Egypt: the inside track

‘No cherubs, pearly gates of having dinner with Elvis and Jesus,’ says Egyptologist Hala Sayed, my private guide for the day. She is explaining that ancient Egyptians imagined that the afterlife wouldn’t look so different from life on Earth. It’s an early morning in September, and we’re standing on the nearly empty main floor of the neoclassical and sensationally salmon-hued Museum of Egyptian Antiquities on Cairo’s Tahrir Square before the tour buses have arrived to disgorge their passengers. Tombs, Hala explains, were often painted with everyday scenes – people grinding grain, having sex, brewing beer – and depicted the family members and beloved pets the deceased hoped to see again. This prosaic version of paradise was not due to any lack of imagination (these are the same people who dreamed up the wasp-headed, hippo-bodied goddess Ahti) but because ‘life was pretty good’, Hala says. ‘Egypt was heaven.’

I’m at the very start of a weeklong trip with my 12-year-old son Joe – our first international adventure in over two years – visiting Cairo and sailing down the Nile to see the temples and tombs that line the river between the southern Egyptian cities of Aswan and Luxor. Today is a big one – the museum, the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx – although with Joe fighting a losing battle against jet lag and the heat, it’s one I end up experiencing by myself. He returns to the hotel with another trusted guide to rest but I promise, on the spot, to bring him back one day soon.

As we snake through midday traffic, Hala and I chat – about our kids, politics after the Arab Spring and the Muslim Brotherhood’s short reign in Egypt. She is a life-long Cairene and like many of the top guides here – often professors and/or former diplomats – she has a master’s degree in Islamic art and architecture and is currently going for her PhD. She points out the new neighbourhoods cropping up between Cairo and Giza, which have merged into a single megapolis with a combined population grazing 21 million, then tells me about President Sisi’s new administrative capital about 30 miles outside Cairo, which, if completed, will be the largest planned city in the world. I have missed this about travel: these casual but meaningful conversations and connections that happen during the in-between moments.

In Cairo, the past smashes up against the present like nowhere else in the world, and all the while we’ve been inching closer to the pyramids that loom over this most urban landscape. After a lifetime of seeing photos of the Great Pyramid, the oldest in Giza and the sole survivor of the seven wonders of the ancient world, I think I know what it’ll be like in person. I do not. The scale and the texture and the way the light hits it as the sun reflects off the surrounding desert and dips in and out of the clouds is something you have to feel. Hala has timed our visit for late afternoon when the heat isn’t so oppressive and the crowds have thinned. People are milling around, but apparently today is relatively quiet. Even pre-Covid, tourism numbers hadn’t quite returned to what they’d been before the 2011 revolution. The government hopes to grow them with high-profile projects such as the long-delayed Grand Egyptian Museum, whose glass-and-concrete outline I can see off in the distance. Apparently there is archaeological treasure enough to fill both the beloved Cairo museum and this one – although many big-ticket items, including all 5,600 objects excavated from Tutankhamun’s tomb, will move to the newcomer. When the $1 billion, state-of-the-art complex finally opens later in 2022, it will be the world’s largest archaeological museum.

It’s even less crowded inside the pyramid. I pass a single person coming down as I climb up the steep, low-ceilinged tunnel that leads to the King’s Chamber, the burial vault that lies precisely in the centre of the Great Pyramid. The guard tells me that if I stand in the middle of the room and close my eyes for two minutes, I’ll experience a strange energy. Then he leaves me to it. And I do feel something. A certain stillness or grounding. Maybe it’s from being surrounded by 2.3 million blocks of granite each weighing more than two tons. Or perhaps it’s that I’m standing alone in the very spot where King Khufu was laid to rest some 4,500 years ago.

There would be no Egypt without the Nile. You get a sense of this on the hour-and-a-half flight from Cairo to Aswan, about 500 miles to the south. The Sahara covers 94 per cent of the country, and most of the population lives within a few miles of the river. From the air the narrow strips of fertile land on either bank look like an emerald-green serpent winding its way across a thirsty land. Nearly every facet of life in Egypt was dictated by the Nile’s rise and fall. Even how long it took to mummify a body: 70 days, because the river floods when the star Sirius returns to the night sky after 70 days of absence; the rebirth of the land was a metaphor for the rebirth of the deceased. Even what taxes the king collected: most temples had a nilometer, a structure like a deep well, to measure the water level; the higher it was, the more the citizens would owe. It feels right that we’ll be seeing this country by boat, journeying down the waterway that sustained both ancient and modern Egypt.

For millennia, the city of Aswan has been the gateway between Egypt and the rest of Africa, and a vibrant trade centre. Besides the massive dam that was completed here in 1970, it is best known for the exchange of two precious goods: spices and camels. ‘Camels are the most loyal and the naughtiest of all domesticated animals,’ says Mohamed Ezzat, a funny, whip-smart Egyptologist who picked us up at the airport and will be with us for the next few days. We’re using a free hour before we have to meet the boat to wander through the Aswan spice market. Through a boyish grin, he tells us about his uncle’s camel who refused to eat or drink for two weeks out of solidarity with the uncle, who was sick and on bed rest; this is the same camel who Mohamed swears he saw smoking a hashish cigarette through his nose a few days later. We stop at Mohamed’s favourite spice shop for a cup of strong mint tea with the owner, who patiently lets us sniff whatever we like. We walk out with little bags of vibrant yellow-orange cumin, beautifully perfumed cardamom pods and dukkah, a spice blend that’s delicious on hummus.

