I say this reasonably often about places I visit, regardless of what continent they’re on, but Egypt felt like India. Not India in 2026, more the India I knew growing up in 2009. My drive from the airport was through a region flanked by agricultural land on both sides, roads filled with microbuses that are Egypt’s version of share-autos, boys a bit too young to be riding motorcycles but doing so anyway, and hardly any young women on the streets by themselves. The Nile seemed to casually weave into everyday life without much historic significance, just as the Cooum river flowed on the route to all the schools I attended and it didn’t seem all that special. I don’t know if the average citizen knows much about what the Nile facilitated a few millennia ago, just like not many people know that the Romans traded metals and wine for spices and textiles through the Cooum

Phase I: Upper Egypt

My itinerary required two entries into the country within ten days of each other and I didn’t account for the multi entry visa, which needed to be obtained beforehand. And as luck would have it, the website crashed. The embassy didn’t pick up my calls, didn’t respond to emails and when they eventually did, they didn’t answer the question I was asking. So there was a reasonable chance that I could be turned away the second time for not having the right visa. But with just four days till my travels started, I decided that I would just go and sort it out.

When you begin the initial descent into Egypt by plane, you can see that most of the country is entirely deserted and sand-colored, and then there’s an almost straight line of stark contrast where the green crops grow against the plateaus near the Nile. If you can’t watch this through a plane window, the second-best option is to look at it on Google Maps. It makes sense on paper given the mineral rich soil on the river banks, but it was genuinely cool to see in person. The Nile is peculiar because it flows from the elevated south to the lowered north, and because of that, Lower Egypt is actually the region around Cairo while Upper Egypt is, counter-intuitively, the south of Egypt.

I entered the country through Luxor. I was greeted by a bunch of people wearing suits asking if I would like my visa fast-tracked. Many countries have some version of this through Global Entry or similar, but I’ve never seen a direct cash-for-speed visa situation. This helped skip all the lines, definitely evoking some groans and thrown hands from local Egyptians, but the visa process dropped from about an hour to ten minutes.

The airport is also where I learned that you tip everybody in Egypt, locally referred to as baksheesh. You don’t tip a lot because the USD-to-Egyptian-pound conversion is very much on the side of the American dollar. But this still meant tipping everybody. And when I say everybody, I mean everybody. You’d go to the bathroom and there would be someone taking tissues out of the dispenser and handing them to you, and they would expectedly and a bit sadly look up to you for a tip. The upside is that everyone is extremely helpful, at a cost in gratitude of perhaps a dollar. The downside is that this got annoying quickly. Which is also a good place to point out that having cash in the Egyptian Pounds was important.

At this point I also noticed that men here also wore three-piece suits for jobs that really do not require them. This happened a lot not just within the airport but also outside where the parking ticketing person, standing in the extreme heat, was also wearing a three-piece suit, in 40°C (104°F).

There is basically one street of main hotels in Luxor with no hostels. I think I counted perhaps six in total, with a new one being built. So if you’re staying in Luxor, you’re likely staying in one of them. The city seemed very under-hoteled, which is a great business idea if you’re particularly looking to start a hotel somewhere. I showed up in the summer, which turned out to be the nicer end of the deal. For the cost of extremely hot weather and some unasked-for tans, I got upgraded to a nicer suite, and the hotel price was cut in half. The heat, for what it’s worth, was not too bad — maybe 40°C, give or take, mostly give. But it was dry heat, and as long as you cover your skin it’s very, very manageable, as opposed to the discomfort caused by humidity.

Sometimes you have to drive out to a site to see the tombs and the Valley of the Kings and the temples, but there’s also a good amount of dilapidated ancient structures just in the city and some of it is still functional. At Luxor Temple, the still-active Mosque of Abu el-Haggag sits about 9 m up in the Ramesses II court, built on the ruins of a 6th-century church that was itself built inside the pharaonic temple. Its door hangs high above the floor because the temple was excavated out from under it, much different from the two extremes I usually see: the Chinese approach of demolishing old temples to build skyscrapers vs day-one preservation as seen in Greece.

