Beyond the pyramids
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www.telegraphtravel.co.uk
For most tourists, Cairo means the pyramids – and the pyramids alone.
A quick in and out by coach, and you can leave feeling distinctly underwhelmed by one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
This is a dusty, rubbish-strewn, unromantic place, where the suburbs meet the desert. There are frantic postcard touts, donkeys laden with Coca-Cola, and tourist police with machineguns sitting on camels. The pyramids can look better from your hotel room.
It would be easy to give up on the rest of Cairo to do what tourists do all over Egypt. From the Library of Alexandria in the north to the Valley Of the Kings in the south, the routine is the same – in and out of an airconditioned coach, then back to the hotel.
Since the 1997 Luxor massacre, Egypt has been paranoid about tourists' security.
Armed police abound, there are scanners inside hotels, and plain-clothes guards on every tour bus. The result is that visitors are so cosseted and shepherded that they rarely have the chance to engage with real people or places.
I wanted to give Cairo a chance, to take the country's pulse by staying four days in this mother of all cities (population 18 million and growing). How safe would I feel?
I had joined a small group of travellers led by Islamicist and British Museum lecturer Sarah Searight and including a local Egyptologist and a plainclothes security guard.
"Most people come to Egypt for the pharaohs," Ms Searight said. "Medieval Cairo has so much to see – but because tourists don't bother with it, there's no focus for restoration funding."
We were walking down a narrow road, Sharia El-Muizz, which offers a good starting point for the old city because it runs between the 11th-century gateways in the city's north and south.
The traffic was mostly donkey carts with cargoes of vegetables, and cyclists with mountains of hot pitta bread balanced on their heads. Restoration was haltingly under way on a trio of medieval buildings and the ground was a mess of building materials.
"Follow me," she said, turning sharply through a doorway, and suddenly all was space, light and white marble.
We were in the vast central courtyard of the Beit al-Hakim mosque, restored in the 1980s. Al-Hakim, we learnt, was a 10th-century Fatimid Caliph – widely thought to be insane – who went out on a donkey and never came back.
"Somebody bumped him off," murmured Amgad, our Egyptian guide. "But at least he'd built a fabulous funerary mosque first."
"Putting up something big would give you credit in heaven," Ms Searight explained.
Next, we were whisked into a 17th-century Ottoman house, bought by King Farouk in the 1930s and subsequently restored with a government grant.
Its warren of cool rooms seemed eerily empty compared with the seething throng outside.
Each conqueror – from Romans to Fatimids, Mamluks to Ottomans, Napoleon's French troops to English war administrators – added their mark to Cairo. As a result, the range and richness of its architectural heritage is unrivalled in the Middle East.
We saw mosques dating from the ninth to the 19th century; Coptic churches with exquisite stained-glass windows; decadent palaces and Napoleonic boulevards.
We were struck by the city's vitality, its warmth of welcome and the apparent safety of its streets, whether the quarter was rich or poor – and the contrast is gaping.
When the tourist hassle began, at the famous Khan el-Khalili souk, it was a shock: "Can I take any more money off you today, sir?"; "How many camels for your wife, sir?" Visitor numbers to Egypt are slowly picking up but are at a fraction of the good old days, which leads to a certain desperation.
The image I brought back from this fume-choked and frenetic city was a strangely serene one. We had ascended the filigree minaret of yet another mosque for a giddying view of the city.
As the sky turned pink, I watched men waving flags from their shabby rooftop eyries, calling in pet pigeons.
And there, in the distance the Great Pyramid of Cheops, slumbered like a ghost, just beyond the skyscrapers, shrouded in smog.
This time it was a truly thrilling sight.
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Partner country Egypt at ITB Berlin
Grand opening ceremony on 6 March 2012 – numerous cultural events with typical national attractions at the world’s largest travel trade show – interactive communication via Facebo (24/02/2012)
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Cairo Office / Agents
Mr. Mounir El- Fishawy
Apt No. 12, 36.
Shreif St. ( Down Town )
Cairo – Egypt
Mobile : +201 231 33236
Tel: +20 2 3939850
Fax: +20 2 3918989
E-mail: itmcairo@tcph.org |
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