In between eight hours of driving to Agra and back, we also took in a few of the other sights in the area:
Akbar’s Tomb…
…and Agra’s Red Fort
Akbar’s Tomb & Agra’s Red Fort
Month: January 2005
The Taj Mahal, up close and personal
What can I say? It’s an amazing building. The second you lay eyes on it, you’re mesmerised. It just commands your attention. You have to hand it to the Muslims: they certainly seem to have a keen sense for design. The Taj Mahal was designed by an Iranian architect, based on Islamic themes you find in many mosques throughout the Muslim world. Everything about the Taj is purely symmetrical.
The Taj Mahal is also full of optical illusions that give it a real presence on the landscape. Things like vertical lines that diverge as they run up the building were made to look parallel while you view them from the ground. When you enter the courtyard (the place where you see the most famous view of the Taj Mahal with the fountains in front), you can start stepping backwards, and it will actually appear to get bigger the further back you walk. The surrounding towers lean slightly outward to protect the main building from earthquakes. Some circular columns that run up the building appear angular when viewed from more than 10 feet away. It’s an amazing place.
The building itself is pure white marble with designs raised or cut out and filled in with black marble and semi-precious stones. You can shine flashlights through the marble and illuminate different colours behind the stones. It’s supposed to be amazing to see late in the day when it illuminates in a range of colours as the sun sets, but it was a bit too hazy, and the sunlight too diffused for me to see the effect when I was there.
Indians are doing it for themselves
India is proving to be quite a fascinating place. I feel as though I’ve had a pretty good primer on congested cities while visiting Cairo and on Indian culture while visiting Singapore and Fiji (where there are large Indian populations).
Although Delhi has a comparable population to Cairo (12 vs 10 million), it seems much greener with lots of broad-leaf trees and grassy parks, and is much more spread out. Kind of like Manhattan vs. Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, I guess. It’s something my fellow travellers seem to notice immediately as well.
Unlike Cairo, however, there is a much greater variety of cultures, so I never seem to get tired of looking around. I’ve seen just about every vehicle imaginable travelling down the roads, and I have been through some sections that are even more congested than Cairo. And I’ve seen just about every kind of colourful food, flower, and craft product being sold from vendors alongside the roads.
There does seem to be a lot more poverty about, with beggars on just about every street corner. One major bonus about travelling around India (from my Delhi perspective, anyway) is that most people seem to be able to understand and speak English.
I’ve signed up for a few tours (gasp!) put on by the Indian government to help with my tight schedule here. The good thing about the tours is that the tourists are mostly Indians themselves (currently living overseas or in other Indian states), so I feel as though I’m not isolated from the culture I’m viewing. I did a tour of Old Delhi yesterday afternoon and got to see some exquisitely designed buildings in the “Red Fort”.
We also visited where Gandhi was cremated, as well as a few Hindu and Muslim temples. All the people on the tour were very nice and sociable. I will do the New Delhi tour with them after travelling to Agra and the Taj Mahal tomorrow.
I spent most of my afternoon today browsing through the National Museum of India, which had objects dating back to 4000BC. There were lots of intricate stone carvings from temples and a large collection of “Indian Miniature Paintings” that were extremely detailed, beautiful, and absolutely fascinating to pore over. I spent a long time scrutinising each one. One guard eventually walked up to me and said: “You must be a teacher.”
My guesthouse is in Connaught Place, a great central place in an area known as the “circus,” which is loaded with good restaurants and shops. I even have a TV in my room with 99 cable channels of pure Indian entertainment. No Western channels in sight!
You have to hand it to this country. With over a billion residents, it’s huge (poised to be the world’s largest in the next 20 years) and is definitely wrapped up in itself with little need to look to the West. It has its own movie industry (Bollywood’s bigger than Hollywood these days), its own culture, etc, etc. It hardly seems as though anyone around here even pays attention to what’s happening in the U.S. (unlike many countries around the world). I haven’t ever felt that way in any country I’ve visited OUTSIDE of the U.S. (the most famous of all for navel gazing).
