fred wobus . com

At first I was convinced that it had all changed. I was straining my eyes to look out for signs of rising radical Islamism. I caught myself counting the number of woman in veils, guessed the age at which girls started wearing them and rigged up numbers of how many of those were doing it against their will.

How silly – What was I comparing it to? Maybe to a painting of camel market that I saw at an exhibition about the European obsession with all things oriental. Only that the Austrian painter, Leopold Carl Müller, who extensively travelled Egypt, did so in the 1870s – my last time in Cairo had been in the summer of 1999.

One might suspect that a lot has changed since ’99 as the shockwaves of 911 obliterated the geopolitical situation as we once knew it. However, this isn’t going to be political at all. I just wanted to see a very interesting city again and revisit some landmarks that captured my imagination seven years ago.

This trip was to start, like so many visits to foreign cities, with a taxi ride. There was an infinite choice of drivers who were all apparently called Mohammed and exquisitely keen to earn my custom. All of them were my friend and they were all going to make me their best price – the customary friendship fare. But none of them got lucky that day. I insisted on waiting to be picked up by my travel agents tour guide. That fact was not easily communicated to a crowd of gesticulating drivers, each of whom had at least 5 mouths to feed and a set of charming children’s photographs in their wallets to prove it.

I did not stay long enough in that spot in the arrival hall to gaze at family photographs and even more business cards with their cousin’s mobile phone number.

In fact, a phone number was all I had to tell my guide and driver where I was. After half an hour of persistent refusal and all too honest claims that I really was getting picked up, he did finally arrive and apologized for the delay.

Cairo was currently experiencing a sandstorm and the airport was swathed in thick clouds of dust. The low visibility had led to various delays and cancellations on the flights of his other clients, whereas my flight had been lucky to have landed at all while so many other planes had been diverted to different airports. Once we left the terminal building I started to realize why.

Although the highway was packed bumper to bumper one could only see a couple of cars in front and behind. As we approached the city centre, the traffic and the sandstorm thickened as myriads of beaten up rust buckets were billowing black fumes from their exhausts.

The highway ploughed through underdeveloped suburbs where houses consisted of no more than clay and corrugated iron. Only laundry lines added dashes of colour.

People that once owned the land in the path of the highway had obviously not been compensated by the builders, as they had not shifted their homes, but merely bowed out of the way a little. Some houses were so dangerously close to the traffic, that had the road not been built on stilts, it would have been encased by now with leaning 3-4 storey houses and woven into a tunnelling cocoon by their laundry lines.

During the first hour in the taxi I saw very little variation in the residential structures that lined the highway and I started to wonder about the real colour of this city. The smog had given a muddy yellow hue to everything. So after all, it was smog, not just a sandstorm explained Nour, my guide. A sandstorm would have been entirely natural and apparently quite common at this time of year, but this one felt different.

The scirocco sandstorm of Northern Africa is laden with tons of very fine dust, which get into every little crevice. You feel it in your hair, in your mouth and the constant urge to blow your nose leads to rainbow-coloured results in your hanky.

This sandstorm however consisted of very little dust and thereby it made sense that it was more connected with the 3 billion old cars without catalytic converters and home-made carburettors.

“You have been upgraded to Pyramids View room, Sir” and I guessed from the effusively courteous announcement by the hotel check-in staff that this was a good thing. To put the bold claim to the test I went straight to the room and to take a photo of the view from the balcony. Not even the most advanced digital enhancement techniques could have detected the faintest of triangular structures in the mud coloured cloud on the horizon. I would have to live without seeing the wonders of the ancient world from the comfort of my own room.

Nour asked what I had planned for the evening, but apart from sampling the hotel buffet and getting a good nights sleep I had nothing particular in mind. The evening took a surprising turn of events when Nour asked me join him for a trip to town. I was slightly baffled and missed the short window of opportunity that he allowed me to answer. He simply too my confused facial expression as a sign of agreement and gave me 10 minutes to get changed.

