Egypt (Cairo)

Country visited:  Egypt

Places visited: Cairo

Dates: 3rd week September 2015 2 nights 1 day

General tips

(1) The country is struggling to recover from the result revolution. There are not many tourists.
(2) I recommend hiring a local guide to take you to touristy places.

You'll be landing in Cairo International airport. Because of the recent events in Cairo, we spent only one day in Egypt and visited only the tourist-friendly places.  We hired a local guide who picked us up from our hotel (we stayed in a hotel attached to the airport), took us to the great pyramids, Saqqara and Cairo museum in an air-conditioned car for about 100 USD. I would highly recommend doing the same for anyone who wants to visit Cairo/Egypt in the next couple of years. It definitely made us feel safer and the cost is not much.

Email ID to contact the guide we hired: m.bahaa2@usa.net Name: Mohamad Bahaa

What was most striking about Cairo during our visit was the total lack of tourists. The local economy has taken a major hit because of this. The pyramids had just a handful of tourists. The Saqqara and Cairo museum had none. I remember one particular incident at Saqqara. It was about 1pm in the afternoon and the temperature was about 40 degrees C. Me, my husband, and the tour guide were the only visitors to Saqqara. We saw this young man (between 20 and 25 years I think) who stood in the sun with a bag of water bottles selling then for 1 Egyptian pound a bottle. One Egypt pound is 0.13 USD. That's the state of the local economy right now. It's very sad.
You will also see several buildings with higher floors left uncompleted and unpainted in the city. This is intentional to evade taxes since buildings under construction have no/less property taxes completed to completed buildings. This hole in the tax law makes for a not-so-good-looking Cairo building scene.

Ok now let's talk about some trip highlights.

(1) Food

 Yum!! and for the price double-yum! Our guide took us to some excellent breakfast ful, falafel place and for lunch he took us to a koshary joint for lunch. We loved the food.

(2) The pyramids

You read about it, you see it in pictures and movies, but when you see it in person it'll take your breadth away.Our guide asked us to use the restrooms right outside the entrance since they were the good classy restrooms and there would be no more restrooms for a while, so I obliged. The restrooms were however quite bad - there was a broken plastic drink bottle for a mug - I shouldn't complain coming from India (I've seen such things several times while I was growing up), but I couldn't hep but wonder how would the normal/ non-classy ones would be? Luckily I didn't have to find out.

I highly recommend doing the camel tour near the pyramids. They'll take you to a spot out in the desserts from where you'll get unbeatable views of 9 pyramids - the pic at the top of this page was taken on my camel tour. Talk to the camel-guides directly if possible. Our tour guide told us that he would get us a good deal and booked us 2 camels for 200 Egyptian pounds each (the camel ride is about 30 minutes long) - I'm sure he pocketed most of it. (The boy who was my camel guide was extremely happy when I tipped him 10 Egyptian pounds and with his broken hardly-English communicated to us that the tip was his only salary.) Since the locals did not understand a word of English and we did not understand a word of Egyptian there was not much we could do about it.

(3) The Saqqara

Like I said before, there were no tourists at all near the Saqqara. This was the 1st pyramid ever built according to our tour guide. The Saqqara was meant to be just a one layer burial for the Pharaoh, but since the surrounding wall was higher, a few layers had to be added to the initial burial layer for the locals to be able to see the Pharoah's burial from outside the walls and thus the 1st  layered pyramid was born according to my guide. I need to google to verify if this is true so take this with a grain of salt.

The highlight of our Saqqara were the hieroglyphics. They are amazingly well preserved. The colors, scriptures etc. are very vivid and makes you appreciate the artists in the ancient Egyptians. Although it was clearly written that photography of the hieroglyphics is not allowed, there was a elderly looking man who followed us and kept badgering me and my husband to let him take pics of us with the hieroglyphics in our phone camera in exchange for a tip. We had to refuse several times before he left us.

(4) Cairo Museum

Its quite sad to see artifacts from several thousand years ago from such a great civilization just randomly lying around with no/minimum security monitoring in an open building called the Cairo museum. It made me wonder how many pieces might have gotten stolen from the place over the past several years. Had the same pieces been in the Louvre, the extent of protection for each of those pieces would have been very different.

The museum had very few things in display the most notable piece is Ramses statue left lying in the ground level of the building.

And that was the end of our one day tour of Cairo.

                                                                           - S and S