Dateline Delhi
So I’ve arrived in Delhi, India, after a few too many hops through the Persian Gulf region. The only flight I could get between Cairo and Delhi took me overnight through Bahrain, Abu Dhabi (UAE), and Muscat (Oman), before heading up to Delhi. Each plane ride was only 1-2 hours long with 1-2 hour stops between each point — but all in the middle of the night.
So yes, I arrived exhausted, but was greeted at the airport and whisked to my guest house for a good long nap. The airline, Gulf Air, was quite nice and insisted on serving a hot meal for each of those short segments. There were plenty of Westerners about, in the terminals and on the planes. In fact, every stewardess was either European or Asian. The airport waiting areas seemed to be full of people ranging from Saudi Arabian sheikhs doing their duty-free shopping in the glitzy Bahrain airport to European hippies headed for India.
I got the impression that many of the Indians travelling on my last flight into Delhi were returning from performing manual labour jobs in the Middle East and had not flown in a while. When stewardesses came through the cabin to collect headsets, they would try to give them everything (pillows, blankets, magazines, etc). When my neighbour asked for a second helping of his Indian dinner, he got infuriated because he claimed the rest of his food got cold before they brought it—ruining his meal (as though he was in some fine restaurant). The second the plane touched the ground, long after it had even gotten off the landing runway, half the Indians were already on their feet grabbing all their stuff out of the overhead lockers. The stewardesses were screaming at them to get back in their seats and buckle up.
This behaviour seemed to continue after we got off the plane. When we all arrived to go through immigration and customs, many of the Indians looked around and tried to find ways to circumvent the long “Indian Citizens Only” line. They would try sneaking through the non-Indian tourist processing line as though it might be a shortcut, but the customs officers refused to serve them. I guess this behaviour all comes from having to deal with the competition you face for attention from the other billion people in this country. That and perhaps a poor understanding of the English language.
The Hustle
The most tiring aspect of life in Egypt is having to endure the constant hustling. When you first arrive, they must sense your naivety and big, bright eyes because they seem to descend on you more. Now that I’ve learned to keep my head down, I tend to be left alone.
Although everyone I’ve met has been very friendly, the friendliest people have seemed to be the ones after your wallet. They are always trying to steer you into a shop somewhere, although sometimes innocently (I think). If anyone tries to be extra nice to you here, you can bet they’ll want money in the end.
The hustlers I really resent are the ones trying to con you in some way. They will lie to you about something being closed (whether it’s a museum or pyramid) in order for you to be bundled into their shop and given a hard sell on something. Or you may find yourself being given a “free” tour you never agreed to pay for but one you’ll be expected to give a hefty tip for.
Every tourist I’ve spoken with seems to agree that the area around the Great Pyramids in Giza is the worst. It’s very hard to appreciate the significance of the pyramids when you’re being bugged every few minutes for a donkey, camel, or horse ride, or a tour guide. The other really bad places have been along the Nile in towns like Luxor and Aswan, where you are constantly being asked to take a Felucca (sailboat) ride, a horse and buggy, or a taxi. It’s nice to get inside a museum, temple, or tomb because you’ll usually find a temporary moment of peace and quiet.
Other annoying hustling happens when children run up and ask you for Euros or adults try to charge you a toll for walking through their scenic neighbourhoods. The worst place I found for this was in the beautiful Nubian villages on Elephantine Island in Aswan.
Photography can be difficult because a lot of people will try to demand money if they know they will be in your shot. Market stall owners will try to charge money to let you photograph the front of their stalls. I’ve been trying to sneak telephoto shots as a result.
It all gets a bit taxing, but as I said, I seem to be bothered by hustlers less and less the longer I hang around here. Either that or I’m just noticing it less.
A life in the Middle East
After spending about ten days here, I thought I would give you some reflections on life in the Middle East.
