-looking vision this place represented not that long ago. Egypt’s current political quagmire is something I don’t know enough about. But like the good political science major that I am, just give me some cheap local coffee, a shisha pipe, and a stack of old Economist magazines and I’ll claim to have figured it out in no time! Khan el-Khalili A photo of the most Instagrammable spot in Khan el-Khalili, a famous open-air bazaar in the middle of Islamic Cairo. Not that I’d fall for its wily, hashtaggy, picture-perfect charms or anything. Whoops. I also whittled away the hours with fellow world travellers at El Fishawy, quite possibly the most famous coffeehouse in all of Egypt. Crammed into a narrow thoroughfare in the bazaar, this place is quite the frenzied experience. Street vendors hassle you every minute. Clumsy shoppers threaten to knock over your hookah. The cafe staff seem to be juggling too many tasks at once. And yet, despite the pandemonium, there’s music and laughter and a theatrical, smoke-drunk energy to it all that makes this place unforgettable. Coptic Cairo Coptic Cairo is a hushed and compact corner of Egypt's capital unlike anywhere else in this mad city. As a visitor, it would be remiss to only notice the country's mosques and pyramids — this country also has a very distinctive Coptic Christian minority, making up around 10 per cent of the population. To be honest, I don’t know much about Coptic Christianity or any form of Christianity east of Rome that uses big, scary words like ‘patriarchate’, ‘autocephalous’, and ‘non-Chalcedonian’. What I do know is that Coptic Christians are the largest Christian community in the Middle East. That they follow their own calendar. That they have their own pope. And that, unfortunately, persecution and discrimination against them is a painful, ongoing problem in Egypt. All the more reason for travellers to remember that they even exist. Photos include the famous Hanging Church, the Saints Sergius and Bacchus Church, and the beautiful Church of St. George (which is actually a Greek Orthodox church). The Citadel of Cairo This is a medieval fortification built by none other than the legendary Crusader-stomping, warrior-gentleman Saladin. Although the citadel itself is not particularly thrilling (it’s a bunch of stone walls on a hill), it provides an excellent view of bustling, dusty Cairo and houses the beautiful Mohamed Ali Mosque. This magnificent mosque, commissioned in the mid-1800s by Muhammad Ali Pasha, the founder of modern Egypt, happily rivals many grand European churches. I mean, just look at that incredible ceiling! Undoubtedly a masjid for the ages. The Mosque of Ibn Tulun Commissioned by the founder of the Tulunid dynasty, this is a handsomely austere 9th-century mosque. Sun-starked and shadow-cut, it looks like the parched and lonely background of a Giorgio de Chirico painting. You can also climb its minaret and view Cairo’s cityscape in its dense, concrete glory. A meadow of satellite dishes punctured by the occasional stiletto-sharp muezzin tower. And even more of Islamic Cairo Fragmented, sideways snaps of the Mosque-Madrassa of Sultan Hassan and the Al-Rifa'i Mosque. Two huge, skyward-yearning mosques standing right against each other at the foot of Cairo Citadel. It’s almost impossible to suggest their volumes and textures through photographs: the gloominess of the lofty ceilings, the rich gravity of the wall patterns, the siesta-like drowsiness of an expansive courtyard... Photos are doomed to failure in places like this. Egyptian food Traditional Egyptian food? Yalla! Let’s talk about it:
And to conclude, assorted views of Cairo and its urban surrounds Many people dislike the relentless, messy hustle of Egypt’s capital (preferring, instead, to blitz through it on their way to the Pyramids and calmer, saner domains). But I took my time with this city and was ultimately won over by its eccentricities. From its languid riverfront to its maddening markets, from its lawless traffic to its unkempt Parisian-style boulevards, from its feral cat hordes to its chain-smoking denizens, from its booming calls to prayer to its slothful shisha joints — oh, I’m genuinely going to miss this place. So farewell Cairo. Au revoir and bshoof-ak ba’deen! Time for me to finally head off to quieter, saner domains.
