Alexandria

Alexandria's harbour

Fort Qaitbey

Yesterday we made a day trip up to Alexandria, on the Mediterranean Coast. It was a long day, leaving the guest house at 6:30 to get the train, 2.5 hours on the train, and the reverse at the end of the day. Still, it was great to get out of Cairo for the day. Alexandria is really ancient, having first been established around 330BC by Alexandra the Great, but its fortunes have waxed and waned through the centuries. Under Ptolemy, it became one of the major cities with mixed Roman and Egyptian architecture, and included a very famous library way back when Cleopatra was the boss there. Alexandria's demise began when the Muslim armies invaded Egypt, and it hasn't ever really recovered properly. Napoleon had a crack at rejuvenating it  in the 1800s, but now it's just another dirty Egyptian city, with its main attractions being its coast and a few historic ruins.

It was so lovely to see the sea again. You had to use your imagination, though, because the beachline is one long line of trash. It seems such a huge problem in developing countries, where modern living clashes with ancient infrastructure - the result is rubbish with nowhere to go. It is totally normal to see massive piles of rubbish beside low-quality high-rise housing blocks, where the residents simply hurl it all out the window. It's not like that everwhere, but it is a bit depressing if you dwell on it too much. We found the same thing to be true in Samoa.

Anyway, we enjoyed visiting the catacombs, Fort Qaitbey (I think this was the setting for James Bond jumping off the fort into the sea on a horse in "Never Say Never Again") and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the modern-day equivalent of the old famous library. The traffic isn't so diabolical as Cairo, so it was a relatively restful place (restful is a relative term in Egypt, of course).

Sunset over Alexandria harbour

This is my last blog entry, since we are due to fly out to England tonight and we will be back in NZ on Jan 26th. Things I am looking forward to in Nelson:

• being able to sleep at night
• being able to cross the road without experiencing a year's worth of adrenalin fix in 20 seconds
• being able to drink the tap water
• not having to negotiate for everything
• HOME!

To those of you who have followed this blog, thanks for persevering, and see you soon!

Road rules in Egypt

Here is my summary of the road rules in Egypt, as witnessed by direct observation and immersion, without one iota of exaggeration ...

All drivers:

• Your horn is your most important piece of equipment. Have it well maintained at all times because you need this to indicate every manouevre you make. No need to be quiet at night - if you stopped blaring your horn at night the locals would probably wake up due to the unusual quiet.
• Lane markings are just images painted on the road to keep a few Egyptians in work. They don't actually mean anything, so ignore them. There is always at least one more lane than indicated, even if you have to imagine it in your mind.
• Staying in lane is for cissies. It's much more interesting to change lanes as often as phyically possible, because you will shave a microsecond off that 8 hour journey. Better still, straddle the white line so you can put off your decision as long as possible, or something bigger comes up your rear.
• There is always a "third lane", even on single-lane roads. It is the imaginary space that would be there if the road were split into three instead of two. You can tell where it is by the white line separating you from oncoming traffic. Feel free to use the third lane for all overtaking manouevres.
• Because you can assume that all drivers know the whereabouts of the "third lane", it's fine to overtake on blind corners - let's hope that the oncoming vehicle is not making the same assumption.
• Wearing seatbelts is compulsory in Egypt, so remember to put yours on just before a police checkpoint.
• Why wear your lightbulbs out at night? Lights are for cissies. They are designed to be used only to get the attention of the driver ahead of you who won't make room for you as you carreen past, if your horn doesn't do it. Driving without lights on is much more fun.

If you are the driver of a large truck or bus:

• You are King of the road, so do whatever you like - you are bigger than anyone else so in the end you will survive.

If you are the driver of a car or van:

• Go as fast as you can, honking your horn at every other vehicle around you.
• Avoid all eye contact with pedestrians, or you might give the misleading impression that you care if they can cross the road.
• Never slow down for pedestrians, or you might lose your place in the traffic flow.
• BUT, never actually HIT a pedestrian, because you will lose your license.

If you are the driver of a motorbike or bicycle:

• Choose whichever side of the road you want to ride on - it doesn't really matter which, as long as you get out of everyone else's way.

If you are a pedestrian wanting to cross a road:

• Don't bother making eye contact with drivers - you don't exist until you are directly in their path.
• If you wait for cars to stop and let you across, you will die of old age on the side of the road, still waiting.
• To cross the road, purposefully step out into the traffic and KEEP GOING at all costs. Never ever think of jumping back - you will probably be killed, because the drivers are EXPECTING you to keep going and so drive accordingly.
• Don't wear black at night.
• Preferably cross in the same place as an Egyptian man - if someone runs over an Egyptian man then the world's natural order has come unstuck.
• Think how much it costs in other countries to get this much of an adrenalin-rush. Here it is free.

