Plan your trip with our routes

Cairo, Egypt, near the museum where you can see the mummy of Ramses II, the greatest pharaoh.

Yesterday we were in Cairo, and except for a couple of times that we rode the tube, we took eight taxis. The first one, and right on the chin. We had booked a room in a good, beautiful and inexpensive hotel; they even had free shuttle from the airport!! After waiting for 30 minutes, no sight of the free shuttle, so we decided to move on by ourselves. Curiously enough, the cheapest option was a limousine, so as bold as brass we treated ourselves. A red Fiat Punto, to be precise. It looked like a limousine as much as our motorbike looks like a Harley Davidson (that is nothing at all), but after seeing the other taxis, it’s no wonder that any vehicle with three doors is enlisted as “luxury transport”.

When we arrived to the hotel, safe and sound, they apologized relentlessly until we put the limousine bill on the table. Then, the typical Egyptian courtesy disappeared immediately. However, they paid as expected. From there, we went to the train station to make the reservations for the sleeper that had to take us to Luxor and the Valley of the Kings. Pedro’s drawing skills are worse than his singing skills so our second taxi driver didn’t get where we wanted to go until, to the sketch of a steam engine, we added the “choo-choo” sound. Allah is great, because of all the stations that there might be in Cairo, the taxi driver took us exactly to the right one.

Our third taxi ride was shorter, but long enough to get the engine smoking in the middle of a highway on our way to the Giza Pyramids. As if we were in a bus, we got out of the broken vehicle and got into the one right behind us where we met two “special” characters. A Chilean military man working for the U.N. in Sudan, and a university professor from California, with Canadian passport, an expert in Middle East affairs, and speaking Arab better than Mohamed. In other words, a real C.I.A. agent. With such passengers, the taxi driver thought that he could trick us and took us to a private tour instead of the pyramids. I imagine his ears are still burning.

The sunset behind the Sphinx of Giza was spectacular, after that, we came back with our friends to share the taxi fee. After negotiating a good price, we got into a private car that, before leaving us at the wrong address, stopped to have a cup of tea. The word stress doesn’t exist in Arab.

After resting in the hotel for a while, we went out for dinner. Any of the ships anchored in the Nile River, and turned into Food Malls, looked like a good option. We ended up in the Blue Nile Boat, surrounded by locals dressed up like westerners, eating burgers and drinking Coke. We had to imagine the cold, frothy beer because alcohol is more persecuted than Bin Laden. All that happened after our next taxi driver skipped the right bridge and got into the typical Cairo’s traffic jams where we wasted a whole hour.

Once the bill was paid, we got into the last of our transportations of the day. After one minute in the taxi, the driver stopped, grabbed his tools and started changing the clutch’s cable in the middle of one of the main avenues in Cairo, as if that was something that happens everyday. Actually, if it doesn’t happen everyday, I am sure that at least every other day, because he had skills. It’s amazing that the descendents of one the greatest people ever, who built not only pyramids, but also temples, palaces and tombs which are amongst the most beautiful ones all around the world, are now driving second hand taxis, falling apart and with broken meters. Not to talk about the air conditioners, currently a luxury in Egypt, a land where the last of its Queens bathed everyday in donkey’s milk.

If their pharaohs could see them now, they would drop their bandages ashamed. When in Europe we were still throwing stones from cave to cave, here, they had such an advance culture that two thousand years before Jesus was born, they were able to mummify their dead people, and we still can see them with their faces, teeth, and hair as if it was just yesterday when they were alive.

But nothing to complain about because I would like to see where we are in half of that time from now…