I had one night in Cairo in August. I had flown into Egypt to get a look at the project in Damietta and to meet the project staff. The visit was an exploratory trip, to give me some information on which to base a decision about joining the project. At the end of my visit, Driver Mohammed drove me up to Cairo in the afternoon, about three hours, and dropped me off at the Hotel Heliopolis, near the airport. My flight was the next morning and I needed to leave for the airport at 5:30am. The following account of that night was copied from my journal for me by EJWH.
After dinner in one of the hotel restaurants I take a stroll around the hotel lobby. I read a guided tour promotional display. It lists a four hour excursion to see the sphinx & pyramids at Giza.Hmm.No-one is staffing the tour desk and I am standing indecise and the bell-captain comes over and asks if I want to buy anything or go anywhere;He knows a driver who can act as a guide for no extra fee.I say, “I was wondering about pyramids."Say no more – he is outside waving his friend in and we have a seat and he recites his standard patter of pyramids; Papyrus, Cleopatra, sphinx, River Nile and Hieroglyphs. 100USD for the car transport and he will negotiate for me the rest…because the pyramids and sphinx are closed (this is about 8 p.m.) and so he knows a guy who will take me on camel or horseback (“as you wish, it’s up to you”) The guy will bribe the guard and take me into the land of the pyramids.I have no idea how to take this, well - maybe important - piece of information.Had I an Egypt Lonely Planet Guide I might have read about such schemes, but I am here on business and I just found out I was coming less than a week ago.I say “yeah, sure, let me get some cash.”Away we go in the bobbing and weaving traffic of Cairo in a new black Mercedes Benz with Hemmet, a fifty-something Egyptian who works at the hotel and moonlights as a driver/guide. Now the guy has serious motivation to get me “there” and back (wherever “there” is) and to have me smiling at the end of the journey, which he confirms will run four to four and a half hours.No worries, mate.We cross the Nile , with its tour boats lit with those same bright little lights that say, “party time!”.Is it the Nile or the Seine?Maybe recycled boats from Paris(?!). Now we are in Giza, not Cairo, west of the Nile. The city goes on and on but the car never stops – all the boulevards have continuous palm tree medians so the entering traffic (driving on the right, not British style) joins the flow and at round-abouts and u-turn spots can back-track to complete a “crossing” of the boulevard.This is great for traffic flow but hellish on pedestrians as there are no traffic lights and not even a break in the three to four ( use of striped lanes is optional) stream of VW Bus Publicos, Cooper Mini (1960’s vintage), taxis, and an assortment pack of every make and model of passenger car ever made anywhere in Asia, Europe or North America.I get a hint at the tone of my package tour when Hemmet pulls to the curb in front of a storefront with a backlit plastic sign that says, “Papyrus Institute and Museum” with the applicable color illustrations.He gets out and I have the door open and one foot on the curb and I realize, “No, this is a flea-bitten tourist trap!”Hammet feels I’m missing an important educational opportunity and not seeing the full ancient picture but relents, and off we speed, continuing down Pyramid Boulevard.We do a u-turn and I see the top of a spot-lit pyramid behind a patchwork plywood fence.We turn away from the boulevard into a neighborhood along the fence passing half a dozen more “Papyrus Research Center and Museum Shops”.Now we turn into a narrow back street and park under a tree in a twelve-car parking area.It looks a lot like the older arrondisements of Paris.Hammet introduces me to the son of the mayor of Giza (oh, really?) who asks where I’m from and tells us he has worked for Halliburton in South Texas. (Oh, really?)He will get me a guide and a horse or camel, “As you wish, it’s up to you.”And they will bribe the guard but “as happy as the guide makes you, you must in return make the guide happy.”Doesn’t sound like a problem.I ask Hammet whether to go camel or horse and he advises horse.So, while those preparations are made I am shown into a perfume and aroma therapy shop with bolster pillow and cushioned seating areas all around the room, and it is not a small shop.A friend of the Giza mayor’s son is introduced to me and before I know it I am in the hypnotic gaze and under the rhythmicly breathing bushy brown eyebrows of an Egyptian oil and rose perfume salesman.Eucalyptis oil is on my fingers and I am breathing it in feeling the warmth in my chest andopen sinuses and a sense of immortal, pharonic well being.At only three Egyptian pounds (EL) per gram, how can you go wrong and now the sales assistant arrives with a first jar size of 300 grams, a second of 250 grams, and the “small” size of 200 grams.Note, that’s "small," as in EL600 or $100.I get the double rose oil. (Hey, I always saidif somebody could bottle a perfume of rose scent, I’d buy it.)And the lavender, knowing that MB will like it.David: scorched in a Giza tourist Trap.I enjoyed being part of the long tradition dating back through the Victorians, Napoleon’s army, the crusaders, the Romans, the Greeks and probably folks even before that, thousands of years of clipped pigeons in the shadow of the sphinx.But wait, there’s more Don Pardo… I finally put an end to the sales barrage, turning down various “pay-half-price, throw-this–in-for” efforts to part me from more of my cash – Oh, not enough cash? make that credit card.I am handing this man my credit card - unbelieveable, a slightly out-of-body experience – remind me to check that statement when I get home. So, back out to the small car park where men sit outside in the mild evening air and smoke sheesha and drink tea and watch the local soccer team on a portable TV. Hemmet takes the small bag with the boxed bottles of oil.The mayor’s son is back and he has a small horse, saddled, and a young man riding beside.This is Kemo, wiry, smiling, reaching his head forward by stretching his neck and then turning his face to look up at you like a character in an animated feature.Kemo is the guide and I am reminded by the Giza Scion of two important things: (1) It is 500 EL for the illegal night tour on horseback - to be paid upon return. (He says he trusts me – aw, shucks – and he will show me the ATM); (2) I must make Kemo as happy as he makes me.So I step into the stirrup and swing my leg over.