He had just split up with his fiancée and called of the wedding just 3 days before the big day, so he was in absolutely no mood for a quiet night in.

We walked a 100m from the hotel – “It is more expensive when the taxi sees you in front of the hotel” and Nour hailed a cab and started negotiating the cheaper local tariff while I was hiding out of view. After seeing me get in on the cheap ride, a seemingly disgruntled cabbie set off to Hussein Square in the old town of Cairo, where I expected Nour to be heading for the next nightclub where I’d end up paying for his beer. But first we stopped at his apartment for Nour to get changed and although his mum would be at home, she was always keen to meet his friends.

Nour’s house was considerably sturdier than those we passed on the highway earlier, but it was nevertheless a local neighbourhood, whose dimly lit alleys don’t usually attract tourists. The roadside café was packed with men smoking water pipes and along the street front all sorts of merchants and labourers were plying their trade in the cold blue sheen of neon lights. The yellow smog gave the light a warmer hue, but it made the scene even more eerie.

The driver was told to wait and 3 floors up a small plump woman with a friendly voice and warm eyes opened the door to us. Nour disappeared into the bathroom and I was motioned to the living room by his mum who was still wearing a night robe and a hair net.

We must have walked in on her evening entertainment. The TV was set to local show on the life of the Prophet Mohammed – as I could tell by the English subtitles. It was only a short episode – part animated, part re-enacted – which gave it the look and feel of a children’s bedtime cartoon.

[thumb:99:l] The next program was a kind of concert or possibly a televangelist prayer show. The singer who was wearing the traditional Arab dress emotionally clung onto a microphone stand and prayed and sang to a crowd of uniformly dressed men. While the front man and his background vocals were all in black, the members of the audience were all wearing a white “thobe” robe. Everyone was wearing a “ghutra” headscarf held in place by the round thick knotted “agal” cord. The subtitles – this time in Arabic – gave it the look and feel of a Karaoke video.

[thumb:100:l] The sitting room was lit with neon tubes and the decorations were predominantly pink and yellow. Several plastic toys, like big Tweety bird out the Tex Avery cartoons, adorned the book shelf. I sneaked into the kitchen, and discovered a cage with 3 sleeping budgies amongst stacks of tin pots and pans. The cage was covered with rags for the night.

Nour had changed out of the business suit into a casual shirt and jacket. On the way in I had noticed an old man in the lobby who seemed to have an interesting face for a photo, so I asked how much tip one would give an old man to take his picture. Having just been to the bank I only carried large bills, but Nour’s mum promptly proffered some small bills for the old man’s cigarette fund. There was no convincing her otherwise, but I promised her to pay back her son later.

On the way to the lift we passed a staircase that had atmosphere of a medieval dungeon. The walls, steps and even the ceiling were solid black and nothing in that dark burrow reflected the ambient light. The steps were strewn with garbage as far as one could see and it might have been the way into hell’s kitchen itself, or as Nour explained – access to the waste disposal unit of the building. Those stairs were solely for servant personnel – the tenants were allowed to use the lift instead.

The old man was still sitting on his plastic chair in the lobby and as if in slow motion he got up and walked over towards the lift. I wasn’t quite sure whether he had intended to open the creaky cast iron doors for us. Nour explained my plan to him and handed over the baksheesh leaving me no time to issue further instructions. The man simply froze where he was standing and looked straight at me and my camera lens.

The resulting photo is the title shot of this story and my favourite of the whole trip. I have taken countless images of anonymous locals with and without consent or baksheesh. Farmers on rice paddies in Indonesia have the habit to stand up as straight as broom handle and smile manically. Admittedly old folks usually make the most interesting subjects, but this gentle old Bedouin lift warden had me captivated. He didn’t get into pose or adjust himself when told he was about to have his photo taken, he simply stopped, waited for something to happen and when I put my camera away took this as a sign to sit down again.