Though I will say, in general it felt a bit exploitative to shill out such well kept history into a mass photoshoot with Dune-esque outfits for Chinese instagram. It did not feel right that you could touch all the hieroglyph walls and the tour guides would write on the walls with stone to teach everyone to read characters. A friend explains this as feeling like he was visiting a Disneyland reconstruction of Egyptian ruins instead of the ruins themself.

These scenes were from the Karnak Temple aka the biggest ancient temple complex in the world, built over roughly 2,000 years by around 30 rulers of the Middle and New Kingdom.

Small digression but here is a little primer on the timeline of Egypt’s kingdoms:

• 4,700 years ago - Old Kingdom - Pyramids were built

• 4,100 years ago - Middle Kingdom - Still some pyramids but mostly declining

• 3,600 years ago - New Kingdom - Rock cut hidden tombs like in the Valley of the Kings. This Kingdom declined as the Persians took over. Alex the Great then arrives and the Egyptians were happy to just be done with the Persian rule and happily switch over to the Greeks.

• 2,350 years ago - Ptolemies - Ptolemy was Alex’s friend and general who ascended the throne as Pharoah. The reign ended with Cleopatra VII.

• 2,050 years ago - Cleopatra dies. Rome takes over.

It was at the same temple that I learnt that you can write hieroglyphics from left to right, right to left, top down, and still have a system to read it based on what side the hieroglyphics are facing. For example, if there was a symbol of a duck, if the duck faced right, you would read from right to left, and vice versa for the other side. I don’t know any other language that has this quirk.

Were there different ‘handwritings’ in hieroglyphics that we don’t understand yet? What if somebody made a mistake? Could you erase a mistake made when carving on a wall? Would you plaster over it and start again? Stone was a lot cheaper, but you can’t exactly replace a wall if you botch it. Would someone proofread your work? Are there ways to make grammatical errors that mean something entirely different? I suspect there are. A lot of hieroglyphs look reasonably similar to each other, so you could plausibly make a mistake and have it go unnoticed forever.

Which raises a question. All of the intricate handwork needed systems where a lot of people had to cooperate. How were people trained? How did they manage to produce output that obviously required high levels of coordination? The pyramids are the obvious example, but also things like extremely detailed sarcophagi with hand-cut pieces pasted on one at a time. You obviously needed multiple people working on the same object, and the same goes for hieroglyphics. Slavery is not the answer here because there is proof that people who built the pyramids were paid for their labour in rations of bread, beer, grain and meat, and were housed, fed and given medical care on site.

A lot of the original colors still persist in the tomb and temple paintings. And there are so so so many hieroglyphs on the walls that it really makes me think of the Egyptians as the original long-termists. They cared about the record of their civilization persisting for millennia ahead of them, in a way that I don’t think modern society has really placed much emphasis on.1

Seeing a mummy for the first time drove this delta home even more. It really fucked with my sense of time, because you’re looking at a physical human who existed 3,000-4,000 years ago and had an entire life, and their toenails are literally intact. You can just viscerally feel that they used to exist. Your brain auto-corrects and assumes this person didn’t die that long ago, and then you do the math and realize how many lifetimes before yours this person existed, and it’s entirely surreal. A little creepy, but more surreal than creepy. This mummy was older than Cleopatra, who is older than Jesus! I also have no clue what physical remains of our society will still exist 3,500 years from now by default. Maybe a lot more garbage than we’d like. Maybe we get good at incineration. Or maybe we won’t be on Earth at all (Mars, etc).

King Tut’s tomb sits amongst 65 tombs in the Valley of Kings, which is a complex of underground tombs that you can actually go into.King Tut’s mummy was preserved within a coffin, which itself, like a Russian doll, was inside a second coffin, inside a third coffin, inside a stone sarcophagus, inside four shrines.

Like the Karnak temple, the VoK was also built during the New Kingdom. The architectural philosophy that went into it was intentionally very different. The Pyramids were a hotspot for tomb raiders, and were already a historic site by the time we got to the New Kingdom. The whole point of preserving the bodies of the dead in complex tombs was so they could continue their afterlives undisturbed. How stupid is it to build a giant beacon that says “dig here for treasure”. To counter this, VoK were the exact opposite of high and mighty pyramids and it worked. Their walls have hieroglyphics still intact with color, because the whole area stayed hidden.

