Cairo was founded in 969 AD and is not only the Egyptian capital but the world’s 16th largest metropolis and the largest city in the Arab world. As a political and religious hub Cairo exerts a great deal of influence over Egypt as a whole.
If you fancy a city break, or are planning to go backpacking in Egypt, you need to visit Cairo. This bustling metropolises doesn’t have to be overwhelming, view my tips and plan your trip today.
Cairo Facts
• The world’s largest collection of Egyptian antiquities is on display in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.
• Cairo is known as ‘Al Qahirah’ in the Arabic language, meaning ‘The Triumphant’ or ‘The Victorious’.
• Cairo’s Al-Azhar University is the oldest in Egypt.
• Cairo has variously been governed by Pharaohs, Caliphs, Romans, Turkish khedives and British/French colonisers.
Attractions
The Great Pyramids of Giza are situated on the outskirts of the city and are one of the world’s biggest tourist attractions. The Pyramids date back to 2560 BC and are thought to have been built as a tomb for Khufu, a fourth dynasty Egyptian Pharaoh.
The Citadel, a complex full of beautiful and historic mosques and museums, is one of Cairo’s most visited sights.
On an island in the Nile stands the Cairo Tower, an impressive structure which provides spectacular views of the surrounding area. The revolving restaurant at the top of the tower is a must visit.
Shopping fanatics can’t visit Cairo without paying a visit to Khan al-Khalili – one of the world’s largest markets. The market stocks a huge array of goods, from perfumes to jewellery, clothing to knick-knacks; make sure you give bartering a go!
Cairo is a prime destination for museum lovers. The Egyptian Museum in particular is well worth a visit as it houses the world’s grandest and biggest collection of Egyptian antiquities.
My Experience in Cairo
To find out what Cairo is really like, I ventured off the tourist track on a shopping trip and had the experience of a lifetime.
As slums go, the settlements that have sprung up in Cairo’s ‘City of the Dead’ are unusually atmospheric. As Egypt’s capital has grown around the cemeteries along the Moquattam Hills, such prime real estate could hardly be wasted on the deceased.
Five million of Egypt’s poorest residents flooded in, setting up shanty homes and settlements amongst the tombs and graves. Mysterious, unknown, and foreboding for both foreigners and Cairenes alike, the City of the Dead comes to life on Friday mornings, with a weekly market that draws tens of thousands in search of trinkets or treasure.
My minibus slowed down only slightly to let passengers jump on and off at the front entrance, an unpaved street that winds for about a mile through the tombs of the now inner-city graveyard. Smells, sounds and images were almost overpowering.
A motorcycle stacked with dozens of camel legs was propped beside huge buckets filled with goat, donkey and sheep entrails. Large pails of cow liver and raw fat sat in the sun, while women and men with blood up to their elbows yelled back and forth bargaining with potential buyers over the din of the crowd.
“Liver! Stomach! Intestines!” a black-clad woman shouted as she pushed her way through the crowd, carrying a dirty plastic bucket swarming with flies atop her head.
The mass of people was so thick I had to step between vendors for the chance to stand still and catch my bearings. Children dressed in threadbare clothing stood in doorways and played in garbage piles, and I looked inside tombs to see cement coffins being imaginatively re-used as ironing boards, dinner tables, benches or beds. Laundry lines crisscrossed the sky, strung up between gravestones, and television antennas were propped on low, flat roofs, powered by wires illegally spliced from nearby mosques.
A row of merchants sold junk picked out of the garbage or stolen off the streets, all neatly displayed on small blankets in the dust: piles of broken kids’ toys; smashed remote controls; old Tupperware lids; coils of wire; pieces of computer; here and there an old watch, a magazine.
Some of the merchandise hinted at desperation: innards of long-outdated typewriters, dented hubcaps, old bedsprings, a piece of twine, a broken phone receiver that someone, somewhere, might need.
“Does this work” I asked, pointing to an old VCR with a smashed display panel. “Yes, it works,” the man replied, brushing the dust off of it with his sleeve. “Can I test it?” I prompted. He looked around at the mud and cement walls along the street and shrugs. There was no electrical power in sight.
He did have an alarm clock whose second hand was clicking confidently around the dial. I offered him a pound.
“Are you kidding?” He laughed. “It’s worth more than four!”
“Two” I said.
