Travelogue: Western Desert March 2008 - Day 2

Emma and I had breakfast in the restaurant at the Le Passage, next to the swimming pool which had a rather bizarre waterfall cascading into it. I was on a mission for white cheese, an Egyptian soft cheese (“gibna beida”) that tastes slightly like sour cream. I have been addicted to it for years and can’t find it a supply in the UK- and it was there side by side with Egyptian cucumbers, pickles, olives and local flat baladi bread. A gorgeous breakfast. Emma decided to avoid salad for sensible health reasons and instead asked the chef to make her an omelette, and this was hand delivered to the table when it was cooked. The tea was Lipton’s Yellow Label, and life was just as it should be.

The next task was to get into Cairo to visit the Egypt Museum. We arranged with the concierge to leave our luggage at the hotel and he gave us a bilingual business card to give to the return taxi driver so that he would know where to take us on our return (which was rather smarter than the hotel envelope that I had stuffed into my jeans for the same purpose). The concierge gave us advice about what we should pay for both the outgoing and return journeys. We negotiated with an amiable driver and zipped in to Tahrir Square in around 30 minutes, through crazy traffic that was immensely dense but, remarkably, moving very quickly.

The Cairo Museum hadn’t changed. The ticket office officially had two counters working but only one was actually available, and the queue took forever to clear due to negotiations between the man in front of us, who was waving around a letter, and the cashier - something to do with a school visit. In the end we bought our tickets and walked through the gardens to the main entrance of the museum, through the turnstiles.

We spent four hours in the museum, missing out the Predynastic (absolutely stuffed with crowds) and starting instead with the Old Kingdom, working our way chronologically through the galleries. I never cease to be amazed at the contents of the museum, or to be saddened by the conditions in which they live. I am particularly fond of the Old Kingdom sections. Seeing the beautifully crafted and composed scenes of animal life and birds is always a joy – nothing like it appears in art until the Amarna period. The Amarna gallery itself is always somewhat disappointing and I always leave wishing that more representative Amarnan art work could be added. The new museums planned may address this.

It is always a joy to see the Tutankhamun collection, which is so very rich and fine. Colours and textures, different materials and varied subjects, secular items and artefacts of profound religious importance are all there. Charitos and vast beds are exhibited alongside tiny statuettes and staggering numbers of walking sticks. Lovely wooden sculptures sit side by side with glorious gold and alabaaster. The huge golden shrines are simply staggering, and the coffins and the famous mask never cease to amaze and please. It was rather strange to have flashbacks of having seen the few missing artefacts in London earlier in the year. Knowing how much is in London, and what a tiny gap this leaves in the Cairo Museum gives an additional sense of how truly voluminous the Cairo collection actually is. Staggering to try and imagine it fitted into that tiny tomb in Luxor, even with the aid of the Harry Brunton photographs and an excellent coloured illustration which showed what the tomb would have looked like when it was found. From a personal point of view it was particularly nice to see the pectoral from the tomb which has a silica glass scarab at its centre, and it added a certain frisson to know that we would be seeing the raw material in the field in a week or so.

The tickets for the Royal Mummies exhibit cost LE100 so we forked out the required amount, and went to inspect the preserved members of ancient Egypt’s royal families. Unlike many areas of the museum this area has been put together with conservation and preservation of the displays in mind. It is climate-controlled, clean and modern. The mummies are contained in glass display cabinets, some partially covered with cotton fabric. They were an eerie bunch. In some ways the display, gathering them together all in one exhibit, had reduced these once powerful, living people, to the level of a side-show curiosity. It felt disturbingly disrespectful to look on the bare skin of the desiccated faces, pulled and stressed by the processes of mummification. They had never intended to be seen like this. I am not quite sure why the exhibit made me so sad. I have seen many mummies in various states of undress in different museums but I think that the difference is that they seemed to be displayed in a way which was educational and informative. The Manchester mummy discussion was incredibly useful, and I came down very much on the side of keeping the uncovered mummies on display for educational reasons. The cramming of all the Royal mummies into one room in Cairo seemed to have more to do with Belzoni-type sensationalism than education or information. I don't know what Emma thought about the whole thing, as we went around the displays seperately and didn't exchange notes afterwards. I’m glad that we went to see it because it was an insight, but I will not need to visit again.

For all of its faults the Tahrir Square museum is a part of Egypt’s cultural heritage. It’s exposed caryatids in a Muslim country have rightly caused some raised eyebrows over the years, its displays are old, dusty and poorly lit, the cellars described as overflowing and disorganized - but although the 1902 Museum seems dreadfully dated today, it has provided an invaluable function for many decades and is part of the history of Egyptology. It certainly has a role in the future. The new Grand Museum is being built on the sands of Giza, which is great news, and plans for the existing pink museum in Tahrir Square will see it continuing to display aspects of the country’s heritage, which is also good news.

Next stop was a much-needed break on the terrace of the the Hilton Hotel, which is in an ideal location next door to the museum. At the time the Hilton was about to change hands and become a Ritz Carlton hotel. I don't know if that ever happened, not having made it back to Cairo since then. The Hilton was built in the 1950s on the banks of the Nile, and I have always enjoyed visiting it after a trip to the museum. Emma and I decided to go there for a relaxing beer before returning to the hotel to meet the Traveline representative who would accompany us to Cairo Airport for the internal flight to Luxor. There we each had a glass of Saqqara Gold beer, and we shared a plate of truly heavenly falafel, tahini and baladi bread. We left the hotel in what should have been good time to return to our hotel in Heliopolis, but Cairo traffic intervened.

The taxi negotiation was fairly painless, outside the hotel itself ,with a short walk to the taxi rank, but it went downhill from there. It took nearly an hour and a half to reach our hotel, partly due to the dramatic increase of Cairo traffic at around that time, and partly because our driver was unable to locate our hotel, attempting to deposit us at one which he assured us was ours but quite clearly wasn’t! Fortunately, he received good advice from the doorman of that hotel and eventually deposited us outside Le Passage, where our Traveline representative was arriving at the same time. Moral of the story: leave at least 2 hours for a return visit from Cairo to a hotel airport. Emma had been booked on a later internal flight but fortunately the Traveline chap had managed to book her on the same (earlier) flight as me.

It was a painless flight from Cairo to Luxor, but we had to stand for over an hour waiting for the luggage to arrive when we arrived at Luxor. Apparently one of the big charter airlines doesn't keep its own ground crew and was using Luxor airport’s baggage handling team to process more than one incoming international flight at the time we arrived, meaning that we had to wait for the staff to become available to process our luggage. It began to look as though we would be on hand to greet the other tour members, due to arrive from the UK at 9.30pm, but in the end we left the airport at 9pm and were deposited only 15 minutes later at the Mercure Egotel in Luxor. It is a functional hotel, lacking anything in the way of frills, but comfortable and conveniently located behind the Temple of Luxor.

Wake up calls, luggage collection details, breakfast times and a pick up time were all arranged, both for Emma and I and those arriving from Heathrow. It would have been good to have a quick walk through Luxor but there was no time The sound of the muezzin brought Egypt to life, even in the generic blandness of the hotel room.

Day 1 can be found here.