Egypt & Jordan, Pt 4
Our sleeper train brought us back to Cairo for one more day. We had a few choices, and decided to go for the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. This is the oldest surviving man-made structure, and it's held up decently well. Some of the pyramids around it, presumably of similar age, looked entirely like heaps of rubble, and Brad was initially doubtful that they were indeed pyramids (and that guides weren't just having a laugh by pointing to random dunes and convincing naive tourists that they're historical), but we went into one and found a lot of hieroglyphs, so they were genuine. Our tour guide for the site did have us pretty skeptical about anything he said by the end of the tour, after spouting a lot of nonsense about the Egyptians possibly having "anti-gravity technology" to move the stones for the pyramids and about the Sphinx potentially having been built 10,000 years ago when Egypt was a jungle... this was the only instance of a bad guide on our whole tour, so I guess we got off easy.
After the pyramid, we had the whole afternoon free. Our hotel wasn't very central to any of the sights in Cairo, but Brad really wanted to see some of the town, and convinced me that we needed to go out on our own and brave the subway system to see a neighborhood referred to as "Coptic Cairo". But first, there was an even more dangerous task ahead of us ... we had to CROSS THE STREET. Now, I'm no country gal, and I consider myself pretty well-traveled, but the traffic in Cairo was hair-raising. Like in China, the horn is used in place of turn signals and rear-view mirrors to indicate the location of the car; the lane lines are rough guides, rarely followed, and traffic lights are almost non-existent. Our first night in Cairo was a lesson in humility when we decided to go to a restaurant our guide had highly recommended, but could not get there because the four-lane street in between us and the restaurant appeared completely impassable. Fortunately, back in Cairo again, we had the advantage of daylight and a traffic cop, which enabled us to scurry across for our chicken tikka.
As crazy as the traffic is, the subway in Cairo is perfectly clean, organized, and efficient. (Although our guide said that, had it been a work day, the trains would have been jammed and our impression altogether different.) I've learned that most subways are pretty much the same, with a few little quirks in each place. In Cairo, the quirks were that there were some female-only and some male-only cars (we avoided both with little difficulty - I think there's probably only one of each per train), and that each train had a set of doors for entrance only and a set of doors for exit only, which everybody completely ignored, shoving on or off the train through the nearest doors.
Coptic Cairo was a neat little cluster of eclectically-designed buildings. Points of interest included a church built on the site where Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were said to have sheltered on their flight through Egypt, and the site where the Pharaoh's daughter found baby Moses. (Conveniently located not three minutes apart from one another!) The site was a mishmash of cultures and languages, and even religions (Coptic Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Jewish), and fascinating for that aspect.
For dinner, Ahmad took us to an Egyptian chain restaurant called "Gad". I wasn't bowled over by it - it was the standard Mediterranean fare that we get at home, off carts, with better quality - but it may just have been that my stomach was acting up and I wasn't in the mood for any kind of food. The day before, Ahmad had taken us to an even more authentic restaurant for koshary. The restaurant only served this one menu item, in different sizes, so they just counted heads as we came in and brought up steaming bowls of this mixture of noodles, lentils, fried onions, and other things that looked like seeds. We poured a nice tomato sauce over the mixture and stirred. It was exactly the sort of thing I like - warm and hearty without any particularly startling flavors - and the fact that we were the only non-Egyptians in the restaurant had made me even happier. I'm not really sure what had gotten to my digestive system between one dinner and the next, but I consider myself lucky - I had two days of not wanting to eat much and a little extra time in the restroom, while some on the trip were laid out flat and groaning.
Originally, the plan had been to take our time getting to the Sinai Peninsula the next day, and that night climb Mt. Sinai in the dark to be at the top for sunrise. However, the guide wisely kept reminding us of the early hour we'd have to get up, and how very, very cold it is at the top of the mountain, so we all agreed to a change of plans and decided to head out early in the morning for the long drive to Mt. Sinai, and climb in the late afternoon to be atop the mountain for sunset. It was a good plan. The drive was very long, although we did get to see (sort of) the Suez Canal on the way, and nap and read. It would have been longer, if we had had to deal with all the checkpoints along the way, but apparently, the checkpoint guys can be bribed with newspapers, which are a rarity on the peninsula, and small amounts of cash.
After the heat of Cairo, the peninsula felt downright chilly, but when we got started on our walk up the mountain, I quickly shed my coat, heated from the exertion. It was a 2.5 hour walk most of the way up the mountain, followed by an ascent of 750 "stairs" - the term was used loosely here to mean "aggregations of rocks that vaguely resemble steps, if you squint". One can hire a camel to take you to the steps, and a man followed us for the first half-hour or so with a few camels, waiting to see if we lazy tourists would give in and take the easy way, but none of us did. It was a more arduous climb than I expected, but I can at least be proud that I did it on my own power, without dromedary aid.
The top of the mountain was quite cold, exposed to the wind; we bought chocolate bars and water and made jokes about commandments and waited impatiently for the sunset. When it happened, it was all too quick, and then we were trotting down the mountain again. Overall, the descent was fine, but doing those 750 steps in the dark with my jelly legs and sore knees was terrifying and not something I'd soon repeat.
Thus ends the Egypt portion of our tour.