Egypt Notes

by Jack Hoeschler

January 27, 1987 – Alexandria, Egypt

We arrived at Cairo’s lovely new international airport four days ago (January 23) after a six-hour TWA flight from Bombay. Since the flight left at 3 am and it is necessary to be at the airport 2 hours before flight time, it had not been a restful night. Happily, the flight left only 45 minutes late and we had business class seats that allowed better sleep. Indeed, it was noteworthy to experience the feeling of separation and relief that we had from being in the civility of the business class section as compared with the crowding and noise with the great unwashed in the coach section.

On approaching Cairo, we circled several times. I was struck by the sprawl of the city into the northeast desert and efforts to establish major new poultry farming and orchard operation in the desert. Clearly this is not easy because we saw various places where the road had been drifted-closed by sand.

Upon landing, only about 20 people deplaned. Since it was Friday, there were very few people about (anywhere in Cairo) and our customs formalities were minimal. We were met by Shah Abaza (our guide) and Ali Bahrani (her assistant) along with Hashim, our driver; sall got off on a good footing. Linda’s attitude about Egypt is completely different from India. Indeed, she feels she has escaped to the promised land even though Egypt clearly is having almost as tough a go at providing public services as India. It is interesting to note the differences in both the country being viewed and the attitude of the viewer in trying to calibrate the two reports.

The following are my initial impressions after two days in Cairo and two in Alexandria, and some rather long discussions with our guide, Shah, and Mo Selim, an Egyptian friend who is Chairman of the economics department at St. Thomas. (We met up with Mo in Alex where he was finishing his annual mid-winter visit to his family.)

Things are not going well in Egypt. The population is now 51 million (vs. 42 million on our prior trip 8 years ago); Mubarak, although honest and personable, is an uninspiring leader; public services, especially in Alex and in the rapidly expanding outskirts of Cairo, are not adequate; the civil service is huge, barely works and is always on the lookout for bakshish; payoffs are endemic at all levels of Egyptian business; real estate speculation is one area where money can be made; tourism is off dramatically as a result of Mideast terrorism.

Offsetting this is the good news. The Egyptians are as friendly as ever. The army looks more professional and better dressed. There is an immense amount of construction of new housing going on. There is consensus that the Aswan Dam saved the country from famine during the drought of the last few years.

The mix of new construction in a clearly decaying situation is most surprising. Alexandria used to be a beautiful Mediterranean city with a cosmopolitan population and lovely villas. The streets were washed nightly. Now it is terribly dirty with rubble, garbage and dirt piling up along every street. New sewers are being installed along many streets with dirt, mud, and sewer pipes everywhere.

Clearly this has been going on for a long time and the cars are forced to drive on the sidewalks in some areas. Once you drive off the main streets in the newer neighborhoods, the streets are not paved at all. Everything is covered with dirt and dust that results from the traffic. Many of the side streets are not passable by automobiles because of mudholes, rubble and garbage.

After the revolution Nasser nationalized many of the businesses run by the Alexandrians and carried out a land reform program that first limited farms to 250 acres, then 150 acres, then 100 acres. As a result, most of the Jews, Lebanese, Turks and other foreigners who lived in Alexandria moved to Beirut. After some years of no growth, a new group of newly rich peasants and others without much class developed or bought into new apartment blocks that were constructed where the old villas had been or further along the shore. These people were used to muddy, garbage strewn streets and seem to be content with the same crummy conditions here. Add to this the fact that there is little or no land-use planning or control and you get the worst kind of real estate speculation in a country where other industries and investment opportunities have been nationalized or otherwise limited.

In a word, they’ve got it all backwards. They should be closely controlling the development process and allowing the farm and industrial sector a freer rein. Since most of the apartments in Alexandria are only used during the summer months, this new construction represents a fair waste of capital assets. Clearly, no construction should be allowed without the minimal public amenities of a paved street, sewer and water. I presume that sewer and water service is provided (even though the sewers appear, as often as not, to drain into nearby canals) but that is not enough if the streets are just muddy paths. Likewise, the streets serving 6 and 8 story buildings should be wider than the 20-30 feet that is currently the case.

Alexandria has the look of the poorer parts of the cities in the movie “Clockwork Orange” and “Brazil.” When you add the descriptions that Mo gave of a bureaucracy run amok and the stories of both Shah and Mo of what it used to be like, it is quite sad. It is certainly hard to predict when, if ever, the city will bloom again. I certainly hope it looks better during the summer high season.

On our way to Alex we took the delta road and were struck by the amount of housing (usually 4 story walk-ups) being built all over the farming areas – not just in the villages. A lot of good farmland is being used up by apparently uncontrolled urban spawl. Again, it appears that insufficient thought has been given to the infrastructure costs of such poor planning. I was not able to confirm how the sewer situation was handled. I fear again that much of the effluent finds its way fairly quickly into the canals.

