Egypt’s southernmost city (population 150,000) and ancient frontier town has the loveliest setting on the Nile. At ASWAN the deserts close in on the river, confining its sparkling blue between smooth amber sand and rugged extrusions of granite bedrock. Lateen-sailed feluccas glide past the ancient ruins and gargantuan rocks of Elephantine Island, palms and tropical shrubs softening the islands and embankments till intense blue skies fade into soft-focus dusks. The city’s ambience is palpably African; its Nubian inhabitants are lither and darker than the Saiyidis, with different tastes and customs. Although its own monuments are insignificant compared to Luxor’s, Aswan is the base for excursions to the temples of Philae and Kabasha , near the great dams beyond the First Cataract, and the Sun Temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel , far to the south. It can also serve for day-trips to Darow Camel Market, Kom Ombo, Edfu and Esna - the main temples between here and Luxor. But the classic approach is to travel upriver by felucca, experiencing the Nile’s moods and scenery as travellers have for millennia. However, Aswan itself is so laid-back that one could easily spend a week here simply hanging out, never mind going anywhere. The tourism scene is much the same as in Luxor.
The twin streams of Egypt’s history converge just below the Delta at
Cairo , where the greatest city in the Islamic world sprawls across the Nile towards the
Pyramids , those supreme monuments of antiquity. Every visitor to Egypt comes here, to reel at the Pyramids’ baleful mass and the seething immensity of Cairo, with its bazaars, mosques and Citadel and extraordinary Antiquities Museum. It’s equally impossible not to find yourself carried away by the streetlife, where medieval trades and customs coexist with a modern, cosmopolitan mix of Arab, African and European influences.Cairo has been the largest city in Africa and the Middle East ever since the Mongols wasted Imperial Baghdad in 1258. Acknowledged as
Umm Dunya or ”
Mother of the World ” by medieval Arabs, and as Great Cairo by nineteenth-century Europeans, it remains, in Jan Morris’s words, “one of the half-dozen supercapitals - capitals that are bigger than themselves or their countries the focus of a whole culture, an ideology or a historical moment”. As Egypt has been a prize for conquerors from Alexander the Great to Rommel, so Cairo has been a fulcrum of power in the Arab world from the Crusades unto the present day. The
ulema of its thousand-year-old Al-Azhar Mosque (for centuries the foremost centre of Islamic intellectual life) remains the ultimate religious authority for millions of Sunni Muslims, from Jakarta to Birmingham. Wherever Arabic is spoken, Cairo’s cultural magnetism is felt. Every strand of Egyptian society knits and unravels in this febrile megalopolis.
Egyptians have two names for the city, one ancient and popular, the other Islamic and official. The foremost is Masr , meaning both the capital and the land of Egypt - an ur-city that endlessly renews itself and dominates the nation, an idea rooted in pharaonic civilization. (For Egyptians abroad, “Masr” refers to their homeland; within its borders it means the capital.) Whereas Masr is timeless, the city’s other name, Al-Qahira (The Conqueror), is linked to an event: the Fatimid conquest that made this the capital of an Islamic empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Hindu Kush. The name is rarely used in everyday speech.
Both archetypes still resonate and in monumental terms are symbolized by two dramatic landmarks : the Pyramids of Giza at the edge of the Western Desert and the great Mosque of Mohammed Ali - the modernizer of Islamic Egypt - which broods atop the Citadel. Between these two monuments sprawls a vast city, the colour of sand and ashes, of diverse worlds and time zones, and gross inequities. All is subsumed into an organism that somehow thrives in the terminal ward: medieval slums and Art Deco suburbs, garbage-pickers and marbled malls, donkey carts and limos, piousness and “the oaths of men exaggerating in the name of God”. Cairo lives by its own contradictions.
This is a city, as Morris put it, “almost overwhelmed by its own fertility”. Its population is today estimated at around eighteen million and is swollen by a further million commuters from the Delta and a thousand new migrants every day. Today, one third of Cairene households lack running water; a quarter of them have no sewers, either. Up to three million people reside in squatted cemeteries - the famous Cities of the Dead . The amount of green space per citizen has been calculated at thirteen square centimetres, not enough to cover a child’s palm. Whereas earlier travellers noted that Cairo’s air smelt “like hot bricks”, visitors now find throat-rasping air pollution , chiefly caused by traffic. Cairo out-pollutes LA every day of the week: breathing the atmosphere downtown is reputedly akin to smoking thirty cigarettes a day.