The taxi driver was in a far less professional mood and started complaining about us having taken so long. Somehow I had the murky feeling we weren’t going to get away with the local fare that Nour had negotiated at the start. Lo and behold, upon arrival at Hussein square, the rate had risen to a moderate tourist rip-off charge. A compromise was reached and the driver was promised the return fare at an agreed hour this evening. At least that is what I thought Nour had told him. From there I still expected him to head for the nearest nightclub with plush leather chairs, mirrored walls and glittery disco balls.

In fact we had arrived at the biggest bazaar of the old town to breeze into a traditional café for a cup of tea. And that’s when things were beginning to fall into place. Earlier on I had embarrassed myself to mention a nasty bruise on Nour’s forehead. What I had taken for a remnant of an unfortunate encounter with a lower than expected door frame turned out to be a sign of his unbroken devotion to Islam. When praying the zealous Muslim hits the ground so hard as to leave a permanent mark over the years.

Some say that there is a connection between the assassination of the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and his religious dedication, or lack thereof. Apparently Sadat was not the enthusiastic follower of the faith that some of his compatriots would have liked. The lack of telltale signs on his forehead was for all to see, so one day he decided to apply chemicals to his forehead just above the eyes to simulate the typical praying bruises.

After a month ruthless crackdown on communists, journalists, students and Islamists it was supposed to appease his radical religious opponents. The latter got wind of his trick and issued a fatwa which approved capital punishment by hand grenade. Members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad meted out the sentence in accordance with Allah’s will during a military parade in October 1981.

On previous occasions I had either not noticed or had been too embarrassed to ask. Nour told proudly me that he had become a devout Muslim after years of decadent debauchery. The immoralities of a drinker, womanizer and trickster trying to run a small time business had caught up with his culture’s ethics and eventually he had found salvation in the holy book of Koran. So that is how I got around the certain prospect of paying for my guide’s beer at an overpriced local discotheque.

Back on the subject of the visible prayer bruises he cautioned me to simply take people sporting such marks for a good person. With the sincerity of a primary school teacher he explained that some will only pray as hard as they can, but in fact only pretend to follow Islam in order to impress their fellow citizens. But as soon as Friday prayer is over these hypocrites would shamelessly go back to a life of stealing, gambling and adultery.

While we were still on the subject I started to look around to see who was wearing the mark of devotion and the first person that caught my eye was a police man in uniform and another lurking taxi driver.

A shisha water pipe filled with fragrant apple tobacco was brought to the table followed by hot cops of tea stuffed with mint leaves. Nour sipped the tea, puffed his pipe and politely declined the offer to acquire new reading material by a young man selling books from a vendor’s tray. The young Somali woman hawking paper handkerchiefs wasn’t quite so lucky, as she was promptly sent packing. An old woman who offered to read my palms didn’t even get as far our table as she was shooed away by the waiter.

The waiters weren’t just serving the customers and keeping the peddlers out; they were also constantly rearranging the furniture. When we had first arrived, Nour and I had the use of a large table, four chairs, a bench and a bulky trunk to sit on. After having to get up a few times, because said sitting implements were being shifted under our bottoms, the little corner of the café that we initially settled down in had shrunk to half a table and two rickety wooden chairs by the time the clock struck 11 o’clock.

We were now surrounded by women sharing a smoke, men playing backgammon, youngsters trying out ring tones on their mobiles, extended families entertaining their grandmothers and the obligatory crowd of Japanese tourists snapping away with their digital cameras.

The scent of mint leaves in the air, the clicking of the backgammon checkers and the frantic flashes of Nippon gadgetry all mingled with the yellow haze that had the large square firmly in its dusty grip.

The conversation took us to football and the Egyptian win over the Ivory Coast in the African Cup of Nations back in February. My match analysis – Egypt was first lucky not to lose to a superior Ivorian side then unlucky to have a goal disallowed and then downright incompetent of scoring from the penalty spot in extra time and finally jammy to scrape a win in the penalty shootout – was not very warmly received. In the end we settled on Ivorian captain Didier Drogba as the scapegoat for lost hopes on the side of the Ivory Coast and raised our tea glasses to Egypt.

