Day 1 Cairo/Giza

If Egyptians are certified by travel guides -- and they unanimously are -- as one of the friendliest people in the world, it is a certificate that doesn't stand up and smack you in the face as you get off your aircraft, breathless with anticipation, and wind into the Cairo International Airport, like we did, thirteen of us. Emirates had flown us in through Dubai, and it was dizzying hoping for the Boeing-777's forward camera to pick up some monuments. The airport is a gloomy, grey excuse for a terminal building, speaking nothing of what lies behind its depressing interiors. Instead of a smile welcoming you to 5,000 years of civilisation -- and a nice little push to the Egyptian economy in the bargain -- you're immediately faced with a signboard warning you that if you've got drugs, you've made a serious mistake choosing to come to Egypt, and you know instantly they're not kidding. Kalashnikov-toting military police are your first friends. The immigration staff are surly. When I went off to look somewhat desperately for kitschy tourism posters (I mean, come on!), all I got was a large mafiosi-type gent hold me by the shoulder and shove me back toward immigration. For a whole minute, I actually thought we'd done something wrong.

Our guide for day 1 was a man called Ahamed (he spent 11.6 seconds driving home its pronunciation to us). Our mini-bus driver Aiman drove us out from the Heliopolis and through much of political Cairo. The grunge and dust that surrounded the exit we emerged from melted nicely into a slick six-lane highway that wound without so much as a turn through much of suburban political Cairo, including Persident Hosni Mubarak's official residence (yawn), the Baron castle (the architects have clearly stolen from Orissa-style temples), the October 6 memorial (which had a half-squad of MiG-21s mounted outside), the Citadel and a few other things I cannot remember now.

I remember wishing the guide would shut up so we could soak Cairo in. For the first 15 minutes in that bus, he just wouldn't let up. Then he began about Israel, and here I found myself on more comfortable territory. Egypt, he proudly pronounced, was the only country that had ever mounted a military assault on Israeli-held territory (the Yom Kippur war of October 1973 in which it snatched back parts of Suez under Nasser's rule). Six October, easily the most trumpeted date on the Egyptian calendar, is immortalised in a road, several government buildings, even a township to the West of the Capital. Either way, Ahamed said he could not understand why Israel "always attacking people". Coming from a pointy-toed shoe-wearing gelled-back hair, tight jeans and blazer John Travolta wannabe lookalike, this was jarring, but I opened the bus window just a slight bit to get some of the outside in.

The plush suburbs rapidly give way to undulating hilly road inexplicably barricaded on both sides by either solid wall or prefabricated iron sheets 10-feet high, and giving motorists (including us, this time) the unseemly feeling of being closed in upon. The walls, constructed not long ago, are actually part of a city beautificiation drive. Why? Beyond them lie as-far-as-the-eye-can-see slums, intermittently broken by spires of a garishly new or soft-focus old mosque depending on which part of the city you're in. That's the solution, we're told. If you can't fix it, hide the ugliness. Many in these slums have university degrees, about 40,000 of which are handed down by the Cairo University every year.

Over very India-like flyovers over fly-infested bazaars, crowds of afternoon lunch-eaters and fruit stores, our bus pulls with a grunt into Giza (pronounced Gizay if you're really getting into the groove), quite simply a part of Cairo but roughly South West on the Nile's West Bank as capital of the Al Jijah governorate (whatever the hell that means). Instinctively, I crane my neck to see if I can any of the pyramids, but Ahamed just shakes his head. We'll have to wait till tomorrow, though there are vistas strewn through Cairo that allow heart-stopping visuals, I hear.

We pull into Pyramid Street (it snakes along the Nile and finally does actually hit the superstrutures on the Giza Plateau) to our hotel, called Zoser, an incongruously luxurious addition to the road. Zoser, a corrupted version of Djoser, was a pharaoh from Egypt's third dynasty and famously made his architect Imhotep build the first step pyramid in Sakkara near Giza. The statue of him at the Antiquities Museum in Cairo is, according to some, the oldest life-size statue found during state-sponsored excavations in 1925. The hotel, at any rate, is quite seemly. After a small interval in the lobby (flooded by Asians), we get our rooms, but there's something about heading to a hotel room that gets me a little edgy. How about getting out for something to eat first?

With the help of a hanger-on businessman called Amr Adel El Shaer (he hangs out outside the hotel to lure tourists away to his papyrus and perfume shop down the road), we find a dhaba-like outfit in a grungy little lane opposite Hotel Europa called Ghazawi. Not particularly clean, but full of affable and large Egyptians, we're treated to pita-bread and a spread of fillings. After accidentally knocking over a large pan of chopped greens (the owner didn't let me pay him back for the loss), I settle for the hummus-filled ones and quickly push about four in. The others tuck into fried eggplant and salad. I said I liked the eggplant, but I actually didn't, but this was Day 1 in a new country, so everything really did seem good. We then trudged back to the hotel for a bit of a nap. I hated this whole nap business to be honest -- I thought i was a crying waste.

After a couple of hours in our rooms, we met in the lobby and were introduced to our new guide -- a peculiarly engaging man called Meleka Shaker, a 40-year-old Copt with a degree in archaeology from Cairo University, a point he would make repeatedly as our companion -- and saviour in some cases -- over the next week or so. Virtually blind in one eye, about five-feet tall and armed with a loquacity that would dispel most into stupors if what he was saying wasn't actually interesting. That was the whole point -- this was an interesting chap, really. He said we could call him Michael, which I personally thought was a little sad, but then tour guides need to do this sort of thing -- anything -- to make stuff easier on their tour groups. Malik was another option, but I suggested (maybe a little emphatically in hindsight) that we call him by his real name. I mean, seriously, how difficult is it for Indians to remember and pronounce Mel-Eck.

We're driven through night-lit Cairo to Khan El-Khaleeli, an Arabic suq (market) that began in 1382, making it one of the oldest markets in the world. Named after the Emir Djaharks el-Khalili, it remains now a bustling, bright and startlingly compact shopping area. Meleka warns us not to buy souvenirs here -- that they're bad quality -- but he couldn't be more wrong. This place rules. Flanked by two mosques on either side of its cafe-lined rampart, Khaleeli bazaar is also where Egyptian Nobel-winning writer and legend Naguib Mahfouz frequently partook of a sheesha and coffee (it is also the location of his Midaq Alley). Mahfouz died on August 30 this year after a lengthy illness following a fall on his head. It's not hard to imagine being transported in every sense just sitting here.