You can feel a slow cultural transition as you work your way across the country. The further north and east you get, the more Middle Eastern everything feels. The further south you go, the more African everything feels.
One of the hardest things to get used to is Arabic script. Tourist places will usually have English translations, but you won’t find them in many areas. The most difficult thing is the numbers, which are unlike the numbering system you’ll find in the West or in Asia. They use a script that makes a “5” look like a “0” and a “0” look like a “-“, so “50” in English translates to “0-” in Arabic, among other things. Simple things like finding your train platform or an address on a street you can find on an English-language map are very difficult. The currency is printed in Arabic on one side and English on the other, so you have to keep flipping your money over to make sure you’re handing out the right amount.
The country is predominantly Muslim, although there are a few old churches and synagogues about. While most Egyptians don’t seem to be devoted enough to drop to their knees every day, there are plenty that do. The mosques call out for prayers early in the morning (before sunrise), around 3 PM, and at sunset. Hearing all the mosques calling out is almost like hearing a multi-alarm fire going off at fire stations throughout your community. Except instead of a siren, you hear someone singing/wailing through a microphone. When travelling by train through country towns up and down the Nile, the mosques are all decorated with neon lights.
Most women keep their heads covered, although some more than others. Some have everything but their eyes covered. Every time I have tried to speak with a woman in a head covering, she has attempted to communicate back in a friendly way, only to be snapped at in Arabic by a passing older man — forcing her to reel back somewhat. Many of the older men here dress in traditional clothing that resembles something along the lines of Libyan leader Omar Gaddafi’s getup.
The younger population seems a bit more hip, listening to funky Middle Eastern music and Western rap. Many young kids seem to be learning English in school these days because they always seem eager to practice their English on you.
That being said, virtually everyone I’ve interacted with has been very friendly and honest with their fellow Egyptians and me. It almost seems as though they’re all distantly related somehow (especially in more rural areas). They seem to know exactly how each person walking down the street fits into their huge extended family.
The Commute
Just thought I would fill you in on some interesting characteristics of travelling around Egypt, now that I’m back in Cairo:
I mentioned before how crazy the drivers were in this city of 10 million. Nobody seems to pay any attention to lines in the road, traffic lights, or even police officers directing traffic. They may slow down a bit, but if they see a gap in cross traffic, they just surge straight through a red light. If police are out directing traffic, they’ll sneak behind them as soon as they turn their backs.
The biggest shock is their refusal to use headlights at night, for some reason. I asked one taxi driver why nobody liked to drive at night with their headlights on, and he told me they don’t use them if they can see without them. This applies to the country as well as the cities. Occasionally they’ll flash their headlights to warn someone who they think may not have seen them. It gets really dangerous on country roads because there are plenty of donkeys pulling carts without reflectors. That being said, I have yet to see an accident (although I have witnessed a few very close calls).
As you can imagine, this makes being a pedestrian very scary. I find myself continually heading down side streets where the traffic is narrow and lighter or heading for subway tunnels to get across some of the more congested parts of town.
And speaking of donkeys, you’ve never seen anything as funny as someone riding on the back of a donkey. Unlike horses, they never seem to get off the ground. They just seem to roll along with little tiny bounces that resemble a dribbling basketball just before it starts to roll. It looks most uncomfortable for the riders.
Cairo happens to have a very nice subway system, although like everything else around here, it seems to be covered in a fine desert silt. Egypt is predominantly Muslim, so they reserve the first few cars of every subway train for women only. Every time I see those cars roll by, the women look like they’re having a great time without any men around. Women are allowed to sit anywhere on the trains; it’s just that men can’t sit in these first few cars.
Boats use much the same custom, especially as you head south. I made the mistake of sitting in the women’s section of a ferry boat in Aswan and was politely invited to sit back with another guy in the rear section of the boat. He was very nice about it, but explained that it was their custom.
