We woke up early on Christmas Eve, eager to go out and do some sightseeing. The first step was to go downstairs and get breakfast, as it was included in the hotel reservation anyway. I’m usually not a big fan of breakfast, but during the vacation it can be a nice way to start the day. Â We showed up right at 5:30 a.m., and we walked into the restaurant to a huge spread of breakfast items. The room was filled with a huge buffet – rows and rows of cheeses, fruits, cereals, breads, sweets, yogurts, and even lots of hummus and Egyptian spreads full of tomato, garlic, herbs and nuts. Our favorites were the big bowl of dates, and the guava juice was really delicious – sort of a tropical banana taste that really hit the spot. We were really impressed, and then we found out there was an entire other room next door that had all the hot foods, including a lonely chef waiting to cook omelets for the guests. We ordered some coffee and tucked in – what a meal! The good news was that this elaborate breakfast would be waiting for us the next two mornings as well.
In preparing for our trip we had read a lot about the scams, tricks and aggressiveness of touts in Egypt, and it was written that the ones around the Pyramids were the worst. We started mentally preparing for the trip out, and strengthened our fortitude and ability to say no. As it turns out it wasn’t as bad as I was led to believe, but it was no picnic, either.
We went down to the lobby to catch our taxi to the Pyramids at 6:30 am. The previous day I had arranged with the hotel concierge for a one-way taxi ride to the Pyramids. The concierge tried to sell us on a half day excursion, a Nile cruise, and various other activities but I just wanted a taxi – and paid for it through the hotel so there would be less hassle. Later I figured out that I didn’t really need to make appointments for taxis because the economy is so bad here that the taxis line up outside the hotels 24/7 hoping for foreigners like us to leave. But the front desk said that the taxi that we had paid for was just outside, motioning to the curb, and sure enough there was a taxi idling there. Kuniko and I walked outside to the taxi and asked about going to the Pyramids. The driver looked a little surprised but said he could do that and motioned to another guy walking up who was ready to drive. “Pyramids, no problem” said the newly arrived driver, and something felt off. I turned back to the hotel just as the doorman came out and pointed me down the street, where another taxi was pulling out of a parking spot. Oh, so that’s our taxi – got it. I said sorry to the guys who had been eager to get a job, and got into the taxi. Not a smooth system at the hotel for catching their cab.
Finally, with the correct driver, I instructed him on which entrance in Giza we’d like to use, and then we settled back to enjoy another frantic ride through Cairo traffic. The horns honked, the driver politely offered us some hot coffee that we politely declined (he held a glass filled to the brim with hot coffee, which looked like it was burning his fingers), and then he turned up the volume of some Egyptian hip-hop and we tore through the streets. Unfortunately our seatbelts weren’t working so we just kind of slid from side to side as we made our way across town.
We really liked the driver – he was much friendlier than the previous guy, and we also liked his taste in music. As we got closer to the Pyramids he pointed them out, and they looked strange looming over the local buildings. We got close to the gate, but the driver made an odd turn, took us down a narrow street that felt weird, and dropped us off in front of a shop. Â Oh, I see – the old “kickback for bringing tourists” system. I was a little disappointed but I had heard that in Egypt this kind of thing happens a lot and you just have to push through. I tipped the driver a little money, and the driver thoughtfully pointed us towards the entrance a few minutes’ walk away. Â We got out of the car, and I stepped around the shopkeeper who was trying to welcome me with his hand extended. I said, “La, shukran” which means “No, thank you” in Arabic, and walked around the car to get Kuniko and try to find the gate. Our sales clerk wasn’t giving up so easily though, and he followed behind us saying, “In Egypt when a man offers his hand for a handshake it is very bad to not shake his hand!” and more comments in an effort to try to get me to at least engage in his services. We just kept walking until we found the entrance.
If you try to make a mental picture of the entrance to the Pyramids, you might imagine a ticket office with a price board, a reception hallway filled with displays explaining the history of the area and outlining what you are about to see. You might even imagine some multimedia programs going on with interactive stuff for kids to play with while you waited in a long line to enter. And it was nothing like that.
The ticket office was just a small old building with three little windows that were boarded up when we arrived. The only reason we knew it was a ticket office was that there was a crowd of Egyptian men who pointed it out to us in the hope that we would give them some money as a gratuity. As we waited for clerks to appear at the windows, our sales guy, who had followed us all the way over from his shop, tried to sell us on a camel ride to the southern ridge, which apparently had a spectacular view of all the Pyramids together. Since we had no other place to escape to, we had to listen patiently to his pitch and then said no thanks. Not camels? How about horses? Eventually he sensed that we were not about to give in, so he suddenly put on a very human face, and explained that because tourism had dropped so significantly in Egypt he and his fellow shopkeepers were really hurting. He apologized for giving us the hard sell, and said that he hoped we enjoyed the sightseeing. I relaxed a bit when I finally saw a glimpse of the real person behind the sales pitch, but he couldn’t resist telling us that he’d be at his shop later if we changed our mind.