(When have I done this before?I don’t recall.Forty-four years accumulates a lot of vague recollections.I wonder if I am adding to the store as fast as they decay, having reached a lifetime equilibrium state) and with Kemo’s coaching and his switch whips to the hind quarters of my horse and his verbal equestrian directions and pleas, we manoeuver up a local neighborhood street, past many folks out on the steps or sitting in chairs whiling away the evening.Kemo waves and calls to many.He is from around here.We pass a party of some forty or fifty men sitting in a large oval of chairs that spills out onto the street and amongst them some of the younger men dance to the ear-numbingly loud music from a six foot tall speaker parked at the curb.A continuous wall runs along the opposite side of the street with camels kneeling beside it munching hay, quiet donkeys and small horses of the same unstable breed as my mount. I try squeezing with my feet and knees as Kemo pleads with me to do, but the horse has his own slow pace unless Kemo takes the reigns or whips from behind.We arrive at an opening in the wall with a folding chair seated and uniformed guard , an old and sleepy man who takes down the steel cable for Kemo and my horse steps carefully between the 2 ft high concrete pillars that prevent anything but a human or a horse or camel or donkey from passing through.It is a half-moon and cloudless. The moon is the only illumination on this side of the wall. I notice the quiet after all the street noise.The horse goes to the left and stops after 20 ft. and I know nothing I do will get him started again.Kemo shortly arrives, presumably after making the guard as happy as he made Kemo.We follow a sand and rock path up a hillside of sand and rock and reach the top of the hill, looking out on pyramids in moonlight.The moon shines from the left on the three large pyramids arrayed, side by side, in front of us.The light and sound show is going with muffled German monologue on speakers somewhere off in the distance and to the right. I almost have my soul bounced clean out of me when Kemo takes the reins of my horse several times to gallop us across lines of sight of the monument governors (as Kemo calls them) and when the governors’ Jeep headlights threaten. The big pyramids are lit most often but when three smaller pyramids are lit on my far left, beyond the left big pyramid, Kemo tells me there are nine pyramids in all, the large three are for kings and the other six are for queens.I am not really listening to what Kemo has to say – he ends each bout of patter with, “You understand? You have questions?”It is like Niagara Falls – you don’t care how many godzillion cubic meters per second flow over the Horseshoe Falls.You just look and feel weight on your chest and have the indescribable sense we call “awe”.It doesn’t matter whether these pyramids are tombs or monuments or who build them or which came first or even how the people used to live before the Invading Arabs did this and Napoleon’s army did that.The moon and the bright white planet and the triangular forms of white against a blue-black sky with accent lighting from somewhere on the right.And while the view perspective changes as we go down the hillside toward the center pyramid, past the current excavations of the workers’ tombs (according to my nefarious guide, that is) and even right up to the foot of the center pyramid where I dismount and go up and touch the stone, yes, and even as the view perspective changes to looking up the jagged side of the monument to the apex, the hum of my soul is the same, the hum of awe in the moonlight. Happily, as I assure Kemo in response to his pestering, we make our way back down the sandy hill to the wall near the neighborhood But, before we leave the dark and quiet, thirty yards from the sleepy security guard’s gate, Kemo tells me to stop the horse.He asks if I am happy with the tour and will I make him as happy as he has made me.I knew this was coming and had mentally settled on giving him one of the twenty U.S. dollar bills in my left pocket. It is hard to take bills out of your left pocket when there is a passport and credit cards in that same pocket and you are sitting on a horse trying not to drop anything. Under the mixed force of pleading and menace shining from Kemo's eyes, I give him two twenties. He looks sadly at me and says, “make it fifty”.But I tell him firmly, “No dice.” My horse is quicker through the neighborhood streets, heading back to the barn, and I have enough cash on me and I pay the Giza Prince and Hammet whisks us throught the Cairo streets back to the Heliopolis and I am still tingling when I trudge down the hotel hallway to claim my five hours of sleep. Footnote:Kemo’s best patter line:“After you get off that horse, you’re going to walk like an Egyptian.”
All images and text copyright Marsha Bailey 2005-2009. All rights reserved.