“By God, I wouldn’t sell it to my mother for that!”
I waved my hand and feigned walking away.
“Wait!” He said. “May God curse you. Take it for three,” and shoved it in my hands.
“I can buy a new one for only three and a half!” I countered, and this went on till a deal was struck.
We both parted, grinning to ourselves at our shrewdness.
On to the used-clothing sellers, their merchandise heaped in mountains on plastic tarps, with crowds of people digging through them indiscriminately. As I rifled through a mound of clothing, a man passing by leant over and muttered: “don’t touch those clothes, they’re from the dead.” I looked at him in disbelief. “They take them off their bodies before they are even cold.” A woman to my right overheard, and laughed. “Why should that stop you? They don’t need them anymore.”
Some of these clothes come from the West, starting as aid but gradually acquiring value as they filter down the supply chain. But other sources are more dubious. One friend told me the doormen of Cairo’s apartment buildings keep a close eye on their tenants’ health: should anyone die the first to know are scavengers who strip the flat, from the china in the cupboards to the clothes on the corpse, before the relatives get a chance to claim their inheritance.
Despite the warning, I found a great fleece button-up shirt. I haggled it down from two dollars to fifty cents, but had to pay five cents extra for the plastic bag to carry it away.
Up the street were the shoe sellers, their produce not always in pairs. “This one almost matches,” a vendor told me. “They are both black”.
“Yes, but they are different styles.”
“Then let me make you a deal. You get one shoe for half price.”
The live animal market offers every kind of species from East Africa and Sudan: monkeys, hawks, badgers, weasels, parrots, fish, all packed dozens to a cage. In a large wire container filled five feet high with desert tortoises, those at the bottom were clearly being crushed. Kids crowded round, poking the animals with sticks and throwing cigarettes into the cages. I asked about a desert falcon, but at eighty guineas it was out of my reach.
“What do you feed him?” I asked.
“Anything… bugs, meat, fish, fruit,” he replied. I didn’t know hawks ate fruit, but he was already busy with a stick, fighting children away from the poisonous snakes.
Just around the corner a taxidermist offered ferocious-looking stuffed versions of the same animals for sale. They looked diabolically creepy, fitted with cheap glass eyes taken from dolls, and then given evil grins with bared teeth or open beak, smeared with fake blood. A goose fitted with bloody fangs was particularly unsettling.
I veered off a sidestreet into the coin sellers’ alley, and sifted through some old coins, presented in bowls or old socks: Ottoman, Byzantine, Greek, and Roman treasures illegally pilfered from archaeological sites or skilfully forged from melted-down copper wire.
The appliance section brought back childhood memories: an old Fridgedaire, bathroom sinks with bronze claws, hand-powered washing machines, coal-heated irons, mantles and awnings ripped from churches and mansions, dusty chandeliers with two or three crystals remaining. Next to these were rows of old and new bikes and motorcycles, some of them with a chain and lock still around the back wheel.
“Do you have the key to the locks?” I asked.
“No, but it is very cheap to cut, you can go to any mechanic’s shop,” was the reply.
As they say in Cairo – what you lose on Thursday, you can find in the Friday market.
Piles of aging military equipment were grouped together: gas masks, empty mortar shells, cracked range scopes for cannons, and outdated nautical equipment. Then printing presses, old couches, a rowing machine, piles of cracked records, empty bottles, stacks of ancient postcards, knives, stuffed teddy bears and a saddle for a camel.
The market ends under a new highway, built so that wealthier Cairenes can drive over the cemetery rather than through it, and the much coveted under-the-bridge sites are occupied by more established vendors such as antiques dealers, the electronics repairmen, the ‘forbidden’ movie sellers, and the dog-mating market.
Here men and boys had brought dogs of all types and sizes to bargain for the price of a mating. Once the deal is struck the men form small circles around the two dogs and watch analytically, hands on their chins, nodding their heads in approval. Other sellers wandered around with puppies, the results of previous mating sessions, to be traded as guard dogs for the farmers in the south.
By this time my shoes and hands were covered with the cemetery’s fine grey dirt, and my clothes and hair permeated with the smell of burning plastic and garbage. At the bus stop the children who had pestered me for the last three hours lost interest and wandered away.
It had been a good morning’s work. I had one shirt, probably stripped from a corpse, and an alarm clock that still seemed to work. It could have been worse. I might have bought more.