2016-07-05 OUR PERSPECTIVE OF EGYPT

Cairo Egypt

We were expecting something different in Egypt and we got it. The city has every extreme you can imagine. It is big, bustling, traffic everywhere and crowded. It is dusty, has way too much garbage everywhere, and is difficult to navigate. Cairo is alive with both history of today and yesterday. The tourist industry has not recovered from the Arab spring uprising of 2011 and still suffers from Muslim terrorist fears and the bombing of several Middle East aircraft. The fear is unfounded, the damage done to their economy immense, as the tourist trade is way way down. To complicate matters, Ramadan is late this year with the ending being in the hot season during the first week in July. These three factors combine to produce almost no tourists……..I mean almost zero. A venue that would expect 6000 visitors a day might now draw 40-100 visitors. These are World Heritage sites that have been here for 5000 years and are basically deserted. We were often the only visitors to a particular site. It was truly eerie. After 5 years of neglect, all sights need major work. Signs are worn, facilities are beat up and vendors hound you to the point that the trip becomes unpleasant.

We scheduled ourselves on a too tight a schedule in order to take it all in. We added a day trip to Alexandria and a two day trip to Aswan where the dam was built in the 70’s flooding the Nile and creating Lake Nasser. The sights are amazing but the long bus rides, and train rides and heat, are brutal and probably not worth the effort.

We have learned much from our travels in Cairo, Luxor, Alexandria, and Aswan. The country to a degree still lives in the past with taxes, utilities, streets, cleanliness, and modern day conveniences, in the background. With an 80% Muslim population the daily effects of Ramadan were everywhere. The 5 times a day call to prayer, and the fasting from 3:00AM to 7:00 PM everyday, is amazing to experience.

I was expecting the city to be easier to navigate. There is no practical bus service for visitors, no Metro and Uber was impossible to figure out. You need to tip almost everyone, have a guide to get into most major tourist attractions, and we found each city hard to navigate. On the flip side, the combination of donkeys, motorcycles, busses, cars, trucks and pedestrians, are an awesome sight to behold. Food was difficult to find ( thank god for McDonalds and KFC during Ramadan), and beers were non existent. The only Café I found that had beer on the menu made me show my ID that I WAS NOT EGYPTIAN. Amazing.

On a positive note, a highlight of the trip was my time in a mosque, during services and seeing the locals pray. Our guide Rashid, was more than willing to sit with Beth and I for almost 2 hours against a pillar in the Muhammad Ali mosque talkingabout everything from the Koran and the Muslim religion to what Americans think about Donald Trump.  Beth and I hit it off so well with his guiding experience that we used him on three separate days and he invited us to his home for dinner and to meet his family on the last day of Ramadan. A very special evening indeed. 

We thoroughly enjoyed our exhausting visit, saw all the old Egyptian ruins, but left feeling that something is missing in Egypt’s future. It seems that the Arab spring might have done more harm than good.

Thanks for listening.

Bud