Cairo’s genius is to humanize these inescapable realities with social rituals . The rarity of public violence owes less to the armed police on every corner than to the dowshah. When conflicts arise crowds gather, restrain both parties, encourage them to rant, sympathize with their grievances and then finally urge: ” Maalesh, maalesh ” (Let it be forgiven). Everyday life is sweetened by flowery gestures and salutations; misfortunes evoke thanks for Allah’s dispensation (after all, things could be worse!). Even the poorest can be respected for piety; in the mosque, millionaire and beggar kneel side by side.
Extended-family values and neighbourly intervention prevail throughout the baladi quarters or urban villages where millions of first- and second-generation rural migrants live, whilst arcane structures underpin life in Islamic Cairo. On a city-wide basis, the colonial distinction between “native quarters” and ifrangi (foreign) districts has given way to a dynamic stasis between rich and poor, westernization and traditionalism, complacency and desperation. The city’s tolerance has recently been further strained by natural and man-made calamities. In October 1992, up to a thousand people died in an earthquake , when shoddily built high-rises and hovels collapsed across the city. Its image took a worse battering abroad after the shooting of seventeen Greek tourists in 1996 and the firebombing of a German tour bus a year later - although the tourists now seem to be making a cautious return. Every year its polarities intensify, safety margins narrow and statistics make gloomier reading. The abyss beckons in prognoses of future trends , yet Cairo confounds doom sayers by dancing on the edge.
Greater Cairo consists of two metropolitan governorates:
Cairo , on the east bank of the Nile, and
Giza , across the river. The
River Nile (
Bahr el-Nil, or simply
El-Nil) is the prerequisite of their existence and fundamental to basic orientation. Bear in mind that it flows northwards through the city, so that “downriver” means north, and “upriver” south, a reversal of the usual associations. The city’s waterfront is dominated by the
islands of Gezira and Roda and the
bridges that connect them to the
Corniche (embankment) on either side of the Nile. There are four major divisions of the city:”
Central Cairo spreads inland to the east of the islands. Its
downtown area - between Ezbekiya Gardens and
Midan Tahrir - bears the stamp of Western planning, as does
Garden City , the embassy quarter further south. At the northern end of central Cairo (beyond the downtown area) lies
Ramses Station , the city’s main train terminal. Most of the banks, airlines, cheap hotels and tourist restaurants lie within this swathe of the city.
” Further east sprawls Islamic Cairo , encompassing Khan el-Khalili bazaar, the Gamaliya quarter within the Northern Walls , and the labyrinthine Darb al-Ahmar district between the Bab Zwayla and the Citadel . Beyond the latter spread the eerie Cities of the Dead - the Northern and Southern Cemeteries.
” The Southern Cemetery and the populous Saiyida Zeinab quarter merge into the rubbish tips and wasteland bordering the ruins of Fustat and the Coptic quarter of Old Cairo , further to the south. From there, a ribbon of development follows the metro out to Ma’adi , Cairo’s plushest residential suburb, and Helwan , the city’s heaviest industrial centre. Except for stylish Heliopolis , the northern suburbs likewise hold little appeal for visitors.
” Across the river on the west bank , the residential neighbourhoods of Aguza and Dokki aren’t as smart as nearby Mohandiseen or the high-rise northern end of Gezira island, known as Zamalek . The Imbaba district, just to the northeast, was once notable for its weekly camel market , but this has now moved slightly further out to Bil’esh. The dusty expanse of Giza (which lends its name to the west bank urban zone) is enlivened by Cairo Zoo and the nightclub-infested Pyramids Road leading to the Pyramids of Giza .
HURGHADA (GHARDAKA)
In the course of two decades,
HURGHADA has been transformed from a humble fishing village of a few hundred souls into a booming town of 50,000 people, drawn here from all over Egypt by the lure of making money. This phenomenal growth is almost entirely due to
tourism , which accounts for 95 percent of the local economy. Yet it’s worth taking Hurghada’s claims to be a seaside resort with a handful of salt. Unlike Sinai, where soft sand and gorgeous reefs are within easy reach and women can bathe unhassled, Hurghada’s public beaches are distant or uninviting, while the best marine life is far offshore. If you’re not into diving or discos, it’s hard to find much to like about Hurghada - though you have to admire its commercial gusto; many of the townsfolk come from Luxor’s west bank, where tourism has been a way of life for generations.While package tourists laze in their resorts, independent travellers often feel hard done by. Paying for boat trips and private beaches is unavoidable if you’re to enjoy Hurghada’s assets, and although conditions for diving, windsurfing and deep-sea fishing are great, the
cost is high, with real bargains limited to accommodation. Nor will you save much by self-catering; everything in the shops is more expensive than in Cairo or the Nile Valley. As tour groups come all year round, there’s no “off” season for holiday villages, whose
peak times are the European Christmas and Easter holidays and the Russian vacation period of August and September. Low-budget hotels are most in demand over winter, when templed-out backpackers flood in from the Nile Valley en route to Sinai.
