Big thanks to Sabina Lohr for tagging me in the Tripbase Best Kept Travel Secrets project!
Secrets are funny things. We like hearing them almost as much as we love sharing them. Though we know we probably shouldn’t. Same goes for travel. I mean, if I told you all about the Pyramids, millions of tourists would come to Egypt each year to see them. We can’t have that.
Living in Egypt, and having worked as a tour leader, I’m also no longer sure what is and isn’t a secret here. Perhaps I’ve become blasé. Take Siwa Oasis as an example. Hundreds of km from Cairo, in the middle of the desert, with picture postcard-perfect sand dunes, and more hot and cold springs than you could shake a date palm at. It’s the perfect secret. Except, you’ve probably heard of it. Same goes for Basata camp, on the Sinai, or Marsa Alam, on the Red Sea coast.
So, here are three Egypt secrets you may not know. Better than that, I won’t have to kill you after telling you.
A few hundred km north of Luxor, Abydos is – in my opinion – the coolest temple in Egypt. It may look like a multi-storey car park from the outside, but inside are some of the most gorgeous, delicate bas-reliefs in the whole of Egypt, and the colours are exquisite.
It also contains the most important in situ Egyptian king list, a record of all the pharaohs that ruled Egypt since the time of Menes. There are, of course, some notable exceptions. Akhenaten and his heirs (including Tutankhamen) were scrubbed from history, because he was a troublesome heretic who sacked the priesthood and instituted a new, monotheistic religion. Queen Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt as pharaoh during the 18th Dynasty, is also missing, since everyone knows you can’t be a real pharaoh unless you have a beard.
And like every Egyptian temple worth its salt, Abydos is replete with mysteries. There are hieroglyphs here which some people claim show fabulous flying machines, such as the so-called Abydos Helicopter.
The area around Abydos is also said to possess immense spiritual power. From 1946 to 1981 an English woman called Dorothy Eady lived in the temple. She believed she was the reincarnation of a temple priestess, and lover of Seti I (the pharaoh who built the main temple). Rather worryingly, given that she was meant to be his lover, she took the name Umm Seti, which means mother of Seti.
2. The Solar CITIES Urban Eco Tour
This is the perfect travel secret to give away, because it really shouldn’t be a secret, yet hardly anyone knows about it yet.
Solar CITIES is an NGO that works directly with poor communities in Cairo, helping them design and develop sustainable technology solutions for their everyday problems and needs. To date, and with very limited funding, they have built and installed over 30 solar water heaters, and a handful of biogas generators, on houses in Darb al-Ahmar and Manshiyat Nasser. Other work currently going on includes converting small generators to run on biogas rather than kerosene.
Manshiyat Nasser is where Cairo’s Zabaleen community of garbage collectors live. One of the cool things about the project is that it makes use of locally available, mainly recycled, materials. Also, it’s a bottom-up, participatory approach to development that taps in to the collective intelligence and ingenuity within the communities, and therefore addresses their actual rather than perceived needs.
If you come to Cairo, Hana Fathy – a remarkable young man from Manshiyat Nasser, who has been involved with the project since the start – can give you a tour of their work. You walk through one of the most fascinating areas of Islamic Cairo, and head via al-Azhar Park into Manshiyat Nasser. This is where the majority of Cairo’s mountain of rubbish is manually sorted, processed, re-used and recycled. Along the way, you can visit families that have been involved with, and have benefited from, the project, and learn how some of the poorest people, in one of the most crowded and polluted cities on the planet, are using home-grown green technology to improve their lives.
You can learn more about the project on the Solar CITIES blog, and you can find details of the tour here.
Full disclosure: Hana is a good friend of mine. I believe the work he is doing is incredibly important, as well as super-interesting, and I’ve been trying to help him as much as I can. So I put his tour up on the NileGuide Cairo trip planning site (which is where the previous link goes). As far as I’m aware, this is currently the only travel publication that carries any information on the tour.
3. The wonderful versatility of the galabaya
I thought we could mix it up a bit, and give a not-place-related tip.
The galabaya is the traditional Arab dress. It comes in different styles and goes by different names, but essentially it’s a loose, flowing robe. A man-dress, if you will. Or if you are a woman, just a dress. Now, many people think galabayas are only for Ray Ban sporting oil sheikhs, and peasant farmers. Not true. The secret is, they are great for travelling. It all comes down to comfort, dignity and style.
Galabayas are incredibly comfortable, and the ultimate lounging attire. If you don’t fancy getting dressed up to mooch around your hotel or hostel, you don’t have to. You can sleep in it (and won‘t have to worry about your modesty if you need to leg it to the toilet in the middle of the night). If it’s cold, you can put one on over your other clothes as an extra, efficient layer of insulation. If it’s hot and sweaty, and you’ve been slapped on the inner thigh with a bout of prickly heat, the last thing you want is clothing that’s going to chafe you raw. Slip on your galabaya, and let it all hang loose.
Galabayas are also great for helping to preserve your dignity. You can use it as a top layer that allows you to get dressed or undressed in public, without flashing your privates everywhere. If you are in the great outdoors and need the toilet, you can squat down and do your business without anyone copping an eyeful. (Note, remove your underwear first!) If you are at the beach, or by or on a river or lake, you can stick your swimming stuff on underneath. Whip your galabaya off when you want to jump in the water, and put it on again when you get out and want to cover up. Note, a sarong is emphatically not as good as a galabaya for this. Sarongs – take it from me – fall down. Galabayas don’t.
Finally, how many times have you been on the road, and ended up getting dragged along to some impromptu fancy dress party? Come on, we all know it happens. Well, with a galabaya, you’ll never be stuck for a costume again. The Moroccan style ones with a hood are best. Monk, wizard, Jedi knight, ghost… the sky’s the limit!
So there you have it, three cats out of three bags. Make the most of them.
Note: The Abydos photo is from flickr Creative Commons, and was taken by Charlie Phillips. The Solar CITIES photo was taken by my good friend Nadia Maanani. It shows me and Hana on the roof of an old Hammam that they hope to regenerate using solar water heaters. (And in case you haven’t worked it out, I’m the bald one, and he’s the good-looking one!)
Oh yeah, I need to pass on the Tripbase secret baton. So I tag:
aric with an a
Canvas of Light
cult of travel
Fevered Mutterings
Rerunaround
Go on – you know you want to!
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