The Adventures of Mactowne

Back at the pyramids... we got out of our cab and into the complex and already had to start refusing camel rides and everything else under the Egyptian sun that could be exchanged for money. There are lots of hawkers inside the pyramid complex that are just incredibly persistent about trying to get into your pockets, by whatever method. As we wandered in we took a cursory look at the Sphinx, which we'd return to later, then Ian took a picture of a guy on a camel. He jumped right off and wanted a tip. We eventually offered him 1 pound to try to get rid of him, which apparently insulted him. He left for 30 seconds, then came back and wanted it. So... that time we refused him. We spent the next several hours going around the outsides of the pyramids and also bought the extra ticket to go up into the largest of the three main pyramids and into a tomb. It was fortunate that we had Takano with us because he decided not to go and we weren't allowed to bring in bags, so we had to leave them with someone trustworthy. He was the perfect solution in a sea of people who constantly referred to us as their "friends." The climb into the tomb was really cool - nice cramped little corridors with steep slopes and stale air, just what you'd expect from an Indiana Jones lifestyle. The tomb wasn't much to look at and didn't have any explanatory signage, so I guess I just blame my own ignorance for that part. We got back out, spent more time refusing all kinds of people (one of which wanted money after Takano used the bathroom, despite the fact that he had nothing to do with the bathroom), then got some cold drinks at a little tourist pavilion. Spent a little more time getting closer to the Sphinx, then eventually headed back to the hotel to get our bags (which were retrieved from a very different spot from the crack den in which we left them, but they were fine so we didn't ask questions), then headed into Cairo by taxi. We were dropped off at a way more central part of Talaat Harb this time and got a cheap room in a hostel very near to the Egyptian Museum. That worked well, since it was our next planned stop. We checked in, dropped the bags, got some food at a little locals restaurant with good grub, then went to the museum. It was a bit like being in the British Museum - lots of really interesting stuff and not nearly enough time to see it all. They have a whole area for King Tut, which includes two of the three coffins he laid in as well as a head dress / mask thing that's in lots of photos all over the world. Really cool to see in person. Takano later decided to check in to stay in our room since we had an extra bed, and to leave the next day, so we went to a travel place with him and worked out tickets for him to fly back and forth to southern Egypt. Somewhere in there we also discovered that the travel places ran trips to the Red Sea for divers. We inquired at one, discovered we'd do best to just buy bus tickets directly from the station, then did that later on the next day. That night we had shokari for dinner (good pasta mix that's incredibly cheap) and wandered the streets a bit before heading back to the pyramids to see this light and laser show that was supposed to be interesting. Takano's guide book said the story was boring but the lights were cool, and that there's no need to pay the $20 a head to see it since you can see into the whole complex from the rooftop terrace at Pizza Hut across the street from the entrance. We went and tested this theory after a very long cab ride (cabbie apparently wasn't aware of a major freeway that we used later). As we pulled up to Pizza Hut I noticed some incredibly bright lights above the entry gate for the pyramids that were pointed towards Pizza Hut. No way... yes, way. They've attempted to blind you with glare so that you can't freeload. But Pizza Hut wouldn't be defeated so easily... In response they stacked old cardboard and tables up to block the lights and provide a few spots where you can still kind of see in. The show turned out to be really boring, so we were all glad that we paid nothing to see it and not sorry at all that we missed the first 15 minutes. If you go, don't bother. After that, we went back to the room and crashed.
Takano left really early the next morning and after checking out and storing the bags, Ian and I went out to get bus tickets. We managed to find the right place with some pages from Takano's Japanese guide book that he left behind for us, so we grabbed those, then got some food. All of a sudden the sidewalks around the city were being plastered with green prayer mats, and we eventually realized that a huge afternoon prayer was part of the preparations for Ramadan. This meant that most businesses closed too, so we found an open cafe, had a drink, and waited things out. The prayer session was really interesting to see - men lined up shoulder to shoulder for many city block lengths all acting in unison to the tune of the broadcast prayer that blares from towers around town. That broadcast happens everyday and multiple times per day, but this was a special session. As hectic as the city is, I always felt that the prayer broadcasts kind of humanized the place. I guess maybe they just make the culture a lot more "visible" when it seems that everyone's main purpose is to shake money out of your pockets.
