Our flight into Egypt began the moment we entered the departures lounge at Heathrow. There, in various corners of the windowless, prefabricated room, were devout Muslims kneeling on prayer rugs, prostrating themselves. This came as a jolt. We were the only Westerners in the room, and most of us had never been to a Muslim country before. Gidget Goes On Holiday. Most of our fellow passengers were on the way to Mecca, via Cairo and Jedda, for it was the season of Hadj, the annual pilgrimage. The Sudanese man on my right read aloud from his pocket Koran and broke into chant throughout the flight. The Egyptian on my left, who had lived in Wales for 36 years, wept on take-off, proud to be taking his family on this long-awaited journey. A man wearing flip-flops and a sheet of white cloth paced up and down the aisle; another calmed himself by opening and closing all the overhead bins. The hostesses raised their kohled eyes to Allah. We drank guava juice and watched an entirely inappropriate American film.
The dust in Cairo Airport signalled our proximity to the desert. Earlier that week, a sandstorm had closed the airport - the same khamsin had peppered windows and cars in Ireland with Saharan sand. We drove along the airport road past a gigantic military base, with fighter jets perched like pharaonic figures at its gates.
With a population estimated at roughly 16 million (16 million!), Cairo wins the Throbbing Metropolis Title, hands down. The city of dust is a city of wild extremes. The frequent calls to prayer by the muezzin send a low, underlying hum through the air, but there is never a hint of silence. Horns blare continuously, and there is an ever-present threat that loud, synthesised music will come at you everywhere you turn. Volume is the thing, in Cairo.
Across the skyline, the tall minarets of the mosques compete with satellite dishes and garish advertising hoardings. Skyscrapers, many of them unfinished, climb along the river bank. Schools are more like shelters, with little equipment. There are low-lying dwellings and high-rise slums, mostly without windows. There are smart suburbs, with colonial architecture and palm trees. There is the City Of The Dead where thousands of homeless live in tombs. Extremes. Third worldliness. Markets and hustle. Western flash; Muslim modesty. Lotsa gold jewellery; countless black veils. Westernisation; consumerism; fundamentalism. Incompatible complexities. Veils upon veils. Big brown eyes. Generous smiles. An undeniable friendliness.
It's a staggering place, teeming with life at all hours of the day and night. Every hour appears to be some kind of rush hour. It is difficult to decipher the structure of an average Egyptian day, never mind the hieroglyphics. When do they eat? When do they sleep? It varies with the temperature.
Overcrowded taxi-vans crawl through the traffic, their suspension listing two inches above the ground; there are BMWs and there are carts carrying wide bales of cotton or bushels of sugar cane. There are motorbikes and sidecars and old cars and flash cars. A Mercedes bearing two polished-looking
sheikhs speeds past ancient Skodas and dusty jeeps. The Cairo Museum provides our introduction to Egyptian civilisation and we peer at the rich pickings from Tutankhamun's tomb through dusty, wood-framed cabinets. From there, we drive to the pyramids at the edge of town where presto! - the city vanishes into the desert. The pyramids, which have stood in your mind's eye since childhood, are bigger than imagined. Their scale and perfection of form are staggering, despite the eye-battering windstorm.
Directly in front of the Sphinx, almost at his paws, so to speak, there is a plaza, with building cranes and high-rise flats and trinket shops leaning towards the monuments. And there's Kentucky Fried Chicken. And, I think, a Pizza Hut.
But there are no tourists. The plaza is almost empty. We meet the Minister for Tourism, Mr Mamdouh el-Beltagi, in his offices. Security is tight. Armed bodyguards stand by as a television crew films our interview. He is to meet some 25 delegations of foreign journalists over the next 10 days to assure them that new security measures have been put in place. He is a passionate, articulate advocate for his country, a major Arab state struggling to find its identity in the late 20th century, struggling to contain the growth of Islamic fundamentalism.
"It is a fact of life that we are living in a violent world and that criminals are everywhere. Since `the accident' in November, we have suffered. We are the target, not tourists," he said.
Tourism is worth an estimated £2 billion to the Egyptian economy and, in this country of 60 million people, it is a vital, multi-faceted industry. For better or for worse, Egypt is now being developed and promoted as a Mediterranean-style sun and sand destination. It is a tall order within an agrarian culture where bikinis are not part of the picture.
Further incongruities. After a cruise on the Pharaoh - the Cairean equivalent of a bateau mouche, complete with belly dancer and whirling Dervish - we beg our companions to take us to a non-touristic local hot spot. They comply. We go to a private club ("gin joint" springs to mind, albeit without the gin) where young waiters in white shirts, boleros and cocky sailor hats are stoking hookah pipes by the riverside. It's 1 a.m., and a 12-year-old girl is singing - yearningly. She is followed by a popular Cairean singer who, we are told, is said to have been castrated after an unwise dalliance with a Saudi princess. And that's not all. The next singer appears with a 16-piece orchestra, followed by two belly dancers - one "official", the other "freelance". It was impossible to even guess what was going on. And no one would tell us. Agog, we were.