If you are a passenger in a vehicle:

• Pray
• As you pray, enjoy the many sights and sounds around you, and be positive - today probably isn't meant to be your last one on earth!

Mount Sinai

Above St Catherine's Monastery

My birthday present to myself was a good dose of food-poisoning, from eating unwisely the night before. We both spent my birthday eve and day spurting from both ends - not such a great birthday, but that's ok. Birthdays can be delayed ... and we felt well enough (just - Grant regretted it for a while) to go the next day across to the Sinai Peninsula, to visit St Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai. It's an 8 hour bus trip, and that was quite an experience. It is supposed to be a "luxury" bus, but it wasn't. You've probably heard all the stories about disgusting toilets at roadside stops, and everyone gawking at the foreigners, and there was all that, but also the driver thought is was funny to bark instructions in Arabic only whenever we stopped, giving no indication of how long the stop would be, then gunning the bus and starting to move along the road if anyone was unlucky enough not to be finished in the loo. I managed to hold it in for most of the journey ...

Sunrise from the summit of Mount Sinai

Anyway, we finally arrived and stayed at the very comfortable guest house associated with the monastery. St Catherine's is the oldest continuously used monastery in the world, dating from the 6th century, but a church has been there at the site of the Burning Bush since AD320. It has many very precious old documents and icons, including a gospel written in the 5th century. Only a relatively small part of the monastery itself is open to the public, but it's still a major pilgrimage site because the area is sacred to all three monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And of course it is the start of the trail up to Mount Sinai, which is where Moses received the Ten Commandments. The thing to do is to get up really early and climb to the summit (a climb of around 1200m, up to a height of 2200m or so), to view the sunrise over the desert "badlands" of Sinai.

Freezing cold at the summit

Grant wasn't up to it at all as his stomach has recovered slower than mine, and I was just going to go up during the day, but I woke at 2.30am to the sound of many feet plodding past, so thought it was meant to be ... so off I went up the mountain. You can take a camel to a couple of hundred metres from the summit if you're feeling lazy, (me? what do YOU think?) so the path was a highway full of people and camels. Although it was pitch dark there were lights all the way up of people's headlamps, and there are about 10 tea houses from start to finish (including one just below the summit), with the prices getting higher with each step. At the summit it was absolutely freezing cold with a biting wind and sprinkles of snow on the ground, so I had all my Europe warm gear, but still hired a blanket at the top to huddle in while the sun got around to rising. It was like the Tower of Babel at the top, with probably 200 people squashed into quite a small area, all blathering in various languages, many riotously praising God with loud prayers and song. It was lucky that the loudest group was from Nigeria, so the wonderful rythmns of Africa drowned everyone else out! Finally the sun rose to a hushed awe (it really was very beautiful indeed), and within 10 minutes the summit was virtually deserted! I stayed on a while to see the landscapes around (it is incredibly gnarly country, all bare rock in bulbous or sawtooth ridges for as far as you can see). Of course I also had to wait for the crowd to thin to get the geocache on the top of the mountain!!! Despite all the hokey and Egyptian-style commercialism, I found it a really fabulous experience and I could really imagine Moses up there all those thousands of years ago.

There's always room for a backgammon book

We decided to splash out and get a minivan back to Cairo, all for us, so it took 6 hours instead of 8. The driver, Kareem, was a great guy, and had a range of methods to smooth his way through the numerous police checkpoints. Sometimes cigarettes were the way, other times he put on some intellectual-looking glasses, other times he just smooth-talked, but one time nothing worked and we had to have our bags searched (the police are ULTRA vigilant at the moment after the Alexandria bombing). The last hour and a half back to Cairo was like being in the wild west, only the Cairo traffic version - terrifying! But we made it! The road rules in Egypt warrant a blog all for themselves ...

A ship on the Suez Canal as we go through the tunnel

Islamic Cairo and Saqqara

A major mosque (oops can't remember which) in Islamic Cairo

Ahmed Ibn Tulun mosque

We had the opportunity to go out again with the American group, once to Islamic Cairo and today to Saqqara. You'd think that all Cairo, and perhaps Egypt, is one big Islamic area, but in reality there is an area of Cairo that is the oldest and contains the most important mosques in Cairo called "Islamic Cairo". To the southeast of the city centre, there are many huge mosques dating from around the year 800 to the 19th century. We first visited the Ahmed Ibn Tulun mosque (868) which is apparently the oldest Islamic mosque still in use in the world. Tourists can visit most mosques without any problem, and take photos, other than when prayer times are on. We women had scarves to wear but were not required to as it turned out.

