Egypt part 1

 

This was 11+ year for my youngest. She is at a good school and can stay there till A-levels. But she decided, with some encouragement from me, to appear for a grammar school. (Grammar school entrance exams are very competitive, even more so in London. The speed and accuracy required in these exams are of an extremely high standard. But more about the 11+ in a different blog post.) 

Planning for the trip 

We booked our tickets about 10 months ago. It gave us something to look forward to for the time we were studying. During the year, we also were able to convince my daughter's best friend and her family to also visit Egypt during the same time. While both families did not fly in and out of Egypt together or on the same dates, we were together for 8 out of the 10 days we were in Egypt. 

The wife and I hold a different approach to travel planning. She likes to research and plan out things, while I like to visit the highlights, and then walk the streets. As it happens, we end up following the wife's plans in every trip. 

A number of my friends have been to Egypt, so we had a good list of recommendations. 

We decided to:  

1) Not go on a cruise to save time in going from A to B

2) Visit Abu Simbel by flying to Aswan 

3) Pyramids and GEM

4) Go to the White desert* 

* decided by the wife 

Itinerary

Day	Night	Activity
Wed	Cairo	Reach Cairo
Thu	White desert	Desert safari
Fri	Cairo	Back to Cairo
Sat	Cairo	Pryamids of Giza (32 mins by Car), Khan Market (45 Mins)
Sun	Cairo	Gems Meusuem (13 Mins) + Cairo Tower + Feluca ride with dinner
Mon	Luxor	East Luxor - Luxor Temple , Karnak temple
Tue	Luxor	West Luxor - Valley of Kings and Balloon Ride in evening . Hatshetput, colosimemon
Wed	Hurgada	Morning Hot Air Ballon in Luxor + Head to Hurghada
Thu	Hurgada	Chill
Friday	Hurgada	Deep Chill
Sat	Cairo	Fly to Cairo / 5.30 pm Flight to London

Flying to Egypt 

We landed on a Wednesday at 9pm, flying Egypt Air. The airline had some frightening reviews online. I was not overly worried - I am from India, it is a 5 hour direct flight - how bad could it be. 

I was pleasantly surprised - the flight was on time, the check-in was smooth, the crew were friendly and took care of us. The only dampener - no vegetarian options. EgyptAir will only carry vegetarian food if you ask for it, else its 'chicken or beef' with a huge smile. 

      Athens at night

The immigration lines were short, and the officer was quick - they did stamp a 'register within 7 days' stamp on our passport, but we did not notice it then. 

We reached the hotel (Novotel Al Borg) in an Uber. (Uber works well in Cairo to a large extent)

Overnight to the White Desert

Most of the desert tours pick up tourists from central hotels in downtown Cairo or from Giza necropolis. We were picked up from our hotel (as our hotel was close to Tahrir Square in central Cairo) in a 10 seater van. This van picked up people from a few other places then left Cairo. 

We headed to the Bahariya Oasis, which is about 400km from Cairo in the desert. The desert starts almost immediately after leaving Cairo. Egypt is essentially all desert except for the Nile. So, if you head away from the Nile in any direction, you reach the desert.  

I was not in a good mood when the journey began. It could be because of the early morning wake up, the not very comfortable seats in the van, the prospect of 4+ hours in it, etc, and I might have moaned a bit to the wife. 

But things picked up. 

The road was fantastic. 2 lanes each way separated by an extra wide central verge. Smooth surface, flat and straight. The van was soon doing 130-140 kmph. 

The kids were behaving much better than me. They were sleepy, but were not complaining and were busy reading and listening to music. 

 

At Bahariya, we had lunch and shifted into a 4x4 drive with Ala. Ala was going to be our guide, driver, cook and valet for the next 20 hours. 

(Ala and me)

We went for another 200km - similar roads continued into the desert towards the oasis at Farfara. Our destination was the White Desert National park, which gets its name from the white chalk rock formations, formed due to the erosion of by wind and sand. 

