Egypt is a mystery in the History. I did realize that after my visit to this Pandora Box a couple of months back.

Geologically, it does resemble India, but is mainly distinguishable by the dominating Arabic Sunni Muslim population. Christians do have a substantial share (to about 30% in Cairo), with a fine mingling of architecture and food.

The country is dotted with old monuments through numerous mosques, pyramids, and astonishing aged community areas where people live with the same zeal and passion.

The country is down- ridden with poverty and exploitation by politics and high- handedness, making people greedier everyday to make their ends meet. Surely, they are very good and emotional at heart but STILL “all in the end is a struggle to earn somehow… every minute everyday’. Precisely, I experienced going back by around 15- 20 years back in India.

My first memorable event was the sight of all pyramids in the dusk.. flying over them, as we approach the Cairo airport. Was I dreaming, going to live them in colors, what I saw in our NCERT books of history 20 years back? Yes… I was really excited!

Our plane landed in time, and we were busy for a while encashing Egyptian pounds and immigration formalities. The arrival airport is quite small and sparingly mechanized, like our small regional domestic airports. They are building a new one which we could see outside (and we used it at departure), as they have a huge population inhabiting the middle- east as expats.

We had done a package deal, therefore entered the tourism cartel right away, with a placard car drifting away from the airport. Ahmed, our chauffeur, was a nice guy and was to stay with us for the whole tour. His courteous gestures showed that he would indeed be good to us, and that was a good comfort factor. We did complement him (with few carrots for a fat tip, if he could give us his full time showing everything), as we usually do in India… and it did work!!

We were to stay in Giza (a couple of kilometers away from the sphinx and pyramids), and so we had to cross Cairo city, and then across the Nile. On the way, we could see some of the oldest colonies still surviving the heat of time and civilization, and people do live there. Often, we crossed heavily congested area, as it was around 7PM.. the office hours. Roads were pretty narrow, and it did give us a sense of pride seeing MARUTI 800s, Swift and Altos in the traffic.

Despite all this visible deficiencies in public convenience systems, we came across the President’s residential area, where umpteen number of military police could be seen cordoning any civilian to venture across the 3 streets area, and understandably causing inconvenience to common man.

We reached our hotel, and settled for good. Late evening, Ahmed took us to an ancient restaurant just near the pyramid, where they welcomed us with fresh bread (khaboos; the Arabic bread…. Yummy!!) being cooked in a tandoor at the entrance (mentioned as- 2000 years old). It was quite peculiar to learn then, that they asked us to pay tips to their guys, and this happened everywhere with us throughout the trip.

After a conventional ala carte Arabic dinner, we took some snaps of the pyramids from the window, and these looked even more beautiful due to changing colors of the laser show in progress. They were as big as the mountain as these looked just on the other side of the road, though were at least a km or two away. Then we realized that we had not come to see something extra- ordinary!

We were back to the hotel adrenalized, assured of our next day’s visit to this amazing world out of this world..

I shall share my next day’s experience in my next blog… (Just not to make this boring). See u later!