Egypt: ending on a high note
Finishing an 8-month trip across 18 countries in Egypt — pyramids, chaos, and closure.
The last hurrah: Egypt was planned months ago — in some ways years in advance — and is a fitting end to the trip. It was always going to be either a disaster or a highlight. I’m so thankful for everyone who made it one of the the place I’m most eager to return to soon.
There was definitely a piece of me thinking “just get through this and you’ve made it.” Skiers say that injuries always happens on the last run, and a version of that felt all-too likely here. We had racked up plenty of hospital visits and illnesses and a few other close calls. My energy was a bit lower after Uganda and Kenya, and Egypt — while perfectly safe if done right — isn’t exactly a place to mess with. “Cairo is a monster. This city will eat you.” That was the prep message from my friend Mo, whose family is from there. I would be meeting him and 3 other close friends in Egypt, which was exciting but can be a bit dangerous too. Sometimes there is strength in numbers, sometimes there is irresponsibility.
Mo grew up in Menlo Park and spent most summers back here with his cousins and family. For more than a decade he’d told us stories of the city, shown videos of protests he’d joined in Tahrir Square during the revolution, talked of the ‘honking language’ of Cairo drivers and shared some of his cousins’ amusing antics. We’d been talking about joining him on a trip here since 7th grade. He was right: Cairo is a monster. Some estimates put it at 45 MILLION people, unofficially. That’s 60 San Francisco’s packed together. It’s got the sprawl of LA and the density of Manhattan, and then add in some half-built squatters high-rises to every nook and cranny between the official buildings.
Everyone there kept assuring us the traffic was far calmer than usual — in fact, the city felt emptier and less alive than it used to, they said. That was hard to imagine after our first freeway trip: “Seatbelts are illegal in Cairo” our driver, Mo’s cousin Seif, told us before launching into the chaos. I gripped the sides of my seat a bit too tightly as our small coupe careened around trucks and squeezed between breaking cars, Seif tapped out rhythmic honks that each meant something different (there’s “Get out of the way” and “I’m merging” and “Fuck you” and many others). I relaxed a bit after a while, comforted that there must be some order to the madness after all. There was no real merging since there are no lanes, but at times it felt less like moto-cross and more like an endless weave since our friend’s car kept popping up in the same place relative to us: we’d pass them on our right, and a few minutes later spot them up ahead on our left. “If you can drive in Cairo you can drive anywhere,” Seif said. And then revealed he had been in 3 major accidents.
Our first few days were an endless stream of city sights. Mo pointed out the neighborhoods and directions from the top of Cairo tower to get us oriented, and we explored the oldest districts and markets and the new park built by the Aga Khan, the mosques and the city of the dead, the Egyptian Museum and Tahrir Square. We chilled at cafes with hookah and went to the Cairo Jazz Club (CJC). We went to the live filming of Abla Fajita, Egypt’s most popular tv show — a mix of the Daily Show and the Muppets (and understood precisely zero of the 4-hour Arabic affair).
And of course the Pyramids. I’m pretty jaded when it comes to sightseeing at this point — there are a lot of old, impressive, history-filled buildings out there. But Egypt staggers not just with the amount of history but with the age of it. The pyramids, as tall as many modern buildings (450’+), were built about 5000 years ago. The time from when Jesus was born to right now was is shorter than from when the pyramids were built to when Jesus was born. When first completed they were the tallest structures in the world…and 4000 years later they still were. And they still stand, nearly original, just on the outskirts of this monster of a city.
And we crashed the ‘wedding of the year,’ complete with an appearance by Amr Diab — the biggest pop star in the Arab world. (Aside: I should have made crashing weddings the theme of the trip). Mo and Seif’s childhood friend was getting married on the outskirts of the city and, having never met us, told them “sure bring whoever” and so after digging up some suits and tuxes (those didn’t make the travel bags) we were in. The wedding started at 4. We checked into the hotel at 3:30. They said we’d go to the wedding at 9, which we thought that was a joke until we walked in later around 9:30.
We spent the afternoon at the hotel pool and meeting our new Cairo crew — Mo and Seif’s friends from growing up. They had all attended an American school so talked mostly in English for our benefit, and we got a good fill of the endless stories and nonstop banter. Arabic lends itself to original jokes and wit (and insults) far more than English as any root word can be conjugated any way, so every few minutes they’d lapse into Arabic to make fun of a friend and the whole room would crack up and Mo would try to translate jokes that didn’t translate well. (If I ever decide to pick up a new language, it will be Arabic).
After a week of exploring Cairo with the guidance of Mo and his friends, we started to get a feel for how things worked. We had now taken a couple of taxis successfully on our own — a new process both because of the language difference and because paying for taxis involves a heated, somewhat lengthy negotiation after you arrive at the destination. How much would this taxi be? “Whatever I decide to give him,” said Mo. Apparently we Americans also tend to slam taxi doors, because they yelled at us for that every time.
We could make our way around our home island of Zamalek and had hit the key sights. We had heard the universal frustration with the military government and plenty of opinions on the current president. We heard our new friends’ stories of setting up roadblocks after the police had been chased out of the city, and taxi drivers’ frustrations with the lack of tourism. We also started to see other pieces of the culture, like the customs around hosting guests. Mo and Seif’s insisted on paying for nearly everything we did, and to try to pay for ourselves in front of others was disrespectful. Finally ‘getting the hang of it’ we of course decided to leave — we grabbed a train for a 2-day trip up to the coast to Alexandria.
First of all, Alexander the Great’s biography is crazy. He conquered half the world and racked up mythology to rival anyone else, and did it before dying at ~32 years old. When Justine Musk wrote about what makes people like Elon great, her example for who he studied was Alexander the Great. He also lent his name to Alexandria, which it turns out is the most common city name in the world.
The Alexandria on Egypt’s Mediterranean shore has to be the greatest of them those. A city of 4.5 million people (no big deal), it blends the craziness of Cairo with the wide sea-front cornices of Europe’s Mediterranean cities. It’s hookah cafes are planted next to fresh fish joints, and packed street markets selling Arab spices and lanterns for Ramadan open onto lively plazas with running children and live music.
A friend of a friend, Ayman, met us on the second day and showed us around the city — another phenomenally generous host that made our time here so special. He took us on a boat ride through the city’s nicest beach, showed us several of the president’s mansions (the military has been claiming just about everything, it seems), and brought us to the new Library of Alexandria. After a night spent smoking hookah and sipping Stella and of course deep intellectual conversation until the sun came up under Alexandria’s famous Stanley Bridge, we headed back to Cairo.
On my last night, we rode a boat down the Nile in a falucca with Mo’s cousin and his crew. We hadn’t spent all that much time with them, but we lounged and talked and then went to dinner like old friends. So welcoming.
Perhaps it’s the immediate nostalgia of the trip ending, but Egypt has the most I’m excited to return to. A boat cruise down the Nile to Luxor, climbing Mt. Sinai, diving at Sharm al Sheik, adventuring through the desert with Bedouins, more exploration Alexandria and the nearby coast. And more time in the monstrous city of Cairo, more time with the friends we met there, more falucca floats down the Nile, more evenings at a cafe talking over hookah. As impressive and alluring as all the sights are, as awesome as the sheer size of the city and craziness of the highways are, it’s the people that made Egypt. It’s the people that make everywhere.
Originally published on Medium/Zig Zag Zuck.