Letters to mom: baksheesh, reason sphinx head is tiny, colonial ride through the neighborhood
Written: Feb 25 '02 (Updated Feb 26 '02)
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Pros: Friendly people, inexpensive activities, even Jesus thought the pyramids were old
Cons: Super-aggressive salesmen turn you off buying souvenirs, make you suspicious of friendliness
The Bottom Line: If you manage to escape the tourist-hungry papyrus salesmen, tip-extorting camel jockeys, and shady taxi drivers, you'll find Egyptians friendly, Egypt beautiful, and the pyramids big and old
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| Teardrop...'s Full Review: Egypt |
Hey mom,
I would have sent a postcard, but the postcard-selling kids here have driven me to the edge and I am standing my ground by not buying their packs of ten for 22 cents, even though I want a pack of ten for 22 cents. This will all become clear later.
I've fallen in love with the Egyptian people and I would come here again and again if I could. Women smile at me from under their long headscarves, random men walking by will call out “Welcome!” as soon as it registers that we're tourists, my barefoot, turban-clad felucca sailboat man invited Eric and I to dinner at his home, a stranger, unprompted, helped us find our way to the right airport in Cairo (during a layover, we had no idea we were at the wrong airport), escorted us to its luggage storage place, and helped us order food in Arabic at the cafeteria before leaving us a few hours later to wait for our flight (I ended up promising to make a website for him, though!). A group of teen Egyptian tourists at a temple took a picture with us (one donned my recently purchased “cowboy” hat), villagers at the edge of rice fields along the Nile waved endlessly at us when we were on a cruise on the river, and a young village girl at a fruit stand stood amazed at me, then blew kisses at me.
The only bad thing about Egypt is, unfortunately, some Egyptians. The ones selling camel rides, oriental perfume, papyrus art, postcards, even taxi rides. They step out in front of you with, “Excuse me, where are you from?” and a series of other rapid-fire small talk and insist you “just look” in their shop. You have to physically walk around them to get away, then you notice ahead the street full of them waiting to hit you hard with their sales pitch. If you, even just out of curiosity, make the mistake of asking how much for something they, of course, quote you triple to ten times their regular price and will follow you for half a block going down to a new “minimum” price every once in a while even if you completely ignore them. A few shouted “free” after we walked pretty far away, to which we said for the thousandth time “no thank you!” If you actually talk to someone you want to buy something from, it’s impossible to get a normal price because they have found out through conversation that 1) you’re American, i.e., you can afford to spend $3,000 for hotels and a flight from the U.S. (which we didn’t do, since we flew from London and didn't join a tour group), 2) you’re staying at the so-so Sheraton which might as well be Four Seasons to them, 3) you work at a job that does not require manual labor. They will also deduce from your clothes and jewelry that you can afford any price they could possibly dream up.
It’s a poor country and tourism has been in a serious slump since the 1997 massacre, when 70 tourists killed by terrorists at a temple, and now even more of one since September 11. We only met one other American couple and noticed maybe a handful more the whole week. The rest were British or European. Not many Americans traveling to Arab-Muslim countries these days, I guess. Several Egyptians we talked to expressed heartfelt sympathy for September 11’s attack. “This is not Islam,” a few proclaimed. But there will always be people who take the name of God to justify whatever revenge, profit, or glory they seek. Osama Bin Laden is just an extreme example. In the end, people like him hurt Muslims and can never honestly be considered having Islamic ideals at heart. So although no one will steal from you, only taxi drivers would dare lie to you (“Uh, that restaurant is closed. I’ll take you to a good restaurant.”), rape and other violent crimes are extremely rare, and women can walk alone safely on the street at 4am (I didn’t try it myself), tourists from crime-ridden America are afraid to come here. And it’s because of a few terrorists taking the name of God for their own ungodly purposes.
Ok, off my soapbox. I haven’t even told you what I’ve done so far. First, I saw the pyramids of the Giza Plateau just outside of Cairo (LE20: $4.50 entrance fee). They are the most famous and some of the oldest of the numerous pyramids in Egypt, more than two millennia old in Jesus’ day and around 4,500 years old now.
The “Great Pyramid” is the biggie, the one everyone goes to visit (LE20: $4.50). A pharaoh named Cheops was buried here in 2528 BC, after convincing his subjects to build this gargantuan structure. (“King Tut,” in case you’re wondering, was buried much further south in a simple tomb carved underground in the 1300s BC, after pyramids went out of style, apparently.) Pyramids were basically another type of grave for the rich and famous, with difficult entrances for extra protection to keep all the pharaoh’s treasures (like solid gold masks, gilded thrones, and tons of jewelry) out of the hands of grave robbers. As was normal procedure, Cheops’ builders started building his pyramids while he was still alive, sort of like organizing a burial plot for yourself, only involving more labor. For at least 20 years, workers, slaves and animals hauled 2.5 million blocks of limestone, each weighing 2.3-ish tons, from a nearby mountain to the site, probably helped by the Nile’s regular flooding. From the entrance partway up they pyramid, a long entry passage (about 3 feet high and 50 feet long) stretches down to a very tall passage deep inside the pyramid angled slightly up. Then, up another incline is the tiny entrance to a red granite burial room. The interior is empty except for the granite burial coffin (sarcophagus), as grave robbers have taken everything. The mysterious Egyptian guy who followed us into this room and offered to take numerous pictures of us in the passageways pointed out the original air ventilation shafts built through the oodles of layers of limestone brick. These shafts can only be fully appreciated after you’ve been in some of the stuffy burial tombs further south in Luxor.