I wander through the narrow serpentine alley-way that bisects the market and after quickly buying some silver jewellery, find the others, all nestled comfortably at one of the cafes up front and pulling with aplomb at a handful of sheeshas being passed around the table. I see them from a distance, and I have to admit it took me whole minutes to convince myself that I was in Cairo. Cairo, itself.

The sheesha (presumably named so for the glass hookah its smoked from) is not new -- it's part of pseudo bar culture in Delhi already) though here there's tobacco apart from the clingy, permament smelling tablets of green apple, apricot or whatever else they've thought of. I grab one and am asked not to inhale. To hell with it -- i pull in deeply and I haven't ever felt better. The apricot gets under your skin though, so if you're ever going to try some, take a few drags and retreat to normal tobacco or you might feel ill.

We are picked up by our bus and leave a still bustling (it always is, apparently) Khaleeli bazaar and wind out back across the Nike bridge through downtown Cairo to a restaurant called Fish Boat, a permamently docked vessel converted for the season into a restaurant. For some reason, nobody wants to eat there (I still have not been able to satisfactorily learn why -- this place looked superb) and are driven by befuddled guide and driver to Peace, a resturant owned by the same people who own Fish Boat, but located in a quietly commercial strip on Pyramid Street itself. The head waiter, who looks uncannily like Stanley Tucci, plies us with beer and cold-drinks first and then brings on the food -- our first proper meal in Egypt. First we're served pita bread and hummus bi tahina (a dip of chana paste and tahini or sesame seed paste, with olive oil, lemon, garlic and chili powder), fresh salad and pickle, a spread that will come to define and encompass this country for me in more ways than one. Humus bi tahina (HbT from now on) is one of the finest things I have ever had the pleasure of sticking down my throat. The rest of the meal includes a rather depressing-looking vegetable soup (I learn it wasn't bad) for the vegetarians and for the others, a platter of rice, seekh kebab, beef chunk and lamb kofta, all frankly quite good, but with that lingering and unseemly smell of meat. For desert, we get some baclava, a sweet pastry of Ottoman origin, but very much like kesar halwa, only better and probably just as unhealthy. After coffee, we say bye to Stanley Tucci and leave. Back to our hotel for the night.

Oh man, I'm thinking. A whole night in a hotel room and all of Cairo just sitting out there. What a crying waste.

Day 2 Giza/Cairo

Personally, I'd love to have risen early and watched Cairo rise. Like Bill Bryson says, there's nothing quite like watching a new city wake up. There's a springy, irrational feeling that you've got the upper hand and that you're no longer a stranger in a strange town. Watching a city shake sleep off is to catch it at its most vulnerable. Maybe the next time round. We had breakfast instead at the hotel. When I realised that hummus bi tahina was an addition to all three meals of the typical Egyptian day, I remember thinking I could get well used to this. Suddenly, everything was deeply, deeply agreeable. We checked out of Hotel Zoser.

At nine, we stepped out from Giza and followed the Nile to the Egyptian Antiquities Museum, nestled beautifully on the river promenade in full view of Cairo's largest luxury hotels. There are throngs of policemen and pink foreigners everywhere at the museum. We buy our tickets and head in. In a pond in front of the museum, Melek indicates lotuses to us. I step up and look at my reflection. I am beaming a little stupidly, so I join the rest of the group as we enter the museum. I've got the metallic taste of anticipation in my mouth -- the Antiquities Museum holds pretty much everything there is worth seeing (apart from the looted, stolen pieces in a scattering of European museums), a total of 1,32,000 meticulously catalogued pieces and about 40,000 pieces lying in boxes in a dungeon, unclassified and pretty much left in history's lurch. The Rough Guide had an arresting nugget: some of the boxes in the dungeon have sunk into the soft ground beneath and have therefore required the government to excavate below the museum itself to recover the priceless pieces. If the harshest punishment in Egypt is reserved for drug-peddlers, I cannot see why the same cannot be applied to those whose carelessness -- no, abject stupidity -- thrusts into peril priceless and innumerable pieces of national history.

The first piece we see, coincidentally is a granite statue of the pharaoh Zoser from 2670 BC, and then move onto a sixth dynasty funerary chamber, full with alabaster canopic jars that once contained the "vital organs" of deceased kings. Sadly, none of this royal offal is visible anymore. It might have been fun browsing through 4,000-year-old gall bladders, but hey. Then we get to the pharaoh Chefren, which was discovered upside down in a wishing well near the Sphinx (which bears Chefren's own visage). Chefren, undoubtedly one of the most prolific builders, has a falcon -- Horus, the god of protection -- on his head. In front of him, a much reproduced and well-preserved piece of Rahotep, the priest of Heliopolis and his wife Nofret from the fourth dynasty. What is startling is the quality of the preservation. This piece could have been turned out at a stonery in Cairo any day of the season and you wouldn't know it. These ancients obviously knew a thing or two about thrusting their art well into posterity. They just didn't let in on how, the cunning chaps. Next, and here's one of my favourite ladies from history, Maatkare Hatshepsut, Egypt's first female pharaoh, who claimed she was a man and had sphinxes of hers fitted with a ceremonial beard just to be sure -- a few days later, we would visit her magnificent temple near the Valley of the Kings. She was eulogised this century by feminist Evelyn Wells as "the first great woman in History".

The we came upon an androgynous demi-colossus of King Akhenaton, man-faced but with a woman's figure. The plaque described the sculptor's style as "naturalism bordering on the grotesque" and they couldn't have been more right. Father of Tutankhamun and husband of Queen Nefertiti (who is widely considered history's first female psycho). King Tut, the boy king, ruled for just nine years, but his life -- and more importantly, death -- fill a whole wing of the museum's first floor, including the famous 11-kg beaten gold funerary mask (which has a pony tail at the back, incidentally). The loot from his tomb fills a whole room as does another with his jewellery. Vulture collars, braces and amulets, sarcophagi with Osiris, the protector of the dead, Anubis, the jackal-headed god of mummification and his daughter Kebhut, goddess of freshness incarnated as a jewelled cobra. Stunning, everywhere you look.

