Cairo :
Al Qahirah is incredible. No matter how you look at it. Population, poverty, plush lifestyles, or the daily out put of rubbish. The last remaining Seven Wonder Kufu's Great Pyramid looms through the all pervading smog from a million motor vehicles.
Depending on the chapter of the guide book you read, seventeen to twenty million people live in Cairo, an additional four thousand tons of garbage is not collected each day and more kids live in the City of The Dead than in Melbourne.
Photographically it is heaven and hell in successive frames. Smog kills contrast and the sun disappears to be replaced by the Khamsin, the fifty day wind that drives men and donkeys mad. Suddenly at Bubastis it rains. Single drops the size of soup plates and water runoff channels in the side of the Sphinx are thought by Geologists to be thousands of years older than when the rock was cut by Kafre's masons.
Amazingly mad traffic snarls, perhaps a thousand vehicles, disperse like sand grains in the wind and the mobile phone runs the economy on demand and better than any timetable.
Security is every where, tourist Police, Militia, and to a much less visible extent the Army, armed and watchful the Camel Corps is mounted on the horizon. Portals blink and call as you pass through, no one watches from nearby desks, violence and major crime are almost unheard of.
And then there is Khan el Kahlilli and dear old Cosmo sitting by your chair at the caf. Not least by any means the wonderful food at the Felfela.