Off to a Great Start

What a revelation the city of Cairo turned out to be!

This morning we drove from our airport hotel to spend much of the day at the Egyptian Museum in downtown Cairo. En route we passed through the very upscale suburban city of Heliopolis, then motored serenely along an elevated skyway sailing through the city right to our ultimate destination.

Our comparative template throughout much of this trip undoubtedly will be India since that was our most recent international adventure. And, believe us, traffic in Cairo is nowhere near as noisy and chaotic as we found in Delhi last December!

Though drivers always seemed to be able to turn three lanes and a parking strip into six lanes seemingly without effort, there was none of the constant horn honking encountered in Delhi and Mumbai. Nor were there stray animals of every description roaming the streets.

To be sure, pedestrians crossed roads very much at their own risk, parking was totally unorganized, bus passengers often alighted and boarded randomly in the center lane, and taxi drivers negotated with potential fares without even bothering to halt their forward movement. But we never saw an accident, and traffic flowed with seeming ease everywhere we traveled.

Truly remarkable (not that the same wasn't true in India -- we never happened upon an accident there either).

The city was cleaner than expected and more lively, too, even during the heat of the day. We saw little evidence of extreme poverty (aside from the squatters residing in the City of the Dead, a huge cemetary complex spread out over acres and acres at the edge of the centtral city). Most buildings blended into the generally sand colored desert environment but often proved architecturally interesting, both historicaly and in terms of the ultra modern. Lee especially enjoyed the wide variety of styles present in the slender minarets we encountered towering over the city's ubiquitious mosques.

The several hours we spent roaming the cluttered, dusty, ill-labeled halls of the Egyptian Museum proved an extremely apt introduction to the days of visits to historical sites ahead of us, largely because Ibrahim steered us from object to object so skillfully. We would pause in front of a statue here, a sarcophagus there, a case of alabastar carvings in the increasingly crowded hallways; and he would deftly illuminate what it was that was important and valuable about what we were gazing at.

Everyone left the musuem with much better educated eyes than when we entered, that's for certain!

Museum highlights: for Heidi, seeing Ramses II's, (tubby) Queen Hatshepsut's and Seti's mummified remains and the gilded wooden set of boxes enclosing Tutatkhamun's coffin and his solid gold inner sarcophagus; for Lee, it was a room full of minature dioramas of everyday life -- carved figurines engaged in everything from brewing beer and herding cattle to sailing fully-rigged Nile River ships -- and the elaborate burial paraphenalia associated with Tutatkamon's mummified remains. There was also that fascinating room filled with mummified animals -- pets and food supplies and votive offerings preserved, like the pharaohs whose tombs they shared, for eternity!

Following a late lunch at a very refined Lebanese restaurant on the GIza side of the Nile, we headed out to the airport for our flight south to Luxor. Enroute we stopped for pictures at the incredibly elaborate residence (modeled on an Indian Hindu tmeple) built by the Belgium Baron Edouard Empain, credited with initiating the construction of Heliopolis on the outskirts of the city in the early twentieth century.

We'll be back in Cairo for three days at the end of our tour to visit even more of the city's sites, very much looking forward to experiencing more of its delights as well.

This evening we are ensconced in the Nile Palace Hotel on the banks of the Nile in Luxor, very much anticipating our visits to Luxor Temple and Karnak tomorrow morning, our first "on site" encounters with the artifacts and remains of the real Ancient Egypt.