Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 16:12:43 +0200
Reply-To: Stebbins <stebbins@AUCEGYPT.EDU>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Stebbins <stebbins@AUCEGYPT.EDU>
Organization: The American University in Cairo
Subject: Cairo #3: Our first outing
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"There comes a time when one has to grab the bull by the
tail and face the situation"
I never really understood that, but I do believe that it is
relevant to our first outing in Egypt. We (my wife Pat & I)
put 40 liters of tap water in the tank, and took 6 bottles
of drinking water, a lunch, 4 maps, and 2 Lonely Planet
(LP) guide books, two arabic phrase books, and set off
for our first van outing in Egypt.
Friday is the Holy day here (weekend) and the traffic is
about 1/10
the normal chaos, so we picked a Friday for our first try at
driving. Our first mission was go fill up the gas tank.
Eat your heart out, 1 Egyptian pound per liter (USD$1 =
LE3.55), this went smoothly as our phrase book Arabic held
us in good stead.
We faced a situation where all 4 maps that we had are
outdated, inaccurate and contradictory, there are few road
signs and even fewer in English. We decided to head south
along the east side of the Nile. Getting too lost is not a
real problem as one is "trapped" in a 4 km band of green
with the Nile on one side and the desert on the other side.
so one can really only go north/south.
It was slow going as the 2 lane road (loosely defined) we
took, went through every dirty, dusty chaotic small village
and I never got out of 3 rd gear. Once out of Cairo, the
landscape turned 'rural' as the Nile irrigation projects
turn
the desert into arable land for about the first 4 kms on
each side of the Nile. After about 2 hours of travel we
crossed the Nile at Beni Suef and headed back north-west,
out to an oasis called Fayoum (
http://touregypt.net/fayoum.htm ). We found the maps to be
nearly worthless and made a habit of using our phrase book
Arabic to ask the omnipresent police if this was in fact the
road to Fayoum, most were pleased to break up the boredom
with a lost tourist. Egypt is in the mist of building many
new roads and the descriptions of how to "get there and
away" in the LP seem no longer accurate. We found Fayoum
to be depressingly ugly and, like much of populated Egypt,
to pretty much like Berlin after the allied bombing.
Leaving Fayoum behind, we headed across the desert back to
Cairo as we wanted to
stop by some of the lesser pyramids in Dahshur (about 30 kms
south of Cairo). ( http://guardians.net/egypt/red1.htm )
These pyramids lived up to our expectations as they are out
in the desert and there are no KFC/Pizza-Huts over looking
them. We were the ONLY tourists there (along with 3 guards
and one caretaker and one camel). There were no lights in
the pyramid so we had to take flashlights down 65 meters
into the heart of the thing, a real feeling of Indiana
Jones.
Right next door, is the "Bent" pyramid (
http://guardians.net/egypt/cyberjourney/dahshur/bentpyramid/bent1.htm
) and we were again the ONLY tourists there too. Actually
this area is littered with pyramids, many being only rubble
heaps now.
(http://guardians.net/egypt/cj98/abusir/abusir1.htm#abusir2
. We also stopped by the Saqqara (
http://guardians.net/egypt/saqqara1.htm ) pyramids to look
at the famous "step" pyramid.
As it was getting late in the day we headed back north
towards Cairo. All-in-all we got lost three times, took 2
lucky correct guesses on which way to go. and as we neared
Cairo we began navigating by the Great Pyramids of Gisa - No
joke - once we could see the Great pyramids (about 20 Kms
out of Cairo) we knew where we were!?!?!?
I took some pictures of the van in front of some of the
pyramids and I'll get them posted to my cyber photo albums
soon, but until then, if you want to, you can click on the
general URLs above.
It was about 33 degrees C during the mid afternoon (about
10% humidity) and the van ran perfectly (including the newly
installed Pertronix 'points'). We didn't fair so well, we
tried to drink a lot of fluid, but we did not keep up the
salt and we developed headaches. Next time we'll keep up
the water and electrolytes.
Egypt IS tourism, but only the "Fly in, go by bus to take a
photo and fly out" variety of tourist. Egypt is NOT set up
for the auto tourist at all, so we have a felling of great
accomplishment in actually getting anyplace and back. So
far populated Egypt is disappointedly littered and chaotic,
and very hard to find our way around. But I guess that is
part of the 3rd world adventure. More later. Malcolm
