The El Feyrouz Hotel

Last year I posted this photo of one of the Nile's many sources, this one in Rwanda. Here's how the same river looks downstream, at Luxor.


That's looking back at the east bank, where the city of Luxor - about half a million people - stands. The east bank is where you get money, tangle with bureaucrats, eat pizza and find lots of scrubby hotels with big painted signs promising cold beer.

I'd rung ahead to a hotel on the west bank, which the guidebook assured me was much quieter. The locals who pointed me towards the ferry terminal all emphasised that the fare was one pound - which I knew from the guidebook, and I wondered about their insistence until it came to boarding and the men selling tickets wanted me to pay two pounds for a return trip. There are no tickets, so I would have had to pay again when I returned.

Luxor seems to be known as the scam and hassle capital of Egypt. Perhaps because I'm accustomed to Mozambique, or just respectful of the sad fact that everyone has to earn a living somehow, I never felt much bothered. For every local with a scam there's another willing to step in with a warning; taxi drivers and felucca (sailboat) captains are quick to step forward with offers, but responded well enough to being politely declined. I should clarify that in my book, shyness about bargaining on a tourist's part does not constitute a scam on a local's part.

Harassment wasn't a problem either. There was a lot of joking around from the men who deal with tourists, along the lines of the shopkeeper who bounded wide-eyed to his door with the line "I must be dreaming!" as I walked past. Either I wasn't in the country long enough to lose patience with it, or I've now travelled enough to know there are worse things to hear from men in foreign countries. Only in one case (a camel-driver at the Pyramids) did I feel the need to tell someone he was behaving badly, and he desisted at once.

Nor was security an issue. The locals with whom I got chatting were always highly amused, and quick to reassure me, when they noticed my Mozambican habit of constantly glancing around to check who was getting close - though I found it interesting that they recognised the mannerism for a security precaution. Many remarked on my travelling alone, but said things like "most tourists are frightened to travel alone" rather than "it's risky to travel alone". (I'm sure they're right, but if the average tourist is opting for group travel for security reasons, it's surely counter-productive - big groups give terrorists more news value.)

Security at tourist sites was generally perfunctory, at least for this obvious foreigner (with interesting exceptions, such as the synagogue in Coptic Cairo). I had to step through metal detectors to enter temples and museums, but no one wanted to search my bag. Tourist police in their handsome white uniforms quietly kept their stations at all the major sites. It was reassuring to have them around, though I never needed them for anything other than directions.

That digression was an appropriately roundabout way of getting to my hotel. The walk from the west bank ferry terminal involved a lengthy discussion with a couple of taxi drivers about the causes of terrorism in Egypt (they both blamed economic conditions created largely by their own government, not anything foreigners did) and a pause for mint tea in a garden cafe (it was a blazing blue-skied day of around 40 degrees), then a short stroll through the side streets.


The El Feyrouz Hotel was certainly easy to find, a big pink cake of a building.


It was a perfect hotel for me - simple, clean and comfortable. The pre-dawn muezzin's call woke me on my first morning there ("prayer is better than sleep") but I slept through it on the second day. There was a lush garden and restaurant.


I enjoyed Egyptian food, which is long on spices and vegetables. A typical meal involves waiters placing a dozen different dishes on your table - aromatic stews, spiced rice, hommus, babaganoush, salads, stacks of flatbread - from which you take your choice. It's great for groups, or those made ravenous by scrambling around temples and tombs in the heat; light eaters like myself spend plenty of time explaining that the food really was delicious but there's just no room for another bite.

I didn't sample Egyptian wines at this stage (more on this later). I was enjoying the experience too much to want to blunt my senses. I didn't even open a book (other than the guidebook) for six days, which must be a personal record. I felt no need to slip into another world when the one around me was so constantly entrancing.

