Cairo...beyond the pyaramids...

1st Sep 2008:

This was our final day in Cairo, and our third day (ever) in the African continent. Yesterday’s high point was the laser light show, and some of the stats that we picked up about the pyramids:

- They are about 150 m in height, or about 50 floors!
- It took about 20 years for the construction of each one of them (knowing that the average life span of a pharaoh was about 40-50 years, I am guessing that they started building a pyramid for the burial of the king when he was 21 or something to complete it in time ;)
- There are some 300,000 slabs of stones, each of which is about 2.5 tons in weight (how did they carry it up 50 floors??)

Pretty impressive stats, eh?

Anyway, for the final day in the city, we decided to make it a bit hectic and catch some of the other “must things to do in Cairo”. Our list:

- Take a peek at the treasures in the Archaeological Museum
- Practice our bargaining skills at the Khan-al-Khalili market
- Take a self-guided walking tour of the citadel
- Wrap it up with a felucca (boat) ride over the nile
- Come back to the hotel, have a quick shower, collect our luggage, and get to the airport in time for our 10pm flight to Nairobi

Despite the heat, and the fact that our plan gave M a chance to indulge in some shopping, we were not delayed much, and were able to do most of the activities in our plan! Here’s a run-down:

First, some random pics from our breakfast at the terrace of our hotel, overlooking downtown Cairo:

Kicking-off the day with a juicy start

Pretty terrace wall

More posing on the terrace

Now, about the musuem. The Museum is considered to have one of the most priceless collections of ancient artifacts, and I couldn't agree more. The contents were very impressive, although their display and the upkeep were not in line with their value. Despite the fact that the relics in the museum are more than four thousand years old, little care is taken to preserve them from the hazards of an open environment, or humidity (the museum is not air-conditioned), or even the touch of visitors & tour guides (no – most of the stuff is not cased). But in any case, it is a “must see” for anyone visiting Cairo.

The Central Hall of the museum

The most impressive part is – yes, you guessed it right – the Mummy Room. There are in excess of 20 preserved mummies on display, and most are in pretty solid conditions. Thankfully, the museum authorities do a good job of preserving the mummies, with humidity controls, glass casings etc. Each mummy has a short description, and these are just really interesting stories. For example, we came to know that King Ramses II, one of the most celebrated pharaohs, had 87 wives! Also, that the Ramses clan had a very distinctive nose – kind of a hooked structure, if you ask me. After a while, we started looking at the noses of mummies, trying to predict whether they belonged to the Ramses family or not – and we were right 100% of the time! Really weird noses those Ramses had…

A mummy, though not of a pharaoh (the hands are not folded in front of the chest). Taking pics was not allowed, but a security guard proactively approached us and offered to let us take pics if we took care of him later on...

Of course, it was completely surprising that these bodies had survived the vagaries of some 5000 years of time…You could see the skin, the facial features, the teeth, and even the hair! You could distinguish if a mummy belonged to a pharaoh or not – if the hands were folded in front of the chest and crossed each other – bingo, this was the mummy of a pharaoh. There were also mummies of friends, close confidants, even pets – anyone who the pharaoh might need when he came back to life…

There was a section on King Tut’s treasures…you can get a sense of the extent of his majesty’s valuables when I tell you that the casing of his mummy was made of solid gold weighing 110 kgs! And this doesn’t include the solid gold headcase! Both the casing and the headcase are on display, so if you are in need for some $ and consider yourself good at lock-picking, you know where to try your luck ;)

Other interesting tidbits that we learned…the Egyptians, very much like Indians, made Gods of every phenomenon that they either didn’t understand or couldn’t completely control. So there were Gods of lightning, rain, birth, food, water, mummification, and for life after death, besides others…Another interesting piece of info – the official pose for royalty always had the left food forward – this was supposed to convey power. So every statue of a pharaoh or a God would have the left foot forward. More interestingly, if there were multiple important personalities depicted in the statue, you could deduce the hierarchy by comparing how much extended the left foot was – the bigger the step, the more important the person! This was all narrated to us by the guide of an Irish group that had allowed us to join them, since we didn't want to hire a guide just for the two of us. By the way, this guy was the only one in Egypt that I came across who didn't ask for baksheesh. In fact, he refused to take money even when we offered! It was a big surprise, since by now the whole baksheesh culture had sickened us a bit...

