Our plans for travel to Egypt in early March were universally greeted with derision and disbelief. Hadn’t we seen TV footage of revolution in the country and chaos across North Africa? Were we mad? Sanity Âprevailed and we went.
Prudence dictated conditions, however. Could Cairo confirm that it was safe for visitors? Were the important sites open? They answered “yes”. Our agent in South Africa, Kim Lings at Nile Travel, with her excellent personal experience of Egypt, briefed us well and we departed with assurances that local knowledge and networks would be available to us at all times.
Nothing was left to chance; everything came up to expectations.
People visit Egypt for its tombs and temples, especially in peak season from October to April, before summertime desert temperatures soar to 50°C and beyond. This year was different. On January 25, triggered by the earlier ousting of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in nearby Tunisia, protests started in Cairo’s Tahrir Square against 30 years of brutal and corrupt rule by President Hosni Mubarak and his cronies and they spread around the country. The army refused to fire on compatriots; after a few days of violence the hated security police melted away; on February 11 the president stepped down. Most tourists cancelled their bookings. Visitors were leaving. The timing was perfect for travelling to the largest open-air museum on the planet.
The great storehouse of the ancient world celebrates 30 dynasties of pharaohs and their immediate successors over three millennia and extends the length of the Nile in Egypt. Close to the border with present-day Sudan, at Abu Simbel, we gaped at the massive temples of Rameses II and his queen (one of many) Nefertari, which were hewn out of solid rock more than 3 000 years ago. In the far north, on the Mediterranean coast in Alexandria, we viewed temples, catacombs and an amphitheatre of Greco-Roman times.
In between, along the Nile, just beyond the limit of the great river’s annual flooding before the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, we took in the clusters of pyramids, most famously at Giza, now a suburb of Cairo; we visited the incomparable temples of Luxor and Karnak and royal temples and tombs on the adjacent west bank. A Nile cruise offered delight in the form of smaller sites preserved today at such places as Edfu, Kom Ombo and Aswan — all these without the usual crowds of visitors.
Millennia of desert sands
The ancient Egyptians built and communicated for eternity. That much is obvious from the massive scale of the architecture and the enduring clarity, elegance and detail of the paintings and carvings, where youthful kings and queens do obeisance before 741 deities to ensure an afterlife of endless splendour. Luckily for us the climate has protected these treasures and the country has suffered few of the earthquakes that levelled so many sites in Greece and Turkey.
Millennia of desert sands that buried many monuments also helped with their preservation until archaeologists found and painstakingly unearthed them in the past 200 years for 21st-century visitors to wonder at.
Those who created these structures were masters of materials, construction and artistry without peer in the ancient world — the crafted bas-reliefs of the nobleman Ramose and his wife on the walls of polished limestone in his tomb at Thebes; the intricate jewellery of gold and precious stone from the tomb of Tutankhamun that we saw in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum; the blocks of polished granite making up the walls in the king’s chamber in the heart of the Great Pyramid of Khufu, where the perfect joins have not shifted detectably in 4 600 years; the towering statues in pink granite reminding us that Rameses II, more than 3 000 years ago, intended to be remembered; the wall paintings in the tombs of both the great and the less elevated depicting in minute detail the lifestyle they hoped to enjoy forever after death.
Everywhere gods and goddesses interact with humans for comfort, warning and inspiration; most endearing is Isis’s devoted search for her murdered husband, Osiris, subsequently worshipped as the god of death and resurrection.
Ancient and modern vandalism
Familiar illustrations in books and documentaries on television failed to prepare us for the real thing. What’s not unlike more recent malpractices, and also took our breath away, was the millennia-long destruction of the historical record. The Egyptians started it — tomb robbers as well as the pharaohs who replaced the names of their predecessors on monuments with their own (an early form of plagiarism).
Thereafter, Coptic Christians habitually defaced the images of “pagan” gods wherever they found them and Arabs removed polished limestone wholesale from sites such as the Giza pyramids and granite from temples to build their mosques.
Weep at what little remains of the great Library of Alexandria, the ancient world’s equivalent of modern America’s Library of Congress. For two centuries it attracted and instructed the leading scholars of its time, including Euclid and Archimedes — as was fully acknowledged by those Greeks and Romans who today get all the credit for laying the foundations of Western civilisation. The exquisite new library of Alexandria, opened in 2002, intends to put the city and the country on the map again as a revitalised centre of learning.
Civic engagement and pride
Everywhere we travelled we heard “Welcome!” and the tentative question: “Have you heard about our revolution?” Mubarak’s departure launched a cautious but confident transition to democracy. Egypt is rich, we were told, but the people have stayed poor through the greed of Mubarak and his elite, who amassed obscene amounts of wealth by iron-fisted control of the nation’s businesses and resources. A palpable spirit of civic engagement and pride among ordinary people has taken over.
Our Luxor guide camped with others at the temple of Madinat Habu for nine days to protect it against criminals let out of jail by Mubarak’s thugs soon after the revolution began. Protesters assembled in Tahrir Square to remind authorities of their demands, then cleaned up the rubbish before they dispersed. We saw teenagers spontaneously directing traffic in Alexandria when there weren’t enough police to do the job. And around the country the national colours were joyously painted on tree trunks, lamp posts, gates, flower-pots, bicycles — Constitutional reforms (though imperfect) were overwhelmingly accepted in the referendum on March 19. Elections will follow, as will (inshallah) a better life for all.
We experienced Egypt in exceptional conditions at a remarkable time in its remarkable history. Would we recommend others to follow suit? Yes, provided you put yourselves in the hands of knowledgeable tourist agents and guides. They’ll teach you how (and where) to negotiate a fair deal, train you in credible “No thank yous” when you’re hassled to buy, show you where to buy bottled water (a must) cheaply, recommend good local eateries, adjust bookings if flights are delayed, solve your problems and keep you safe. It’ll cost you in tips, but it’s worth it.
Egypt’s past and its vibrant, energised post-revolution present are the ultimate inspiration. The time to enjoy both is now, before tourism — and prices — pick up again.