We walk through the rest of the floor, filled with boomerangs, furniture and staffs from his rule and wind out to a part of the museum I have been waiting to see for most of my adult life. The Hall of Mummies costs an additional 100 Egyptian Pounds to enter. I would happily have forked out ten times as much to see half of the Hall. It is, to say the least, one of the most important things to see in this vast and befuddling ountry. At first, like most great things, it doesn't seem like much -- just a bunch of glass cases with dead guys. My mother and I are the only ones who decide to go, and we do.

It begins with a case holding the body of King Seqenenre (Tao II The Brave, 1539 BC), one of the last rulers of Egypt's Thebes region. A disturbing visage, the King the plaque tells you, almost certainly died from battle wounds. You nod to yourself as you notice an ugly gash across his forehead which, if it hadn't killed him instantly, must at least have caused him some discomfort. You can see the old man's gums, the mummy is so well preserved. Fifteen seconds inside the Hall and every single hair on the back of my neck was on end. Next was King Amenhotep from 1525 BC. A female mummy of Princess Meritamun, though the plaque isn't sure. Meritamun was daughter of Ramses and later his wife, and best loved of the queen Nefertari. She was buried in the Valley of Queens. I do hope it was she I was looking at for three whole minutes, so I cannot imagine why. King Tuthmosis I, who died ripe and old, was next. But his arms are not crossed, so the plaque says he may not have been a royal. When you look closely, it's hard to miss his perfectly preserved eye-lashes. By now, I can tell you I was shaking, though stone walls do pack in the cold rather efficiently. King Tuthmosis II was next, a man with an overbite and superbly preserved nails, white teeth and -- the best part -- wisps of matted orange hair. This here was a human being, 3,500 years old, but here, in the flesh, an expression on his face. I remember thinking that if this mummy stirred and sat up, I would only be mildly horrified -- this thing was the King. The warrior king Tuthmosis III, 1.7-metres tall, was next. Then came the tallest new kingdom pharaoh Amenhotep II, and in my opinion, the most enthralling in the Hall. His head is thrown back almost in agony or sorrow, his mouth slightly open. A sportsman, he died at 45. The mummy of Tuthmosis IV followed, manicured fingers, perfectly preserved hair, looking perfectly asleep. And then the real mccoy, the guy who takes it all home -- Ramses II (see picture). Sily wisps of white hair on his bald head, a prominent adams apple, high cheek bones, arched eyebrows as though in pain and large slender hands. The Hall finishes up with finely preserved King Seti II (his mouth, unlike the rest, is pursed shut) and King Merenptah, the 13th son of Ramses, who died of teeth problems, arthritis and arteriosclorosis (how did they figure this!?). Talking inside the Hall of Mummies is frowned upon, but I can tell you I had no problem holding my tongue inside. It was the easiest thing I've ever done.

My mother and I finally exhaled only once we were out. We went down to join the others and tried to persuade them about what they were missing, but I realised there could be no words to fully describe the Hall. As we walked away, my hair was still on end.

We bought postcards, posters and stuff in a giftstore opposite the museum and when the bus came, repaired to Fish Boat on the Nile for a surprisingly mediocre lunch, though with the usual side-spread, I was the last one complaining. It was also here that I noticed for first time the positive profusion of stray cats in Egypt, a facet amplified to bizarre proportions a few days later in Alexandria. The cats here are brave and large -- they seem to know, at any rate, that back in the good days, they were worshipped and plied with vulgar amounts of cream and fish-heads. That myth lives on now in Bastet, the cat-headed goddess of protection, and her violent other Sekhmet, the lioness-headed goddess of war, both ladies that no pharaoh ever messed with.

Next, we started out -- and I had to keep assuring myself that this was all real -- for the pyramids of Giza. The bus tore out of Cairo and through a little suburban hamlet sprinked with brightly coloured vegetable stalls, into the stony arid desert of the Giza Plateau. Through two buildings, we first caught sight of Cheops, the largest of the three. Again, as with much that was to follow, there were few words. Driving upto the vista point, we caught sight of all three pyramids in a row -- Cheops (Khufu), Chefren (Khafra) and Mycerinos (Menkara). Humility is a cliche now in front of monumental mass, but if any single group of stuctures perpetuated the cliche, it would have to be the Pyramids of Giza. Of course, the jury is still well out on how the ancients built these colossally large tombs, and none of the theories put forth even near satisfactorily answering questions of how they were constructed. The Rough Guide, which did not quite match up for the pyramids, superscribes its chapter on the pyramids with the quote "Everything fears time, but time fears the pyramids." Damn straight.

I was eager to take the supposedly rewardless sojourn through the inner chambers of Chefren, but was persuaded not to -- something I will regret until I visit Egypt the next time. Instead, after following route right uptil Chefren, being overhwhelmed at its base, we drove downroad towards the Sphinx, which sprang into view to the right when we hardly expected it. All through, the arid moon-like landscape lay strewn with Pepsi cans and empty cigarette packs. The police strode around on camels and hid their faces when I tried to photograph them. The Egyptian government has thrown prudence and taste to the wind and is meticulously destroying the area around the pyramids. A horrendous open-air opera theatre sits on the desert mauling the endless desert scape and simply ruining any real panorama of the pyramids, and an unspeakable monstrosity of a Boat-shaped building -- the boat's been shifted elsewhere -- sit at the very feet of Cheops. Therefore, from two sides, you'll have to put that darn thing in your frame if you want to capture the structure at all. Up front, they're now building a grand stage for carnivals and theatre. Right there next to Third Millenium BC structures. There is much in common with how we treat our monuments here.

We walked through surprisingly well-preserved alleyed stone passages to the bowl of earth that contains the Sphinx. The Sphinx, an absolute joy from afar but a vandalised remnant from up close is the single largest statue in the world, hewn 20 metres high and 57 metres long from the limestone bedrock, the body of a lion and the head of Khafra, the pharaoh whose tomb it guards with menacing outstretched paws. Scaffolding ruined the view, but in profile, he's still quite amazing. Legend has it that the Sphinx's famously missing nose was blasted off its face by Napoleon's artillery practice (if that's true, I would now encourage Egyptians to go to Paris, defacate on the Arc de Triomphe and then take it apart with icepicks). For now, it's being carefully restored. On the outside, the government is constructing a grand stage. The Tourism Bureau in Egypt is one of the country's most powerful and influential agencies. Which is probably why, after being free of human colonisation for decades, the modern day Sphinx, in addition to the Sun, stares right at a Pizza Hut not 500 metres in front of it.