Eventually that came to an end and decided to use the internet for a while, then headed in a cab to the Citadel to try to finish up our sightseeing in Cairo. Our taxi driver took us all the way there, then told us it was closed. I think he wanted to score an additional ride out of us.. so, we got out. We walked along one side of the complex on the street for a few minutes, then our next best friend arrived and told us over and over that he wanted to practice English and didn't want any money. He was a student of something or other and wanted to show us around his neighborhood... we tried to break off once, then Ian and I hesitated, he latched back on, then insisted upon showing us two mosques that were open, despite the fact that everything else was closed. Somewhat reluctantly, we decided to walk with him... I hate being outwardly rude to / ignoring all these people, but you really have to be on guard in Cairo. You never know who wants to screw you and who doesn't. So, we walked into this neighborhood that can be best described as a sprawling slum and let this guy lead us around in the general direction of the mosques we had pinned on our little tourist map. He talked and talked and pointed out a few things of interest, talked more about the earthquake of 1993 (I think that was the date), about how this mosque is trying to help children who lost their parents, etc. So, this was all well and good because we were seeing a definite slice of local life that we'd never have seen otherwise, but as usual it ended with the money issue. He took us to his local mosque, we shed our shoes, went in to look around, then took us to the old man who runs the place and wanted all kinds of money as a donation to help these children. It seemed legitimate, but Omar said he didn't want any money... He wanted us to donate some each right then, then some more when we went up into the minaret on top of the building to look out over the city. We told him no over and over, and he finally settled for us just paying some amount to get up into the minaret. We gave him something like $10, then went up on our own to look around. Even the seemingly nice guys all suck you in for money... even when it's for a good cause. Christ. Or... someone else. Allah?
After admiring our $10 view, we came down, left discreetly with no further discussion, then wandered through more of the slum area and the locals' bazaar to find our way back to the west and the area we were staying. We saw all kinds of things in the slum / bazaar, including carpets, food, and a million other things for sale, a dead sheep carcass slumped up against a building with some rubbish, and a crazy traffic jam that totally blocked up this really narrow dirt road (great place for an explosion, I thought). We managed to get back out with an alternative route, hailed a cab, then went straight to Cairo Tower to see one more bit of the city. The view from the tower is awesome, as it sits right near the Nile and gives you a top down view of most of the city area in 360 degrees. It's a bit hard to interpret where you are with no maps and the walls of the city constantly rising around you, so this was a good way to figure things out spatially. It was also a good stop for the best strawberry juice we'd ever had (pure fruit) and some really nice waiters who did not want to put us in taxis or hotels. We killed several hours there, then went back to get our bags, then went to catch the overnight bus to Hurghada. The bus wasn't spectacular but it wasn't horrible either. It did break down for a bit in the middle of nowhere (literally couldn't see anything out the windows, because were in the middle of undeveloped desert), but it got us to Hurghada eventually. We checked in to the Sea View Hotel (an okay place with good views of the gargantuan rats that live across the street). Oh, they also came by the room to spray pesticide around our toilet, which kind of poisoned the air in there for the next 10 hours or so. Classy... But we weren't there to lay around the hotel. We got out and started looking for diving advice. A nice guy who runs an equipment shop called a friend and had him come talk to us / take us to his dive shop in a local resort, and at that point we realized we wouldn't be able to make boat dives. We had to leave the next evening (this was kind of an unplanned detour) and that wouldn't necessarily give us enough time for making the bus and almost certainly not enough time before we could fly. So, thus began our long deliberations on what to do. We eventually settled on going the next morning to drive down to a place called Sharm Elnaga with this little dive shop. This place is part of a resort that's around 45 minutes south of Hurghada