Taxis don’t use meters here, so you have to barter a fare before you get in. You can often get them to cut their prices in half. The most annoying thing about them is that they insist on honking every time they see a tourist (inquiring whether they might want a taxi – just in case they hadn’t already thought of it on their own). It gets really annoying and makes a walking exploration of the city quite jarring and stressful.
When I was riding in a half-hour taxi ride around sunrise, the driver promptly pulled over at the first hint of daylight, got out of the cab, aligned himself with Mecca, put his prayer mat down, got down on his knees, kissed the earth, and prayed for about five minutes. No meter involved since we bartered, so it didn’t cost me anything extra.
The cheapest way of getting around is to jump on a public taxi van. They seem to use the same system here that they were using in Fiji. Usually for about US$0.15 you can hop on a van packed with locals and ride as long as you want in whatever direction they’re circulating. It gets a bit wild and crazy as they boom funky music and try to cram as many passengers as they can in back, but it’s lots of fun. They seem to get a kick out of having a tourist travelling with them.
The overnight train here from Aswan was fine. They’re basically the same trains they use in Europe, and they tend to keep the tourists travelling separately from the general Egyptian population. I managed to get about five hours of sleep last night, which wasn’t too bad.
Security is pretty tight all over Egypt these days. There are armed guards with machine guns riding in the engine compartment of most trains. There are tourist police all over the popular tourist areas, and there are military checkpoints on many roads leading around the country. Most of these police seem very friendly and eager to practice their English on you. Sometimes they’ll try to bum a cigarette off you in the end since just about everyone is a chain smoker around here.
Odd Egyptian Encounter #2: Aswan
With an hour to kill before my train was scheduled to depart from Aswan for Cairo, I decided to take a walk around a quiet city park to read my Lonely Planet Guide and plan my next few days back in Cairo.
There were plenty of local people relaxing in the park, but I finally managed to find an empty bench I could sit down on and read. The benches in the park were always paired, with two benches positioned back to back and facing opposite directions. My set of benches was empty on both sides.
While I started to read, I heard some Egyptian girls sit down on the bench behind me. As I continued to read my book, one of them said, “Hello”. I turned, smiled, and said hello back, figuring they just wanted to practice their English. There were three: two women in their late teens or early twenties, and a young girl of about 8. The woman saying hello to me happened to be very attractive.
I went back to reading my book. The same woman said “Hello” again, but this time added “My name is” and told me her name (which I can’t remember). I smiled and told her who I was. Every time I said anything to them, they seemed to look somewhat baffled at what I was saying as they tried to digest its meaning. Their English skills were obviously very limited.
I returned to reading my book when the same woman blurted out, “I love you.” I love you? I mean, what do you say? Thinking she was joking, I turned and said: “But you don’t even know me!” She looked very concerned that she couldn’t understand what I had said. She looked to the other woman for help in understanding me. I kept trying to talk to all three of these girls, but they just couldn’t understand what I was saying. The only one smiling was the little girl. I went back to my book. The other woman never really said anything to me but “hello”. She seemed to be there to support her friend.
Again, this woman said, even more forcefully, “I love you!” and again I could only giggle nervously. Every time I laughed, the little girl would giggle — but the woman looked more and more desperate and more and more forcefully said “I love you” again and again as she stared straight into my eyes. It was as though she was trying to put some voodoo on me, getting more and more frustrated that it wasn’t working. All the English these girls seemed to know was “Hello”, “My name is”, and “I love you”. I couldn’t ask them to explain because they couldn’t understand a word I was saying.
Throughout this whole ordeal, older Arab men would occasionally walk past my bench and bark something at her in Arabic. She would usually sass them back in Arabic. Although most people seemed to be Muslim in the area, there were Catholic schools in town, and it was very possible she was Christian and not subject to Muslim customs — but I got the impression she may have been on a mission to be rescued from Egypt.