This leg of the trip also led me to the Luxor museum where I got to meet this fun statue on Amenhotep IV. He seems like he could be in a frat and work in NYC finance if he wanted to. All his statues are significantly different from the standard aesthetic and it looks like he was mewing in all of them. And this is how we can conclude that the GigaChad aesthetic is not a Gen Z phenomenon at all. In fact, it is 3300 years old.

Food

There are usually two menus at restaurants: the English tourist menu and the Arabic menu. If you don’t read Arabic, you’re getting the English menu with marked-up prices. In dollar terms this again didn’t really mean much, so I was comfortable paying extra despite knowing I was getting mildly scammed. Luxor was particularly not great for food if you’re even a little bit specific, which I was. My doctor warned me not to eat fresh fruit or vegetables because I’d barely taken the typhoid vaccine before the trip, which made finding food harder.

The most memorable Egyptian dishes I tried were:

Koshary. This dish is hard to classify. It is best explained as a popular carb fest street food made of pasta, chickpeas, lentils, rice, fried onions and three different sauces made of vinegar, tomato and chilli. The pasta is an Italian addition, from the large Italian community centred in Alexandria.

Alexandrian foul. A slow-cooked liquid meal made of fava beans very similar to the Telugu Ambali. Just like ambali, it was served with coriander, chopped onion, and falafel made of fava beans that tasted like masala vada.

On the note of my ice cream hobby, I of course had to spend some time finding peculiar flavors. Cairo delivered Lotus, Hibiscus, Mastic, and Cassata.

I will say, for a country so close to the Middle East and historically central to a lot of trade, I thought the food would be more flavorful and spicy. Cairo had an appreciable amount of Indian food, which I was not expecting but then, neither was I expecting to see a Hindu-temple-styled building in the middle of the city, built by a Belgian industrialist.

The best cuisine in Luxor was, however, Chinese.

China in Egypt

I saw more Chinese tourists than any other demographic, to the point where some local markets had more Chinese tourists than local Egyptians. When asked around, I found that the Chinese tourist volume is so high that the Chinese food is great, the tour guides speak Chinese, and a lot of hotel staff were actively interested in learning Mandarin. So I suppose if you want to learn the language, you could always attend a Chinese immersion school in Egypt. The only school I saw in my days in Luxor was, in fact, a Mandarin school.

Turns out this was a lot deeper than tourism, through infrastructure and much more interestingly, Chinese lingerie. Sometimes these items are made from PET water bottle recycled material collected by local scavengers who are paid by weight of plastic collected. In Asyut, a Chinese couple who sold lingerie imported a bottle washing line from Jiangsu and opened Upper Egypt’s first recycling plant. The collected plastic bottles are then spun into polyester thread, which is sold to garment makers, some of whom are also Chinese. So a plastic bottle in Asyut can come back into town as lingerie.

There is a version of this in Cairo too. In a neighborhood called Garbage City, the zabbaleen hand sort the city’s waste and recycle over 80% of what they collect, against Germany’s 66%.

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Phase II: Lower Egypt

From Luxor I flew to Cairo. The pictures don’t really show this, but the pyramids are a lot closer to civilization than I was led to believe. You can see the pyramids on your regular highway drive.

The overall highway aesthetic is similar to something from the early 2010s, which turns out to be roughly accurate because by most estimates two thirds of Egypt’s passenger cars are over ten years old. A lot of the cars seemed very dilapidated. Much more than in any other developing country I’ve been to. Seems like it’s just hard to get affordable cars in Egypt. For new cars you have to pay a high customs duty, development fee and VAT. And Egypt does not let you import a used car. Countries like Kenya and Pakistan that also have worse import deals for new cars (50-75% on duties against 30%) are just able to buy used ones, up to 8 and 3 years, respectively. So you end up with old cars with many many repairs and any new car on the streets is a mark of wealth.

Which also meant that it’s very unreasonable to expect seatbelts unless you pay a premium for a car that has them. This didn’t really come as a surprise to me, but it’s something to keep in mind if your travel experiences are limited to the Western world.

Getting a taxi was an experience by itself. I am used to haggling in India, but this truly felt like the pro max version of avoiding eye contact and trying so hard to not say “no thank you” because every time that was taken as an invite to haggle more. I am bad at haggling down, much to my mom and grandma’s disappointment. This sometimes involved someone following you from the exit of a temple till you get to your car, often reducing the amount of items they sold by 10x.