It reminded me of a sea bed - sand and On the way, we did off-road driving (120+kmph), some sand boarding (approx 15kmph), visited the black desert and a crystal mountain. We also found many fossilised marine creatures encrusted within the  limestone at a few places.  

Just before sunset, we arrived at our tent. Ala got busy - he made a small wind break next to the car, and then began preparing food for us. We huddled next to a small fire and watched the sun set. 

Soon after sunset, the stars came out. I had been looking forward to this. Long ago, the night time view was like this every night. The sky would be littered with stars. The view was well worth the effort. We spent the night in the tents.

In the morning, we work up to watch the sunrise and had breakfast at the same time. We wrapped up and left the tent at 7.30am. On the way back, we stopped at a hot water spring. After that, we bade farewell to Ala, and sat in the van to head back to Cairo.

The Pyramids 

There are many pyramids around Cairo. The largest one is the Great Pyramid at Giza, which has three pyramids and the Sphinx.  You can buy an entry ticket and walk around the entire area. However, you will be approached by many people offering to show you around - by a car, or a tanga (horse-cart), or horses. 

We took a Tanga-wallah masquerading as a guide for $70. We were happy to have bargained it down from $180. However, the joke was on us. The tanga-wallah knew less about the pyramids than we did. 

For the money, we got photos like the ones below. 

We were a group of 4 adults, out of which the men were not very enthusiastic about a claustrophobic walk inside a 5500 year old tomb.  So, we decided not to go inside the pyramid. 

GEM 

The next day, we went to the Grand Egyptian Museum. It is a modern museum with impressive architecture and has an impressive collection of Egyptian artefacts. 

I will not recommend the guide tour offered by the GEM - it is usually very large (our tour had 50 people), so it is hard to talk to the guide or even see what the guide is talking about. By the time you reach the artefact that the guide has been talking about, the guide has moved on to the next thing. 

Another tip, the tour tickets include entry tickets, so do not buy the entry ticket if you have bought the tour tickets. We bought tour tickets, and then entry tickets as the language is not very clear on the GEM website. They were sympathetic but they have no way of refunding a ticket, so we ended up with double entry tickets for 8 people :( 

If you have already bought entry tickets, you can get your tickets upgraded for the tour at the museum (but not online). 

You can uber to GEM and uber back. In case your uber driver asks for payment by cash (we were asked for $20 for a ride which cost $3), just cancel and rebook and you will eventually find a driver who won't. See a similar conversation with another uber driver. 

Khan-el- Khalili Market 

Close to central Cairo is this market which reminded me of Delhi's Sarojini Nagar and Karol Bagh market. We went there at 9pm and it was not very busy then. There are shops for clothes, souvenirs, stone, glass, jewellery, cutlery  - and there is a lot of bargaining. 

The Egyptian salesmen

I was mildly irritated by the repeated sales pitches but this irritation changed to admiration gradually. Every person who approached me did so with a smile. They wanted to talk to me and get me to walk into their store. If I refused, they would persist as long as I was smiling. If I lost my smile, they would immediately withdraw. 

They would usually start to talk by identifying me as an Indian, saying Namaste, and then start talking about Bollywood. They would make jokes about how they dislike the actors in Bollywood as their wives like them, and how they are happy that the Bollywood stars are far away from them. 

They would always smile while negotiating on price. 

We adopted a 80% discount to the starting price. It was an extreme step, but once more, the joke was on us. Soon, we were suprised to note that the shopkeepers were happy to part with their wares at this discount. 

Egypt is not the richest of places. Their currency has been hammered in the last few years and months and is now at about 50EGP to 1 USD (down from 20EGP to the USD from a few months ago). So, I would imagine how a lot of things are more expensive now. Tourism has also been hit - earlier by Covid, and then by the war in Palestine. So, it must not be easy to earn your living in Egypt for many who depend on tourism. So, beneath the smiles, there was the serious business of earning a living. But the mask did not slip. 

For this, I admired them.

In the second part to this blog, I will cover the remaining part of the trip - Abu Simbel, Luxor and Hurghada. 