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Luxor and The Valley of the KingsLuxor, a city on the Nile River, stands at the site of the ancient pharaonic capital of Thebes. On Luxor's East Bank is the Egyptian township proper with the popular Temple of Luxor and the Temple of Karnak. On its West Bank are the harsh desert visages, the burial place of pharaohs, and the stark archaeological iconography of so many people's imagination. Karnak Temple... If the must-see of Luxor’s West Bank is the Valley of the Kings, then the must-see of the East Bank is without a doubt the Karnak Temple Complex. Now, I readily admit that I have a penchant for exaggeration in my descriptions. I pop on my travel-tinted lenses and suddenly everything’s a little ‘beautiful this’ and ‘amazing that’, but I think that even without such worldly biases this place is awe-inspiring. An immense religious site that first began life 4,000 years ago, Karnak is primarily dedicated to Amun-Re, the supreme patron deity of ancient Thebes (along with areas dedicated to his wife Mut, the divine mother goddess, and Mont, the falcon-headed god of war). To enter its Great Hypostyle Hall is to enter a forest of colossal stone columns. It is to truly become a human-ant surrounded by the workings of towering and ageless pagan gods. Immense. Colossal. Towering. How much further can I strain the thesaurus in search of fancy ways to say ‘very stupidly big’? I’m not certain, but they all apply to Karnak. To appreciate just how powerful this place is, one should reach Karnak as soon as it opens (i.e. before any tour groups arrive) in order to become fully consumed by its enormous pillars in the chilly, honey-yellow morning light. How much backbreaking labour went into this place! Consider the slavishly carved hieroglyphs, the heroically erected obelisks, the monstrous pylon gateways, the broad sacred lake, and the careful rows of sphinxes and headless god-kings. Can you feel the endless toil of craftsmen? The snap of ropes and the crush of wheels? The dust and sweat and the want of shade and water? Labour of labours for the king of kings. Located away from all the tourists milling inside the Great Hypostyle Hall is the smaller, but no less impressive, Temple of Khonsu. Here you can admire ancient colours that have endured layers upon layers of neglect. Here you can listen to the small birds that nest and flitter within a canopy of aching stone. Here you are finally alone. Let the sound of birds wash over you. Let it restore you like a sigh. This world can still be peaceful sometimes. Photos of Luxor Temple, day and night... This ancient complex sits on the Nile’s east bank, surrounded by busy shops, cafes, and restaurants. It’s been kicking around since 1400 BC and may or may not have served as the coronation site of new pharaohs. The temple was partially converted into a Christian church by the Romans, was occupied by Arab villagers in medieval times, and now has an active mosque in the middle of it. In other words, oodles of history. Many people opt to walk around it, peering in from the outside. But if you have the time and budget, I recommend purchasing a ticket to go inside — especially after dark, when the imposing columns and timeworn statues are lit up for dramatic effect. Cycling towards the Valley of the Kings on the West Bank of Luxor... Now it is time to venture across the Nile to Luxor's West Bank. A stark desert landscape. Barren limestone hills. The dry morning heat and a solitary bird of prey in the sky above. Like venturing across another planet. Exploring the West Bank with a janky, rented bicycle certainly isn’t the easiest way to do it! But for some reason, cycling around ancient ruins has just become a thing I do now. I did it at Angkor Wat, at Ayutthaya in Thailand, and I did it recently in Hampi. I guess it’s the joy of setting your own pace, of having to work for your tourist attractions, and of exploring a locale in an economical, old-school manner. No reason to stop now. The Tomb of the Nobles... Filed under photos-I-technically-shouldn’t-have. Turns out a small, ahem, tip to the guards can turn a ‘no photo’ area into a "my friend, take as many photos as you want" one. Baksheesh, baby! These are the 18th dynasty burial chambers of Sennofer, a royal gardener, and Rekhmire, a vizier of ancient Thebes, in a barely visited part of the West Bank known as the Tomb of the Nobles. Their decorations are sensational. Bright grape arbour ceilings. Scenes of craftsmen hard at work. Harvests, banquets, offerings. The colours pop like they were painted not that long ago. Unlike the sepulchres of the mighty pharaohs, which are mainly painted with religious themes, these tombs provide wonderful insights into everyday ancient Egyptian life. 10/10, would bribe again. The Temple of Hatshepsut... The Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut on the West Bank was built for a powerful New Kingdom pharaoh. What a panorama with those timeless cliffs and that vivid desert sky! It should be noted that the monument has undergone heavy restoration and reconstruction and there’s not a terrible amount to explore within. Still, you can’t beat that frontal view. It completely seizes the imagination the first time you see it. Hatshepsut, you may be interested to know, was a woman. She was (to the best of our knowledge) the second-ever female pharaoh and is considered one of Ancient Egypt’s most successful rulers. On more than one occasion during my temple visit, I overheard female travellers talking excitedly about the fact that Hatshepsut was a woman and about her enduring legacy. History is evocative. It says as much about our present hopes and wants as it does about our distant past. Ah, at last — the world-renowned Valley of the Kings... Or as the ancient locals used to call it back in the day: “The Great and Majestic Necropolis of the Millions of Years of the Pharaoh, Life, Strength, Health