Anyway, I could go on and on about the museum, but you have to see it for yourself. We wrapped up our stay there when our tummies started growling, and made a beeline to the Pizza hut, for a quick pasta and another glass of mango juice!

In the snap: Used tickets to the Mummy Room, Mango Juice, and dear friend - the Lonely Planet

This was followed by a trip to the Khan-al-Khalili market, where we had a ton of fun bargaining like crazy for a few souvenirs. I also went inside a mosque for the first time in my life! This was followed by a wonderfully relaxing tea-sipping + people-watching session, sitting out in the open on a “dewan” (couch) in the market.

D, close to the Khan-al-Khalili mosque

M, sipping tea, while the server tries to lure a busload of Koreans

Sipping Egyptian tea

One of the shops in Khan-al-Khalili market

We wrapped up the day by taking a 1 hour private felucca trip down the Nile. Our bargaining skills polished by our efforts at Khan-al-Khalili market, we were able to negotiate the rate for the felucca from $400 to $40 pounds! While the view wasn’t that great, the experience of floating over the Nile was a memorable one, just knowing the significance of the Nile for this region and its ancient civilization. You just need to make one trip to Egypt to understand why they call the country “the gift of the Nile”. As the plane descends into Cairo, you see yellow sand & desolation everywhere, except for small patches of greenery and life along the Nile. Even now, everyone lives pretty much close to the river, and most of the country (I forget the number – it was at least 70%) is still unpopulated as there is no water!

Yes, we had this huge 30 person boat to ourselves (plus the boat captain)

Having relaxed at the felucca, we came back to our hotel, settled our dues, freshened-up, bid goodbyes to the wonderful owner of the hotel, went to the airport, once again requested the immigration officer to not stamp a fresh page in our passports, and took our seats in the plane to Nairobi. The Egypt Air flight provided us with my worst ever flight meal: boiled rice with boiled carrots (that is it!). We decided to skip the meal and catch some sleep instead. But time flew by quickly, and before we knew it, it was “seat backs forward, tray table folded” time…time to experience the real Africa!

Pics from Hawaii

I just remembered that I didn't upload any pics from the Hawaii leg due to a rather slow internet...so here are some of them...more have been uploaded on picasa (see below).

On approach to HNL (Honolulu International Airport)

Sunset from our hotel in Kona

View of the ocean from our balcony

Akaka falls

Ideal vacation: sea, shade and a book

Trail from the Akaka falls

The "most dangerous to search for" shells (Opihi)

Inside a Thurston Lava Tube

Pics galore at http://picasa.google.com/OurGreatWorldTour

Cheers!

Off to the pyramids!

So we finally got some well-deserved sleep last night. The plan for today was basically centered around the pyramids – go to see them early in the morning before it got too hot, and then make a return trip in the night for the laser light show.

We basically did exactly that, and found the experience completely rewarding. Its somewhat of a funny experience seeing the pyramids, as they lie in the middle of a densely populated suburb of Cairo (Giza). Here you are whizzing through the busy streets of Giza, and suddenly there are these huge and ancient monuments – quite an interesting location!

The pyramids themselves were quite amazing – especially after you put them in the context of the time when they were built. One can keep wondering how these huge structures could have been constructed 5,000 years back…to help me get my arms around what 5,000 years meant, I thought about all the changes that have happened in the last 500-1,000 years: electricity, cars, phones, internet, video, skyscrapers, aviation…imagine rolling time back by 500 years when these were not there… and then imagine rolling it back by 5 times that much amount….that was the time frame when these pyramids were built! And here they stand, to this day…

Everywhere around the pyramids were touts, guides, camel owners and other people who would constantly follow you, selling you their goods & services.

We kind of expected them, after reading travelers’ reports, and were not bugged too much – although they can be quite persistent. A very common interaction would be:

Hi! Where are you from…India?
Yes, from India.
Oh…Maharajaah!
(We smile)
And…Amitabh Bachaaaan
(We smile again)
Come, take my camel ride / I’ll guide you through the pyramids / I am an official watchman and can take you to hidden places / …other random solicitations….

