Cairo. The real deal.

The next day was our first day in the country of Egypt.

It was pretty exciting to get up in the morning and rush on to the bus to drive across the Sinai. I was excited not only to get to the actual, traditional part of Egypt, but to cross the famed Sinai. Yeh, I’ve crossed the desert on my way to Utah, and the day before had driven through the Negev, but this was my first HUGE desert, so inhospitable that the only real population by the Red Sea are nomads. But first came the border crossing.

Talk about a long wait. When we came to the Gulf of Aqaba, we had to grab all our stuff and disembark into the hot sun -- the beautiful view of the pristinely blue sea was helpful, I must say. It seemed to take forever to get through the line and out of the bureaucracy of Israeli checkpoints just to enter the Egyptian side. I paused at the sign which said "Welcome to Egypt!" in English and "Marhaba bukra Misr" in Arabic (which I was stoked that I could read, btw) and took pictures. Then we rushed across the line and into Egypt.

Realizing that I was suddenly in one of the oldest kingdoms on the entire planet was dumbfounding. Were it not for my exhaustion and general heat stroke, I would likely have been bouncing up and down like the Energizer Bunny. The Egyptian policemen wear antiquated uniforms--all white with a leather belt which has an extra leather strap that wraps over the shoulder. It was like a last vestige of the colonial period of the Middle East, or of the Ottoman Empire. For some blasted reason, Egyptians never quite adopted the air conditioner. That means in almost every building we went (other than our hotels) it was just as hot as outside and frequently more stuffy.

People had warned me about the Middle Eastern tendency to cut into lines but I'd forgotten. As I stood there in the line, I got progressively farther and farther back due to the nonchalant groups of other people who would stride up to somewhere in the middle of the line and slyly integrate themselves into it. Thankfully we were saved from being in the line for the next week because the Egyptian checkpoint passport-people realized we were just a huge group of extremely harmless Americans, so they called us to come to our own separate line so we could get through it.

Once we were on the other side, we had the fabulous opportunity to experience our first Egyptian bathroom -- meaning, no toilet paper ever (they generally have someone standing outside who, for a few Egyptian pounds --about 5 to a dollar -- will give you two or three squares of paper), toilets which actually operate only half the time, and typically no soap or paper towels. We never encountered a bathroom without running sinks though, thankfully. Because of the numerous warnings we'd received, we used hand sanitizer obsessively. I became very paranoid about touching anything after going into that bathroom. It was not pleasant.

After that little adventure, we trundled onto the bus which was as colorfully decorated as a fiesta, and started off into the Sinai. The water of the Red Sea is transfixingly beautiful -- it’s this shade of blue you can hardly believe is real because it’s dark but clear and bright at the same time. Sort of like the night sky just before the first stars appear, but more brilliant. Soon though, we had passed into the mountains which were just as starkly empty of plants as the mountains in the Negev.

When we emerged from the mountains, we spent the next five hours driving through flat land where the only trees were telephone poles and the only life was old men running dirty way stations, that is, except for the checkpoints. I couldn't quite figure out why there were so many of them. You would think they would only need to check you a couple times to make sure you weren't Israeli terrorists or smugglers, not to mention there was only one road you could drive through most of the desert anyway. Yet this was the scene of several recent major wars, from the Suez war with France and England on one side and Egypt on the other, to the 1967 War where Israel conquered all of the Sinai and kept it until the Camp David peace accords.

At the check points, they'd have us stop for a minute and they'd talk to our bus driver for a moment in hypersonic Arabic. Several other soldiers, either in their distinctive camo or the white police uniforms, would unabashedly stare at us until the engine revved and we were off again.

I listened to my iPod for a while, unfortunately, I only have exercise music on it so my ears were full of Linkin Park and Green Day. The music did make it easy to imagine the soldiers of so many generations who'd traversed this wasteland on their way to Israel or to Egypt. Soon though, I became absorbed in a conversation with one of my favorite people on the trip, Yassir from Cairo. He’s one of our tour assistants who has been coming with BYU students on this excursion for years. He spoke with me in Arabic as frequently as I could understand him, and he taught me about Islam, Egypt and his life in Cairo. It was fascinating to see it from the perspective of a native Muslim, and I found him to be amiable and intelligent. As I had been warned by my Arabic professor, he soon pulled out his cell phone to show me his beautiful family: twins, a little boy and girl. In turn I showed him what pictures I have of my family on my camera. The trip seemed a lot shorter with him for company, though he did have a habit of speaking so softly that I had to strain to understand him. Like most middle-aged Muslim men, he had a calloused bruise on his forehead from his daily prayers. I became very accustomed to seeing it all over Egypt.