From the Sphinx, which I turn to look at as much as I possible can, we're driven to the Al Fayed Perfumery (see picture) right there in the Pyramid market. Our guide Melek obviously gets a commission from bringing us to these sharply tourist-driven enterprises. Loosely apparently related to the Mohamed Al Fayed family of Princess Diana fame, our group is hosted with hibiscus tea, turkish coffee and a lot of talk by Hassan, the firm's Nubian pitch-man, and damn is he good at his job. After an extended presentation on how mixers in their workshops created Hugo Bosses and Calvin Kleins every day only to find them sold for top dollar in the rest of the world, he invited us to buy our own. It was clearly a very impactful pitch, because everyone bought some. We settled for CK-One, Bulgari and something else I cannot now remember. All in all, it must have been a sweet $150 or more. Not bad for a half-hour of hot air.

Next, we were driven to a Papyrus Institute -- this is hilarious. All across Egypt, we found shops (they really are just shops) selling varieties of stuff from papyrus to perfume to alabaster, but calling themselves "institutes". Maybe it means something entirely here in the desert. A large Egyptian woman took us -- a little hurriedly I thought -- through the making of papyrus before practically ordering us to write down which pieces we wanted to buy on a provided form, and yes, they took dollars, euros and pounds sterling, thanks. I imagine everyone was a little embarassed by the quietly aggressive nature of Egyptian enterprise. I mean, we were handed our order forms before we'd even entered the shop. I found this distasteful immediately. It seemed to nibble away at everthing that I thought was nice about this country even though I'd seen nothing at all. As with the perfumery, everyone bought some papyrus art. From the shop, we proceeded to what is supposedly Cairo's "in" clothing chain, called Funky Bros, its logo a camel with sun glasses and a palm-tree motif shirt with a speech bubble that says "time 2 get funky", in the backdrop, the pyramids in cartoon-hand.

We then went to the Giza train station. After loading up all the bags on a hand-drawn cart and settling everyone inside the station on the platform, I went off with my uncle in search of fruit, but returned with peanuts from a chap on the street selling infinitely more interesting looking nuts, but I decided I would try them later. The platform was very Indian -- bustling, street stalls for quick food of baguettes and eggs with spinach and meat, a tiny cafe. The train was a special luxury train for tourists like us. I would have loved to be in an ordinary train instead, but after a long emotionally and physically draining day, I was happy with some rail comfort, even though it wasn't up to much. As our train pulled out, we were served tray-dinners of rice and meat (very, very mediocre), though before that we took the edge off our weariness with glasses of scotch in one of the cabins. I think I fell asleep as soon as I climbed into my bunk bed.

Day 3 Aswan

After a depressingly dry breakfast of croissant, cheese and moldy cake, our train pulled early into Aswan station. Aswan, on the Nile's East Bank and on the first cataract (bouldered interruptions in the Nile's flow), is a bustling tourist and commercial hub in Southern Egypt, also according to an encyclopedia, one of the driest inhabited places on earth -- it is solely from here and around here that all of ancient Egypt's granite was ever mined. Its 200,000 population gravitates loosely but uniformly about tourism-driven services. We walked out to our bus (the hotel had expected us a day later, but Meleka made up for the crisis with quiet efficiency).

Driven at wonderful speed by our driver Phantom, we shredded through pristine, almost European streets past a new Coptic church and edged upward to Hotel Basma, a resort hotel -- we couldn't have hoped for a better place to stay. We waited around at the reception with its overpowering poster of President Hosni Mubarak before finally getting our rooms. From the hotel's foyer, Aswan rolled down to the Nile like one section of an amphitheatre (see photo). We were all deeply pleased to be in such a nice hotel. I would later learn that the place was actually running at a huge loss because the opulent construction and facilities had severely underestimated tourist footfalls, which is why occupation levels are ludicrously low. When we were there, about a third of the hotel was occupied, and this is high season. Our rooms were superb, but there were things to do, so after a quick wash, we were all downstairs again in our bus heading to the river. There we hired a motorboat that took us, its kerosene engine spluttering and coughing and threatening to die, to the Philae Temple. In 1960, the Temple of Isis on the Philae Island was dismantled (it was threatenened by a flooding Nile after the low dam was built) and reconstructed on the nearby Agilkai Island where it stands today. 90 minutes later, my mother confirmed to me that she had never seen anything as beautiful in her entire life as the Temple of Isis.

Built by the Ptolemeic dynasty to honour Isis (in Greece, Isis was Aphrodite), the temple was systematically vandalised by subsequent rulers and then permanently shut down under Roman rule. Singularly serene and stark, the Philae temple was a cradle first of ancient faith and then, interestingly, of Christianity itself before it was again shut down by the Ottoman rulers. The legend is, of course, that the Virgin Mary herself, was a Christian concept put forward specifically to ease the passage of worship from Isis to the then new Christian faith. It worked. The temple's East wing looks out over the Nile through lotus pillars, all around it, the river laps at its stone. The Nilometre that was built to check rising water levels seems to have been lost during the reconstruction.

We got back into our boat shortly after, though many of us felt a full day could be well-spent on this island alone. I had to agree. The boat took us back ashore and we were driven then through very European Aswan over the High Dam, though we couldn't see very much except for the vast spread of the Nile, silver with the sun from where we stood 111 metres above its surface. A little disappointed (I mean, everyone's heard of the Aswan dam!) we made our way to the Makka restaurant in the dusty commercial zone that straddles the railway station from which we emerged in the morning. Here, we consumed filets of excellent Aswan fried fish and brown rice, while the vegetarians got something new, which I understand they welcomed. Next to the restaurant was a spices store, with the clinging smell of cinnamon on the insides.

We then drove to the Nile promenade for an idyllic ride in a fellucca, a traditional Egyptian sail boat operated by two quietly affable Nubians, who sang for us when asked and took us on a lazy cruise around the beautiful Elephantine Island ("we have rocks in India, so what's the big deal?" someone said). The water was still, and despite repeated warnings that some of the Nile was infested with minute ringworm flukes that gave you a painful and sometimes deadly condition known as schisosomiasis (or bilharzia, named for Theodor Bilharz, the German physician who first discovered its effects on the urinary tract), we trailed our hands in the water. When one of us pointed to a structure on a hill and asked our guide what it was, he said a little uncertainly that it was a Coptic church -- it turned out to be a police outpost, sparking one of us to say, a little cruelly I thought, "When in doubt, say it's a Coptic church". Our boatman then spread out some trinkets for sale right there in the boat and manouevered us back to the dock. We then drove back to our hotel.