So wherever we went, we were greeted with two phrases : Maharajaah and Amitabh Bachaaaan!

We roamed around the area, looking at the various pyramids. There’s the great pyramid, and then there’s a “small” pyramid. Now don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing remotely small about the “small” pyramid. It is about 40 stories high, and is called smaller only because it was built by the pharaoh to be about 10 metres smaller than the “great” pyramid – a gesture of respect to his father who lay buried in the bigger one. Nice touch!

We also went inside the tomb area of the “small” pyramid, through a claustrophobic sloping passage where you had to bend and walk down in a tunnel that was about 3 feet wide and 4 feet high, and sloped at about 30 degrees. The tunnel ended in the central tomb area, where there were high ceilings, a tomb with the mummy excavated (it lies in one of the museums), and a dehumidifier running 24 hours. It was quite a surreal experience to stand there, knowing that you were in the middle of one of the oldest man-made monuments that are still standing, and thousands of years back this place housed one of the most important persons of that time!

We came back out, and after some more clicking and posing, went back to the city center, in search of food. By now, we had seen a whole bunch of KFC’s and some Pizza Huts, and we decided to take the easy route and just hit a Pizza Hut instead of experimenting with local food. Besides, we had tried some local food the night before, and had found it to be a bit bland. We searched for about half an hour in scorching sun, and were rewarded with a Pizza Hut that served good pies, garlic breads, and the most delicious Mango Juice that we had ever tasted!! The mangoes in Egypt are the real deal – identical to the ones back home, and the juices are fresh, pure juice – no sugar, no milk, no nothing – just pure juice that tastes just like eating the lovely mangoes from home. Both of us had the mango juice to our heart’s content

We then came back to our room, rested for a bit, and then went back to the pyramids for the laser show in the night. This was an experience that’s quite difficult to put into words, but let me try:

One-way ticket to Cairo: $350
Tickets to late night laser show at the pyramids: $30
Watching the pyramids lit-up in the middle of the night, while sipping tea and listening to the story of the pharaohs: PRICELESS

It was one of the most fabulous experiences of our lives…Because this was not peak season, there were hardly 10-15 other people around us, as we sat close to the Sphinx, hearing the story of the pyramids and watching the laser show being cast on the Sphinx and the pyramids.

We so totally loved the experience that we continued for the next show in German as well, relying on the audio translating device that did the job of translation for us. We left about 11:30 in the night, still not wanting to leave at all! After another quick stop at a Pizza Hut, and - yes, you guessed it right - a few more mange juices later, we were back to our hotel in Cairo. The hotel had a beautiful open terrace, where we spent a bit of a time recounting all that we had seen during the day, and then hit the bed, ready for a busy day ahead of us.

From the land of the pharaohs

We are here!! We are finally here…..After the issues yesterday, today was pretty smooth. No major visa issues, no issues with the short connection, and even our luggage arrived in time and completely intact. The funny thing is that by now, with all the visas and the revenue stamps – including the additional Egyptian visa we got yesterday – we have pretty much exhausted the pages in our passports!! We now have 3 blank pages – one for Kenyan visa, one for Tanzanian, and one for Lesotho, if required. So going forward we have to remember to ask every immigration officer to not stamp anything on a new page…and hope that he/she agrees… :)

Anyway, back to Cairo. The initial reaction at seeing the city from the air was a sense of awe at the amount of barrenness: as far as I could see from the plane, there was brown, dry sand – no traces of civilization, greenery… life. As our plane taxied to its gate, the first few planes we saw were old, discarded, sand-covered ones belonging to now defunct airlines. The sight just added to the sense of lifelessness and decay that we felt from the air.

The old feeling of the city continued with us as we drove through the city in our taxi. Most buildings were pale yellow in color, all covered by dust, all seemed to be past their prime years. The whole city seemed to depict a place that was important and well-developed a few decades back, and then the powers-to-be had decided to ignore it. Most cars, especially taxis, also seemed to come from a different era – there were tons of Peugeots and Lada Rivas that I can only guess were from the 80s.

