Cairo
Exhilarating, noisy, seething, sprawling and confusing, its medieval heart beating within a modern, chaotic, traffic-choked body, Cairo is a city that lives non-stop, 24 hours a day.
Here you can be zipping along a highway and see 4500-year-old pyramids on the skyline; spend pennies buying bananas and oranges from a donkey-pulled cart and splash out downtown on designer clothes, finely-wrought gold jewellery or the latest electronics.
In this city of a thousand minarets, where families can live on rooftops and generations of children grow up among the tombs in the ‘City of the Dead’, are Christian churches that date back to the 4th century and splendid palaces in palm-filled gardens.
A powerful sun burns through air turned blue with pollution. Men wielding flimsy brooms battle against the tide on waterlogged backstreets after a winter downpour. On narrow alleys quishy with mud, women draped in black from head to ankle sidestep the worst of the gathered detritus of daily life. In modern suburbs, avenues of smart residences are set back from tree-centred boulevards.
A forest of satellite dishes clings to crumbling mudbrick apartment blocks; mobile phones have an Oriental ring. Donkeys wait patiently by dark doorways, horses plod before carts, oblivious to anything motorised.
On the roads, tiny black and white taxis – elderly Fiats battered and bruised but undaunted – negotiate for space among people-packed minibuses, dust-caked vans, motorbikes, Mercedes and BMWs. Somehow four lanes of horn-blasting, headlamp-flashing traffic squeeze at speed onto three-lane highways.
At night, Cairo presents another face, a glittering fairytale city of lights. The Nile is at its most beguiling as friends meet to stroll along the Corniche. Tiny boats, little bobbles of green and pink lights, zip across the river, floating restaurants beckon and smart highrise hotels silently proclaim their importance.
Useful links
Egyptian Tourist Authority
Added 2008/07/03 @ 13:56:39
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