At the hotel, after a brief chat with our clearly exhausted guide, I took him off and bought him a sheesha and myself some coffee on a restaurant verandah lined by date-palms. The sky was purple before dinner. In my hotel room, I let English cable television wash over me -- a viewer called Milan Antonjevic from Serbia & Montenegro had requested a music channel to play Believe by Cher, and had dedicated it to his parents. After another scotch evening (these were becoming more enjoyable with every passing day) in one of our rooms, dinner was at the Lotus Restaurant, though I couldn't imagine why it wasn't outside. It was a cool brilliant evening. I had a long lazy smoke on the verandah before we went back to our rooms for the night.

Day 4 Abu Simbel/Aswan

The next morning, we were without our guide, which presented itself as a rather promising prospect. For one thing, it meant we'd see what we had to see without the running commentary such as it is, and for the other, we were on our way to Abu Simbel. We were taking a short flight because, as I was later told, driving meant a long desolate 300-km journey through desert, a mandatory police convoy and the likelihood of encountering roadblocking waylayers from the bush who hate tourists and the West. To be honest, I don't blame them. Being invaded must come easy to them, and that's just pathetic.

Our EgyptAir (logo: the Falcon head of Horus) Boeing-737 waits for us and transfers us over a true land of arid death with a few lakes, over 30-minutes (which includes apple juice if you're interested) to Abu Simbel. I sat next to an Egyptian guide who pointed out the monument to me as we descended into the airport. The four sitting colossi looked like little wooden toys, but even from up there, I remember being able to make their faces out perfect, mouth, eyes and all. We landed at a busy little terminal -- the Abu Simbel is the second-most visited tourist destination in all of Egypt after the pyramids -- and houses the massive 20-metre high facades of King Ramses II and Queen Nefertari. Built in the 13th Century BC, it was ostensibly a monument aimed to intimidate the already subjugated Nubian backdrop. In the 1960s, the entire monument, reinforced with injections of resin, was sliced up and moved up-hill to save it from the rising waters of Lake Nasser, an artificial reservoir 600-km in circumference built for the Aswan dam.

What I personally found more beautiful than the Greater Temple that lies between the four colossi, was the smaller temple that Ramses built to honour Hathor, within the larger complex to the right. Supremely and arrogantly adorned with Ramses striking down faceless enemies, the two temples ostensibly served as a warning for the raw power that lay downstream on the Nile. As we slowly walked through and gazed up at every square-inch of the Temple's insides, it was amply clear that Ramses II -- the old man whose corpse I'd seen in the flesh just 48 hours before -- was a brilliant and paranoid megalomaniac. As an aside, I noticed a small falcon making superb use of a brief updraft to float virtually stationary over the temple before riding the current's wake down across the other side. Horus!

We walked all the way around the monument along peculiarly pristine Lake Nasser (infested with fish at this time of year apparently) back to the main entrance, and then followed a seemingly endless retinue of gift-shops until we got our bus back to the airport and back to Aswan. Phantom was there to receive us and he drove us back to the hotel where we picked up Meleka. The colour, it appeared, had returned to his face even though most of our trip lay promisingly before us. He got into the bus and we were driven back to the Nile promenade, this time to get on board Emilio, a luxury cruise boat for our three-night sojourn down the world's longest river. The boat, one of about fifty that steam out of Aswan all the time, was plushly furnished -- it had cabins better fitted out than many hotels I've seen, and from its large windows, was, well, the Nile. If anyone was tired (not me) from the Abu Simbel stop, it was all quickly forgotten once we got onto Emilio, Italian-owned.

Lunch on the minus-1 deck at water level was the first thing we did. Sadly, the food was hopelessly poor though the three days, though by this time -- as I've said before -- I had ceased to be hopeful of anything as long as bread and tahina remained a staple. Tragically, this was not the case on the boat, and I had to wait two whole days before seeing any of the stuff. Meleka dropped his first bombshell when he told us that we wouldn't be sailing that afternoon as was originally planned, though he did not explain why -- and I don't remember any of us asking. The result: we were spending our first Nile cruise night on board a ship alright, but docked cosily at Aswan through the night and scheduled to pull out from its rigging a full 24-hours after we'd gotten on. Personally, I was mightily depressed, but then decided it was probably the best possible opportunity to get off the boat and take in a little Aswan on the street. Therefore, I carefully weaseled my way out of the Sound and Light show at the Philae Temple that everyone else went for and headed out instead into Aswan.

I ventured down a market alley opposite the dock and after buying cigarettes and a notebook for this journal, met Abdul, a Nubian who owned the cigarette shop and a two-terminal cybercafe right above. I used the internet for an hour, and uneasily tuned back into the real world. Not much happening except for Navjot Sidhu and Shibu Soren being handed down guilty verdicts. Yawn. I walked for a couple of kilometres down the promenade and found a police chowki of sorts and stopped to have a chat and a smoke. All of them spoke manageable English. One of the cops dispatched his constable across the street to bring me a cup of hibiscus tea and a tumbler of Okk, the local spirit, a sort of brandy really but smelly as hell and bloody strong, but drinking it felt good in the whipping evening breeze, so I energetically downed the helping and only politely refused another. The police here are paid well one of them tells me. Egypt also has a special police regiment designated for "Tourism and Antiquities", a service especially important after the terrorist bombing in Luxor in 1997.

I ambled back to the ship and joined the group in the bar lounge after dinner for an evening of whirling dervishes and a bellydancer. The latter dragged my uncle onto stage, while I smoked from a vantage point near the entrance. Later, men and women from our group would pass judgement that since she only shook her hips -- and not her stomach -- the artist was mediocre. Later over scotch, one of us, who was fitted out in a smashing designer shirt for the evening of entertainment, attributed her disinterest in him to the fact that she was a phoney. It had been a strangely long day, or at least it felt that way. I went up to the sun deck of the vessel for a quick smoke and then went to sleep quickly in my room.