As we moved through the city, we started chatting about our plans in Egypt. With us losing one day in the visa issue, we thought it wouldn’t make any sense to go to Luxor, as it was about 9-10 hours of journey, which wouldn’t give us enough time in Cairo. We were debating if we could squeeze in a trip to Mt. Sinai. Mt. Sinai is the place where Christians, Muslims and Jews believe that Moses received the Ten Commandments from the Big Boss. It is supposed to have one of the best sunrises anywhere in the world and we were drawn both towards the natural beauty of the place as well as its historical & religious significance. At the same time, squeezing in a trip to Mt. Sinai would be pretty tiring – we had taken a red eye flight to Cairo, and would have to sit in a car for the whole evening and part of the night to get to the base of Mt. Sinai (takes about 7 hours). From there on, there’s a climb for a few hours to the top, and then the journey back. So we were debating between the two options and decided to get some local opinions…

Anyway, we reached hotel Osiris, where we met up with the friendly and knowledgeable owner Mr. Nabeel. We had also called up Fatma – giving her our coordinates. Fatma was M’s roommate from her single days in Chicago. A reunion of old friends followed at the hotel when she showed up, along with her cute son Youssef. It was an interesting feeling to see someone who was quite a carefree person now taking care of her own kid!!

We pretty much spent the rest of the evening catching up with Fatma over food and tea. Tea is quite an obsession in Egypt – it is usually served, without milk, in small glass cups that look like shot glasses. It is pretty refreshing, and once you taste it, you can clearly understand why it is liked so much! We had some tea at the rooftop terrace of our hotel, as we saw the sun go down in downtown Cairo.

Walking around the town, we also witnessed two other obsessions of Egyptians. One was soccer – people follow the game pretty seriously, and things become quite absorbing when you mix obsession #1 (tea) and #2 (soccer). Here’s a pic to show what I’m talking about - Egyptians sitting in a street cafe catching a game of soccer while drinking tea….

Obsession #3 is smoking….Egyptians love to smoke, and there’s second hand smoke available everywhere and free-of-charge! This despite the fact that the cigarette boxes here don’t just have a health warning – there is usually a ghastly picture of a lung-cancer patient with no hair and a bunch of tubes attached to the throat and the mouth. If that can’t deter anyone from smoking, I don’t know what will…The love for smoking runs so deep that it is usually difficult to find a non-smoking hotel room – we were lucky that Osiris had a strict non-smoking policy in the rooms, although the common areas and the balcony were full of it.

Based on our conversations with Fatma, we had decided to skip going to Mt. Sinai, just taking it easy in Cairo instead...This meant that we had to walk around Cairo, looking for a clean hotel with breathable air – an activity that would become a regular one in the days to come! Fatma had done a good deal of research to help us out, and Mr. Nabeel was also pretty helpful, to the effect that we found a decent place without much hassle. We wrapped up the evening with a quick trip to Fatma’s place, where M started to doze off in the middle of conversations….that’s when we figured that we wanted some shut-eye really bad!!

Oh, What a Day!

Oh, what a day!

Phew, what a day it has been! Our travels usually have some kind of adventure element, and following this tradition, today came with some full-blown adventure in venti size. Since the day we booked our tickets, I had been uncomfortable about our DEL – BAH – CAI leg. Repeatedly I had bothered M with my belief that something would go wrong, largely because of the short 1-hour connection time in Bahrain, horror baggage handling stories I had heard about Gulf Air, and usual delays at Delhi airport. Well, I was right and I was wrong. Right in the sense that a major glitch did happen, and wrong in the sense that it was not because of any of the reasons mentioned above.

Last night we met up with dear old friend Polu, of Shonaa fame (more of this later). We crashed at his place, and woke up promptly at 4:15 am, after catching about 4 hours of sleep. We got ready and took a cab that we thought was waiting for us, getting to the airport well in-time for our flight. It was only after reaching the airport that our driver realized that he had not been sent to pick us up. This moment of truth occurred as we were getting of the taxi at IGI, and he got a call from one irate customer, trying to find out where the hell the driver was for the last one hour. The guy’s confused face was just hilarious….I am guessing the conversation went like this:

Where the hell are you? I’ve been waiting for my airport drop off for the last one hour!

