"Madame, madame, MADAME! Welcome, welcome to Egypt!! You like see pyramids on camel, maybe Neel sunset cruise?" The touts lurk everywhere, on street corners and bus benches, in front of hotel entrances and ice cream stands, and one guy even jumps into my taxi on the way to the pyramids:
"You want beautiful camel to ride?"
"No. No camels, no horses, no donkeys, no guides, no nothing."
"It beeg hill."
"I don't care."
"You like perfume maybe, nice papyrus?"
"You are so wasting your time."
Despite Cairo's reputation for toutism, I generally walk the streets unharrassed. After all, salespeople completely ignore me in the stores at the malls back home, so why should it be different here? I just don't look like easy money.
Travelers always know that you can't go back and visit a place and expect it to live up to the original impression. Perfect experiences in places like Petra, the Taj Mahal, or Ankor Wat are better left to the memory. Cairo, nearly forty years later, remains surprisingly the same, but bigger, with a gazillion more people (please airdrop some birth control in this country), and layers of pollution that will surely corrode the pyramids into grit within the next millenium--that is if the ooze of urban sprawl doesn't cross the road and knock over the fence and carry them away first.
No comments:
Post a Comment