Cairo in Egypt is a massive, chaotic and clattering city steeped in religous history, thronged with people and
reverberating to the sound of car horns, ghetto-blasters and muezzins summoning the faithful to prayer.
Cairo has been the heart of Egypt for 1000 years and is an amalgam of
the medieval and modern worlds, a confusing cluster of earthen houses and modern office towers.
A myriad alleyways will greet you, as will a shamble of food hawkers,
goats, camels, donkeys, mosques and temples within an atmosphere of turmeric and cumin.
Nobody really knows how many people are living in Cairo but it's believed to be between 18 and 22 million. It's worth noting that
Egypt's overall population is increasing by about one and a half million each year.
Cairo has many squalid squatter camps and the 1985 photograph above of
the old quarter shows an area containing crypts for the dead where people had moved in to live.
Cairo is essentially a rubbish-strewn city where the suburbs meet the desert. There is dust everywhere and car fumes permeate the air. A
Cairo holiday can be a bit grimy but it's an adventure and it's great fun.
The city suffers a severe housing shortage, with plenty of outlying slums built mostly by migrants from the countryside looking for work
in Cairo. Quite a few apartment buildings in Cairo appear not to be
completely built on their top floor, mostly because of a 10% tax on finished buildings.
Backpacker tourists can usually find cheap hotels in downtown Cairo within an area conveniently close to the Egyptian Museum and near both
Islamic Cairo and Coptic (old) Cairo.
Transport links are well established in downtown Cairo for most Egypt holiday travel needs, airline tickets and for day tours to pharaonic
sites such as Memphis, Giza, Sakkara and Dahshur.
|
