Home » Egypt » Touring in Egypt by train and boat

First, this was not a bicycle tour. It could probably be done by bicycle but I used trains, boats, and buses. And camels, of course. My excuse to put it here that I rented a bicycle in Luxor and rode through the desert to the Valley of the Kings. More about that later.

Touring in Egypt by train and boat

Thomas Driemeyer
2005-10-17 11:23:31

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CAIRO

The tour began and ended in Cairo, because Cairo has an international airport. Cairo is an amazing city, crawling with people and so much buzzing with chaos that it's a miracle that it works at all. Traffic follows different rules than in other cities. Where else could you park your car on the double line in the middle of a busy road, walk up to a policeman, give him, hm, a small token of appreciation and ask him to watch out for your car? Taxicabs are also unusual because the drivers regret having missed their true calling (kamikaze pilot in 1945) and now make up for it by their driving style and fare price schedules that border on extortion. I had the pleasure of riding with an Arab friend a few times and watch him haggle the price down to virtually nothing.

Money in Egypt also follows different rules. There are very high prices for tourists and extremely low prices for everybody else. A tourist is defined as a hapless victim who stays in one of the western-style hotels and travels on those Agatha-Christie-style Nile riverboats. For example, a soldier makes about 10 Egyptian pounds per month, which in 1988 was the equivalent of three bus rides in Germany. I actually bought a pita bread for one-quarter US cent in a small village. The entire three-week trip cost DM 300 (US$ 210 by 1995 exchange rates) plus the flight! I doubt the value of the Egyptian pound has increased since then.

Ok, so I was king with my German bank account, as long as I stayed away from the tourist traps. This meant staying in the Cairo youth hostel, scenically located in a side street close to the Nile river. Obviously, one of the first points on my agenda were the pyramids of Giza, which postcards invariably show in the middle of the desert but which are actually right at the edge of the suburb of Giza. They close early there, but we managed to "get lost'' and watch the sundown over the pyramids. ...