in The West of Thebes”. Catchy. Photographed in this section is KV2, the tourist-swamped resting place of Ramesses IV; KV6, the pleasantly uncrowded burial site of Ramesses IX; and KV8, the sparse and claustrophobically deep tomb of Merneptah. This was my katabasis, my descent into the underworld. There are over sixty chthonic tombs (only around a third of which belong to actual kings) from the 16th to 11th century BC spread throughout this area. Many of them are opulently coloured and meticulously decorated. A number of them plunge ridiculously deep into the bowels of the earth. Hieroglyphs as far as the eye can see. Hexes and spells. The Book of the Dead. Mythological scenes and deities galore. And don’t forget tomb robbers, King Tut, and the curse of the pharaohs. Death has inspired an unparalleled art form within these chambers. A brave and highly qualified archaeologist stands baffled before his discoveries in an ancient Egyptian tomb... Welcome to KV9, the Tomb of Rameses V and Rameses VI. It is marvellous. The tomb is spacious, sensationally preserved, and sublimely colourful — the sepulchral highlight of my trip to the Valley of the Kings. And it’s also weird. Really fucking weird. Some of the paintings on the walls are genuinely quite freaky looking, like something out of an unhinged fever dream. Elongated beings. Decapitated bodies. Serpentine and/or vermiform beasts. Man-animal hybrids. Wacky limbs and sinister grins. Maybe it was just the odd mood I was in, but this tomb seriously felt like a plunge down the rabbit (hieroglyph sign no. E34) hole. And finally, a nighttime visit to Luxor Museum... “Did I do the right thing, trying to escape into history? Did this ambition make any sense? After all, we encounter in historical accounts the very same things such as we thought we could flee in our time... we are never in the presence of unmediated history, but of history recounted, presented, history as it appeared to someone, as he or she believes it to have been. This has been the nature of the enterprise always, and the folly may be to believe one can resist it.” — Ryszard Kapuscinski
Life on the Nile...When I was in Egypt at the start of 2020, I was exclusively travelling by train up and down the course of the Nile. The view out the window is, at times, utterly striking. From one side, you can see rich agricultural lands, palm-lined islands, lazy feluccas on the water, and dense urban development. From the other, all you see is uninhabitable desolation. Egypt is a country beset on all sides by wastelands, desperately hugging a single, riverine lifeline. Banks of prosperity sharply demarcated by arid nothingness, with no gradients between the two. This is a country that stuns you with the notion of geography as destiny. The train took me to Aswan — a small, laid-back city in the deep south of Egypt. Some of my best days in Egypt was spent here. I joined a group of couch surfers and their hosts in Aswan to go swimming in the Nile, followed up by a gorgeous sunset view from atop a desert escarpment. A dip in the Nile? I ain’t afraid of no crocodiles! The water was freezing, however. Downing a can of Stella, the de facto national beer of Egypt, helped with my recovery. And it’s a surprisingly passable beer for a Muslim majority country. Beer was, after all, a lower-class staple in ancient, wheat-intensive Egypt. Let us give thanks to grain agriculture for (a) enabling the rise of oppressive, megaproject funding, centralised tax systems in early societies, and (b) creating booze for the plebian masses. Welcome to Philae! Ancient ruins, many over 3,300 years old, on a picturesque island in the middle of a reservoir. Accessible only by boat, the island includes a temple to Isis, the goddess of fertility, and was also worked on by Ptolemaic and Roman builders, as well as later Christian ones (who stamped very noticeable Coptic crosses into the pagan stonework). Further, the whole complex was lifted up and relocated to its current location in the 1960s to save it from flooding as a result of a new dam project. Interesting... right? Okay, time for a story! If much of Egypt’s past glory can be credited to the Nile, then a huge chunk of its 20th-century history can be credited to the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Since the dawn of Egyptian civilisation, the yearly flooding of the Nile bought bounteous harvests but also harkened famine and doom when it failed. The solution? A big-ass dam to control the water flow. This was the dream of the anti-imperialist, pan-Arabist maverick President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s. But the problem was that it was expensive. Really expensive. So Nasser tried to play both the Americans and the Soviets for money and then nationalised the all-important Suez Canal to generate the necessary funds. In response, Israel, France, and the UK invaded Egypt. Boom. The Suez Crisis ensued. The invasion quickly backfired and these countries were forced to withdraw (effectively ringing the death knell for British imperial ambitions in the new world order). As for the dam’s post-construction impact? An agricultural bonanza. National wheat yields tripled in the following decades. Egypt became insulated from devastating droughts. And, at one point, it provided the country with half its electricity. But the dam also messed with the local ecosystem, displaced tens of thousands of local Nubians, and, of course, threatened numerous precious archaeological sites. A messy war. Huge numbers of displaced people. Relocated temples. Accelerated economic development. Damn, man. Pictured below: the art of jabana at a Nubian guesthouse on a cool evening in Aswan. Coffee beans roasted on hot coals, ground down with spices using a mortar and pestle, then boiled in a long-necked clay pot. Palm fibres are used to filter the brew and it’s served very hot, very black, very sweet. Just the way I like