On the way back we took the desert road and were equally impressed by the amount of industrial and new agricultural development that was taking place all along this formerly deserted road. They seem to follow the universal law of development in third world countries – the first thing you do is build a wall around your property even though there is nothing inside except desert sand. The second rule of this type of development is to ignore the trash piling up outside the walls. Indeed, it seems clear that after a while everyone simply fails to see the trash and garbage as well as the accumulations of dust. Because of her positive attitude about Egypt, Linda too fails to see it. Such is life.

The desert road from Alex ends at the southwest corner of Cairo near the pyramids. As we drove down into the valley, we first passed the huge new development areas called October 6 and Nasser City. These are huge land developments with only the infrastructure work being done. It is surprising here how far ahead of actual building the roads and lights are. Again, it appears that the forces of central planning have a hard time coordinating things.

At the base of the plateau, we drove past the military police base that rioted last year and then the three hotels that they torched. Even though it has been almost a year since the riot, there is no evidence that any move has been made to reconstruct the hotels. Perhaps it is a function of the fact that the tourist economy took a big nosedive last year because of the Achille Lauro ship hijacking and police riot scares.

The tourism depression has been quite hard on everyone, especially those group operations that had chartered boats or owned buses. Shah told me that where they expected to have groups coming through every other day, they were lucky to get a group every other month. Somewhat offsetting the absence of the Americans are substantial increases in German visitors. But Shah, at least, finds them to be nowhere near as much fun as the Americans. We would agree. They almost never reply to a salutation, and they always seem to be serious, if not outright grumpy. Apparently, they don’t tip very well either. It is nice to have people crying for the return of the ugly Americans.

After a layover of three days in Cairo, we headed off to the Sinai Peninsula. The primary focus of this part of our trip was St. Catherine’s Monastery at the feet of Mounts Sinai and Horeb. This, of course, was the area where Moses was supposed to have seen the burning bush and to have received the Ten Commandments from God. It turned out to be a highlight portion of the trip because of both the terrain and the history surrounding the place.

We drove from Cairo to the new tunnel under the Suez Canal just north of the City of Suez. The road from Cairo to Suez is an unremarkable highway through the desert. Unfortunately, this highway is bordered by landfill that burns with a sulfurous and obnoxious smell, numerous junk yards, junked cars and trucks, and long sections where thousands of loads of sand were dumped across the desert landscape (that already seemed as if it had enough sand). Shah explained that this was done in preparation for new industrial development. There was evidence of new industry in various stages of development and disarray, but the overall impression was that of the accumulated trash and junk of the industrial age in an area where it would probably never decay. Ecology is not a high priority in Egypt.

That thought causes me to add an aside about the general issue of pollution in undeveloped countries, in general, and Egypt, in particular. In a word, it is awful. All up and down the Nile Valley we saw huge factories belching endless clouds of dirty smoke into the sky. That, combined with the dust and sand from the desert creates a constant haze. It reminded me of those old paintings of 19th century American industrial landscapes with all the billowing smoke stacks that symbolized industrial progress. The same holds here and the pollution seems essentially invisible to the people. Even more distressing was the water pollution. The Nile looked very bad at Cairo and didn’t look much better until we reached Aswan. The canals looked much worse. It is worth noting, however, that the people seem to notice this pollution. Outside Asyut, Shah’s cousin who runs the family farm went so far as to say that they used well water for irrigation because it was healthier for the fields. He claimed that the well water was absorbed by the land easily while the canal water tended to sit in the trenches for days at a time as if the ground were ejecting it. A number of people, including Shah, warned us that we should be careful of high-water-content plants like tomatoes and cucumbers (even if they were peeled) because they might have taken in some vile pollutant from the irrigation water.

(I discussed this last idea with some Britishers who were with us on the Nile cruise, and we concluded that much of this was bad science because the plants would not take in bacteria or viruses unless they were dissolved in the water. The process of osmosis would filter out such pollutants. But it will not filter out metals which might be dissolved in the water. We therefore concluded that the rule about peeled vegetables being safe was probably still a good one).

On the Nile we noted that all the cruise ships now appeared to have sewage systems – they were often installed on the front deck of the boat since they were clearly an afterthought. Since this was the case on our fairly new boat (less than 5 years old) it appears that the rule requiring such safeguards must be fairly recent. This still does not prevent plastic bottles and other garbage from being thrown overboard, nor another cruise ship from pumping out a dreadful stream of awful effluent just upstream from us. It is a pity the industry that earns its livelihood from tourism on the Nile does not do a better job of policing pollution on the river itself. The guides in the Grand Canyon keep the place immaculate and much the same could be done on the Nile.

The land pollution is perhaps the worst because it doesn’t go anywhere. The smoke gets blown out of the narrow valley fairly quickly and the river keeps renewing itself, but the garbage, papers, junked cars, broken stones and bricks that seem to lie along every sidewalk and street, no matter how nice the neighborhood, never go away. At best they just blow around a little. This too seems to be invisible to most Egyptians. Clearly the crowded conditions and the general poverty of the country are a basic cause. But there is no reason a neatness campaign could not be started in the schools and drilled into people.