We had boarded our sleeper train from Luxor to Cairo around 8:30pm, with an expected arrival in Cairo at 5:45am. I had taken Ambien in the hopes that it would allow me to sleep on the train, with mixed results that involved lots of tossing and turning and lurching around with the train. The conductor woke us for breakfast around 5, and the four of us constituted one pretty groggy group.
By 6am or so, we were on the outskirts of Cairo, and more or less waking up. The train stopped in Giza around 6:15, but it was another hour before we arrived in Cairo, since we were constantly sidetracked for more important trains. But we finally got to Ramses station, bundled our stuff off the train, and set about finding transportation to our hotel.
Finding a taxi wasn’t a problem, but since we didn’t yet know the city, we had difficulty negotiating a decent price. The thing to know about Egypt in particular, and Cairo specifically, is that there is really no shame among vendors – if a taxi ride should cost E$10, they are just as likely to quote E$100 as they are to quote E$25 (with few exceptions, they won’t ever open with a reasonable price). There was simply no way we were going to take the first offer. So we wasted fifteen minutes or so playing games, asking for prices, walking away, being chased by drivers, and so on. Eventually we paid E$20 for the five to ten minute ride, which means we probably still got taken.
But we ended up at our hotel, the fairly well-reviewed Osiris, which is a small place in the Bab El-Louk district. Since we hadn’t managed to make reservations (the hotel doesn’t take online reservations, and the published phone numbers were wrong), we knew it was going to take some luck to get rooms for the four of us. We ended up with one room with three beds and an extra mattress on the floor, which worked out OK because Luke was going to be up bright and early for his return trip anyway. So we dropped our stuff and headed out into the city.
And what a mistake that was. Look, I know Cairo is a big city. I’ve been to a good number of the big cities in the world, and I get the big city vibe. But Cairo is… just not pleasant. Mexico City is probably the best comparison. We spent four hours or so walking through the market district and through a fair amount of downtown, and the consensus was that this just really isn’t a place to visit recreationally. Outside of the international hotel district, there just really aren’t many restaurants except McDonalds and KFC, and the whole place has an edginess and vibe of irritation that just make it unpleasant. Whereas crossing big streets was crazy but basically cheerful in Amman, in Cairo there’s a lot more animosity to the game. Drivers will pull so far forward that there’s no room to walk, even when they’re just sitting in unmoving traffic. Small meannesses like that are ubiquitous.
To be fair, we did spent a couple of hours at the Cairo Antiquities museum, and it was pretty incredible. It’s a pretty well known place, so I’m not going to rehash it all here, but the short version is that it’s a positively huge museum practically bursting with all forms of displays of ancient Egypt. From carvings to mummies, from jewelry to papyrus paintings, there are something like 160,000 exhibits. They’re densely packed, and many of them are unlabeled or labeled with hand-typewritten notes that themselves are probably close to 100 years old. And there are some pretty nice lilies in the pond out front, too.
The good news is that there’s a new museum being built in the Giza area, scheduled to open in 2015, so you may be able to see all of this great stuff without venturing into downtown Cairo, if you’re patient. Me, I’d wait.
We ended the day with some drinks and snacks at the Ramses Hilton, which was decent enough, and then we stopped by – yes – McDonald’s, which offered free WiFi. What can I say? Our hotel’s WiFi didn’t work, the Hilton’s wanted us to be a guest and wouldn’t take money, and we hadn’t seen an Internet cafe with WiFi (the provided computers are too scary to use). So McD’s it was. For two and a half hours, as Anna scoured the net for an affordable hotel that would get us our of Cairo. By 10pm, we had a place in Giza, plans to head out early to beat the tourists to the Pyramids, and headaches and terrible music stuck in our heads.