E1 memories

I wanted to write a post about some of the things I don't want to forget. This post is going to be a 'dear diary' post.
I was just talking to KK the other day (who by the way is expecting a baby in March - yay!) and could not recall the area in which most of my friends in London stay. 3 years since I moved out of London and I was never good with names in the first place. I was in London in September 2010 and I did get lost inside tube stations and had to resign myself to reading the noticeboards (such a tourist-y thing to do).
Back to the topic, this post is about my stay in London. My closest friends stayed next to Tower Hill station - zone 1 - but right on the other end of the circle line from my high street Kensington flat. There was a communal garden on the first floor which was the scene of a few summer parties and some a lot of random wine drinking.
My birthday was celebrated there - number 26 - I wanted to go home and sleep and was wondering why all my banker friends who had to be in office (much) earlier than me kept hanging around for no apparent reason. I realised soon after that  there was a cake to be cut which happened only at midnight.
There was a flat in the Pump house mews which was vacated only recently by its distinguished occupants now   happily multiplying in Wimbledon. This flat was just under two minutes away from this garden. I remember one completely mad party at this house - once when the hosts were respectably drunk even before the first guest arrived. I made a fool of myself at this party (quite happily if I might add), insulted one or two people and then fell asleep only to wake up a few hours later still wanting to rejoin the party, which had moved out into another flat in the same complex.
Most of my weekends were spent here in E1 in 2005. I  honed my cooking skills here - scrambled eggs and omelettes and chicken were cooked and devoured with great tenacity here. I am just an average cook, but my friends made me feel like a chef (in substantial measure because of the fact that I was happy to cook). Because of my hostel upbringing, I used to see things between friends in a very tit-for-tat manner. Every exchange had to be equal or it would be resented. However, I saw that people were extra nice in London - not only to me, but to each other as well. I was taken care off and it felt nice. Taking care of young men  boys meant having patience for untidy and unruly behaviour, an ability to cook a lot of food and watch it being gulped down and constant leg-pulling and so on... doing all this every weekend and sometimes even during the week showed a depth of character much beyond what is encountered in some of the 24 year olds I meet today. I had lucked out. .
Summer in London meant long walks longer sit-ins at parks. The park in front of my flat in Camden, Hyde park, Green park, Greenwich, Battersea park - none were spared. There were long meandering walks - a few of which ended in the Beer garden (not so) near Sloane Sq. station which served huge pitchers of LI Tea (made in about 15 seconds flat).
I remember having dinner at the Masala Zones and experimenting with places like Andrew Edmunds. I remember listening to unending cribs about the rain and the cold and equally nonstop stories about the fun during the summer. 
I remember watching a movie called Polar Express when 3 out of 4 of us were asleep and a musical called Les Miserables (2 out of 4 here too). Movies which fared better included Sarkar (with 'angel' written on Katrina Kaif's T-shirt who appeared wearing this for a milisecond but was long enough for two of us to spot it and agree on the words) and Swades (We loved Gayatri Joshi and the songs were touching).

*I need to report a few strange dreams (with one particularly abstract dream just after watching black swan) but am going to park that for now

Winter cheer

Snap. A year went by. One year ago, I had just finished packing for moving back to India. I was saying my goodbyes to my friends, colleagues and to the city and was getting done with that as well.
I knew I would come back often. I knew that my time in London will never come back. Memories are made with the place, the people and the present. Each one of them changes constantly, people changing the least I guess and the present changing all the time. I miss my time there - From Camden to High St. Ken to Hampstead and even the time spent in the Docklands - there are things about each place which I miss. Each place I stayed there had its own flavour. In the beginning, it was all about settling in and roaming around with my IIMA friends 100% of the time and learning how to cook. It changed into numerous cookins, anda-paranthas, walking up the hill with Nautanki and haggling like two middle-aged housewives, the Heath and the village. It also meant finding new friends and reading new books as older ones got married or got busier. West Hampstead had the flat screen TV and playstation and snow and weekday night outs followed by dreadfully long days in office.
Moving back to the present, the wedding season is in full flow. Almost all my friends are married - RG is my only hope in ensuring that I am not the last one to get married - which is also not a bad thing. It is not a bad thing because if something is so good to spend your entire life in it, it must be good enough to wait for. Also, I love my (almost) complete control over my life and space and interests, which I think reduces a bit with marriage. As AS tells me – “You will lose all the controls. But you will like losing them.” If he was not married, I would believe his intentions but not his veracity. Since he is married, I doubt his intentions.
Any how, my ex-manager from ebookers has gotten me in touch with some new companies - we should be able to last out this recession with such friends, but let us see how this story unfolds.

