By Adrienne Rubin

To see Egypt is to see the culmination of humanity since the dawn of civilization. It is a land of contrasts; the ancient and the modern, the marvelous and the mystical, the decadent and the despondent. Rich in cultural history, poor in infrastructure, daily life in Egypt is both illuminating and alarming.

Cairo - City of Chaos

My taxi driver from the airport used to be a history teacher, but now he’s studying to be a certified tour guide. Better money, he says, and tourists are more reliable meal tickets than the government. He complains about the current administration continuing to build palaces with money that should be spent on education and healthcare, while simultaneously pointing out with pride the multitude of palaces we pass that have been built throughout the ages by other leaders, dictators, tyrants, and corruption in other forms. Disappointment and frustration with the current state of affairs is still trumped by national pride as we zig zag through Cairo, surrounded by traffic and history. I have found this to be true in Greece and Rome as well – the mentality that everything’s going to pieces, but there is pride in belonging to a culture that dates back to ancient times.

I can’t call Cairo a beautiful city. There are beautiful things in it, and there is a beauty to it, but it isn’t physical. The beauty is in the joy that can be heard on the street, the rhythm of the chaos punctuated with moments of stillness, the music of the call to prayer five times a day, the chorus of all the mosques at once just after sunset.

My tour guide, Amr, tells me that there are so many mosques worldwide that with all the calls to prayer across the different times zones, at any given moment there is always music coming from a mosque somewhere. As he puts it, “the music never leaves the earth.”

Dancing with Death while Driving

Egyptian traffic is legendary, and driving in Cairo is an adventure in and of itself. The Cairo cab drivers are made of the same mettle as the ancient Egyptian warriors, with nerves of steel as they do battle on the semi-paved roads. I have nearly a full hour from the airport to Giza to experience the free-for-all of cars, trucks, horses, strings of camels ridden by men smoking cigarettes and yelling into cell phones, entire families piled onto motorcycles, tired donkeys ridden by small, barefoot children and crinkly old men in galabayas, and people on foot, so many people on foot. Even though it’s the middle of the night, it’s the eve of Eid, the celebration of the end of Ramadan, and everyone is out (although I will come to learn that this is the norm, not the exception, as Cairo never sleeps). Traffic lanes, where they exist, are purely decorative. A whole, inscrutable language is spoken with the beeping of horns as we careen between cars. A city of nearly 30 million people, and there are hardly any traffic lights. Every intersection is first-come, first-served, every roundabout enter-at-your-own-risk, every pedestrian crossing a high stakes game of Frogger.

Unfinished Projects

By daylight the next morning, I get my first real glimpse of the city. A slight sepia tone colors the city and landscape, a potent combination of desert dust, city smog, and humidity from the Nile delta. Everything is the soft colors of the desert, variations of beige, brown, tan, punctuated by the bright colors of women’s outfits adorned with colorful niqābs (headscarves), shopfront advertising, street vendors, and brightly-painted trucks and carriages. Many buildings appear to be crumbling, the leftover bricks lying by the roadsides, remnants of unfinished projects. After spending thousands of years building monuments that might outlive humanity itself, it’s as if Egypt has spent the last century starting projects without completing them. Forests of skyscrapers across the city are skeletons of brick and concrete with rebar columns stretching to the sky like antennae and gaping holes where windows should be, sitting empty and abandoned indefinitely. Some buildings are finished on the lower levels, inhabited even, but families continue building as they can afford to, one floor at a time. Even the new Grand Egyptian Museum, three decades in the making to become the biggest museum in the world, was supposed to open in 2016 and has been delayed over and over again.

The Great Pyramids on Horseback

West of Cairo on the west bank of the Nile, where lush green crops give way to dry desert, crumbling pyramids, temples, and monuments dot the landscape. Once nearly reclaimed by the desert sand, these monuments have been heavily explored, excavated, and exploited over the last 150 years to become Egypt’s most iconic symbols and most visited sites.

First, we once again brave the Cairo traffic to drive from our hotel to the front gates of the Great Pyramids. We elbow our way through the gates following our turbaned and galabaya-clad guide and meet our horses on the inside, all Arabian stallions. Once we are inside the gates, we take the long way around so there is nothing between us and the pyramids except open desert, and as soon as we hit the sand the horses break into a gallop, racing each other across the expanse until we reach an overlook that gives us a magnificent view of the pyramids with the cityscape stretching forever behind them.

After visiting the pyramids on horseback, I can’t imagine seeing them any other way. Nothing truly gives them scale like seeing them up close and then far away, covering the distance between with spirited gallops on a fiery Arabian stallion, dodging camels, carts, and tourists, manes full of wind as we gallop across the sand. From afar, the pyramids can be viewed as they were meant to be – stark, pristine monuments against the vast, empty sandscape. Up close, they reflect Cairo itself – crumbling, crowded, littered with trash, surrounded with busloads of tourists from around the world, stray dogs, skinny carthorses, bored camels, and hawkers trying to sell everything from souvenirs to home-brewed teas and concoctions in recycled plastic bottles.

Our riding guide takes pride in the horses, who belong to his family, all Arabian stallions. The horses appear to be well-fed and well-loved, they know their job and do it well. They know exactly which stretches of sand are for galloping and which viewpoints are for posing for photos, which mine does with style and grace, ears pricked. Jittery and excited when he knows we’re about to take off, he settles immediately when we near the pyramids themselves and the crowds, nimbly navigating through throngs of people. He doesn’t even flinch when a bus honks at us, and doesn’t bat an eye when we are passed by a string of cantering camels. Nearly all the horses I see with riders, pulling carts, or tied up on the side of the road are male, all intact, no mares to be seen whatsoever. We see many who are so skinny it makes my heart ache, ridden with harsh bits or chains across the nose, showing scars that speak of an unspeakably hard life.  The donkeys are in even worse shape. The camels seem to fare better, but perhaps they are just hardier.

After spending the morning on horseback, we return later to visit the pyramids on foot, but now instead of having the vantage point of being on horseback, we’re in the midst of the crowd. Languages from around the world drift by in snippets on the wind as I jostle for position to take the same picture of the Sphynx as hundreds, maybe thousands, of other people just today. The Sphynx doesn’t seem to mind, gazing regally out towards the city, which is never-ending to the east. Behind the pyramids to the west lies only desert.

Leaving the crowds behind, we visit the Red Pyramid and the Pyramid of Djoser, a 6-tiered step pyramid built in the 27th century B.C. by Pharaoh Djoser, who pioneered the tradition of building these monumental royal tombs. More than a dozen pyramids in varying stages of crumble and decay span the distance from here to the more famous Great Pyramids of Giza, built a century later. We climb a rickety staircase to a narrow tunnel down into the depths of the Djoser Pyramid, then up again into the central chamber. The still air inside is hot and stifling, but we have the luxury of an air-conditioned vehicle and cold water bottles upon our exit. Imagining the ancient workers who built these colossal structures with neither modern luxuries nor modern tools and technology is a testament to human strength and ingenuity, and the lengths rulers will go to in order to be preserved, both in memory and in body, in the case of the mummified monarchs of ancient Egypt. The tunnels and chambers are lined with carved hieroglyphs, narrating the lives and legends of the pharaohs and leaving them instructions for their passage into the next life, which begins at the nearby ancient necropolis of Saqqara.

The Egyptian Museum in Cairo the next afternoon provides a more detailed context for the monuments we visited, devoid of life and emptied of their ancient treasures. The museum brings ancient Egypt to life, full of imposing statues, elaborate sarcophagi, and glittering treasures.

Many of these riches weren’t found in Cairo or Giza, but rather in Luxor…my next stop.