Tale guide
Egypt - gateway to the stars
Before we embarked on our visit to my brother in Egypt, we researched a little about this mystical place and just a small amount of reading well and truly captured my imagination. But in retrospect, the information I gleaned from the little I researched, hardly scratched the surface.
My brother, Michael Kim, worked and lived in Cairo for many years prior to the Covid pandemic and his company very generously laid on a young doctor of antiquities to show us around on a private and personal tour that was, in itself, very special.
But, by way of an introduction, try and imagine walking out of a modern, airconditioned airport building into a hot, dusty city of 21.3 million people who work, eat, sleep, play and seemingly rush around the city at breakneck speed.
It is the sixth largest metro in the world with more than an extraordinary, one billion passenger rides taking place every year.
Our introduction was hair raising enough. Kim met us at the airport, and we climbed into an Egyptian taxi who took us to his expansive flat in downtown Qttamaya, North Cairo, faster than it took us to fly from Johannesburg.
Admittedly, he gave us fair warning not to look out the window, nor take any notice of what was going on around us én route, but the friendly warning didn’t prepare us whatsoever.
I’ve been in some hectic places in Africa before, that make Johannesburg look like a Sunday walk in the park, like Luanda, Nairobi and Lagos, but Cairo takes the cake by a running mile.
Driving in Cairo equates to the Indianapolis 500 except that there are at least 12 million vehicles ranging from heavy duty trucks, busses, cars, bikes (push and motor) and donkey carts navigating the roads, not to mention camels and pedestrians, none of which travel slower than full speed and none of which are under the control of folk who either have been taught to drive or give a damn and apparently without the aid of a traffic control regime!
It is a journey of near misses, howling horns, waving arms and screeching tires which, if you weren’t familiar with it all, you would find somewhat intimidating and in hindsight, nervously amusing.
As we got out of the taxi at our destination and started to regain our breaths and allow our heart rates to subside, I expressed the thought that I thought that people pay big money to have thrills like that on Disney World’s rollercoaster which, I might add, would be a lot safer!
The pyramids of Giza are colossal and way more imposing than any photograph could illustrate.
Standing next to the first level of huge blocks of stone, my six-foot frame shrunk to the size of an ant against the gigantic structure rising almost 450 feet above.
It has tested man for thousands of years as to how the virtually impossible task of moving them into place was achieved, let alone bringing them from wherever they were made.
They were built almost eleven thousand years before Christ. The Great Pyramid was constructed from 2,3 million large limestone blocks weighing 2,6 tonne a piece.
To put this amazing structural feat in context, with all of the engineering knowledge and technology available to man today in the 21st century, we would not be able to build the pyramids if we wanted to. So, it remains a mystery as to how exactly did those ancient Egyptians build those structures.
To add to the mystery of it all, Egyptologists Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert propositioned that the location of the three pyramids of Giza, together with the statue of the Sphinx that lies proud, staring out across the Cairo metropole, are together an identical geometric, terrestrial map of the three stars that make up the ‘Belt’ in the constellation of Orion as it occurred in the sky at the time of the Spring Equinox in 10, 000 BC.
This couldn’t have happened without the mathematical and geological and astronomical knowledge the human race thought it had only learned during the comparatively recent past.
So, there is a school of thought the believes ancient Egypt was aided and abetted by alien forces while another believes the Egyptians worked out how to do it by hand notwithstanding the absence of many answers to the questions of “how?”
Back down on earth meanwhile, one couldn’t help but notice that just about every more modern building in this massive city looked half built!
It turns out that according to local law, property tax is only due on completed buildings, so everyone builds houses, flats and offices with an extra floor on the top or a wing on the side, which are intentionally never completed, thus certified as a partial build against which property tax can’t be levied!
Cairo is a crazy, fast but exciting city. A city housing all of the oldest religions where ancient Coptic Christians and Roman Catholicism, exist in close proximity to majestic Islamic Mosques, and Jewish Synagogues, as well as a multitude of other different sub sects.
Modern Cairo is a tourist mecca in which gambling and liquor, et al, are forbidden for the Egyptians themselves. But if you are a visitor, even from countries in the Arab world who are ordinarily denied these pleasures in their home countries, you are free to partake in all that is on offer.
These pastimes are also contained in particular locations so as to avoid the unnecessary and undesirable contamination of the local population.
We visited the famous Ace Club which is reserved for ex patriots and foreign visitors only. Here we encountered a couple of gentlemen from across the border, clothed in white turbans and flowing white kaftans clearly having an unusually great time.
In the days of the Egyptian empire, Sudan, which is a huge country that lies immediately south of Egypt today, was part of the empire.
There are in fact many more pyramids in Sudan than exist in Egypt.
We were taken to Saqqara, the burial ground of Egyptian kings and royals, serving as the necropolis of the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis. It contains the oldest complete stone building complex known to man, the pyramid of Djoser or otherwise known as the Step pyramid.
Saqqara, together with Giza complexes is the oldest of the seven wonders of the world.
There are also plenty of strange bugs floating around the Nile, as we discovered to our detriment, but then again, I guess bugs are a risk across most of Africa.
Over the years, I have been a victim of malaria on a number of occasions, as well as bouts of yellow fever and black water fever, to mention a few.
This time around however, it was Ann that got struck down by something nobody has ever been able to identify; but so severe was her condition, that she had to be admitted to ICU immediately upon our return home, where she had to stay for almost a fortnight before the doctors got the fever under control.
Aside from catching the bug at the very end of our stay, Cairo was an amazing and unique experience and left me pondering on the many mysteries of the universe we simply have no knowledge of.
