January 1, 2018
My friend Andreas and I decided to go to Cairo, Egypt, over New Years as both of us wanted to see the Pyramids. The Pyramids are pretty impressive, but it turns out the best thing about Cairo is to hang around downtown and drink tea and smoke shisha like the locals do.
When working New Years is usually a good time to travel with all the public holidays. The downside is that most of Europe is pretty cold around New Years so you have to go pretty far from Sweden to get to any warm places, and I generally prefer warm to cold, big time. Andreas and I decided that this would be a good time to visit Egypt as it’s a bit too far to be a weekend destination, close enough to go for just a short week, far enough to not be too cold, and is home to the only remaining ancient wonder of the world, the Pyramids of Giza.
After flying over the evening and most of the night we were pretty tired when we arrived in Cairo early in the morning so the first day was pretty lazy. After a nap we went walking around the area closest to the hostel, and already got annoyed by way too many people trying to sell stuff. They even go as far as telling lies about a road being closed and that we have to take a detour, a detour that they will of course show you, and that just happens to pass their shop. We did however have a few locals who were just beeing friendly, and one even took us to a local shisha place that we would’ve never found by ourselves so it’s not all bad, but it’s really hard to tell the good ones from the hassle.
We made our way to one of the tourist attractions, Cairo Tower, just to get an overview of the city. Turns out the tower was really cheap for locals, not so cheap for tourists. We went up anyway and yes, there was a pretty alright view, but not really worth the price, especially not as it turned out we had an even better view from our hostel. So far Cairo has not impressed me that much.
Eventually we got better at dodging people, and that made it way easier to enjoy the place, and as soon as we got out of the most touristic areas people were curious about us rather than just trying to figure out how to scam us, and there were a few times, especially when walking around in a park, when people just wanted to have a photo together with the exotic white people. Nice to see that people can enjoy a day in a park with there friends all over the world.
The walks also included some touristic places such as the Unesco-listed Historic Cairo, also including a visit to the Christian areas known as Coptic Cairo. While walking around we found some amazing street food. It was basically a wooden cart with what looked like a homemade, wood-powered oven on it. The guy pulling it around sold baked sweet potatoes from there. He spoke no English but with some gestures I bought two potatoes. I guess I overpaid him a bit with 5 Egyptian Pounds (€0.25) because he insisted on adding a third potato. Yum!
Now it was time to become tourists. I usually prefer doing things myself instead of paying for tours, but with our limited time we went for a tour anyway, taking us around to some of the main sights that you kind of have to have seen if you’ve been to Cairo; Memphis, Sakkara, and, of course, the Pyramids in Giza. Memphis was a fairly quick stop to make some more time for the pyramids. We made a proper stop at Sakkara though as I had gotten it highly recommended, and it was impressive. There’s a lot of maintenance work going on at one of the pyramids there so it was partly covered on two sides, but all the ruins around were open to exploration.
And now for the main thing. Time to see the only remaining ancient wonder of the world, the Giza Pyramids. They are impressive, and definitely worth visiting, but at the same time the visit feels like a huge anti-climax. There are so many people trying to sell you everything, including tacky souvenirs, camel rides, rides out in the desert to some photo spots, etc. And it doesn’t get better when you see all the garbage, mainly plastic bags, tumbling around the entire area. This place would be so much more amazing if they just cleaned it up and had some more regulated and organised way of retail for the tourists. But I guess that would take away part of the Egypt experience…
There is one more thing that is a bit of a must-see in Cairo, the Egyptian Museum. The museum is huge, and still barely big enough to fit everything they have. Unfortunately this made it feel more like a storage area rather than a museum, and after a while you just get numb to what you’re seeing. A stone, another stone, a slightly larger stone. Probably the best place in the world if Egyptian History is your thing, but my brain simply gave up after a few hours.
My favourite part about Cairo was however Downtown Cairo. All the small streets and alleys were full of shisha cafés. Due to the majority of the population being muslim they don’t really have bars with alcohol (except for places targeting tourists). Instead the locals get together with their friends, sit down at a shisha café, and smoke shisha and drink tea together. We did this most nights as well and this was probably the best part about being in Cairo. Enjoying the place like a local!