Day 5 Aswan/The Nile

In the morning after breakfast, I took my mother out to the street I'd walked down yesterday. The boat would sail at 1.00, so we had three hours as we set out. Inside of ten minutes, we found ourselves in a craft store looking for Horus. Mohammed, the storekeeper kept us there for a long time -- I would learn shortly after that many of the shops on the street were owned by a loose bunch of friends (see picture) who shared each other's profits and lived in the same place. While the others remained on the vessel or partook of coffee on the sun deck, I brought two more people from the group to the street. Abdul served my mother some tea as she looked at her e-mail, while I had a Pepsi and a smoke and made friends with Gaba (second from right) who runs a spices shop. He asked me to pay him forty pounds for a bag of dried hibiscus leaves for tea, but I bargained that down to ten. He still made a seven-pound profit, he cheekily told me after my notes had disappeared into his counter. Gaba, Mohammed and Abdul help each other -- they pitch each other's products and services, divert customers toward each other. Abdul, a Nubian from outside Aswan, asked if I wanted to see the Nubian village and museum. We just didn't have the time. Abdul says he hasn't married because its too expensive and is happy living with his brother and friends. He hasn't the first damn clue where his folks are. He, for one, would be happy watching the Muslim Brotherhood come to power in Egypt.

My mother, the other two and I then walk down the shops on the promenade where she buys another Isis, the one with her wings spread. I found Breitling and Rolex watches for 300 pounds a pop, but when I said 300 pounds for both was my last price, I was incredulously dismissed. I slunk back a little embarassed, though those were two of the finest fake watches I had ever seen. Freighted in from Italy at a bare minimum of expense. It was well past noon, so we rushed back to the vessel -- walking across another to get to ours -- and by two, through lunch, we were sailing.

It was a beautiful richly sunny day so it was no surprise that all of us -- except my mother, who inexplicably preferred the cabin -- repaired to the sun deck, stretched out on deck chairs and snoozed. I faced the starboard side which paraded through village after village with thin margins of bullrush hugging the river -- the Nile is not very broad. We were steaming along when I began to write this journal. Other ships like ours either steamed past or were left behind, always with a token blast of their horn probably as a sign of submission. The deck was filled, otherwise, with pink, freckled old foreigners in their bathing suits -- I hate to say that it was not a pretty sight.

About 60-km downstream, twilight had set in as we pulled into the ancient agricultural town of Kom Ombo, one of the trippiest places yet. Clambering up a market-lined front, we winded into the Temple of Kom Ombo complex, built in the second century BC. With the exception of the magnificent sandstone doorway dedicated to Sobek, the crocodile-headed god, by Pharaoh Tuthmosis III, the rest of the temple is almost definitely Ptolemeic (when we had a hard time finding Sobek on the walls, one of us said, "Doctor Sobek is off duty"). Light rapidly faded as we were shown the carvings and then to, in my opinion, the best part -- a chamber with two perfectly preserved mummified crocodiles. In the dark, strategic lights came on lighting the temple up eerily, its Greek roots amplified immeasurably. On an entirely other note, Pope John Paul II was titular bishop in this town from 1958-63 before he was packed off to Krakow.

We bumped into another Indian family from Bengal on our way down from the temple and as a result the group was split, some of us losing ourselves to the market, the other to coffee and sheeshas. After a spot of shopping and a smoke, we got back on the ship and steamed north toward Edfu through dinner -- we reached Edfu when we were asleep, I imagine about 3AM though I can't be sure.

Day 6 Edfu/Esna

We woke early to Edfu. It was cold and dull outside. After breakfast, Meleka got us into horse-drawn carriages that took us with dangerous swiftness (colliding wooden wheels, they say, make a loud thwack before you're thrown) to the Temple of Horus, the most completely preserved ancient temple in all of Egypt, certainly the best kept. This was the only place where officers scowled at tourists who ran their fingers along thousands-year old sandstone etching. All wasn't lost yet, I thought.

After we saw the immensely absorbing insides of the Ptolemeic temple -- there was even a carving of Horus smiling -- we were advised by our guide that the ancient Old Kingdom part, about 50-metres away, was not worth a visit because it was in a steep state of ruin. Looking back now, it was a big mistake listening to him on this one. It has, by at least three leading accounts, more archaeological and historic value than the undoubtedly beautiful Ptolemeic part, providing insights into provincial Edfu from the end of the Old Kingdom till the Byzantine era. Here's a really good reason why it's sometimes a good idea not to listen to your tour guide. Up front in front of the imposing pylons (much like the ones at Philae), I had a smoke and looked up at a huge carving of the falcon god. His birth is a strange, but certainly the most central, story in ancient Egyptian mythology. Isis and Osiris were married, though the latter's brother Seth murdered Osiris, hacked him into 42 parts and fed some of those to a pair of welcoming crocodiles in the Nile. A distraught Isis, with quiet alacrity hunted the pieces down and put them together just long enough for her to conceive Horus, who then grew up, killed his father's murderer and rose to be Egypt's definitive symbol of good over evil. The Mary-Jesus parallel is not, apparently, a coincidence. The Isis-Horus relationship is almost certainly known, according to historical records, to have sanctified the divine mother-redeeming son concept before Christianity's forms fructified.

We returned to our vessel and spent the morning sunning ourselves on the deck and watching another cruiser try to overtake us, finally giving up three hours later. It was hypnotic the Nile breeze, beer, quiet. After a few beers and some pitifully bad lunch, we steamed into Esna, our final stop though we still had another night on the boat before heading north to the West Bank Necropolises. Two barrage bridges cut the Nile off at Esna, barring vessels from moving any further unless they can successfully navigate the locking system. Most don't bother and return to Aswan from Esna instead of persisting for the 55-km to Luxor. Ours just sat pretty since we had another night to go, as we navigated our way through a Movenpick boat onto the land. A few from the group crossed the road next to the dock with Meleka for a sheesha and coffee, while the rest went off to explore the popular souk, one of Esna's main attractions, quite apart from a Ptolemeic temple to Khnum (the Ram-headed creater god who made people and the world sitting at a potter's wheel), which we didn't happen to visit, again on the advice of our guide. Why, why, why.