I am here….at the airport….errr…dropping you off….???

Dropping me off? Saaley, subah subah tuney kitnee pee hai?

Nahin sir, I came to your place promptly at 5

Abey, teree to…

(confusion, confusion, and confusion. One totally perplexed driver)

Anyway, we sorted that mess out rather quickly, and went in to check-in. That’s when the drama started. The check-in people looked at our Egyptian visas, and were immediately concerned. Reason? Well, there was some overwriting done on both our visas, in the validity period section. It clearly looked as if we had changed the dates ourselves. The reality was that the Chicago consulate had erred in writing down the dates for the visa, and when I had raised this up, the clerk had just overwritten it with the correct dates. I requested her twice to put a signature or some kind of official seal to make the changes look legit, and twice she told me that it was not required. I guess the Indian immigration people thought otherwise.

So began a desperate fight to win a tri-partite argument, with me, Gulf Air ground staff and Indian immigration – all trying to explain each other’s situation. After much honest effort by me, I was able to convince them that:
- The visa correction wasn’t my mistake, and I had not forged the document (Good start, I told myself)
- In most likelihood, I wouldn’t have any issue immigrating into Egypt
(Looking really good)
- Despite the above, there was a non-zero probability that I would have to be deported back to India from Egypt, in which case they would be held liable
(Oopsss…)

So there it was. Me and Neha were denied boarding passes to travel to Egypt. Surprisingly, both of us weren’t too disappointed – we just focused on getting the visa in order – an objective that we were successful in achieving. This involved:

- Dropping off Polu at the Bain office
- Removing the license plate from his brand-new Suzuki Swift and putting it back on his other car, where it rightly belonged
- Picking up M and practicing my driving skills in Gurgaon – Delhi traffic
- Convincing Egyptian embassy people using a mix of “I’m stuck here for no fault of my own” with some “sir, aap hee hain jo hamara kaam bana saktey hain..”
- Waiting…waiting...and waiting in 35 deg Celsius heat to collect the passports back. Polu’s air-conditioned car came in handy, and so did the MickeyD’s at CP

Overally, it was a tiring day, with a disappointing start, but a relaxed end. Two people were really helpful – Polu aka Shonaa, and the really nice guy (Mr. Ahmed) at the Egyptian Embassy. We managed to get a fresh visa issued, with pretty much no supporting documents, within a matter of 4 hours! There was also the “naam to rahega incident” – the clerk at the embassy told us that since this was a special request, he wasn’t going to give us a receipt for passport pickup. All we needed to do was tell him our names, and he’d give back the passports. He then proceeded to ask us if we’d remember the names on the passport, or did we want him to write them down on a piece of paper…

Hmmm… those were our names, and we usually don’t forget our own names, except maybe after severely traumatic accidents J. After a quick consultation, both M and I agreed that the non-issuance of boarding passes did not constitute a traumatic accident, and hence there was little likelihood that we would forget our own names. Hence, we politely declined his offer to create a cheat sheet for us with our names….
(In case anyone is curious, he was not trying to be funny or anything…it was a genuine concern on his part!!)

By the way, they did charge us again for the visa, so those $40 were definitely the most useless 40 bucks I’ve ever spent.

We wrapped up the day with a triple DDD (Domino’s Delivery Dinner), followed by some emailing etc. to sort out my I-20 issue. (More of this later). I finally hit the bed at 3:45, to catch about half an hour of sleep, before heading off to the airport to fly to the land of the pharaohs….

Travel tips:

- Never ever agree to take any official document that has been corrected/overwritten, no matter how much the official tries to convince you that it would be ok. Insist on getting an extra seal or signature, and if that doesn’t work, refuse to collect the document. After all, it isn’t the official who would be stuck if things don’t work

- Ordering a cab is pretty convenient in most major cities in India. For eg, in Delhi you can order it over the phone (43434343 for example), and the cab will be there at the set time, with a reasonable set price (Rs. 15 per km)

- Being mentally ready that something will go wrong can do wonders to how you handle the situation when it does indeed go south

So that’s it for now. More from the land of the pharaohs….if things work this time!!