The only thing that spoiled a good cuppa that night was a generous helping of mint leaves in every glass. Mint tea gave me flash backs of being ill during child hood when a grandmother is around. I therefore preferred the flavour to be associated with chewing gum.

Every table in the café had small vase with freshly picked mint leaves from the back garden and I observed several punters helping themselves to seconds and munching down entire stalks of the perennial herb.

Suffices to say, that I preferred my tea black and mint-less, but the only way to achieve this was to remove the leaves as soon as it was served. The unsurpassable language barrier didn’t allow me to communicate my dislike for toothpaste flavoured tea.

Later in the evening, it had turned midnight, Nour got comfortable to explain his turn of fortunes concerning the cancelled wedding. Things started to turn sour in the build up to the wedding when he had turned to his fiancée’s girl friend for advice and was promptly suggested to marry her instead as there was no money in the other family. Somehow this got round the family of his wife to be and the father in law wasn’t pleased to be called a scrooge. But apparently that was exactly what he was, because he’d been constantly quarrelling over money for the wedding. The prospective wife was then unmasked by her “friend” as a simple minded small town girl who had her eyes set on his money. A woman with such low education was obviously not his type of marrying material and the prospect of a militant tight-fisted father soured the prospect even more. In the end Nour pulled the plug on family intrigues and called the wedding off. Had things gone smoothly he would have been a married man by this time the next day.

All the advice I would have had to offer – drown all worries in several glasses of locally brewed moonshine – would have fallen on deaf ears. A good old-fashioned sugar rush was to lift the spirits and we left the café for a dessert shop. The place sells milk-based sweets at midnight and possibly at all other times of the day as well. The must-have dish of choice is “Om-Ali”, which means “the mother of Ali”. It got me thinking what Cassius Clay’s mum had to do with sweet milk, when I remembered that Mohammed Ali was a much revered prophet in Islam, who had been around long before the greatest boxer of all time had changed his name.

It turned out that neither boxers nor prophets were involved in the creation or naming of this dessert. Legend has it that Om Ali was the first wife of a great sultan. When he died, his second wife started an ill-fated war of succession that left her dead. Om Ali celebrated the occasion with a new kind of dessert that was distributed to the poor in the land.

Another story involves again a sultan, who started to feel peckish during a hunting trip in the Nile delta. The hunting party stopped for food at a poor village along the way. The locals called upon their best cook, Umm‘Ali, to feed the hungry monarch. She filled a large pan with the little they had – scrapings of stale wheat flakes with bits of nuts – and put it in the oven together with milk and sugar. It was so well received that the sultan went back again and thus the dessert became known by its creator.

But all this is mythical twaddle to Charles Perry of the Los Angeles Times who credits an English nurse by the name of O’Malley for the invention of this great Egyptian sweet.

The Om-Ali on Hussein square was exceedingly yummy, with its heaps of coconut and crystallised sugar. The crispy texture came from the use of corn flakes which, having been invented by the infidels in the New World a few centuries after the reign of the Ottoman Turks must have been a local variation on the classic recipe.

The dish was prepared in a giant aluminium hot tub full of bubbling milk that was constantly being stirred by an old man wearing a blue jeans cap on his head. Several other employees were rolling out filo pastry, grating coconut, chopping nuts and winnowing raisins.

Recognizing a worthwhile photo opportunity I got my camera out, but the head chef immediately stepped in to prevent any evidence from reaching the outside world. No smiles and baksheesh could convince him to consider. The surreal scene of nocturnal pastry making by flour dusted trainees and their Levis-capped chef surrounded by all those huge vats of sloshing, bubbling milk was not to be captured on photo. The moment will have to remain only in my memory and when I think back to it I can still taste the sweet milky delight with that special crunch.

