Heat, Dust and Dirt Bikes in Egypt
Sean and I are drain a couple bottles of Stella beer, staring over the River Nile from my balcony of room 709 in 150 year-old Shepheard Hotel. It’s 3am, but the Cairo traffic remains intense, as it has the entire day, the entire week. Traffic flowing like the muddy waters of the Nile, the world’s longest river, the lifeblood of a country comprised mostly of desert. Most of its 83 million inhabitants live near the riverbank, that’s 99% of Egypt’s population concentrated into a mere 5% of its land. It explains the crowd, the chaos, the 24 hour rush hour.
Everyone knows that Cairo shouldn’t work, and yet somehow it does. There’s just too many people crammed into too tight a space. Too many cars on the road, blaring their horns, spewing leaded fumes into an atmosphere laced with smog so thick you’d swear it leaves splinters in your throat. Constant jostling on the sidewalks, Frogger in the cross streets, people tripping over each other in metro stations, clothing shops, bazaars and tea shops. It hasn’t rained in 10 months, and everything is caked in a safari-yellow dust, blown in from the desert that encroaches the city’s limits. From atop a viewpoint, sucking on an apple-flavoured hookah, I see the sun set like a deep orange egg yolk being lowered on a string, disappearing too high behind an impenetrable black cloud of gases. It is hoped rain will wash the pollution away one day, like a shower clearing away a ring of muck around the bath tub. But in one of the world’s most polluted cities, where two million cars choke the potholed roads, and fires burn sugar cane for fuel, it will take more than just a thundershower. I savour the Stella, the Egyptian beer brewed since the late 1800’s as it washes down the soot in my throat. And the traffic slugs forward.
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