Rick Steves’ Travel Blog

Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, who ruled the country as a dictator for three decades, was deposed on February 11, 2011. The revolution here is barely two years old, and any visitor to Cairo with an interest in peoples’ struggles (like me) will find plenty of opportunities to learn more.

I’m staying at the deluxe Four Seasons Nile Plaza — perhaps the fanciest hotel in North Africa. Touring the elegant Presidential Suite of the hotel where Hillary Clinton booked out an entire floor for her stay, I comment that luxury like this corrupts anyone. The elegant young woman showing me around sensed I was talking about Egypt’s ruling elite and agreed, saying, “President Morsi is in shock. Our leaders went from prison and life in hiding to hotel rooms like this. It’s clear the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t understand how to run a government. They still act like they are in the underground. You cannot rule a country from the underground.” She said, “We are fed up. If a taxi driver ran against our president today, the taxi driver would win.”

I went straight to Tahrir (“Liberty”) Square, which served as the epicenter of Egypt’s popular uprising and was made famous by the revolution. It feels battered and exhausted. The hub of this vast city — with a traffic-control situation permanently on yellow light (no red, no green) — carries the mood of a party that’s over, and only the thugs stayed. This city has endured a frenzied political mosh pit and is nursing its wounds before the next round.

Walking by a wall of powerful political murals, I dead-ended into a street literally walled off by six-foot-square concrete bricks. Staring at the wall, which looked like sixty stone dishwashers stacked neatly seven layers high, I thought, “This feels like an American Embassy neighborhood.” Then, looking beyond the barrier, I saw the Stars and Stripes hanging limp in the mucky air.

New fortifications feel like they’re here to stay. Banks have newly constructed blast barriers. Hotels have tall, artfully designed yet no-nonsense security gates. Foreign schools and government buildings shrink behind newly beefed-up walls. With the success of the revolution, the police force basically melted away. The result: Along with people simply demanding their freedoms, Egyptian society is also dealing with opportunistic, ready-to-rampage mobs and easily incited religious gangs. As a tourist, I feel safe enough. But it would be a little unnerving to be a minority living here.

I find that this revolution has emboldened people. Listening to the talk in the squares and in the cafés, it seems that suddenly everyone is a politician. Women wearing scarves suck on hubbly-bubbly pipes in impromptu cafés set up on the streets under sexy MTV videos. There are dozens of new talk shows on TV, each filled with political and sarcastic content to counter the dozen government and religious channels playing far-right and conservative programming to their less-educated audiences.

I’m told that Egypt’s voters, many of them illiterate, are easy to bribe. In the last generation, the government failed to provide for the needs of its people. As it faded from the hearts of the people, the Muslim Brotherhood filled the gap with effective and appreciated social programs. In the post-revolution election, there was no strong political alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood — which, in so many ways, was already providing what governments should provide. With this built-in advantage, followed by a barrage of gifts and promises for the poor districts and towns, it’s no wonder they won the election. But now the question I hear Egyptians asking their leaders is, “Why aren’t you ruling?”

Freedom of the press is new, but it is fragile. Mubarak once said, “Let the dogs bark.” But the dogs of the press bit him. The Egyptian press has long been a problem for anyone violating the will of the people. Under the current government, you can criticize, but you cannot insult the president. Just this week, angry fundamentalist crowds stormed “Media City” (the Burbank of Egypt). Talk show hosts had to sneak past the angry mobs. One host, Dr. Bassem Youssef, the closest thing Egypt has to a Jon Stewart, was arrested and then interrogated for his sarcastic political wit that stepped over the permissible line. Today, he’s back on the air and, understandably, more popular than ever.

Photo by Trish Feaster (for her Egypt blog, see http://thetravelphile.com/)

A new attraction in Cairo is feeling the pulse of the people’s struggle for freedom by enjoying the political murals facing Tahrir Square.

If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.

Driving around Cairo’s “Freedom Square,” you have a sense that there’s history in the making here for a great nation. Join me for a spin.

If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.

Cairo, “the city of a thousand minarets,” is the biggest city in Arab world (with 17 million people). And whether you’re wandering aimlessly through the market streets of its Islamic quarter or driving out of town through towering canyons of high-rise apartment flats, you can’t shake the sense that this city goes on forever.

In fact, random housing is the new scourge. Vast fields of rare, rich agricultural land have been plowed for the last time, as developers throw up towering, cheap, concrete-and-red-brick apartment flats. It’s scandalous: Productive fields are so scarce and precious in Egypt; this housing could be built on sand instead, allowing good soil to survive and continue to feed the multitudes of hungry people here.

As is the sorry case in most of the developing world, the poor and uneducated multiply like rabbits, and the wealthy and educated have only a couple of children. Trying to explain the new post-revolutionary dynamic in this country, my friend said, “Democracy has advantages and disadvantages…and we’re experiencing the disadvantages.”

I find traffic chaos endlessly entertaining. Only in Cairo have I seen cars randomly choosing to go against the traffic — their drivers actually mad at those going in the lawful direction for being in the way. Tuk-tuks, three-wheeled motorcycle rickshaw taxis recently imported from India, are perfect for the Calcutta-like chaos of the streets.

Streets recently cobbled to be pedestrians-only are now a battlefield of both cars and walkers — like an accidental double exposure that didn’t work out. There’s nothing graceful about cars, merchants, and pedestrians all struggling over the same space. Horns honk as if to fill a “void” that’s already jam-packed. Wagons loaded with long, wobbling pipes and boards joust through the crowds. Doing battle with the cars and motorbikes on the streets, I recall how just a few months ago, I crossed a street in Seattle that was empty of cars. A cop stepped up and issued me a $50 ticket for jaywalking. When you live in a lawful society, you may not appreciate the value of strict parameters being set, with strict consequences enforced. That ticket makes a little more sense to me now.

On the fertile streets of Cairo, life is everywhere. And so is death. I hear what I think must be a child is squealing from an apartment high above. Then people gather, the squealing becomes more heart-wrenching, and my friend tells me, “Someone in that apartment has just died.” Later, while catching a rest over mint tea at a restaurant sprawling under a blanket of exhaust at the side of a chaotic highway, I see a somber parade of people following the simple plywood coffin of a dead loved one — marching through the traffic on their way to the city of the dead. Muslims (perhaps waiting for their own Martin Luther) believe in scoring religious favor by doing good deeds, and — as if eager to score a few easy points — people race to help carry the coffin.

If there’s any order amid the intensity, it’s Egypt’s social class system. The big determiner of which class you fall into seems to be education. The vast sea of uneducated masses share the poverty. The hardworking, educated middle class struggles against a flagging economy, desperate not to slip to a lower rung. And a tiny economic elite lives in its isolated, parallel world. I was struck by the dignity and grace and good humor of the people I met all across the board — especially the poor. I felt safe here, more so than in big cities in Central America. I encountered no aggressive beggars, and hustlers were limited to the predictable, touristy places. And, while I saw a few international visitors in my hotel, after three days spent on the streets, at the sights, and in the mosques of the greatest city in the Arab world, I met no Americans and only one Canadian — a Sufi Muslim with a big red beard from Montreal who was glorying in the spirituality of his favorite city on earth.

Here in Cairo, people and cars mix and mingle on the streets. Join me for a lesson in crossing an Egyptian street.

If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.