We also visited the Madrassa of Sultan Hussan, a huge school and mosque complex built around 1356. At the time it was the largest building in all of Eurasia. Lastly we visited the Citadel, which is a fortified complex built to defend the city in 1830. The Albanian Mohammed Ali ruled Egypt then (fairly well by what we hear), and was responsible for a lot of modernisation, building of infrastructure and social initiatives.

The Pyramid of Zoser

4500 year old hieroglyphs

Today we went out to Saqqara. This is an area to the south of the Giza pyramids, and there are many more pyramids here that are not so tourist-infested. They're built in a different style (much older, from around 2500 BC), and are called "step pyramids". They are like a layer cake that gets narrower, but the result is a stepped structure rather than a triangle. Some of these pyramids have chambers you can go down into, with the (now empty) sarcophagii of the dead guy who had had it built. Apparently tourism has been alive and well virtually since the pyramids were built, so the very earliest visitors were busy robbing the graves of anything valuable for thousands of years. The pyramids are built with granite, which only occurs in Upper Egypt, so it was all barged down the Nile to get here. the granite blocks have shifted over the millenia, and inside you can see where the joints have slipped - in the chamber we went into there was a slippage of about 20cm, so we all hoped the next earthquake wasn't scheduled for today!

There are also burial chambers dotted all around the pyramids, and inside these are hieroglyphics depicting the activities and pasttimes of whoever was to be buried here. The one we saw was obviously keen on fishing, hunting and drinking beer. It just slightly blew my mind to think that I was looking at hieroglypics chiselled out about 4500 years ago! The only reason they are so well preserved is that until last century, most of the chambers were buried in sand. Who knows what will happen over the next few hundred years?

We also visited Wisss Wassef, an art centre where locals have congregated to make woven rugs, batik and pottery. The rugs are works of art and sell for thousands of dollars, so needless to say we did not add one to our souvenir collection!

They are really fond of their camels!

On the computing front, we are making slow progress, because everything here is slow. We will probably not achieve a great deal, but everyone seems to appreciate our willingness and just being here, so hopefully in the next two weeks we’ll achieve something. Everyone is super friendly and there is a constant throughput of people at the guest house from all over the world, which is very interesting. Tomorrow we will go to church across the way (the Anglican Cathedral).

Khan el Khalili

Looking at a map of central Cairo and taking into account the scale, it's easy to think that it won't take long to walk from A to B. It seems that's always a mistake! Getting anywhere, by foot or car, takes ages because of the chaotic traffic and lack of footpaths. There are sometimes footpaths, but they're often crowded with stalls or blocked in one way or another, so you end up on the street, and cars are jammed at least 2, sometimes 3 across in a one laned street, so things move slowly, with constant honking of horns. I have put in a video of a relatively civilised street scene to give an idea of what it's like. This one has a barrier in the middle so people can't cross, but usually pedestrians just walk into the traffic. The traffic never ever actually stops for pedestrians. We have learned that the only way to cross is to just step out confidently, keep going and never hesitate. Otherwise you find an Egyptian who is crossing and go next to him.

A street in Khan el Khalili souk

Today we ventured on our own to one of the souks, or street markets, called Khan el Khalili. It is an area of tiny narrow streets, most not wide enough for a car, and filled with endless street stalls. We took the GPS to make sure we could find our way out again! You can get anything there - clothes, jewellery, antiques, spices, oils, household things, car and bicycle parts - anything. We tried our completely infant bargaining skills on a few things and came away modestly satisfied. We probably paid far too much, but it's still very cheap compared with NZ. In fact everything is really cheap here - you can eat for just a few dollars a day if you just stick to the basics. You can get food delivered to wherever you are staying, although you pay baksheesh for almost every transation. Even the Egyptians all work on the principal of baksheesh. We were encouraged to see it as a way of getting good, cheerful service, and we're slowly getting the hang of it.

So far we have not achieved a great deal on the computer side of things, although we have begun to make small contributions. Grant is helping set up a backup system, as nobody does any backups. I am doing some work on the various websites that exist for the diocese and its ministries, though progress is slow as getting to talk to relevant people isn't all that easy. I will be doing some teaching on Saturday. It's Coptic Christmas tomorrow so it's a really big deal around here - the Anglicans are wanting to show solidarity with the Coptic Christians in the light of the recent bombing of the Coptic Cathedral in Alexandria, and the 10% of the population who is Coptic in Egypt is making a big celebration of their Christmas day.