I read Mark Twain’s account of his trip to Egypt in 1866, which is hilarious. He got to climb the pyramid, with muscled Egyptians dragging him and his group up the whole way, constantly extorting “baksheesh,” or tips, during the most precarious parts of the climb. He wrote that the Pyramids have “suffered torture that no pen can describe from the hungry appeals for baksheesh that gleamed from Arab eyes.” Apparently this has been done for hundreds of years - climbing the pyramids, that is. Extorting baksheesh has been done for longer. But the government stopped it (climbing) after a few people fell to their deaths. I didn’t know it at the time, but you can easily bribe someone to help you climb to the top at night. Our driver alluded to this but didn’t say it outright. There's no stopping baksheesh.
Closeby is Cheops’ son Chephren’s pyramid (another LE20: $4.50). Its peak still has some of the alabaster casing that originally covered all three and its “causeway” to Chephren’s Nile-side mortuary temple is still intact, although the Nile has moved further away. Most of the alabaster covering was stolen in subsequent centuries to build palaces and mosques in the city.
The Sphinx, the big lion-with-pharaoh-head statue, is situated along Chephren’s causeway. It’s known in Arabic as “Abu al-Hol” or “Father of Terror.” No one knows when or why it was built, but many say Chephren had it built, from a huge piece of limestone leftover from his dad’s pyramid, to look like a lion with a god’s face, wearing a pharaoh’s headdress. Eric and I saw a special on TV that suggested from erosion evidence that it was built hundreds of years before Chephren, originally as a lion, but was changed many years later perhaps by Chephren to be a pharaoh-like god. That would explain the seemingly tiny head on a large lion body. Plus, all the other sphinxes I saw (they’re a dime a dozen here, most of them small ones lining grand avenues to temples) are better proportioned than this famous one, so I’ve bought into the lion-to-sphinx theory. By the way, the reason its nose is gone is fabled to be because the Turks used it for target practice when they ruled Egypt during the Ottoman Empire (1500s AD), although that's now hotly disputed in what's known as "the great sphinx schnoz debate." It’s beard eventually fell off, too, and some Brit carted it off to England, where it now sits in all its beard grandeur in the British Museum.
A little further Southwest is Cheops’ grandson Mycerinus’ (just say "Macarena") pyramid (another LE20: $4.50). This one is the crumbly pyramid, primarily because it’s built of sandstone, which turns into sand (instead of limes), but also due to the damage done by a 16th century caliph (the word for an Islamic leader of a country; no relation to the adjective “callipygian,” which means "having beautifully proportioned buttocks") who wanted to demolish all the pyramids but only managed to really rough up one of them.
I must say, the best experience with the pyramids was when Eric and I rode a camel and horse around them. The horse, although small (Eric could wrap his legs around its belly), would gallop through the sand. Eric didn’t do this, though, just me cuz I'm so dainty and light. The camel was fun to get on and off of, plus Eric and I could both ride at the same time. I learned to say “yallah-yallah” to get the camel to giddyap, although it would only trot a bit and seemed to disagree with my steering decisions. They let you ride wherever you want in the desert, “they” being a barefoot camel guy and his ten-year-old trainee. They were fun, until the guy complained about the size of our tip, saying, “But you’re American…” We gave the kid money, too. Both tips were higher than normal, and we know we got ripped off on the ride itself (LE60:$13 for two animals; our book said LE30: $6.50 is normal). We had to ride through this rough neighborhood with people in poor people clothes walking around, riding in donkey-drawn carts or sitting in shabby tea shops smoking tobacco from magic lamp-looking glass pipes, staring at us in our fine garments. A few kids followed us for a few paces, then said “Hello!” before staying back, watching us ride away and wave. I really felt weird, like a colonialist hiring “natives” to take me around, and having children say “hello” to me like I was a royal guest riding through their town or something. Next time, I’m not bringing anything to wear that’s white.
Anyway, I’ll have to write more later as there’s so much more to write: King Tut burnout (Egyptian Museum), pitfalls of revealing your elbows, 6-year old carpet “students,” "hand-cooked" hamburgers, making a taxi driver “very happy” by tipping 65 cents, column forests (Karnak and Luxor temples), “had cheap suit” massacre, the value of hotel pens, tourism thugs, my first attempt at bribery (Valley of the Kings), dodgy taxi number 8, and “Welcome to Alaska.”
Will write soon!
Love,
Teardrop...
Recommended:
Yes
Best Suited For: Couples
Best Time to Travel Here: Dec - Feb
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Epinions.com ID:
Teardrop...
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Member: Christine L
Location: Detroit, MI
Reviews written: 10
Trusted by: 25 members
About Me:
Hail from New Orleans, live in Detroit, still have a German driver's license.
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