Traffic in Cairo

Back in 1993, I was lucky enough to travel to INTERCHI 93 which was held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, more commonly known as Holland, although Holland is just a particular region (two provinces to be exact) of the Netherlands.

Since this was going to be my first trip to Europe, my journey grew (much like this sentence) from a simple six-day conference trip to a month long trek through Europe, to throwing in a side trip to Cairo because I “always wanted to go to Egypt,” which is true, because I've always been fascinated by the pyramids at Giza. The trip was fantastic and included, in addition to Cairo and Amsterdam, stops in Paris, Florence, Venice, Pisa, and Salzburg, and even a trip to my mother's ancestral hometown of Bielefeld, Germany.

I spent four days in Cairo (which, at the airport, had nice big signs saying, I'm paraphrasing here, “Welcome to Cairo, people possessing or trafficking drugs will be hanged, Have a nice day!”) seeing the sites and cursing my bad luck that I hadn't been able to schedule a trip to the Valley of the Kings since it was the 50th anniversary of discovering King Tut's tomb and they had opened it to the public to celebrate. (Update: this turns out to be wrong... see below.) Actually, I wasn't all that disappointed because the Sphinx and the Giza pyramids more than made up for that. The Great Pyramid is a stunning sight; even though I knew it was more than 40 stories tall, I was still absolutely amazed at how big it was, and although pictures of the Sphinx are almost cliché in our society, standing in front of the real thing is a humbling and powerful experience.

Anyway, whenever I discuss my trip to Cairo, I inevitably bring up Cairo's traffic, which makes the traffic in Los Angeles or New York City, look like a bunch of toddlers on tricycles. There are streets and traffic lights in Cairo, but these are only considered as “guidelines” and rarely followed exactly. Instead, drivers pay attention not to stop lights but to the guards standing at most intersections holding scary looking automatic weapons. The general rule for driving is to go as fast as you can on any suitably horizontal surface without actually killing anyone or destroying too much property. These are all elements that make for a truly crazy driving experience, but what makes Cairo traffic truly sublime is its pedestrians. There are few things scarier than to be zipping down a highway at 70+ miles per hour, roughly in a lane of some sort, and watch a pedestrian step into oncoming traffic WITHOUT LOOKING AT THE CARS! They then proceed to cross the highway as if it was no more than a river with an especially strong current. I was never actually behind the wheel while in Cairo, but several times I thought I was going to be witness to vehicular manslaughter.

What triggered this post was that a political blogger that I read regularly, Billmon over at the Whiskey Bar, is in Cairo now and had this to say about Cairo's traffic:

Along the way, though, we had to deal with Cairo traffic, which is to traffic what Iraq is to nation building -- with the added distraction that Egyptian pedestrians are utterly fearless when it comes to wading out into a major arterials, and utterly indifferent to any problems this may cause for the drivers bearing down on them. Egyptians in general don't so much walk as glide (those ancient tomb painters knew their subjects) and watching a bunch of them weave their way among the cars zinging past is enormously entertaining, like watching a enormous chorus line do the cha cha.

In that post, he talks about (among other things) the dangers of assuming that your Visa card truly works “world wide” a myth that we discovered early in our trip to Denmark when we encountered multiple stores that would only take a “Danish Visa card” and not one of those strange Visa cards that we brought from the states.

But, more important to me, was the fact that he confirmed that my memories of Cairo's traffic are NOT exaggerated and boy did that bring me back to those four wonderful days in Cairo back in April 1993.

Enjoy,

Ken

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Update: Since writing this post, I have learned that King Tut's tomb was discovered in 1922, so it would have been the 71st anniversary of that discovery in 1993. So, now I'm not sure why King Tut's tomb was open when I was there, but I remember having several people ask me if I planned to go down to the Valley of the Kings to see it.