The souk is deeply directed at tourists, though we all make some pretty slick bargains. I on the other hand, in addition to some scarves, bought a New York Yankees cap for some reason -- I've always wanted one even though I've never watched a baseball game in my life and don't ever plan to. For ten pounds, it was in the bag. The shopkeepers here are overly friendly -- of course they all know Amitabh Bachchan. A young Arab called Sharky is alarmed when I gently correct him when he says Amitabh is a Muslim. At first I didn't think it made a difference. But when I told him that it didn't really matter either way, though he in fact happened to be a practicing Hindu, Sharky was viciously unsettled, was even willing to bet on it. A little irritated, but mostly just a bit alarmed, I gave him 30 seconds of spiel on how we were Indians first. I could tell it made an impact because he seemed embarassed. In Egypt nowadays, after they've guessed your nationality -- they're getting uncannily good at this -- they ask you if you're Muslim. Each time I was asked, I would ask why, and then there would be embarassment. To test it, one time I said no I was Hindu -- they didn't seem to understand. Another time I said I was Christian -- hmm, ok. A third time, I said yes, I'm a Muslim -- Ah, good. If this was one man asking me these questions it wouldn't have been so much of an issue. But I had this brought to me from Cairo to Aswan to Alexandria and that, to be very honest, just didn't do it for me. With the consolidation of the banned Muslim Brotherhood organisation and Mubarak's increasing placation of other extremist groups, it's all just filtering down. On my request though, Sharky took me to his friend's house to get a feel of houses and people here. I was given more Okk, this time time it was much better probably because it was diluted with very fizzy soda. Sharky said in Arabic to his friends that I'd said Amitabh was not Muslim. They all laughed, one of them even choked.

Back on the ship, after a beer with two from our group in the bar lounge, it was more scotch -- my parents were relieved to see me -- and dinner, before another smoke on the deck and a stupor like sleep within minutes of hitting the sheets.

Day 7 West Bank/Luxor

The next morning, we rose normally and after the last breakfast, we got into a bus and drove through green Nile and canal flanks to the Colossi of Memnon, the huge statues of Amenhotep III, sitting in guard of the larger necropolis that lies beyond. I decided not to get off the bus -- both statues were imposing enough from where I sat. For some reason, I was desperately sleepy and I needed something quick and strong to wake the hell up. From here on out, we entered possibly the most desolate lifeless patch of planet I have ever seen. Between every horizon line, it was an inexorable replication of brown and shades of brown, limestone and sandstone relief with our narrow metalled road snaking quietyly and carefully through it as though not to wake some huge lumbering creature of the Theban Hills up. I sat amazed until, sadly, our vehicle turned into a profusion of tourists at the entrance to the Valley of the Kings.

A tiny patch of valley on the West Bank nestled within a horseshoe bend of the Nile, this is part of the larger Theban Necropolis that includes the Valley of the Queens. Probably most famous for King Tut's tomb, the VoTKs is a week's observing if you had the time. Home to a profusion of tombs of kings and nobles of the New Kingdom (18th, 19th and 20th dynasties), the VoTKs lies directly below the pyramid-shaped al-Qurn peak. Historians say the shape didn't pass the pharaohs by, and their choice of resting place in the New Kingdom was specifically to ape the Old Kingdom's use of colossal pyramids as tombs as in Giza.

After a short brief from Melek about why most of the tombs are shut to the public (restoration work or the danger of caving in with too many footfalls), we are advised to enter the tombs of Ramses III, Ramses IV and a later king Siptah, who ruled from 1194-1188 BC and was likely the son of King Seti II and one of his Caanite concubines. The latter, possibly the finest we saw, the colour of the inlay and carvings still fresh, the blues and reds of vultures and Anubis almost perfect. The tomb, a straight axis one, dipped down to a sarcophagus room, though his mummy was not found in the tomb, but rather with a bunch of others in the tomb of Amenhotep II, buried a few hundred yards away in the same stretch of necropolis. We didn't go into King Tut's Tomb either because it was closed, or because we were advised by our guide that there was nothing see inside. Either way, what the....

From here, we took the tuf-tuf out to the main entrance -- I noticed how starkly cold it was in the shade of the bare mountains and warm it was without them -- and took our bus to the Temple of Hatshepsut, nestled in a cradle beneath a wall of high weathered limestone mountains in Deir el-Bahri. It was in this serenely grand expanse of dirt that on November 17, 1997, Islamic terrorists massacred 62 people, including 58 tourists (35 of them Swiss), an incident that has come to be known as the Luxor massacre, even though Luxor technically lies on the opposite side of the Nile to the East. Before the majesty of Hatshepsut's magnificent temple -- Egyptologists from Poland are restoring the sanctum -- tourists were chased with machetes and beheaded like sacrificial animals not ten years ago. The massacre, coupled with the September 11 attacks, have simply quartered Egypt's tourism inflow and crippled development that remains stubbornly dependent on revenue from foreigners. You can imagine, if visa fees are still going toward repaying UNESCO for the $40 million relocation of Abu Simbel.

A throng of schoolchildren from Luxor thronged past us up the temple steps, their teacher telling them not to shout toward us. They'd come to see Hatshepsut, the original feminist, the carfully vandalised statues of her and the supremely kept coloured inlays of Anubis and Horus on the right flank. Hatshepsut is known to have thrown everything else to the wind and declared herself pharaoh, insisting she was a man and assuming the title Maatkaare for it. Papers have been written drawing pseudo-psychological lineages linking Hatshepsut to Biljana Plavsic and Maggie Thatcher. It is obvious now that mortuary workers during her time themselves laughed at the idea of a woman pharaoh. A cave above the temple has carved graffiti depicting what appears to be Senenmut, her chief advisor, engaged in an subjugating sex with Hatshepsut -- either a politico-sociological dig, or the world's earliest known pornography. Or both. From here, we were driven across the Nile to the immediately enchanting city of Luxor, formerly the seat of Thebes and now a precariously luxurious hamlet, fed, like everything else by tourism with a bit of agriculture on the fringes. We drive straight to a restaurant on the Nile for lunch. I watch feluccas float past from the restaurant vista -- I realise that this restaurant is owned by the same chaps (Abou Zeid) who own the first two restaurants we were taken to in Cairo and Giza.