Perhaps she was placed into an arranged marriage she wanted no part of. Perhaps she was about to reach a point in her life when she would have been expected to start wearing traditional Muslim garb, such as a head covering. Perhaps she just wanted to leave that part of the world. I will never know. And she obviously had no grasp of the complexities of moving to another part of the world. It’s not like I could have just taken her along with me.
Eventually a young man, perhaps a cousin, dropped by to talk with her after observing or hearing about what was going on. Soon he was joined by an older man, perhaps an uncle. They were both very polite to me and seemed to know a bit more English than the girls, but they also seemed quite concerned about her behaviour and were lecturing her in Arabic.
In the end, I had to leave to catch my train. I shook each of their hands, said goodbye, and headed off on my journey to Cairo. I cringed as I walked away, thinking that might have been offensive to them. The little girl seemed obviously off the hook because of her age, but I was quite concerned for the welfare of the other two women. Especially the one who repeatedly said she loved me. I just hope nothing bad happened to them afterwards. Such behaviour in that part of the world is unheard of. I’m sure she was taking a big risk even talking to me.
Aswan, the end of the line
I’ve now hopped on the train once again to make my way about 4/5 of the way through Egypt, just north of the Sudanese border, where I spent the night in the town of Aswan. Aswan is an old trading crossroads with the rest of Africa, and you can feel the presence of the rest of the continent much more strongly here. It also happens to be the end of the train line from Cairo.
I spent most of the day yesterday wandering through street markets and visiting some Nubian villages on Elephantine Island in the middle of the Nile River. There is lots of rich colour and culture everywhere. The weather has been warm, dry, and sunny all day, but a bit chilly at night. The Egyptian people seem very warm and friendly towards tourists throughout the country.
I checked out the Nubian Museum in town this morning. It is probably the nicest museum I’ve come across in Egypt. It covers the history of the Nubian people who live from here south into Sudan. The museum was established to showcase a collection of saved relics from the beginning of civilisation through the Egyptian period and up through today, spanning thousands of years.
The British designed and built the huge Aswan Dam just south of here in the 1960s, hoping to control the annual Nile floods (which also used to fertilise the riverbanks for good farming). The dam created Lake Nasser, the world’s largest man-made lake, and flooded out many ancient ruins. The UN got a number of countries to donate money and expertise to salvage what they could from the area and to showcase it in the Nubian Museum (and probably others).
This afternoon I caught another cheap ferry across the Nile to the West Bank, where a number of old tombs were built into the side of a mountain. I spent a few hours exploring the various passageways and checking out the inside inscriptions and spectacular views back across the river.
Tonight I’m boarding the overnight train for Cairo again, for a few more days of exploring before flying off to Delhi.
Odd Egyptian Encounter #1: Luxor
When I first arrived at my remote hotel outside Luxor, I was told they were full and that the only available room would cost me extra because it was a little nicer. I was also told they offered meals in their beautiful courtyard. As there was really no other place to eat nearby, I planned to have a snoop around the area, take a nap, and return that evening for dinner. Oddly enough, the full hotel always seemed pretty dead and empty to me, and the courtyard restaurant they claimed they had never seemed too busy either. It must have been another scam, I concluded.
I came out to eat at around 6 PM on my first night and found the courtyard deserted. The hotel manager was sitting around and socialising with some of the locals who stopped by for their daily chat. He was very friendly, offered me tea, and proceeded to talk with me in his fractured English. A local taxi driver, obviously friends with the manager, walked in and joined us for tea and conversation. He appeared to be a dead ringer for Libyan leader Omar Khadafi, down to the threads and all. A big guy, about my age.
I was told the kitchen wouldn’t open until after 7 PM. When the manager stepped aside for a few moments, the taxi driver said he would be happy to have me over to his place for dinner if I was hungry. Trying to be culturally sensitive to such offers (as I had to be in Fiji) and not wanting to offend, I agreed to accompany him to his house for dinner — putting some weight on the fact that he seemed to be known and trusted around the hotel. My biggest concern, as always, was getting food poisoning. He seemed thrilled to have a guest and insisted it was all his treat. I figured it would be interesting to experience a Middle Eastern meal with a local Egyptian family.