In the late afternoon, we passed under the Suez Canal which we weren't able to see except for the huge ocean liners passing over it. Someone in our group held her breath the entire time we were passing under the canal in the large, curving tunnel. It was extremely impressive. I tried on the way back and failed miserably. When we emerged, we had left the Sinai and were officially, indisputably in Africa.

I have now been on four different continents. It was a very cool thought.

At first, Egypt was almost exactly like the Sinai, but then the city of Cairo began to emerge. It holds 14 million people and is the biggest city in all of Africa as well as the 16th biggest city in the world. And, as Egypt is a third world country, it is extremely poor for the most part.

This may help you imagine what it looks like: You know those games where you can construct a building? It starts with just the outside, the walls, roof and floor, in only brick or cement. In Cairo, there was a lot of brick. So imagine a high rise apartment building with nothing but the shell of the walls, roof and floor. Then hang laundry out of the windows, break off a few pieces, put a rusty bike on the balcony and makeshift shutters on the window. Put hundreds upon hundreds of these buildings next to each other, of slightly varying heights and levels of dilapidation, Middle Eastern people in traditional Arab clothing, headscarves and out-of-date western clothing, cars which squeal around corners, bicycles and carriages, a Mosque or ruin every few hundred yards, lots of smells -- most unpleasant, and a strange film of grime over everything, and you have greater Cairo. This was essentially what I saw of it while there. This may sound mostly negative, and it was difficult to see people living in such squalor, but I did not get the impression that along with the poverty the people were unhappy. On the contrary, they seemed to be contented with their lives and happy with the communities surrounding them. Yet no one deserves to live in streets full of filth. I can see why people devote their whole lives to charities employed in aiding these countries. But in all this, I'm forgetting a major part of Cairo -- the Nile.

The first time we drove over it on a large, freeway bridge, I clapped my hands in joy and gasped. It is everything it should be, wide, meandering, blue (at least from the surface) and edged by bright green papyrus and tiny houses made of straw. The delta together with the Nile is the most stunning combination of color. Dark, dark brown, every shade of green thinkable, yellow from the shacks of papyrus, and the blue Nile. It was almost shocking to look from such verdancy to the cement, metal and brick of the city. On the Nile sailed feluccas (one-masted, triangular sailed boats, one of the oldest vessels in the world), tour boats and dinghies. And way far in the distance, almost dwarfing the buildings of Cairo, the three pyramids of Giza waved in the heat, pale with the atmosphere between us and them, and an even more shocking contrast between the old and new. Something that crossed my mind several times as we drove towards our hotel was how much Egypt had changed. From a civilization who four thousand years ago built the only remaining wonder of the ancient world, to the country that had so little power in the current world... that was astounding.

Finally, we got to the hotel. When we disembarked, I was exhausted and absolutely ready for bed. But first, we had the “Pyramids Light and Sound” program to attend. If that sounds cool, believe me, it is. The sun had set while we had dinner at the hotel, (skipping over the fresh fruits and vegetables--no one wanted Pharaoh's revenge), so we drove through dark, winding streets of Cairo. It was one of the last days of Ramadan and, accordingly, there were few people on the streets. I watched the hundreds of souvenir shops shoot past, carrying the same wares as the next, and the men in their traditional garb sitting in sidewalk cafes smoking on hookahs. When we arrived, for the millionth time that day, I could hardly stand to stay still. Grabbing the arm of my friend Lindsay, we rushed over to seats as close as we could get to the front. We sat directly in front of the temple of the Pharaoh of the second pyramid. The Sphinx sat only a little off to the side, and the three giant pyramids of Giza rose monolithically in front of us. Against the orange light pollution of Cairo, they were giant black triangles that gobbled up a significant portion of the sky.
The light show began slowly with the first pyramid, Mycerinus', the smallest of the three, as it was lit in blue. Then the most famous, with the portion on the top still covered in limestone as they had been originally, Chephren's pyramid was lit green. Lastly, the largest of the three: Cheops’s pyramid, the father and grandfather of the other two, lit up yellow. Then the light show began. Green lasers, projected pictures onto the temple, various colored pyramids and a loud British narrator told the story of the pyramids and the Sphinx from their beginning through Alexander, Napoleon and the Ottomans until now. It was spectacular to say the least, though perhaps slightly too extravagant in its praise and descriptions. The term purple prose comes to mind. I took pictures of the show, some of which actually aren't blurry, and I hope to post them as soon as I can.

Unfortunately, sleep is a nastily controlling thing and I found myself drooping during the performance. When we finally got back to the hotel, I fell asleep almost immediately after I went to bed.

Coming next: the Pharoah's tomb in the pyramid (I actually laid down in the original sarchophogus inside the tomb), the sphinx, memphis and exploring Cairo.