Once a hotel driver drove me to his uncle’s stone shop. Unasked for and borderline sus as fuck because once you’re far enough away from the city, there’s no way to get anywhere without a car because it’s very very sunny with no shade and you will dehydrate like the kid in the three body problem before getting far. Anyways, he asks me to just check out the place and in hindsight I should’ve said no but I don’t think annoying a driver in a place I don’t know was a good idea. I caved and checked out the outlet which included a very elaborate demonstration of how their sculptures were made of stone but others shops use plastic. There was a confusing but hilarious singing of happy birthday as they lit a ‘stone’ carving made of plastic and it burned like a candle. I now realise how deranged this sounds. But I made the second mistake of laughing because it was so absurd. Thereby bound by more indulgence, I was obligated to buy something.

Besides the haggling, people were incredibly hospitable and were just very happy to chat. Too hospitable at times. A taxi driver parked the car on a highway, with the ignition on and all, fully ran across incoming traffic risking his life just to get me water (I already had my own…). This lad also kindly put me on some Egyptian rave music which I quite enjoyed and listened to on repeat for most of the trip until a local friend pointed out that on a scale of Drake to Kendrick, the musician I was listening to was…Andrew Tate.

I stayed on the Giza Plateau close to the pyramids, which I did not realise were white and made of limestone that was later stripped down to rebuild parts of the city. You can also go inside them. The interiors are a lot smaller than I expected. The passages are extremely steep, extremely hot, and require some crawling, and there’s not much to see, really. But the fact that you can do this at all is still pretty remarkable. I thought it was interesting that this counts as safe, given there are no exits and no way of getting out if something did happen.

The Nile was a lot narrower than I expected. This tracks with a theory that the Nile used to be a lot wider, which meant it ran a lot closer to the Giza plateau than it does today. Then most of the stone used to build the pyramids could have been floated up. We even have the logbook, the diary of Merer, which records a crew ferrying limestone to Giza by river during Khufu’s reign. The bulk of the pyramid was still local, quarried a few hundred meters away. Which makes the pyramids less mysterious than they usually are made out to be. What’s still actually open is the narrower ramp geometry of how all the stone was moved vertically

A lot of educated Egyptologists seem to become tour guides as their primary career, and a lot of them spoke five or six languages. Russian, English, Chinese, Arabic, and maybe a couple more. I initially assumed getting a tour guide was just another way to get scammed, but it proved very, very useful, especially for noticing particular sculptures and inscriptions that would otherwise have meant nothing to me. That said, there were places where it was just very helpful to have Claude say things. It was good enough to tell me where a particular inscription was within a complex — specific enough to say “go to the south wall of the XY Temple, on the external-facing side” to find the exact thing I was looking for.

Naturally I went to the Grand Egyptian Museum, arguably one of the best museum collections in the world with a 5398-piece Tutankhamun collection shown together for the first time. It was most surprising to me that gold was also everywhere. On tombs, on sarcophagi, used to make boxes, chairs, and chariots. The actual ‘gold’ of the jewelry economy was silver. You can see an example of that where a jewelry box was built out of gold, but the jewelry itself was made of silver.

Besides the nine main pyramids in Giza, there are more personality-filled ones in Saqqara and Dahshur. They house the red pyramid, black pyramid, step pyramid and bent pyramid, all pretty much explained by their names.

Instead of driving to these sites like a normal person, I decided that I wanted to ride a horse there instead. There were just two problems with this plan. I do not know how to ride horses. And I didn’t know how to get to Saqqara through the Sahara desert. Fable 5 promptly found me at an equestrian center close to the sites that did joyrides. They even sent a car to pick me up from my hotel and needless to say there were no seatbelts. There is a full side story here that involved me getting locked in the balcony of my hotel without my phone with 10 minutes to spare before the driver was supposed to pick me up. But I will spare you the details. Eventually the beat up car (arguably the most beat up car in the entire trip) took me down a highway bypass lane that looked very sus, and the only solace I had was that there were many many kids playing on the streets so it had to be safe right?