Armed with a couple of tinfoil trays of Om-Ali we made our way back to the road where the quarrelling cabbie found us again. Half a day earlier we had promised him a return fare and the agreed pick time up had already passed for several hours. Slightly embarrassed to be caught perjuring to a member of the automotive trade, he on the other hand seemed extremely pleased to see us. It turned out that he had waited along the sidelines all night in order to get a paid fare back to the district where Nour lived. Incidentally that was also where his family was waiting for him to come back with a bit of spare cash for groceries from the night market.

I will never know whether our fare ever made it into the hands of his wife to buy vegetables, but it was nice to know that after all the wrangling over a couple of Egyptian pounds we all got home happy and safe. But only just.

There is the anomaly that developing countries have around 80 per cent of the world’s road accident fatalities despite having only 20 per cent of the vehicles in the world. Egypt has only recently been knocked off the top spot but it still averages more than 16 road deaths per year for every 10,000 registered vehicles, compared to an average of two to three deaths per year in developed countries.

And just before being allowed to peacefully nod off at the hotel we were treated to an exciting demonstration of how that grisly figure came about. Most countries make the use of head lamps mandatory during night hours so the driver can see where he’s going and the other motorists can see what it going to hit them, before it does.

Egypt has put this bit of common sense into practise with an interesting twist. In the dark it is considered to be an act of courtesy to switch one’s head lamps off, if other cars are seen to be approaching. That civility of passing each other blindfolded is meant not to dazzle the other driver and it might have worked in the olden days of donkey carts going at walking pace. It might even work out in the country on a dead straight three lane dual carriage way during full moon, but whenever this customary behaviour developed – it was before the introduction of fast cars and seven lane inner city motorways. The motorway didn’t actually have seven lanes, it had no lanes at all, at least not any that were marked by white lines on the tarmac. The width of a lane was dictated purely by the dimensions of the car and as the size of cars varied from a measly Citroen 2 CV to a 14 axle road train, so did the number of lanes at any given time.

It takes a lot of practise to navigate the frantic traffic based purely on instinct, but it takes divine intervention to survive it in the reduced visibility of a night time smog-induced sandstorm. Our driver who had done quite well on the way out but he had problems finding his way back. Nour jumped in to help guide him to the right motorway exits. At one of them Nour was too slow to read the sign and our driver was too busy adjusting the car stereo, so we shot straight past the turn off. Any other responsible motorist would have kept on going to the next bridge or found an alternative way to turn around, as this is neither legal nor a good idea to do in fast moving traffic at 2 o’clock in the morning.

TV shows like “100 best police car chases” have scenes recorded by surveillance cameras at motorway junctions where people back up on the hard shoulder to steer onto the missed turn off. These films are shot in countries where motorways have hard shoulders, and even if they weren’t built for reversing, they do serve a purpose.

The lack of markings on the Cairo expressway allowed no judgement whether there had ever been an extra lane that was reserved for safety reasons. Our driver stopped in mid traffic and pulled over to the crash barrier where he reversed back up into the oncoming traffic while honking his horn for good measure.

I know that western tourists easily feel queasy when immersed in the traffic frenzy of foreign countries, but watching the faces of other locals is usually a good indicator when things really get out of hand. This time Nour was as shocked as I was, but did his best to calm down his frightened passenger and watched in terror the onslaught of swerving vehicles and unlit donkey carts.

When we had miraculously traversed half a mile of busy motorway in reverse gear, the tape had rewound to play cheerful Arab pop music. However it could do little to wipe the frightened look off my pale face. The driver had a good laugh and insisted that the short cut had saved me money by not having to circumnavigate the entire Cairo expressway again.

In the end I got my head down in the room that still had no view of the greatest wonder of the ancient world. However, I had the feeling that the pyramids would still be there and even the hawkers and begging children would still be there. I had no doubt that the camel riding tout would still be there and given my refusal to pay for a stroll on a cantankerous ruminant would still drag me into their cousin’s perfume shop.

In fact absolutely nothing had changed at all – Cairo was still kept alive by the same charming madness that I had grown so fond of back in the summer of 1999.

After just 10 hours in the country, I positively looked forward to seeing more of Egypt.

View only the images in the accompanying album …