We are sailing on the 40-cabin Sanctuary Sun Boat IV, a spacious, Art Deco-inflected vessel with plenty of places to watch life on the Nile unfold. Our days on the river take on a rhythm. Most start with an outing to a temple, followed by lunch on the boat, another temple visit or excursion, and then back to the boat for dinner and actual sailing to the next location. On our first afternoon, while we’re still docked in Aswan, we take a ride on a traditional wooden felucca, tacking hard to catch the wind. As our captain scrambles barefoot to work the two sails, Mohamed points out the sites, including lush Lord Kitchener’s Aswan Botanical Garden and the 1899 Old Cataract Hotel (now managed by Sofitel), where the film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1937 book Death on the Nile was shot and famous visitors to Aswan have always stayed, from archaeologist Howard Carter to Princess Diana. My favourite time is evening, when we return to the boat and recap on the day over cold drinks and bottomless bowls of salty peanuts. Joe and I scan the river, looking from bank to bank as kids jump off docks into the water, yelling hello as we sail by, and fisherman putter home for the night. One evening, we watch three boys lead a dozen horses into the Nile for a swim as the setting sun turns everything to honey.

The temples we visit along our sail – including Kom Ombo, 30 miles north of Aswan, with its still intact painted ceilings, and the Karnak complex in Luxor, where the enormous Temple of Amun-Ra is the largest religious building ever built – are all astonishing. But the temple to Isis at Philae might be the most moving. It’s the site of an inscription dated to 394 ad, thought to be the last example of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. A one-liner about the god Mandulis is the last known vestige of a writing system, and really a way of life, that came to an end here after three millennia. Mohamed points out where the Christians who took over the temple in the fifth century scratched out the faces of Egyptian deities. He shows us little crosses allegedly carved by the Knights of Malta during the Crusades and the graffiti left here by Napoleon’s troops in 1799, as well as a memorial carved high up on an outside wall that names British soldiers who were killed in the Sudan in 1884. The entire complex is a tribute to modern engineering; in the late 1960s, fearing the temple would be totally submerged by flooding from the newly built Aswan High Dam, the Egyptian government and UNESCO moved the buildings, stone by stone, to the nearby island of Agilkia where it stands today. The temple is a timeline of the last 2,000 years, and the layered history is as captivating as the structure itself.

‘We used to find bones and sell resin-bead necklaces to tourists,’ Egyptologist Mohammed Abdelrehim tells me about growing up in Luxor in the 1970s, in a neighbourhood near the Valley of the Kings. Mohamed, who is old friends with our previous guide Mohamed (‘It’s the Mike of Egypt,’ he jokes, then tells us we can call him Mohamed the Better), is taking Joe and I on a private tour of the ancient necropolis where royals who lived during the New Kingdom – a sort of Golden Age of Egyptian art and political stability that ran from a period spanning 1570 to 1070 bc – were buried in tombs sunk deep into the heart of the surrounding barren hillsides. He knows every nook and cranny of Luxor; with his bookish beard and safari hat, he looks the part of the trusted expert in an Indiana Jones-style flick about Egypt. As we drive past half- demolished houses on the edge of the site, he tells us that many of them have been purchased by the government so that archaeological digs can continue; there are tombs that have yet to be found. When he was growing up, Mohamed says, it was common to lift a rug at someone’s house and find a tunnel where the family had been digging for treasure.

We are outside the tomb of Amenhotep II, waiting for the guards to unseal the door. As Mohamed tells us, the tomb was closed for 20 years and can now be seen only on private tours to prevent further deterioration; Joe and I might be the only guests to lay eyes on it for a year. We feel incredibly lucky that we’re getting this rare access – and that we’ll be able to take our time and really look around. Guides aren’t allowed in the tombs, so Mohamed preps us on what to look for. It’s a good thing he does or I would have spent the entire time mesmerised by the ceiling, which is painted to look like the night sky, the deepest inky blue covered with little yellow stars. Later, we have King Tut’s tomb to ourselves, and a guard motions us over so we can get up close and peer into Tut’s face, separated only by a plate of glass and a few inches. In the gorgeously painted tomb of Queen Nefertari, we recall Mohamed’s words and locate her in one of the reliefs with an Eye of Horus tattoo (apparently the first tattoo found on a person of royalty). We spot the red edit lines, places where the master painter corrected the strokes of more junior artisans.

After we’ve returned to Cairo, Hala takes us to the recently discovered tomb of Wahtye in the Saqqara necropolis, about 15 miles south-east of Giza, where, perhaps unfairly, we have a laugh at Wahtye’s expense. He lived about 4,100 years ago, and while he was the priest to a king, he was not royalty. But as Hala points out with a smirk, he really wanted us to know how important he was, as the huge images of him throughout the tomb attest.

Later, as we head to see the 14th-century Mosque-Madrassa of Sultan Hassan, Hala says something to our driver in Arabic. Thirty minutes later, we pull over, and she tells Joe to come with her. We are at the lesser-used back entry to the Sphinx and the Giza Pyramids. Joe doesn’t have the time to explore like I did, but he gets to experience them nonetheless. I see my son text friends a photo of himself with the pyramids in the background. Later, he posts it to Instagram, giving in to that timeless human need – as did Wahyte, the early Christians and Napoleon’s troops – to let the world know, ‘I existed, I too was here.’

Getting here

Abercrombie & Kent offers a 10-day Egypt trip, with three days in Cairo and Giza and a four-night river cruise between Aswan and Luxor, from £5,650 per person, full board, including guided sightseeing, park and entrance fees, and airport transfers. abercrombiekent.co.uk