Cairo realities

One of the cave churches

Helbees, the Guest House manager, offered to escort us and another guest today to see the Cave Churches of the Mokattam district in southeast Cairo. Helbees is a diminutive Egyptian woman, but we were grateful for her presence as we went to this fascinating area and walked around it. It's a place in the hills where the Coptic Christians have made a sanctuary (over centuries) and have carved churches out of the rock. There are lots of them, some very small (the size of a house) through to others that can seat 5000. It's hard to believe the dedication it must have taken to excavate these chambers from the hills. The Christians have been always been a persecuted minority, so this was a relatively safe refuge, and there are many carvings of biblical stories all over the cliffs.

How many cats can you spot? There are at least six.

Around this cave area is the one of Cairo's huge rubbish dumps, and the Christian community here has established a ramshackle suburb around it and an industry sorting and selling the rubbish for recycling. The squalor is unbelievable, but despite that they are friendly and welcoming. Not sure I'd accept a cup of tea around these parts, but we didn't feel in any danger as we wandered through the streets. Nevertheless, having Helbees with us to speak Arabic was a huge bonus, and we instantly agreed that we would never have gone on our own.

The following images give you an impression of Cairo and the many contrasting sights there are all around.

The River Nile

Outdoor butcher shop

Have bread, will travel

The Citadel

View from the Cave Church area - all the white stuff is rubbish

Transport takes various forms

Street scene in the Mokattam area

Street scene in the Mokattam area

Citadel at sunset

Sky dishes define every horizon

Egypt!

That Pyramid

Within 12 hours of arriving in Cairo, we have already been out to see the Pyramids at Giza and the Sphinx and had a ride on a camel. It would have taken us days to screw up courage to go there on our own, but our time of arrival here has unwittingly been amazing. At the Guest House, there is a group of students from the USA led by Chris, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies. They are doing voluntary work here with the Sudanese refugees, and since today is their first day here well and so was set aside for sight-seeing, they invited us to come along with them to the Pyramids. It was such a wonderful opportunity to do it with an experienced guide and to get all the history from someone who knows it well.

The Pyramids at Giza are only a short distance out of Cairo (the NZ troops had to pass them to get back to their camps when they were stationed here during the war). Suddenly, through the early morning smog, there it was - the Pyramid of Cheops. Hawkers are everywhere, offering headdresses, pyramid models and postcards, but they were not nearly as pushy as the hawkers in Beijing, and their are tourist police everywhere (just as likely to shout angrily at a tourist climbing too far up on the pyramid as at a hawker!) Anyway, we had a wonderful time with Chris' group walking around the Pyramids and hearing about the history. It was big in those days to be buried with all your paraphernalia, and big shots like Cheops had their ships buried near them too, in a huge pit dug out of the earth and stone near the pyramid. The ship, made out of Lebanese Cedar and tied together by rope, has been unearthed and re-constructed in a nearby museum. The Sphinx is quite small compared with the three pyramids here, but is impressive because it is carved out of bedrock rather than built of stacked stone blocks. The pyramids and Sphinx are all rather crumbling, but the scale of them seems to prevent them falling to oblivion, and there is some effort apparent in preserving them.

"Gee up" didn't seem to work in this case

The other fantastic thing about tagging along with Chris and his group was that we didn't have to haggle prices, so we had a camel ride without having to worry about whether we were being ripped off. It really was great - it must look so stupid to the Egyptians, all these squawking tourists getting kicks from riding what, for them, is like a bus! But we thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing and we managed to stay on and hopefully not look too undignified.

The Guest House is run by the Anglican Cathedral here and is a very friendly place. We have already met another Kiwi, Rosie from Wellington, who works for the diocese, and there is apparently a group from Adelaide arriving tomorrow. It promises to be a very interesting few weeks. Tomorrow we hope to meet with Mike, our contact guy here, and discuss what we can do to help in the computer area. I have already been able to assist today in a small way - the Guest House manager asked me to help her tweak the website so that it looks better. It seems likely that we will be useful in some capacity.

The recent suicide bombing in Alexandria has caused a lot of worry, as it involved tensions between the Coptic Christians and the Moslems. We are yet to hear whether there is any cause to be concerned here in Cairo, and it seems to be an issue with the Coptics (the majority of the 10% Christians here), not the Anglicans, but it is clear that all is not well in relations between the two groups in Egypt.