Cairo Transport: Buses

Standing on Ahmed Orabi street in the Mohandiseen district of Cairo, I felt lost in the cries of “Giza! Giza!” that issued from the men hanging out of the passing buses. What is for most foreigners the name synonymous with Egypt’s most famous pyramids, is a densely populated place of travail for many of Cairo’s working-class commuters; a city that has virtually been engulfed by the capital’s sprawl.

The buses that serve downtown Cairo are somewhat more infrequent; every morning it was a long wait for the number 91 that would take me into Cairo’s heart. The overcrowded metal carcass of this diesel-fuelled beast meant that my fingertips were often hanging on to the edge of the door, my toes clinging to the bottom step as we weaved through the interminable Cairo traffic. The reward for which was the breeze that relieved the stifling heat, and the views of the Nile as the bus coasted over the 26th of July bridge. And of course, the novelty of not being reprehended by some over-bearing health & safety official. Maximum occupancy means little here; this is Cairo.

This is Cairo

Arriving into one of the world’s most densely populated cities, with a metropolis population of around 18 million people, Cairo assaults the senses. Eyes are constantly trained on the oncoming traffic, peering through the smog; the nose becomes blocked, black with the pollution; car horns & tourist touts banish silence at all hours; one can taste the exhaust fumes.

But this onslaught is quickly forgotten, the senses become rapidly attuned to Cairo’s charms. The eyes wander to the fantastical Islamic architecture & grand, colonial buildings & gardens; they flitter from the scriptive Arabic calligraphy to the painted portraits & graffiti, all interwoven by the banners draped across streets.

The nose follows the smell of the sweet shisha smoke emanating from street-side cafés; in the souk, fresh garlic mixes with mint, and smoked fish; sweet potatoes caramelise in mobile ovens.

The muezzin calls echo throughout the city, issued from the hundreds of mosques, amid the shouts from souk hawkers peddling their wares. The clack-clack of domino players rattles through coffee-houses. Greetings of ahlan wa sahlan are issued from every shop-front.

The tongue craves another fuul & taameya sandwich, washed down with a fresh fruit juice, or sweet, minted-tea.

So yes, I liked Cairo.

A lot.

Obstinacy in Sinai

I had hoped to go and hike the mountains around Mount Sinai & St. Catherine’s monastery for a couple of days. The peaks that line the Sinai coastline had whetted my appetite and the allure of a little altitude to curb the intensity of the heat was more than a little enticing. Most of the hostels in Dahab organise day-trips there, but I am a parsimonious traveler with a deeply engrained dislike of tours, and so went in search of a bus, hankering to re-live the kind of fun had getting to Erciyes in Turkey back at the start of this trip.

One tour-operator had told me that the bus left at 8am; my hostel manager claimed that they no longer ran, but that I could go on his tour. My cynicism of the vested interests of such folk meant that I disregarded his advice, and instead waved-off a new-found friend as she boarded the night-trip to the mountain.

The next morning at the bus station, I found out that he had been right. Nice Egyptian hostel manager, one point; stubborn, tight-fisted traveler, zero. Back in town, I learned that there would be no tour that night as the monastery would be closed the next day. Two points to the manager. I had burned my bridges, and unless I was willing to kill another couple of days in Dahab, hiking the hills of Sinai was now off.

Deciding the mountains could wait for a return to Egypt, I had just enough time for a morning coffee and a final dip in the Red Sea before another slog-out to the bus station, carrying my oh-so-heavy backpack during the peak of the Dahab sun. I would have to settle for ogling the scenery from the bus window, clutching a one-way ticket to Cairo.

The road to the capital is a long one, traversing the arid, desert roads of Sinai before skirting up the other side of the peninsula’s Red Sea coast. A while after the bus had cleared all the police check-points that surround Sharm el-Sheikh, black rubber traced an “s” through the wind-swept sand that dusted the tarmac. The source of these skid-marks soon became apparent: an over-turned bus lay across the road, its human-cargo spilled out beside it, some bleeding from meeting with the asphalt. My fellow passengers muttered prayers to Allah as we crept past this gruesome spectacle, but the scene did not seem to tame the unrestrained over-taking of our own driver.

