The Mariott and the City of the Dead

The staff at the Cairo Mariott sport buttons that read, "Yes is the answer. What is the question?" When we checked in, Ed asked if our room had a view of the Nile. The attendant looked at his computer and shifted. "No," he said. "It has a view of the garden." We shrugged and accepted our keys. A porter directed us to the elevators and then the 17th floor.

We walked into the room and out onto the balcony. There, spread before us was the northern mass of Zemalek Island. To our right downtown Cairo. And in the middle, we could see the Nile, flowing to the south past our hotel. "It's not quite you expected, is it?" asked Ed. No, I admitted. I was expecting something more exotic and romantic. He said it gets better as you travel further south, when you can see the desert and palm trees lining its banks. Later, I realized what had formed my notions of Cairo. It was Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Yesterday we did very little. Ed napped in the hotel while I went for a swim and read in the lobby. We ate a late dinner, and then retired to the hotel room where we were pulled into watching a zombie movie on tv. This morning we woke late and had a leisurely breakfast before taking a cab downtown. At the Ethiopian Airways office we tried to book our plane tickets, but she didn't take credit cards. She suggested we use the American Express office located just inside the Nile Hilton. It was closed. We decided to try again tomorrow.

Instead we took the afternoon to tour the City of the Dead, to the east of Cairo. We took a cab to the Mosque of al-Azhar and walked east. Soon we were looking across the Sharia-Salah Salem highway, and out over the necropolis.

The city is built similar to any other old quarter, save that the buildings are all effectively mausoleums. The poor live in and around the buildings; famous tombs and mausoleums dot the grounds, including mosques and medressi. We wandered into the center of the city in search of the mausoleum of Sultan Qaitbey, one of the last strong Mamluke rulers. We wound ourselves through the streets and found a few buildings, but none matched that replicated on the one pound note. We wandered around the dusty streets searching for the telltale minaret, soon finding it just a few blocks away.

An attendant lead us into the mosque, and through a door to the mausoleum. We toured the chambers and then he lead us up to the roof and then up into the minaret. The views of the city and the surroundings were what I had imagined Cairo to be, with domes and minarets dotting the smaller sunbaked buildings. In the distance, the Citadel crowned a nearby hill.

From the mosque we walked north, to Sultan Barsbey's Mausoleum and then into the larger complex which houses Sultan Barquq's Mausoleum. This mausoleum boasted two medressi, flanking the main square of the mosque. The attendant took us up into the minaret, and we spent some time standing upon the roof gazing at the buildings around us.

We took a cab back to the hotel and I marvelled at the difference between the cool lobby of the Mariott and the dusty streets we had just wandered. Ed said he had read years before how staying in nice complexes isolated you from the world outside and now, having stayed in a few on business, he could attest to fact that it was so. But being in the Mariott after a few months in Baghdad was a great way to decompress.

We ate cakes and drank hibiscus tea as we relaxed our legs and discussed how to plan our last day in Cairo and our onward ticket, then wandered around the hotel looking for the travel agent. The agency was closed, but as we walked by a Japanese restaurant, Ed said he wouldn't mind having sushi for dinner. I enthusastically concurred.
Posted by eku at September 22, 2006 11:55 AM