After a few minutes some young women wearing colorful headscarves walked through the crowd, opened a door to the small house and started selling tickets. There was no price list anywhere to be seen but inside a small chart showed the price for foreigners (120 pounds) and Egyptians (20 pounds). Â We bought our tickets and then walked through a small security checkpoint. Then we went on in to see the Pyramids. We were the first people to enter, and there were only three or four people behind us in line. I guess it pays to get there early!
We walked up the mild embankment and were greeted with an expansive view of the Giza Plateau. Right in front of us was the Sphinx, and then behind it arrayed in a line were the three Great Pyramids. What I didn’t expect was quite a few smaller pyramids as well – varying in condition from good to falling apart. We had made it! It felt good to finally be here, and to be here pretty much alone was even better. We walked up the hillside to see the Pyramids up close. We spent time at all three of the biggest Pyramids, and they were even more impressive than I had imagined. They are huge, and it is hard to believe that tourists used to climb to the top of them – it certainly looked dangerous to me.
We spent a long time walking around the area and taking photos – it is quite large – and tried to burn off all the calories from our big breakfast. There was the option to go into the Pyramids themselves, but we had decided beforehand that it wasn’t something we wanted to do – I had read that it was a tight space, empty and not very interesting inside them. Later in the trip we would have a chance to enter the tombs of the Pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings, so we’d hold off on Pyramid spelunking. Just standing at the base of the giant structures and looking up at something that had lasted so long was humbling. The lack of other tourists made it feel even more special. To be alone with structures having 5,000 years of history – it made a big impact on me.
But we weren’t totally alone. Some touts had paid the admission fee to enter and brought a few camels with them. We were approached by camel riders offering a ride over and over again during our visit. Usually there are a lot more tourists, so all the touts had no choice but to concentrate on us. Thankfully we were in the desert so we could see them coming from a long way off. They couldn’t understand why anyone would want to walk when you could ride a camel. I had heard all kinds of horror stories about the tricks that they use to extract more money from their “guests” – paying a price to get on the camel and paying a much higher price to get down, to give one example. We weren’t interested and let everyone know that… “La, shukran.” There was even an old Egyptian lady with two little kids who saw us coming and then suddenly began struggling with a big bag, looking pleadingly at us for help. Why would an old lady be here in the middle of the Pyramid complex with a big package that she had apparently been able to manage until we arrived? These are the questions that you had to ask yourself before stepping unwittingly into an uncomfortable situation. Years of travel to other countries had really prepared us well for this trip.
Thoroughly invigorated from our walk among the Pyramids, we left the plateau after a couple hours, and found a taxi driver to take us back to the hotel. We negotiated a good price before getting in the cab, and he drove us back through heavy traffic. There was a pretty big car accident on the freeway blocking everything – a car had run right off the elevated expressway and they were trying to rebuild the guard rails while cars crawled by. The driver didn’t try to sell us anything or take us anyplace weird – just straight to our hotel so I gave him a big tip. I wanted to reward simple, professional service. Â Back in our hotel we shook the desert sand out of our shoes, and spent some time resting up before setting off again.
Believe it or not we were hungry, and so Kuniko and I walked to a nearby kebab stand that had caught our eye the previous day and ordered some chicken kebab sandwiches. The shop was very casual and very cheap, and we sat in the back of the shop at a Formica table, eating off paper plates. Delicious! Our strategy when we are eating in a new country is to order lots of small things instead of one big meal, and so we left the shop in search of something else to eat.
For fun we walked east of the Dokki neighborhood to the banks of the Nile River. In this area the Nile split to surround an island, and so the river didn’t look quite as wide as you’d expect because you are seeing just half of it. We crossed big streets with fast moving cars – most intersections didn’t have pedestrian crosswalks or signals, and the streets that did have pedestrian signals simply never changed from “Stop”. You had to be brave and walk through the cars, trying to make eye contact with the drivers and judge whether they know you are there or not. It was very hard at first to cross the streets – but by the end of the trip we got better at it. It was kind of like crossing the street in Vietnam, but there it was only scooters you had to watch out for. In Egypt you had to watch for full size cars and trucks, which are a lot less forgiving.