That night, I arrived into the bustle of one of Africa’s most densely populated cities, a little wiser to the woes of obstinacy.

To Egypt, ish

I must admit, the Egyptian leg of this journey south wasn’t the one that inspired me the most. After my trip to Morocco last June, I expected similar scenes of hassle. In the Middle East I was always going to stick out as a foreigner, but whereas previously I had often been treated with intrigue (“why did you come to Syria?”), here I would be seen as a walking wallet.

With the short hop across the Red Sea from Aqaba, the short, squat buildings dotted across the wide, dusty roads of Nuweiba exhibited a marked difference from the Jordanian streets. The hassle involved in negotiating a shared taxi down to Dahab was a somewhat less pleasant welcome to the country. Everything has to be negotiated in Egypt; I suppose it becomes inevitable when such a large proportion of the population relies on tourism as their source of income.

But I cannot say that Dahab was Egypt. The town is split into three parts: the “resorts” which open on to the soft, sandy beach lining the lagoon; the “camps” which cater for more budget holiday-makers & travellers; and Dahab “proper”, which is where the people working here actually live. Wind-surfing centres line the lagoon of the resorts with motor-boats skimming across the calm sea. Here, there is not an Egyptian in sight, it was all British families and bikini-clad Russians. One hundred metres away, the other side of the high, resort walls, is the village of Dahab where veiled women walk the streets and men wear djebellas rather than speedos.

I took a hut in the more back-packer part of town, which is more set-up for diving, with the Red Sea coast here lined with coral reefs. This used to be on the hippy-trail — Egypt’s Shangri La, so to speak — but as the place has developed tourism has proliferated. Come evening, walking down the main street in town one is obliged to literally run the gauntlet of all the restaurant touts vying for custom.

Whilst I would have loved to have sampled the diving here, my budget didn’t really run that far, and so I hired a snorkel and joined the scores of white backs exposed to the midday sun, marvelling at the corals and abundance of tropical fish. I had always thought snorkelling was a bit silly, but free-diving down through the turquoise waters to the coral amongst the shoals of exotically coloured fish banished these preconceptions.

Another day I hired a mountain bike, venturing towards the mountains that line the Sinai coast. Error. Cycling in the scorching, dry, desert heat, with temperatures above 35°, I thought I was going to become a shrivelled, dried-out corpse; just another feature of this arid terrain. Arriving back in town, I buried my head in a water-melon before diving into the cool waters of the Red Sea. This heat would take some getting-used to; and acclimatise I must if I plan on heading further south into Africa proper.

Jaws

Aqaba seemed like a strange place. A city in the still rather conservative Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, it is only a few kilometres from the border of the repressive Saudi state, yet here were Westerners walking around in short-skirts and baring shoulders. This was quite a different side of the Jordan I had witnessed a month previously; the breed of tourist they get here evidently don’t respect the local culture. Skin? I felt like I hadn’t seen it for months.

A couple of days were spent reading, drinking tea, and trying to relax a little after the intense weeks in the West Bank, although “letting go” wasn’t so easy…

Swimming out from a secluded spot on the Red Sea coast, I was past the shallows of the coral reef in the stunningly clear, calm, turquoise waters, when a boat pulled up beside me. The Jordanian captain ordered me aboard his glass-bottomed vessel. “It is very dangerous here, there are sharks” he warned me. I asked his two German tourists if they had seen any sharks yet; they replied in the negative. Personally, I wasn’t convinced that sharks swum this far up in these relatively shallow, calm waters, but the issue didn’t seem open to debate. He was adamant I was to board.

The next day, I was on a ferry crossing these same waters, bound for Egypt. And still didn’t see any sharks…