It's Two AM, Do You Know Where You Are?

On these international journeys, I’m always seem to arrive in the middle of the night stumbling after other bleary eyed fellow travelers through brightly lit and impossibly white customs counters, exiting out into the gassy glow of orange municipal lighting and the combined smell of smoldering embers from city incinerators and roadside trash disposal, diesel and leaded fuel, dusty streets. I love it. 

You bump along to some hotel where the staff is surprisingly wide awake, crash into a bed that you hope is comfortable, knowing that you will wake up in a city you've never visited before and a whole new experience that will forever mark your life and give you memories to later dream on.  

If you expect The Four Seasons on these Global Village treks, you are on the wrong voluntourism trip.  I've stayed in bunk beds four across in a crowded cabin, cement block hotels with armed guards and bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling to shabby chic hotels, remnants of some grander era of the ‘60s… which is where I find myself on the morning of October 9^th in Heliopolis district of Cairo. 

Prevalent in this Mother of all Cities are sand particles that breeze in from both sides of the Nile where the desert stretches on for miles.  It adheres to cars, buildings, your feet and turning white limestone buildings brownish yellow of silt and dust. 

My first mission after getting rousted out of bed at 1:30 pm is to locate the “Cilantro” coffee shop our coordinator has suggested directly across the street from the Hotel Baron.  Not in her detailed account of arrival procedures and neighborhood conveniences was the life threatening street crossing. One has to cross two wide streets separated by double trains tracks in a shallow ditch.

I’m determined. I get my New York on, hold up my left hand first and dance between cars and motorbikes and tour buses, gingerly hopping down to the train tracks that separate the two boulevards, then climb up the other side and do the same thing all the while clutching my laptop and looking directly into the driver’s eyes as I do my same little dance to coffee. 

Although there don’t seem to be any streetlights in this part of town, in downtown sections of the city, crossing lights display a green man running in a quick animation as if this has always been the way to get to the other side.

Before leaving, Cairo: The City Victorious was recommended to me via 43Places.com.  The history is astounding and everywhere I look, I try to match the words to actual locations. There so much to write about Cairo, but I am anxious to talk to you about the build and so I will save that for later.