The next thing, and this every book tells you is the finest thing you'll see in Egypt beyond the pyramids, is the Temple of Karnak, right there, smack in the middle of a modern city. Consider this: "Approximately 30 pharaohs contributed to the buildings, enabling it to reach a size, complexity and diversity not seen elsewhere. Few of the individual features of Karnak are unique, but the size and number of features is overwhelming." We walk up the portico lined with rams-head sphinxes and enter the pylon into an open courtyard and a hall of lotus pillars, followed by two huge obelisks. I cannot speak for the others, but the meticulous complexity at Karnak struck me more than the even the pyramids did. There was something here that reached up and said look, look, look how old and strong. Only one of the four parts of the temple -- the Precinct of Amun-Re -- is open to the public. We walked through walls of heiroglyphics to a museum of stone shaken down by an earthquake, a fallen obelisk, a bath and a scarab for fertility wishes. If I could recommend just one place to see in Egypt, this would probably be it, though Cheops will probably want to strike me down. I did not visit the Luxor Temple, which ir an extension of the Karnak concurbate, but am told it is more of the same splendour but smaller. I sat in the bus instead, shooed off curio sellers and reflected on Karnak and how the sun bounced off yellow stone before turning pink and dipping off.

We sat in a cafe near a mosque for over two hours after the Luxor Temple after cruising around the city in our bus. We ate there and then left for the Luxor station to catch our train back to Cairo. It had been our most crushingly tiring day yet, so there was no scotch evening on the train though I would very much have liked a couple of larges. Oh well.

Day 8 Cairo

Back to dusty Giza, and I was getting unsettled by plans to go to Coptic Cairo -- I was definitely not interested in churches or anything modern for that matter, so I decided to play it neutral and went instead to the Giza Zoo in the El-Dokki precinct of Giza. First I meet my friend Amr at his papyrus shop and oblige him by buying three fine pieces -- he "give me good price" after two Moroccan ladies (his friends) tell him to stop being such a tightwad. When I named Rabat, Casablanca and Marrakesh as places I'd heard of in Morocco, they were supremely impressed. Nobody had heard of Rabat, they told me.

I stood on the curb and waited to see if I could angle public transport to the zoo. I was told it would be an hour's walk, but a ten minute drive. I angled for a micro bus, shouting ZOO. At least fifteen would pass me by without a word before one stopped and I was dragged into the seat next to the driver's. There were no words -- he just took my money and in ten minutes, I was at the zoo's gates. A beautiful zoo inside, I tipped off a zoo worker to play with two lion cubs, watched pelicans and crocodilians before heading back to beat a 1PM curfew for lunch. Amazingly, everyone had lunch at a McDonald's in a musty mall across the road from our hotel.

In the evening, we went to the sound and light show at the pyramids, though the rain meant we couldn't sit up close, but rather at one of those covered cafes where you had to order drinks if you wanted a place to sit. So we did. The show was magnificently produced, but only the lights. The cheesy Sphinx narrator (briefly engaging for being projected with a real face), the crusty, cliched script, woeful acoustics and Roshan Seth-style diction meant that I was only there to take open-aperture photos of Pink Floyd concert style Giza pyramids and briefly gawk as Cheops flipped from purple to green and back in a few seconds.

We were taken to a restaurant called Felfela for a traditional meal after we ambled out from the sound and light. It was much like the first day, though the chicken was fabulous and Nancy, a Lebanese pop sensation, was a nice touch to our first almost totally useless day in Egypt. I went to bed early.

Day 9 Alexandria

We checked out of Zoser after breakfast and our bus began driving us towards what I was anticipating to be the perfect end to ten days in Egypt. A three-hour drive from Cairo to the north west Mediterranean coast to Alexandria. Eight-lanes eased us on through a jungle of high hoardings mostly advertising telecom, cars and milk, through a handful of dusty hamlets (we stopped at a cafe-pump for a smoke, coffee and strange self-illuminating yoyo things) and fifteen minutes before you pull into Alexandria (Al-Iskandariya in Arabic, which in my opinion sounds much slicker) you drive through miles of open mall and factory outlet promenade -- this part is strikingly like the US, only a little smaller. We cross a pair of tram tracks with a blue waiting tram and burst upon the city's huge 20-km marine drive, stretching from both ends of the city, with a depth of just 3.5 kilometres, and cruise down the gradiented, gently banked highway along the rich Med blue to our hotel, Plaza, an ancient and cheerless place, with unhappy staff and a peculiar string of guests, including two Arab businessmen who appear and sound like they're waiting for a particular rival to walk through the hotel door so they can take him to a corner and give him "some talking to". It doesn't really matter -- we've got an ocean facing room with a balcony, all hours for less than 24 hours and room service.

From the balcony, the city arches along like two flanks on either side, a grey strip of road separating building from sea. Founded arguably in 342 BC by Alexander, this city became the seat of Ptolemeic rule in Egypt until Islamic rulers founded Cairo and laid Alexandria to waste, rendering it a mere fishing village according to one account. Now Egypt's second-largest city and largest commercial port, it is still the ultimate holiday destination even for Cairenes, which is a little pathetic, though if the Med exploding onto you could hold its surprise each time, it would be worth the beautiful three-hour drive. Our guide, anyway, pulled us along to two of the most boring sites I have ever visited, at the expense of a city just sitting there and begging to be discovered.

I think everyone on the group agreed then as they do now that Pompay's Pillar ("If it was not built by Pompay and had nothing to do with him, why was it called Pompay's pillar?" someone asked our guide) and the Roman theatre were both highly missable. This is not once to say that they were not beautiful or important -- they indubitably were -- but with just a handful of hours in hand, it would have made infinitely better sense to snake into Alex's souks and markets and melt into the seafood bazaars. For lunch, we were taken to a stylish place opposite a boat dock, where we were inefficiently served magnificent grilled mackarel, friend red mullet and batter-fried calamari. This was followed by a sojourn to a fruitseller on the same sidestreet, from whom we bought profusions of oranges, bananas, persemons and strawberries.

My best time in Alexandria sprung, as always, from crisis. On our way to the Monteza gardens, our driver, a quiet Copt called Rimon, took us a little too cleverly into inner Alex with the intention of beating the highway rush hour. The result -- we were nice and stranded and it was getting dark. I and my uncle decided to jump ship and walk it back. We did it in forty minutes, about 3.5-km, all along the magnificent and darkening sea-face pavement, its profusion of dog-sized cats, sea air and speeding cars to our left, finally turning a bend on the Four Seasons to find our hapless little hotel and nobody back yet, not even the bus. It was a long evening, ended and rounded off well with whisky and all that fruit we bought, and the dulled sound of cars from the street below as we basked in the company of fellow travellers. The sound of the sea hadn't a chance of getting into our room through all of that.