In the morning, we go to the Citadel, one of the few places where a woman can wander freely into a mosque. An Egyptian family comes up to us spontaneously, shakes our hands and thanks us for visiting their country. Looking back over the city, I ask our guide what he thinks of the present government's efforts to sustain democracy. "I travelled all the way home to Aswan last year to vote," he says. "And when I went in, you know, the official gives me my ballot. And, you know, it was already marked."
The inflight entertainment on our one-hour flight to Luxor is less colourful than on our flight to Cairo. We are among tourists now, as well as Egyptian businessmen with laptops. We are greeted by an entire fleet of nattily-dressed agents from Viking Travel, a company allied to Stein Travel in Dublin which organises top class itineraries, tours and guides. Cruise boats line the banks of the Nile - empty. The streets of this notorious town are quiet. Tourism accounts for 85 per cent of the local economy so these are dire times indeed. We are the only customers in a restaurant that seats 100.
The proprietor, pleased at this surge in custom (all four of us), prepares a splendid feast of Red Sea fish and barbecued chicken and beef and traditional dips and delicious pickles and salads. He invested everything in this restaurant only two months before "the accident". He also tells us that his girlfriend was killed in a car accident in Cairo. We understand how this might have happened and we offer our sympathy. "Yes," he replies. "I lost my girlfriend and I lost my car."
Luxor induces total cultural stupefaction. Here, the extremes could not be more dramatic. On the East Bank, the edifices of modern tourism, including the golden arches of McDonalds, vie with the enduring forest of columns and obelisks of Karnak and Luxor Temples. Its strip of luxurious hotels with multi-channel TV, swimming pools and bars can be seen from the West Bank, where people live in mud-brick dwellings and farm the land by hand, cutting sugar-cane stalk by stalk.
The landscape is stunning. Against the backdrop of the white, bone-dry Theban hills, date palms grace the incredibly lush flood plain of the West Bank. Hoopoes and herons swoop along the irrigation canals; there are goats and water buffalo and oxen. Men are dressed uniformly in galabiyya robes and turbans. Little has changed in 3,000 years. The cultivated plain runs in a narrow strip beside the Nile. It comes to a sudden halt beside a strip of asphalt road. On the other side of the road is the desert. Boundless.
Spread across the wadis and hills beyond is the Theban Necropolis, which testifies to the same obsession with death and resurrection that produced the pyramids. Mindful of how these had failed to protect the mummies of the old kingdom pharaohs, later rulers opted for concealment, sinking their tombs in the arid hills and perpetuating their memory with gigantic mortuary temples in the plain below. Security checks and roadblocks have been set up throughout the region, although how you police the boundless desert is anyone's guess.
Our seventy-something guide, Mohammed, whose father and grandfather were also guides, brings us down through the chambers of three of the 64 tombs in the Valley Of The Kings. He is well-known everywhere we go, and his spiel is learned and respectful. He takes us to Hatshepsut's Temple, the scene of the massacre, where a spectacular performance of Aida had taken place only months before, complete with elephants. Mohammed was off on that day in November, he tells us, by quirk of fate. One of the four guards shot dead, however, was a friend.
"The people here, they suffer, you know? They have nothing without the tourists, you know? Nothing. Not food. Nothing." We travel back across the verdant plain, this time on camels led by barefoot children. We come to a halt where a woman is cooking beans in a tin buried in smouldering turf. Later, we call into the famous Winter Palace Hotel where the price of a gin and tonic would have bought her a month's food. A SAIL across the Nile at sunset in a traditional felucca is a must. In fact, the cruise ships, with their belly dancers and synthesisers and games rooms, are not unlike the Holyhead ferry. Try the feluccas instead for a spell of contemplative tranquillity and a break from the crowds and hawkers of Luxor - even if you do have to barter the fare.
HMM. Bartering. Yes, shopping is tricky. The hawkers and the haggling can wear you down. Keep your cool and sense of humour, advises the Rough Guide. "Once you begin to know a few characters and begin to understand the score, Luxor seems like a funky soap opera with a cast of thousands."
I asked a young caleche driver to help me find Egyptian cotton sheets and lotus oil. "Not in the tourist souk!" I urged. He brought me to the back streets of the town, past cages of chickens and goats and sheep roaming free, past mountains of beans and pungent spices and herbs, and organised about five different offers of marriage for me instead. "Sheets, I said. I want sheets!" One chancer offered 500 camels for the pleasure of my company. Show me the camels, I said, keeping my cool like the book said.
In any case, all those proposals could only be good for the morale - (the Rough Guide also has a cautionary section on gigolos) - but I'm tempted to go back at Christmas. November to late February are the ideal months to book. March and April are fine, too. With or without fellow tourists, it is sure to be a complex journey through time and conflicting cultures; a journey that will continue to engage your imagination for years to come.