it. The Nubians. What am I remotely qualified to say about them? They are a group indigenous to Sudan and southern Egypt. Once there were even Nubian pharaohs but now they’re a people without their own nation — many of whom were forcibly displaced from their lands by the Aswan High Dam. It’s no wonder Rastafari aesthetics are so common in southern Egypt. Due to their uncertain place in the world, many Nubians have embraced the Rasta ethos of peace, harmony, and minority rights. Along with traditional coffee, we listened to Nubian music and ate coal-roasted dates. All in all, a wonderful evening. I wasn’t expecting to experience any Nubian culture during my stay in Egypt so I was delighted to glimpse even a fragment of it. My only previous exposure to anything remotely Nubian was being a cast member in the Elton John musical “Aida” (a cheesy Romeo and Juliet story with topless Egyptian warriors and sultry Nubian princesses) during high school. No, seriously. My life has just been one wild culture trip after another. Glorious praise to Ramses the Great, chosen of Ra, challenger of Hittites and punisher of Libyans! All Egypt prospers under his benevolent protection! The main attraction of travelling down to Aswan is to make it to Abu Simbel in the far southern reaches of Egypt — any further south and you’d be in Sudan! Getting to it was tough. I had to wake up before 4 am, take a three-hour-plus minibus ride there from Aswan, and then race to the ticket booth so I could see the place before it was completely swamped by other tourists. But in hindsight (and after a recovery nap or two) I believe it was worth the effort. When you think of towering pharaonic carvings and rock temples in the desert, when you think of Ozymandias with his “frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command”, you are thinking of the Great Temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel. Four colossal statues of the king of kings flank the entrance to this 13th-century BC edifice. You see reliefs of captured foreign slaves on both sides of the entryway. There are potent, violent scenes of military conquest on the temple’s interior walls. Surely no other surviving structure of the ancient world can still project such indomitable, ferocious power. Next to the Great Temple is a smaller temple dedicated to the sky goddess Hathor and Ramses’s royal wife Nefertari. And both these buildings lie on the banks of Lake Nasser, one of the largest man-made lakes in the world, which was created by the Aswan High Dam. This leads us to an impressive fact about Abu Simbel: like the Philae Temple Complex, the entire site had to be disassembled and rebuilt on higher ground in the 1960s to save it from rising waters as a result of the dam’s construction. This project required an international team of engineers and scientist and remains perhaps the most impressive archaeological rescue mission of all time. Bloody hell, there should be a traveller's game in Egypt where you drink a shot every time you hear about the Aswan High Dam… "And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Dahab! A famous backpackers haunt on the southeast coastline of the Sinai Peninsula! After a long, bumpy, and exhausting night bus out of Cairo (which included an unannounced 1 am bus swap and multiple security checkpoints), arriving here was like suddenly being tossed into an idyllic mirror universe. Dahab is carefree and beachy in an almost holiday-postcard-cliché sort of way and, in my honest opinion, it is what Goa should’ve been like. My goal here in Dahab was simple. It was to scuba dive in the Red Sea, eat falafels, potter around and read books and, most importantly, mellow out for a couple of days. I think I succeeded. And what is Dahab, exactly? Well, there's a lot to comment on. There are the Russian holidaymakers and British pensioners. The quirky Egyptian restaurant owners and Bedouin locals. The usual-suspect-backpackers and marijuana smokers. There are dive shops and quad bike hires and desert adventure operators. It is a place to indulge and do everything at once and do nothing at all. Pictured below: me with one of my new underwater buddies. Farewell landlubbers! The coral reefs around this part of the Red Sea are superb. During my stay, I obtained my PADI Advanced Open Water certificate, giving me the ability to dive to 30 metres. With my newfound ability, I had the opportunity to explore the Blue Hole near Dahab, a submarine sinkhole with an internationally notorious reputation – it allegedly has the highest diver fatality rate of any dive site in the world. Thankfully, my dives there were beautiful and undramatic. But this marvellous Egyptian story could not last forever. My flawless plan to escape Egypt via a dodgy commuter ferry to Jordan sadly ended in failure. On the very morning I arrived at the port in Nuweiba, the ferry company decided to block all foreigners from boarding due to concerns over COVID-19 (this was just a few weeks before it was officially declared as a pandemic). Disaster! So instead of spending my afternoon eating knafeh in the Hashemite Kingdom, I was stranded in a filthy, dilapidated South Sinai port town. Luckily, I had two equally unlucky French Canadian backpackers to keep me company while we waited for a bus to take us out of the “asshole of Egypt” (their words, not mine). So I wasted a whole day of travel but made two lovely new friends in the process. Hence, this episode is filed reaffirms the old adage: It’s not the destination that matters, but the friends you make along the way! The good news is, I was able to fly out of Egypt and into Istanbul – a little manoeuvre I like to call 'Failing to Byzantium'. Hah. (P.S. As it later turned out, this ferry debacle was due to classic Middle Eastern miscommunication within the company — it has since allowed some nationalities to enter Jordan. Alas, the issue was resolved well after I had departed.)
