Visa hunt starts! We try to leave early. Our first stop is the American Embassy to find out if we need a letter of invitation for Sudan. You do not need a driver’s license, nor driver’s school training to drive in Cairo – you need nerves of steel, if possible, an armored vehicle, determination and patience that continues to multiply itself. When you stick your car’s nose out in the traffic you enter a world that will be difficult for me to explain in order for you to understand what I really mean. No rules apply except for the unspoken and you learn them as you blunder along. We have a big, heavy vehicle, loaded and it attracts a lot of attention; FOREIGNERS are written write over it and I think it actually helps us in this case. Egyptians, in general, are very friendly and welcoming and even in the traffic – if our monster try to edge and negotiate itself through a very narrow space, we find more help than shouts of anger of fingers wagging at us. Some waves us threw with the pull of an eyebrow saying, ‘’just go your idiots, with that tank of a car of yours”, but most are accommodating. It is an interesting experience once you are in the “traffic-river”. You should not be bothered by close distances, hair-rising close distances, nail-bite close distances – they are around you all the time – most of them you are not even aware that they are happening where you cannot see. The traffic move forwards, on average, when the river is swelling, probably 20km/hour – it can go down to 15 to stop; pull away; stop. You are surrounded by a mass of cars – with no order, in no lanes and often some not even pointing in the general directions of the flow – forwards. It is no surprise to see a car, motorbike or even donkey-cart fight their way upcarstream or find a car blocking your way completely - and you have no idea what will happen next. The mystery is that it all moves forward in some kind of a way – slow, choppy under the accompaniment of excessive honking through all existing sound frequencies that can exist. Some cars honkers even play short melodies. I might have seen a traffic light, but they have very little effect on what’s happening in the “river”. Security guards dressed in black with white batons and whistles are able to conduct the most order out of the chaos.
The area around the embassies are heavily guarded and tanks with soldiers are everywhere. We finally thought we have a parking place for our car when a guard calls Willie back and said we cannot park in the close vicinity because of the gas bottle and diesel cans on the roof. Where to find parking? Willie circles several times and finds parking next to Tahrir Square (where most of the protests happen). Everything is calm and peaceful though at the moment.
Our US embassy expedition was not very successful. According the lady who works there no letters of recommendation were given to other embassies since 1992 – totally the opposite from what we’ve recently read in blogs from over landers who are still traveling. Well, this is authority.
Around the corner to the Sudanese embassy and what a rude reception Willie receives. “No visas for Americans! We don’t give visas to Americans!” There was not a way we could talk to him, explain our situation or anything – he was closed for us and our situation. We asked if we could speak with someone else and was told to wait. We waited more than an hour and there was no one who could help us. Willie then decided to go to the Ethiopian embassy. Maybe it will help if we can show that we have Ethiopian visas to prove to Sudan that we have no desire to stay in their country? Who knows?
We are not allowed to enter the Ethiopian embassy and have to sit in the street. We explained our situation and first they wanted to know why the boys do not have Sudanese visas (we have, but they are expired) and all of this communication takes place on a pre-school English level. You are never sure what is understood and what not. We fill our necessary forms, pay money and are told to wait again. Down the street comes a man with a grey-blue robe and turban around his head shouting, “patatas, patatas!”as he pushes a cart with a little steel dome oven. He sells smoked, roasted sweet potatoes or yams. We are so hungry and have no idea how long will we still have to wait. Hugo walks over and asks him how much. He immediately starts to wrap patatas and Hugo, with all kind of hand gestures, says no – how much, but whether we wanted to or not – we have 5 patatas!
They taste wonderful and he watches us gulp through them. He comes over again – this time with a plastic bag to wrap them in and a spice mixture in scrap paper with science formulas on them! He takes the yam from me, dip it in the mix and shows me now it eat…Hmmm, very nice, salty and garlicky, but very nice! He is happy and we are happy. What an unexpected friendly gesture in a day that this far was difficult, full of potholes!
A friendly Egyptian girl emerges from the gate and tells us that our visas will be ready the next afternoon. She, however cannot guarantee us that they guys will have visas since they do not have Sudanese visas in their passports. All we can do at this stage is pray.
We plunge into the Traffic River, overflowing its banks into all directions, and what hypothetically could take ½ hour takes 1 ½ hours to get home. If you do not allow impatience or irritation to become your partner then it can actually be quite funny – you become a spectator of an ever-changing, ever-morphing show. The one thing I’ve realized is that once you are in the river you become river possession, an object of public display – everybody comments on us, about us, laughs, winks, waves, greets, shouts, sings – it is quite a happy celebration of us being in Cairo. We hear “Welcome in Cairo” all the time. Young boys and guys-to-become men think this this is seriously cool (my guess, as a woman, is that this must be the realization of some pre-mordial dream of most men… this is just a guess, though) The road has effectively blended tightly with the social fibre of the city and has become a social network oasis: you can: sell anything; fix anything; eat anything; cook anything; talk about anyone and anything 1 ft from the road – everything goes as long as the masses approve and the margins of approval are wide – there is not too much you can do wrong: don’t bump or scrape someone’s car; don’t hit someone’s hand when he walks by; DO NOT park in the wrong parking spot and that is as much as I could observe that is deemed negative. Women weave in and out the traffic, selling tissues and trinkets; goats graze right next to the road; old men stare at us through the smoke of their water-pipes and tea, from motorbikes mid-eastern music loudly blare into the air and join the cacophony of the Allmighty Traffic River. It is a world of its own where you become part of and live a life of the traffic.