I have barely walked a horse on my own before so it was wild how quickly you’re allowed to gallop a horse in Egypt. I have never worked my abs and knees (?) and random leg muscles I didn’t even know I had, as much as I did being on a horse galloping. Many cramps later I got to see Saqqara on horseback. It was worth all the fear of falling off.

Followed by this new found joy of animal back travel, I also tried some casual camel galloping. Camels are fucking huge. I don’t think people talk about this enough, or maybe I’m just not in the rooms where camel height is discussed in particular detail, but they’re huge. And for some reason they were also running. This is what I imagine riding a monster truck would feel like. Minus seatbelts of course.

The last leg of the trip was Alexandria, and I had the cool experience of reading Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff as the trip unfolded. The book followed the same route I did. It opens with a bit of introduction to older Egypt, then moves to Cleopatra meeting Caesar roughly during my time in Cairo and follows their relationship until he dies. Her next relationship with Mark Antony then takes her to Athens which I happened to listen to while I was actually there. And I arrived in Alexandria just as Cleopatra and Mark Antony were spending the last days of their lives after being cornered by Octavian. The day I arrived in Alexandria, they both died in the book and are said to have been buried there too.

Some things from the book that were new to me: Cleopatra had children with both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and it was her daughter, Cleopatra Selene, who went on to outlive her sons. It would have been an incredibly different timeline had her son with Caesar survived, he was descended from the Greeks, the Romans, and the Egyptians. There’s also an urban legend that the C-section was named after Cleopatra’s son with Caesar, Caesarion, but that’s not true.

View on Women

There didn’t seem to be a standard Egyptian look or beauty standard. Maybe this goes back to how Egypt was, in a way, probably the America of its time. A lot of immigration, a lot of emigration, a lot of trade, and therefore a big mix of what people looked like. To the point where people assumed I was Egyptian.

The city was both a lot more and a lot less conservative than I expected. Wearing headscarves was very common among women, but others were wearing tight, mermaid-fitting clothes, something I do not see publicly even in India. I was encouraged to carry a headscarf throughout the trip in case I needed to enter a temple or a more local town but it also turned out to be the most practical way to keep my face from getting fried in the sun. I wonder how much of the practice just originated from the Bedouin culture of desert travelers protecting their skin, and then evolved into something more religiously required. I think it’s quite likely it started as simply the most efficient way to cover your skin during long-duration sun exposure.

A friend joined the Alexandria leg of my trip. From then on I was only referred to as Mrs. [my friend’s name] even when we repeatedly asked the hotel to not do so. Turns out “Mrs.” is a sign of respect but also may have been a religious thing because it’s illegal to be in a hotel with someone you’re not married to (for Egyptian nationals). We tried telling them that we were siblings, but it still wouldn’t stop. And for what it’s worth, this was also an American name-brand hotel which only made it more annoying.

On the very last day of the trip, we met a local and had a very…interesting conversation. He opened by asking us what we thought about feminism. Before long, it was clear that he was talking about women being educated and having the same role in society as men as the root cause for a declining fertility rate in America. He said that most women didn’t actually want to be successful and highly educated. That the “woke mind virus” was causing people to want to be ambitious instead of starting a family. And also, on how men are better drivers than women, women make less money than men, and so their time is better spent taking care of the home and raising children (!?). This person was young, educated, and was working on very interesting technology. It was quite a surprise to see someone like that believe something so extreme, so deeply.

When I visited the Library of Alexandria, there was a class of kindergarten girls and a batch of college girls having their graduation ceremony outside the building.2 It seemed like female literacy rate was reasonable, but clearly doesn’t translate to female employment.

And with that ended my trip in the country.3 On the flight from Cairo back to India, there were multiple points while boarding where I would look in every direction and see zero women. I eventually counted six women on the entire plane, including the cabin crew, me, a little girl and a few other adult women travelling with their husbands. Which left me very intrigued about what exactly is happening between Mumbai and Cairo. I guess that is a mystery for next time.

Thanks to

UNC for funding the trip and Hiya Jain, Sudharshan Sundaramahalingam and Shreyas Hariharan for reading drafts of this piece.

3

There was a lot of generative AI imagery, in government-run buildings of all places. I joke about this, but I think OpenAI has a moral obligation to make sure ChatGPT generates good images if the rest of the world is going to base some percentage of its physical graphics on the software.