Results tagged “Egypt” from Intelligent Travel Blog

Transplanted Englishman Paul Rogers writes about music and lifestyle for LAWeekly, and reports for us from the Characters of Egypt Festival:

"Does he have to keep using that bright pink cell phone?" groaned the lady atop the camel in front of mine as she pointed her camera down at the little lad leading the lanky beast. My fellow tourist was lamenting the otherwise exotic, trapped-in-time image in her viewfinder--the boy's hungry eyes and tousled hair emerging from a traditional earth-toned robe--being tainted by a disappointingly familiar, decidedly 21st-century fuchsia Motorola.

That happened in Tunisia a few years back, but I was reminded of it while perusing the Characters of Egypt Festival in that country's Eastern Desert last weekend. The event returned for its second year to a sandy valley within sight of the Red Sea, about 30 miles south of the rapidly developing resort town of Marsa Alam. An enthralling coming-together of numerous tribal "teams" representing indigenous peoples from all over Egypt, it was a chance to witness their poetry, dancing, jewelry, music, and racing (camel/running/hopping) in and around an array of outsized tents. Organized by the Wadi Environmental Science Centre (WESC) and the Egyptian Desert Pioneers Society (EDPS), Characters of Egypt gathered around 160 of the country's estimated 300,000 tribespeople.

With fewer than 500 tourists attending on each of its three days and a charmingly loose "desert time" schedule (and despite the presence of sponsors like Infiniti and EgyptAir), Characters of Egypt offered illuminating peeps into numerous threatened cultures in an unusually informal setting. But it was also a place where I found myself, like the lady in Tunisia, trying to influence (rather than truly experience) my surroundings.

We recently received a letter from a reader asking for help finding a cruise across the southern Mediterranean along the coast of North Africa. She hopes to visit cities founded during the Roman Empire rich with remnants of the past. Here are three travel companies with excellent cruising options for exploring the region. All trips are education-oriented and feature prominent speakers and guest lecturers on relevant topics from archaeology to classical culture and language. One of the highlights of all of the tours is the magnificent Leptis Magna Theater on the coast of Libya, pictured here, and featured as one of our "50 Places of a Lifetime" in our current issue.

Hello, city-lovers! Today Nick Rowlands brings us the best of Cairo, which has more to see than just the pyramids.

Want to see your city on IT? Copy and paste our list of fill-in-the-blank questions into an e-mail, fill in your answers, and send your responses to IntelligentTravel@ngs.org. And if you're still waiting for us to feature yours, fear not! We're going to keep posting as long as we keep getting them (please include photos and links!).

Cairo is My City

The first place I take a visitor from out of town is the Pyramids: you've got to catch them while you can, as you never know how much longer they'll be around!

When I crave a decent shisha pipe I always go to Cedars Lebanese restaurant.

To escape the traffic fumes I head to al-Azhar Park (former rubbish dump, now Cairo's most attractive green space).

If I want to play backgammon I go to my local coffee shop and challenge the locals (and lose)!

For complete quiet, I can hide away on a felucca in al-Maadi.

If you come to my city, get your picture taken with the Sphinx - cheesy photos of you kissing and patting him on the head are compulsory.

If you have to order one thing off the menu from Aboul Sid it has to be the super-traditional rabbit and molokheiya (a slimy green soup made from a vegetable similar to spinach).

Ataba market is my one-stop shop for great junk-rummaging and people watching.

Rainer Jenss and his family are currently on an around-the-world journey, and they're blogging about their experiences for us at Intelligent Travel. Keep up with the Jensses by bookmarking their posts, and follow the boys' Global Bros blog at National Geographic Kids.

On the remote chance that someone from the Ministry of Egyptian Tourism might be reading this post, I urge you to gather up all the street vendors and merchants from around your country, put them in a room, and send them a simple message: If you ease up on constantly harassing tourists to buy something from you, we might actually purchase something!  

It's staggering the amount of time and energy we spent fending off souvenir salesman during our two weeks in the Middle East. We actually started to devise strategies on how to minimize the pestering, and even though the boys are just 12 and nine, they were not immune to being hounded. Don't make eye contact, don't say a word or answer their questions ("Where are you from?", "For you my friend, no charge to look", "How much you want to spend?"), don't stop to look at anything, and whatever you do, don't ask how much something costs. If you do, you better have a sound exit strategy.    

I remembered this side of Middle East travel clearly from my first visit there some nine years ago, but it still didn't make the situation any less irritating. One positive aspect of all this, however, is that it kept our shopping in check, something that had challenged us since we stepped foot outside the U.S. seven months ago. We needed to try to keep our spending down, and buying stuff for a house we don't even have yet, no matter how tempting, was becoming too frequent an occurrence.

Rainer Jenss and his family are currently on an around-the-world journey, and they're blogging about their experiences for us at Intelligent Travel. Keep up with the Jensses by bookmarking their posts, and follow the boys' Global Bros blog at National Geographic Kids.

One of the benefits of having traveled throughout Africa for the last two months is that it has kept us in an information void for some extended stretches at time (Carol fondly refers to this as being in our little bubble). We did manage to watch Barack Obama being sworn in just a couple hours after we toured a township in South Africa, and I was able to retrieve sporadic e-mails in the bush from friends and family raving about how lucky we were to be on this trip while filling us in on the happenings from back home.  And it seems like every correspondence we've received has made some sort of reference to the lousy economy and how ominous the mood is in the U.S. I'm quick to reply that the places we've been to are feeling it too, proving that there's truth to the saying that when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.

From what we've experienced, I can attest that one sector deeply affected by the global financial crisis has been the travel industry. This was evident from all the empty hotel rooms and sparse crowds we'd seen in recent weeks. Although it's true that countries like South Africa, Kenya, and especially Zimbabwe have been impacted by social unrest and political instability, the economic slowdown has clearly compounded the fact that traffic is down as much as 60% in some places.  

One country that didn't seem as affected was Egypt. If they've lost business as a result of people cutting back on vacation spending, it was hard to notice. The same seems true for Jordan, which found us in full planes and sold-out hotels for our excursion to Petra. Maybe not as many Americans are there as formerly, but the usual mix of German, French and Japanese tourists appeared well represented. We also heard plenty of Indian, Russian and Chinese accents, and from what we can gather, travelers from these emerging countries might be compensating for any drop off from our part of the world.