Luxor Temple

The sleeping train from Cairo arrives in Luxor before 7.00 AM. I stowed my bag in the left luggage office, smiled through the ambush of taxi drivers outside the station, and walked down Sharia al-Mahatta towards the Nile. Luxor's governor is cleaning up the town, aiming perhaps more for the comfort of tourists than of average locals: the street is like a sand-coloured shopping mall. Maputo streets would be bustling by that hour, but in Luxor things start more slowly. About five minutes into the walk, sniggering at the steadily declining fares offered by my remaining attendant taxi driver, I glanced up and saw the tallest lotus capitals of Luxor Temple between the shop-fronts.


It's humbling and deflating to meet them so unexpectedly, when a moment ago you were absorbed in your own fleeting concerns. I know the pharoahs built to make people like me feel small, but I'm amazed at how effective it still is, even for those of us who should be well and truly inoculated against the ideology.


Not everyone is so respectful, of course. The obelisk that belongs on the right side of the gate in the above photo is presently in the Place de la Concorde, Paris.

Of course the French were only the more recent of a succession of visitors who for whom the place was just a resource. The Arabs built a mosque atop the old temple walls:


That was long after the Romans had adapted it for use as a fortress, covering the heiroglyphs with their frescos.


Heiroglyphs that somehow never made it into the history books I read as a child: cattle ready for sacrifice at the temple.


More conventionally festive, acrobats doing backflips in the celebrations for the yearly Opet festival.


And that was just the morning in Luxor. I'll come back to the rest of the day, but I'd best post this before solid people get impatient.


(Photo actually taken at sunset the next day, but it seems to belong here.)

First day in Cairo

My camera played up on my first day in Cairo, so the only photo I can show you from that day is this unsteady shot of St Barbara's church in the Coptic quarter.


After a few hours in Cairo, I needed to sit quietly in a peaceful medieval church. Occasional tour groups somewhat dispelled the atmosphere, though it was worth it to hear one tour guide, explaining a frieze of Jesus' miracles to Japanese tourists, refer to the "super powers of Jesus".

Having just spent six of the most wonderful days of my life travelling in Egypt, I feel authorised to pontificate on the key to successful holiday travel, which is to plan to do not too much. For my first day in Cairo, my only other goal, besides the Coptic quarter, was to visit the Egyptian Museum.

Even that was a bit too much for one day. It's a spectacularly cluttered museum, so crammed with treasures that much of it gets pushed into dusty side compartments - I wandered into one of these accidentally, enjoying the sense of antiquities so common as to be put aside and forgotten, until I ran into staff working on computers and realised I wasn't supposed to be where I was.

I should have left after a couple of hours, while my taste was still sharp, but in such an important museum there's always some important piece remembered from art classes waiting in the next gallery, and one more gallery won't hurt. The extravagance of Tutankhamun's burial treasures are a glittering blur. At least I found the Amarna room early. Akhenaton's strange smile, literally so far above the small matters of humans, will stay with me a long time. There are four near-identical colossi of him in the Amarna room, but in one of them the conventional serene smile has a strange grim twist in the corners, and that's the one I remember.

The average photo in art books does these colossi no justice. Certainly, to understand what the Amarna smile is, you need to see it as the average photo shows you, full-face and properly lit. But to understand what the Amarna smile is, you need to see Akhenaton gazing far over your head, his stone mind on eternal matters, smiling at his thoughts.

The other event of note on my first day in Cairo was that I did probably the most dangerous thing I've ever done, which was to cross the Corniche El-Nil on foot at peak hour as I walked into town from the Coptic district. Locals do this at a walking pace, somehow; I did the split-second tourist dash. Most of my travels around Cairo that day were actually done on the metro, which was cheap, trouble-free and no dirtier than the Paris metro. Each subway train has a couple of carriages designated for women only. I thought I'd be respectfully dressed in my ankle-length skirt and modest blouse, but I kept finding myself with the only bare arms on the carriage. Headscarves are near-universal. Trousers are fine, glitter and jewellery is plainly expected, and even figure-hugging tops are acceptable, but the only skin to be shown is face and hands.

More of this tomorrow. By the time I'm finished posting about Egypt, it'll be clear why it has taken so long to get around to it.