We reach our campsite – happy to have a place where we can go back to, but not even there are we removed from the roar of the traffic in the distance. We receive a happy surprise when we drive in: the Brits have joined us again. We have lots to share and we find that we are tied closer together by every kilometer shared.
The area around the embassies are heavily guarded and tanks with soldiers are everywhere. We finally thought we have a parking place for our car when a guard calls Willie back and said we cannot park in the close vicinity because of the gas bottle and diesel cans on the roof. Where to find parking? Willie circles several times and finds parking next to Tahrir Square (where most of the protests happen). Everything is calm and peaceful though at the moment.
Our US embassy expedition was not very successful. According the lady who works there no letters of recommendation were given to other embassies since 1992 – totally the opposite from what we’ve recently read in blogs from over landers who are still traveling. Well, this is authority.
Around the corner to the Sudanese embassy and what a rude reception Willie receives. “No visas for Americans! We don’t give visas to Americans!” There was not a way we could talk to him, explain our situation or anything – he was closed for us and our situation. We asked if we could speak with someone else and was told to wait. We waited more than an hour and there was no one who could help us. Willie then decided to go to the Ethiopian embassy. Maybe it will help if we can show that we have Ethiopian visas to prove to Sudan that we have no desire to stay in their country? Who knows?
We are not allowed to enter the Ethiopian embassy and have to sit in the street. We explained our situation and first they wanted to know why the boys do not have Sudanese visas (we have, but they are expired) and all of this communication takes place on a pre-school English level. You are never sure what is understood and what not. We fill our necessary forms, pay money and are told to wait again. Down the street comes a man with a grey-blue robe and turban around his head shouting, “patatas, patatas!”as he pushes a cart with a little steel dome oven. He sells smoked, roasted sweet potatoes or yams. We are so hungry and have no idea how long will we still have to wait. Hugo walks over and asks him how much. He immediately starts to wrap patatas and Hugo, with all kind of hand gestures, says no – how much, but whether we wanted to or not – we have 5 patatas!
They taste wonderful and he watches us gulp through them. He comes over again – this time with a plastic bag to wrap them in and a spice mixture in scrap paper with science formulas on them! He takes the yam from me, dip it in the mix and shows me now it eat…Hmmm, very nice, salty and garlicky, but very nice! He is happy and we are happy. What an unexpected friendly gesture in a day that this far was difficult, full of potholes!
A friendly Egyptian girl emerges from the gate and tells us that our visas will be ready the next afternoon. She, however cannot guarantee us that they guys will have visas since they do not have Sudanese visas in their passports. All we can do at this stage is pray.
We plunge into the Traffic River, overflowing its banks into all directions, and what hypothetically could take ½ hour takes 1 ½ hours to get home. If you do not allow impatience or irritation to become your partner then it can actually be quite funny – you become a spectator of an ever-changing, ever-morphing show. The one thing I’ve realized is that once you are in the river you become river possession, an object of public display – everybody comments on us, about us, laughs, winks, waves, greets, shouts, sings – it is quite a happy celebration of us being in Cairo. We hear “Welcome in Cairo” all the time. Young boys and guys-to-become men think this this is seriously cool (my guess, as a woman, is that this must be the realization of some pre-mordial dream of most men… this is just a guess, though) The road has effectively blended tightly with the social fibre of the city and has become a social network oasis: you can: sell anything; fix anything; eat anything; cook anything; talk about anyone and anything 1 ft from the road – everything goes as long as the masses approve and the margins of approval are wide – there is not too much you can do wrong: don’t bump or scrape someone’s car; don’t hit someone’s hand when he walks by; DO NOT park in the wrong parking spot and that is as much as I could observe that is deemed negative. Women weave in and out the traffic, selling tissues and trinkets; goats graze right next to the road; old men stare at us through the smoke of their water-pipes and tea, from motorbikes mid-eastern music loudly blare into the air and join the cacophony of the Allmighty Traffic River. It is a world of its own where you become part of and live a life of the traffic.
We reach our campsite – happy to have a place where we can go back to, but not even there are we removed from the roar of the traffic in the distance. We receive a happy surprise when we drive in: the Brits have joined us again. We have lots to share and we find that we are tied closer together by every kilometer shared.
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