Behold! Objects from the Egyptian Museum, the Museum of Islamic Art, and the Coptic Museum in Cairo, Egypt’s chaotic, bustling capital. I can't help it, I'm a museum junkie. The Egyptian MuseumHoly smokes, this place is a mess. Often described as one of the most distinguished collections of antiquities in the world, this museum is the encapsulation of “quantity over quality”. It is a sprawling warehouse of dusty, poorly labelled artefacts from across the absurd span of Ancient Egyptian history. Many of its treasures are genuinely wonderful to behold (Tutankhamun's room is a highlight, despite the guards constantly screaming at boomers to stop taking photos, and I thought the royal mummies were worth the extra ticket), but as soon as you venture beyond the main wings you’ll find yourself lost amidst rundown display cabinets filled with scrolls, coffins, amulets, tablets, sarcophagi, jewellery, and the like. Good stamina is a must because if you aren’t battling through the noisy tour groups, or navigating messy construction areas, you are trying to wrap your head around whether this or that relic is from the New Kingdom or the Third Intermediate or the Middle Kingdom — or whether you actually care at all! So what did I personally learn from this neglected stockroom? I learnt they were obsessed with symmetry, with flatness, with the serenity of the face. Power was everything and submission to it was everything else. Death constantly preyed on their minds, as did bounteous harvests and feasts of plenty. Before anyone else, they had mastered the art of shaping stone as though it was an afterthought. Their writing system was both sacred and a toil. Endurance was their one true god. Their entire civilisation was devoted to creating objects that would last a thousand dynasties. Even when they were ancient, they knew their ancestors were more ancient still. Please note: the woeful state of the Egyptian Museum will hopefully not continue. A brand new archaeological museum is scheduled to open in Giza later this year and will, for all intents and purposes, replace the current site. So it's likely that I was one of the final 'seasons' of tourists to have faced the disastrous, old-school Cairo museum experience. Lucky me. The Museum of Islamic ArtAccording to the Wikipedia page, which was undoubtedly edited by someone working there, it is “considered one of the greatest in the world”. Yeah, it’s pretty great (although the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia gives it a run for its money). It certainly made me want to see more Persian stuff. And I felt like I could’ve stared at some of those geometrical designs for hours on end. After visiting the Giza Pyramids and the Egyptian Museum, this place was an oasis. Clean, quiet, fascinating, and totally hassle-free. Best of all, I received a free guided tour by a Cairo University student who was volunteering at the museum for course credits. Check this one out, art history nerds. There were, like, no other visitors in the entire building. My guess is that the museum fell off everyone’s radar after it was heavily damaged by a car bomb in 2014 that was targeting the Cairo police headquarters across the road, shutting the place down for a couple of years. But it’s been completely renovated and — judging from the large numbers of heavily armed policemen in the locale — in slightly safer airs at present The Coptic MuseumIt’s a “comfy” museum that showcases a cross-section of Egypt’s Christian art across the centuries. Why do I say comfy? Because of how adorkable early Coptic paintings were. Not the most clever analysis, I know, but look at those big, childish eyes and bold, crayon-like streaks. I love it. The most significant thing in the Coptic Museum is perhaps something that isn’t a painting or a sculpture: the “Gnostic Gospels”, a set of 4th-century manuscripts hidden in a clay pot that two Egyptian farmers accidentally found in 1945 while digging for fertiliser. You remember The Da Vinci Code, right? These manuscripts are where that novel got many of its kooky ideas from and where your weird New Age aunty probably got some of hers. They’re full of the more fun, mystical, and esoteric ideas that early Christian sects developed before they got stamped out for heresy
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AuthorMing is an economist, traveller, and creative writer from Melbourne, Australia. He’s a nebulous collection of particles on the lookout for a good corner to sit with a book and a cup of coffee. Archives
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