The Lawyer

This is about a friend. She is one of the brightest and funniest people I have met - a budding writer, a human rights lawyer and a child at heart.

I met her in London, where she was on a scholarship (of course!) to do a one year post graduate course in Law and Literature. I did not know that these two things could be or needed to be taught together. I still have limited ideas on the subject. This was the cool thing about knowing her - she came from a very different background. She thought differently and had a different approach to life. All my friends were mainstream professionals - engineers, MBAs, bankers and the odd CA. Most, if not all of us were in it for the money, more or less. It was nice to get to know someone who cared enough about things to devote time in it. Someone who read things and then went there to help. She had lived and worked and taught in refugee camps (At the same point in time, I was in a campus about 4 kilometers away with nothing much to do). She had lent a hand when dams were to be stopped from flooding villages. Her job after law school was with a firm which worked on gender and sexuality issues. Someone just posted a comment about how we live in our shells and tend to forget how bad things can be. This one was different. She always wanted to be in the thick of things.
She was the kind who could give a 20minute rem on Freud (very contextual, because I used to live in a house right opposite Freud's home) and make it quite interesting with examples and subtexts. She taught me words like poco (which is short for postcolonialism) and new words which were used in poco literature. For some reason, she used to think, rather strongly believe, that I am (or people like me were) homophobic(s) (I really wish there was a milder word for this).  I had never thought on those lines, nor do I think I am one, but still, it remained quite a discussion point for us.
What were the things we had in common - interest in lots of food and lots to drink, making merry and chatting about all and sundry  Other common traits - laziness and chaos. Trust her to miss a lecture (she used to have about 2 in a week) because of all kinds of reasons. Chaos - this one was worrying sometimes and she did surpass me. Missing deadlines, rocketing phone bills, dropping things.. She had this knack of finding things which did not belong to her (like she once found a cheque which she then returned after locating the owner).

Here's to the lawyer chick. Happy Belated Birthday. 

Dinner delights

Moved to the east end of London, as they say, with the monstrosity below right opposite the river.

(overturned cockroach, balding porcupine)

Bad thing - see above.
Good thing - Nice house at a reasonable price - 3.5beds+blah+blah+blah+room with enough space for a ps2 and 10 friends
Bad thing - No neighbourhood
Good thing - Some good neighbours (read PV,AV,TG,SG)
Bad thing - A daylight robbery store called Budgens
Good thing - Clean everything
Bad thing - Wont stay for long


I also wanted to capture the whole dinner thing that I have going. I like to call people over, cook for them, feed them and send them back. My parents are horrified at this behaviour. Why do I do it - well I like cooking, for one. I like cooking when there is some company even better.
Anyway, had two such dinners this week - TG and PKnV and it goes without saying that it was great! Wonder how much of this I will be able to do in Delhi.

Delhi is a city of distances - especially if one stays in Sarita Vihar. You hardly walk to a friends house. You drive to it, and quite often, you plough through chunks of traffic to get anywhere.
I will miss that about London. Going from A to B while reading a book and looking out through the bus window. Wonder when we will have such buses in Delhi.

The sinking of the bank holiday

Three days of holiday. Three days of uninterrupted rain.
I had the super idea of checking up the weather map and heading out into that part of the country which does not have any clouds in the satellite picture.
This is what I saw.....
£$%$@~@~#'#'#'@@#!!!!
All hail the gloom!