We hopped into his modern taxi van, and he told me he had to run a few errands to complete the meal. I just waited in the van while he popped into a few neighbourhood shops to get chicken, bread, and some drinks. It became apparent that he had no family and that we would be eating alone together. It was getting dark when he turned down a dirt road that led to his home: a mud shack near the border of some agricultural fields. As far as I could tell, there was no one else living around the immediate area.
Needless to say, I started to feel a bit uncomfortable and a bit vulnerable in such a remote, darkened location. I wasn’t even sure how to get back to the hotel. The house was very basic, with cracked mud walls painted over, few decorations, and sparse furnishings. He was nice, smoked like a chimney (like all good Egyptians), and desperately tried to communicate with me using his broken English. He told me that he had learned the language from conversing with tourists at the hotel over the years. He seemed thrilled to finally have a visitor at his house and retreated to his kitchen to whip up a meal for us.
He brought out a simple spread of barbecued chicken, a vegetable soup, and flatbread. We would try to talk about things, but it wasn’t always easy to understand what he meant. After eating, he seemed eager to sit down next to me on my side of the table. He told me he wanted to hold my hand while we talked.
Now, as odd as that may sound, it is actually quite common to see Egyptian men holding hands and walking arm in arm in Cairo. Nothing is meant by it, but I still didn’t like the idea. Some of the conversation we had also had me a bit concerned. He went on about how he hated women and didn’t believe men and women should be friends. He told me he was divorced and his wife had moved to Cairo with the kids. He seemed quite bitter towards her. He also mentioned having once met some married men. It was hard to decipher what he was saying with his poor English.
My alarm bells were starting to go off, and I began making excuses about how tired I was from not being able to sleep on the overnight train from Cairo the previous night and how I really needed to get back to my hotel room for a good night’s sleep (even though it was only about 7:30 PM). He suggested giving me a massage to help me relax. I started insisting that I really needed to get back to my hotel, trying to be nice, but also quite adamant about getting out of there.
He finally complied with my wishes and took me home, but not before insisting on arranging to meet me the next day. Still wanting to be polite, I agreed to allow him to ferry me around the local sites in his taxi. I was very relieved to get out of there, and vowed (to myself) never to return.
For the rest of my time in Luxor, I had a very difficult time getting rid of him. He kept trying to get me back to his home, and I kept making excuses not to go. He was taxiing me around, as he was doing for other hotel guests, but he was also refusing to charge me any money. “You pay me later”, he would always say — forcing me to arrange another time to meet with him for another taxi ride.
At one point, he failed to meet me at an arranged time to transport me to my next chosen tourist attraction. After being twenty minutes overdue, I thought for a moment I was finally free of him and jumped into another taxi. On the way back to the hotel, he managed to spot me in this other cab. He whipped his taxi around, flagged down the other taxi driver, and got into a huge argument in Arabic with him over me — insisting that I was his customer and that he be allowed to transport me for the rest of my journey. He was quite upset. It was all very unnerving.
The unfortunate thing about this odd encounter is that it made me feel uncomfortable enough to leave Luxor a bit earlier than I had wanted. I could have easily spent another day in the area touring the fascinating ancient ruins. I finally told him that I was going to Aswan, a town farther south. I had to assure him I would return a few days later even though I had already booked my train ticket straight back to Cairo from Aswan with no intention of stopping back in Luxor again. This seemed to be the only way I could make an easy break free of him.
When he drove me to the train station on my last day, I pulled him out a generous payment that was more than enough to cover all his taxi service and the meal he fed me. He seemed very pleased and quickly tucked the cash into his wallet, with no hesitation or suggestion of giving me any change.
The experience left me wondering… he was probably one of the world’s greatest hustlers — but I will never quite be sure what exactly he was hustling me for!
You must be logged in to post a comment.