As we were waiting to cross at one intersection a guy casually started a conversation with us. He asked where we were from and when I said Canada he said that he had a friend in Toronto (red flag #1). When we crossed the intersection he kind of tagged along making conversation. He asked which hotel we were staying at, and we told him our hotel name and he said that it was a coincidence because he works there as a painter (red flag #2). As we walked along he explained that tomorrow he is going to get married (red flag #3), and so he is running errands today before the big event. He was planning on driving to a village south of Cairo the next day for the ceremony. He asked us what we were doing at the moment, and since we weren’t really doing anything but walking around taking in the sights, we said as much. He recommended a market nearby (red flag #4), and when he said market I mentally envisioned a big open-air market with lots of food stalls where we could eat. He offered to show us the location and I said, “Sure, why not?” and we were off. Â He led us down a few streets, still chatting the whole time and finally brought us to the doorstep of a painting shop where he said we could see his original artwork if we would just come inside and look (red flag #5).
It was at this point that I finally registered all those little red flags that individually didn’t bother me the first time. It is easy to look back at the situation now and see it all clearly, but this guy was clearly a professional at this and he did a great job luring me in like a plump fish. Fortunately we knew enough not to go into the shop to see “his” paintings and he subsequently tried to get us into another “antique” shop nearby, but we weren’t having it. He was visibly frustrated by our unwillingness to enter these shops (the shop owners pay him a “finder’s fee” for each potential customer he brings in) and asked us what we were looking for. We told him the truth – we were looking for food. I told him what we wanted to eat, and he looked defeated. He recommended walking in a particular direction for about ten minutes and there we would find a restaurant that he said was good. He told us that he needed to get going and take care of his “wedding preparations”, and then asked us if we’d like to donate something to commemorate the big event and thank him for all his help that he gave us. Â I offered him 10 pounds (50 cents), which I felt was about how much I valued his “services”, but he actually asked me for 200 pounds. Â I laughed and gave him 20 pounds (about a dollar) and wished him good luck with his wedding.
Throughout our trip we met people who would start a nice conversation, and sooner or later mention a store or a shop that they would like to introduce you to. It became kind of a running joke between me and Kuniko – we’d start to see people coming and know they had a shop to recommend. Soon we figured out ways to break off the interaction quickly and not waste their time or ours. Â But it just goes to show how tough things are there for the local people and how gullible some tourists must be. It is easy to make fun of the approach now, but it worked on me to the tune of 20 pounds.
While walking around with our “guide” Kuniko had spotted a supermarket that looked promising, so now on our own we could go check it out. The Alpha supermarket wasn’t quite as nice as the Metro supermarket that we had visited earlier, but it had more Egyptian products (and fewer imported items). Just down the street from the supermarket was a tree-lined avenue with carts selling fresh fruits and vegetables. The quality of the produce varied, and cars weaved around pedestrians honking their horns to create more chaos, but we like those kinds of environments. There was even an old lady sitting on a box cutting up fish (without refrigeration), surrounded by five or six cats patiently waiting for scraps.
Along the street we found a restaurant with an outdoor kebab stand selling shawarma wraps. We lined up at the register to pay. An old lady behind us in line asked the cashier to translate into English that I was a “beautiful boy”. Thanks, lady! We ordered two wraps and watched the process of making them. The wrapping material was thinner and wider than a tortilla, with a squared-off notch in the bottom The cook put in some sauce and then lined the wrap with meat from the kebabs and vegetables and spices. Then he dipped one edge of the wrapped meat in the puddle of meat juice and oil standing at the bottom of the kebab pan, and fried them on a hot plate until the outside browned like a panini sandwich. He handed over a bag containing one chicken and one beef shawarma, and we headed back to the hotel to enjoy the bounty of good food. This takeaway style was pretty common in Cairo, and so we often got food to go and brought it back to our place to eat it. When we got back to the hotel we had received a small Christmas present from the hotel staff – little stockings full of Egyptian chocolates. That was kind of them. The chocolates were pretty good, too.
For dinner we went to a takeout place that looked good online, called Semsema. It was traditional Egyptian food served fast food style. The place was swamped with takeout orders, and we waited in a big group for our food to be completed. The staff noticed that we were waiting a longer time than most and started shouting at the cooks, and before we knew it the food was in our hands ready to go. We had ordered an assortment of different dishes – hawawashi (a sort of fried lamb sandwich), grilled chicken on cinnamon infused rice, croquettes filled with ground lamb called kobeba shami, and salted vegetable pickles as a palate cleanser. As we walked back to the hotel with the food we stopped at a liquor store to buy a couple of Stella beers, too. One lady watched us walking by and begged for money or food, and when I shrugged and kept walking she had a few choice words shouted at our back in Arabic. Thanks to all of the shenanigans that we put up with today we really started to get comfortable with how things go on the streets of Cairo. Each time we came back to the hotel we felt like it was the end of a little adventure, and it was very satisfying to walk the streets easily by the end of the trip.
So we enjoyed our feast in our hotel room, and everything was great. I was surprised how tasty the food was in Egypt, maybe because our expectations were so low. It was heavier food than we are used to eating, but we are on vacation after all.