and it has pretty awesome reef dives that you can do from shore. Our guide came along and met us at the office in Hurghada, loaded the equipment into his tiny car, got us in, then drove us down there. As we suited up we realized the gear was pretty crappy. Nothing was exactly new, my regulator hose was backwards somehow (forcing me to do a little S-curve with it so it wouldn't be upside down and leaking all the time), my depth gauge turned out not to work, and my mask leaked a lot. Nonetheless, the first dive was gorgeous. The sand of the desert goes right up to the sea and looks completely desolate, but this incredibly reef is teeming with life just below the surface. We stayed near 50' on the first dive (being a bit cautious because we had to fly around 18 hours later) and visibility was fantastic. I've never seen so many kinds of coral, or even fish, anywhere. We spotted a ray and Ian saw a lion fish, among many other things of interest. We had a pretty long surface interval since our guide kind of disappeared, then after 1:30 hours or so, got ready to go again. At that point my tank buckle on my BCD broke, and the guide swapped gear with me. He had swapped once already, so I was back to a broken depth gauge. The BCD buckle couldn't be fixed properly, so he bent the metal part into shape, discarded the plastic, and somehow felt comfortable jumping in with totally crap gear. So... whatever. The second dive was very cool as well, but we didn't catch any of the sharks we were hoping to see. We did see a great lion fish though, which was some consolation. The gear continued to be uncomfortable and kind of annoyance throughout the dive, and I think that contributed to me using air uncharacteristically fast. After a little safety stop on our way back in I was down to about 25 bars (half of the absolute minimum you're supposed to surface with). But, I'm still here. After that we drove back to the dive shop in Hurghada, got our stuff, and headed to a place for lunch.
After lunch we went to the bus station and caught our evening bus back to Cairo. This one was a little nicer and a bit more comfortable, but still a very, very long ride. We got in that night around 11:00pm and then headed to the airport to spend a few more hours before we'd take of for Mumbai. By the time we were ready to leave I was wasted and really needed sleep. Ian was about the same. He got to enjoy the business class lounge at the airport (somehow he got a business class ticket cheaply through STA) and I had a Cinnabon while I waited for the flight, then eventually woke up with my head on the Cinnabon table when he returned. We finally got on the plane and I fell asleep instantly, slept through take off, and woke when a flight attendant shook me for breakfast. It was a nice flight (Egypt Air) - another good example of non-American companies that are still treating passengers pretty well. Then, around noon, we landed in Mumbai.
We could see the slums reaching right up to the edges of the airport as we came in - a sight that had become familiar during my brief research on the city for a class back at school. I think the fact that I had previously read a fair amount about the place made me like it before we even touched down, and I've been glad for that ever since. India has been very refreshing after the rudeness of the Greeks and the conniving of the Egyptians. Again, I'm generalizing, but that's what we experienced more often than not.
As we exited the airport we asked about hotels at a little hotel counter, and they set us up with a cheap room in Colaba (the southern most of the original 7 islands that were joined) at a place called the Causeway Hotel. We took an hour long taxi ride there for about $10 and started to realize that Mumbai would still be a bit cheaper than we had previously thought. We checked into the hotel, freshened up, then asked about a good place to eat. The guy at the desk sent us downstairs back onto the street right in front of the hotel to eat at a place called Leopold's. That sounded awfully familiar...
So, we went down, grabbed a table, and I became increasingly convinced that we were sitting in the restaurant described in the book Shantaram. At one point I finally asked our waiter if he knew the book and he confirmed that this was the exact same place. Gregory Roberts (the author) still frequents the place, he said, and last sat at the same table we were dining on. Wow.. I got so excited that I bought a t-shirt. The food was great, neither of us got sick, and it was even pretty cheap. Just awesome... suddenly the town became pretty familar as I continued to spot scenes from the book, which Roberts does a great job of describing. It was almost like I'd been here before.