The town itself is a hotchpotch of utilitarian structures, garish hotels and gaudy boutiques, but Egyptians love its wide boulevards and sea breezes, the spaciousness and “Benetton ambience “. Nowhere else in Egypt are shorts de rigueur and holiday romances so easy. Russians have added fresh spice to its already cosmopolitan mix of Italians, Germans, French, Brits, Aussies and Japanese, whose hedonistic potential is grasped by Saudi princes, for whom Hurghada is only two hours away by private jet. For Westerners, however, the chief lure remains underwater: a score of coral islands and reefs within a few hours’ reach by boat, and many other amazing dive sites that can be visited on liveaboards.
ISMAILIYA ’s schizoid character is defined by the rail line that cuts across the city. South of the tracks lies the European-style garden city built for foreign employees of the Suez Canal Company, extending to the verdant banks of the Sweetwater Canal. Following careful restoration, its leafy boulevards and placid streets of colonial villas look almost as they must have done in the 1930s, with bilingual street signs nourishing the illusion that the British empire has just popped indoors for cocktails.North of the train tracks you move into another world of hastily constructed flats grafted onto long-standing slums , and a quarter financed by the Gulf Emirates that provides a cordon sanitaire for the wealthy suburb of Nemrah Setta (Number Six). This Janus-profile reflects the city’s twentieth-century history , when two disparate sons of Ismailiya had a lasting effect on Egyptian society. Hassan el-Banna created the Muslim Brotherhood that was the bane of the British, and has vexed Egypt’s rulers since independence. Two generations later, Ismailiya became synonymous with Osman Ahmed Osman , a self-made millionaire contractor whom Sadat appointed as Minister of Housing and Reconstruction in 1975. As Gulf investments poured into the Canal Zone, billboard-sized pictures of Osman began to outnumber those of his patron, who finally agreed to opposition demands for an audit. By the time it was discovered that millions had been stashed in Swiss banks, Osman had fled the country. Subsequent investigations into his political connections proved inconclusive and he is now back in business.
The Town and around
Ismailiya’s carefully restored old town is a pleasure to walk or bike around, shaded by pollarded trees. Most of the sights can be reached on foot within ten minutes, although a couple of places outside town warrant renting a bicycle in the backstreets…
Ismailiya’s carefully restored old town is a pleasure to walk or bike around, shaded by pollarded trees. Most of the sights can be reached on foot within ten minutes, although a couple of places outside town warrant renting a bicycle in the backstreets off Mohammed Ali Quay, or catching a
service taxi from the turn-off near Mallaha Park.Starting on Mohammed Ali Quay, first on the trail is the large, vaguely Swiss-looking
House of Ferdinand de Lesseps , who lived here during the canal’s construction. Disappointingly, you can only visit the interior if you’re some kind of VIP, since the house now serves as a private hotel for guests of the Suez Canal Authority. In De Lesseps’s study, books and photographs are scattered around his desk and bed as if the Frenchman had been reviewing his life’s work, while his carriage stands outdoors, encased in glass. Lone visitors might chance a peek inside if the rear gate is open; otherwise, you could try presenting yourself at the Suez Canal Authority and bluffing the press officer into fixing a visit - though this could well prove a waste of time.
A pleasant fifteen minutes’ walk down the street from the De Lesseps House, the Ismailiya Museum (Sat-Thurs 9.30am-4pm, Fri and during Ramadan 9.30am-2pm; £E6) leans towards ancient history, devoting a section to the waterways of Ramses and Darius. The highlights of its collection of four thousand Greco-Roman and pharaonic artefacts is a lovely mosaic from the fourth century AD, depicting Phaedra, Dionysos, Eros and Hercules. Other sections cover the canal in modern history, the Battle of Ismailiya and the “Crossing” of October 1973.
