Egypt, Almost Do-It-Yourself

A dear friend offered us the amazing opportunity to use a week at a resort in Hurghada that she couldn't use and that would otherwise have gone to waste. To this week we added 3 days in Cairo. We travelled with Olympic via Athens and, arriving in Cairo at around 8 pm, we went straight by taxi to the bus station, where a bus would travel all night to get us to Hurghada the following morning.... but that's where the trouble began! In fact, with great difficulty we discovered that the service was seasonal and would start only the following day, contrary to what I had been told at the Egyptian Tourist Board in via Bissolati.

Fine: finding yourself in a city of 20 million inhabitants, at 9 pm, 2 men and 2 women without knowing where to sleep, is not exactly ideal! But at that point the famed Arab cordiality came to the rescue, because the taxi driver who had brought us there decided to take care of us..offering to have us accompanied by a cousin, in his taxi...all the way to Hurghada, which I can't remember whether was 400 or 600 km away! The price he quoted us seemed reasonable and we agreed to talk it over.

So he launched himself once more through the crowded city streets to reach a suburban district, where, in an instant, all his relatives and friends decided to take up "our" situation, discussing at the top of their voices what was best for us to do, because the cousin's taxi was in poor condition and he didn't feel up to tackling such a long journey! The tension rose, at least among us, because by then it was 10.30 pm. In the end we insisted on being taken to an office to book hotels, which were open 24 hours a day and which, fortunately, existed, and we found a 3-star hotel, full of cockroaches and with a third-world bathroom...but at least we found one! the next morning we took the famous bus, we lost a day at the beach, but it was perhaps an even more interesting experience.

In fact the bus, with the TV at full volume, the windows dirty with various bodily humours, nevertheless had 2 hostesses, complete with uniforms - stained too - very kind and pretty, offering at least a free tea...in a not very clean glass. But hospitality is sacred and cannot be refused. The bus ran almost the whole time alongside the Red Sea, and it was interesting to see the sea, the occasional oil platforms, gigantic ships and, on the mainland, desert, a few urban clusters and several police checkpoints. In Hurghada the resort is beautiful, but we discover that the coral reef can only be reached with organised boats: what a disappointment. Oh well... don't look a gift horse in the mouth....! One day we took a trip into the stone desert, with the ritual camel ride; another we went to Karnak and the Valley of the Kings, both meeting high expectations, and another we reached the reef.

Here the emotions were strong, both because when you swam among the tropical fish, you had no time to memorise one species before you saw a thousand others, and because on the way back we saw a group of dolphins following us.....the emotion of seeing animals in the wild arrived unexpected and overwhelming! And then, dolphins are special animals...I found myself laughing and crying at the same time! The time came to go to Cairo, but this time we booked the hotel through Francorosso, directly from Hurghada, which found us a 4-star on Gezira Island (Zamalek). We used the same bus service, which unfortunately still travelled only by day.

In Cairo we visited the Pyramids, which disappointed us greatly, the Arab part with the mosques and the souk, which always hold their charm, and finally...the Cairo Museum, where Tutankhamun's sarcophagus remains to this day, more than 15 years later and with many more trips and many exhibitions seen behind me, the true wonder of the world, for me. I couldn't tear myself away from that solid gold mask and those lapis lazuli eyes, which communicated to me a flow of 6,000 years. Only one other time have I felt this transmission of primordial energy, but there I had also had physical contact..and it was in Sardinia, resting my hands and face on a "door to the afterlife" of granite, 4 metres high, of a Giants' Tomb. Back to Egypt...it is certainly a land capable of offering strong emotions.