That afternoon we got online to do some tourism kind of research and got info on the Dharavi slum tour (something I'd found months back and really wanted to do), local monuments, etc. Afterwards we went to the slum tour office (conveniently about 1 minute away), booked the tour for the next morning, then walked over to the Gateway of Indian (big stone monument thing that greets people who arrive in Mumbai by boat). It was... covered in scaffolding. Like many things around here at this time of year. Oh well. So, we did that, then stopped in a little tourist booth thing to ask about tours out to the caves at Ellora and Ajanta. These guys set us up with a tour that included "everyting" (not really). We paid with my visa, which we're still hoping will help us reverse the charge, or at least part of it, and decided we'd leave the next day after the slum tour on an overnight bus, see the Ellora Caves the next day, stay in a "nice hotel," see the Ajanta Caves the day after that, then overnight bus it back to Mumbai. So, that's what we did. The rest of that day we went out to the Haji Ali mosque (one of the dirtiest places I've ever been in my life - kind of deprecated the significance of it), rode to Gandhi's old house (closed for pest control that day), and saw a couple of parks that sit on a hill on the north end of Marine drive, providing good views out over Chowpatty Beach. They were... the something Mehta gardens and... another one. I'll have to edit that in later.
Once we were done at the gardens we got in a cab to head back to our hotel, and it made it half way, then broke down in really heavy traffic. Ian and I jumped out to help push it off the road, much to the amusement of the Indian cab drivers all around us. Our driver didn't ask for anything after we pushed it a couple of blocks, so we took off and were actually close enough to cruise down Chowpatty Beach for a while. It's not anything spectacular, but it is a nice open space that is heavily used by the residents around it. And open space isn't easy to come by, so it's worth a leisurely stroll. Eventually we took a second cab to get the rest of the way back, then dropped our stuff, had dinner at a cool little hummus shop, then went to Leopold's for a night of drinking. We ordered a pitcher of beer, which comes in the shape of a huge cylinder about three feet high. I drank more than one beer for the first time in my life that night. It wasn't easy, but the Bacardi Breezer I used as a chaser helped. We went through a couple of those, then called it a night (they close at midnight anyway). We got a reasonable amount of sleep, then got up and out the next morning for the slum tour. It was a great tour, and I definitely recommend that everyone see it. We began by checking out the open laundry area where a whole laundry operation is regulated (people rent stalls and wash clothes for individuals, businesses, etc.). Pretty fascinating. That was sort of our first glimpse of just how industrious Indian people are as compared with many other nations. The tour continued with some short glimpses of other slums from the road, but the main event, the Dharavi slum, was where we finally got out of the car and onto our feet. The guide led us into the slum through a narrow corridor, where light began fading. The interior of the slum is pretty dark in places, due to the extremely dense building placement. To give some idea of the density, the Dharavi slump apparently houses 18,000 people per acre. I don't see how that's possible, but that's what our guide said, more than once. Maybe he meant 1,800?
The most impressive part of the place is its industrial pursuits. The gross domestic product there is over 500,000 dollars annually. We saw everything from its incredible recycling industry (cardboard, plastics, copper wire, glass, most any kind of rubbish) to its leather production, for which it is famous. We also had glimpses, albeit short ones, of the housing areas. The slum was really where the white person celebrity thing began. We get a lot of stares pretty much everywhere, but there are enough whites wandering around Colaba that it's not that big a deal for the locals. In the slum, however, we enjoyed many curious smiles and waving, and the kids were hilarious. They'd run up to us, want to shake hands, and practice the few English phrases they'd picked up in school. Many times we heard their young voices calling out, "Hello, Sir, how are you.?" If one succeeded in shaking our hand, he'd run off immediately to tell his friends and they'd then chase us down as a group to get a handshake each before laughing and saying goodbye. There are some really cute kids in there. I think their culture really overcomes their circumstances and it hardly feels like a place of deprivation, so long as they have each other and those beaming smiles to keep them going.
After the tour we headed back to Colaba to spend a little more time before we'd catch the overnight bus to Aurangabad for the cave tours. We grabbed some more food (still solid - no diarrhea), got our bags, and made our way to the bus. Then, our next overnight jounrey began. Again, not a great, comfy bus, but it could easily have been worse. Early the next morning we woke up in Aurangabad and got a quick cab to our hotel - Hotel Manor. Sounds impressive, anyway, right? Details to follow...

posted by Matthew MacLeod @ 3:35 AM