With permission from the museum, one can also visit some plaques and obelisks from Ramses II’s time, in the Garden of Steles down the road, past the guarded residence of the head of the Canal Authority. It’s nicer to wander amid the 500 acres of exotic shrubs and trees of Mallaha Park , or stroll alongside the shady Sweetwater Canal that was dug to provide fresh water for labourers building the Suez Canal. Previously, supplies had to be brought across the desert by camels, or shipped across Lake Manzala to Port Said.
LUXOR has been a tourist mecca ever since Nile steamers began calling in the nineteenth century to view the remains of Thebes, ancient Egypt’s New Kingdom capital, and its associated sites - the concentration of relics in this area is overwhelming. The town itself boasts
Luxor Temple , a graceful ornament to its waterfront and “downtown” quarter, while just to the north is
Karnak Temple , a stupendous complex built over 1300 years. Across the river are the amazing tombs and mortuary temples of the
Theban Necropolis , and as if this wasn’t enough, Luxor also serves as a base for trips to Esna, Edfu, Dendara and Abydos temples, up and down the Nile Valley.In a town where
tourism accounts for 85 percent of the economy, it’s hardly surprising that you can’t move without being importuned to step inside a shop, rent a
caleche, or have your shoes shined. Hassled and overcharged at every turn, some tourists react with fury and come to detest Luxor. Keep your cool and sense of humour; it’s possible to find genuine warmth here. Once you get to know a few characters and begin to understand the score, Luxor seems like a funky soap opera with a cast of thousands. Cool feluccca guys and bazaar hustlers, nervous rich tourists and piastre-pinching backpackers - their dealings and misunderstandings are as intriguing as the monuments.
Most foreigners come between October and February (especially Christmas and New Year), when the climate is cooler than you’d imagine, with chilly nights and early mornings. Around the end of March the temperature shoots up 10°C, making April the nicest time of the year to visit, though the weather remains agreeable until late May or early June, after which the daytime heat is oppressive till late October, when the temperature plummets. During the summer tourism is well down, and the locals have time to sleep by day and party at night.
Orientation
Luxor spreads along the east bank of the Nile, its outskirts encroaching on villages and fields. Orientation in central Luxor is simplified by a relatively compact tourist zone defined by three main roads. Sharia al-Mahatta runs 500m from the train station towards Luxor Temple, where it meets Sharia el-Karnak , the main drag heading north to Karnak Temple (2.5km). Karnak is also accessible via the riverside Corniche , though tourists generally stick to the 1.5km stretch between Luxor Museum and the Winter Palace Hotel. The “circuit” is completed by a fourth street, Sharia el-Birka - also known as Sharia al-Souk after its bazaar. In the last decade or so Luxor has expanded south towards the village of Awmia, with dozens of new hotels and other facilities along Sharia Ibn Khalid Walid (running 3km from the Novotel to the Sheraton) and Television Street (named after its TV tower), which now constitute extensions of the tourist zone.
MERSA MATROUH
Although
MERSA MATROUH has grown phenomenally and sees itself as a sophisticated resort, it remains a hick town with donkey carts outnumbering cars on the main street, which in summer is clogged with groups of well-to-do Egyptian and Libyan holidaymakers. All the local
beaches have been ruined, leaving only the magnificent cove at Agiiba and neighbouring Ubbayad beach, both far from town. Whatever Egyptians might say, by no stretch of the imagination does Matrouh fit the tourist board’s promise of a hedonist’s playground. The only people likely to think so are the Libyans who’ve started coming here since the border was reopened; Egyptians go the other way, seeking work in Libya, while Western visitors are generally more interested in reaching Siwa Oasis.A grid of mould-poured low-rise blocks housing forty thousand people, the
town spreads up from the coast towards a ridge festooned with radar dishes. As Matrouh has gone from being a quiet fishing port to the booming capital of the Mediterranean Governorate, immigrants have poured in from other parts of Egypt, inspiring mixed feelings amongst the locals.
Despite appearances, Mersa Matrouh (”Sheltered Anchorage”) has a long history . Founded by Alexander the Great on his way to Siwa, it was here that Mark Antony and Cleopatra sought solace after their defeat at Actium, and that her fleet put out to sea for its final battle against Augustus. During the Islamic era, Matrouh was a busy trading port with a sideline in smuggling; its other main industry (dating back to Roman times) was harvesting sponges. Divers came from as far away as the Cyclades - up to two thousand of them per year in the early part of last century. To pluck the sponges from the seabed 60-90m below, they used a stone to make themselves sink faster, which they jettisoned at the bottom. Sponge-harvesting ceased in the early 1980s.
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