Africa & Middle East > Egypt > Cairo and Giza > Cairo > Ancient History > Articles > The Grand Tour: Style on the Nile

It was a moment both sublime and ridiculous, the right royal high tide mark of a fading tradition known as "the Grand Tour". The year was 1928, the place Giza, Egypt, and that slightly pathetic playboy of the Western world, the Duke of Windsor, was the perpetrator. Having clambered 136 metres up the Great Pyramid - the 4600 year-old headstone of Pharaoh Cheops - the duke used its summit as the world's largest divot, whacking his ball onto the fairway of the adjacent Mena House hotel's golf course.

No matter how many postcards you've seen, nothing can prepare you for the shock of the old at Giza, 13 kilometres from central Cairo. Teeing off from, or even climbing, the pyramids is no longer permitted, but the Giza circus that swirls around them hasn't abated a jot since the duke's day, if not the pharaoh's. An ebullient gaggle of Egyptian holiday makers, gangling, gurgling camels and half the races of the world gather here daily to contemplate the last of its seven ancient wonders.

As they have done for decades, the local Jabari tribesmen lure tourists up onto their camels - "for you, my friend, it is free" - thence to extort whatever baksheesh the peeved rider will throw down should he or she wish to touch ground again. Camel-mounted Tourist Police restore a semblance of order for a few minutes. Upon their departure a tide of freelance "guides" washes in again, some with winning lines like, "Mister, you want to see Sphinxter?"

"All men fear Time, but Time fears the Sphinx", declares the portentous, Burtonian narration of the Son et Lumiere show, that melodrama of green lasers, deep larynxes and desert lore that nightly booms across the faces of the pyramids and Sphinx. Wanting my own personal Son et Lumiere experience, some years ago I arose at dawn and, disregarding the regulations, climbed the so-called "third pyramid" - of Pharaoh Mycerinus - which, at 65 metres, is the runt of the Giza litter. After ten minutes of effort, I stood on its summit, overlooking the Western Desert. In the distance, the sun's fingers were fanning across the Nile, prodding to life another crowded Cairo day. For the moment though, my view was four thousand years old. The triangular shadow of the pyramid pointed like a huge sundial across the desert floor, and the only sound I could hear was my heart thumping.

"Fancy putting the pyramids in front of your nice hotel!" a guest is reputed to have complained to the manager of the Mena House Oberoi hotel. Here is a hotel old enough to have a history, not just ersatz nostalgia, and the squeaky floorboards to tell it. Built in 1869 for Empress Eugenie of France's visit to the opening of the Suez Canal, the parade of personages to have graced or disgraced themselves here includes Churchill, Roosevelt, Cecil B. De Mille, Henry Kissinger and former OPEC boss Sheikh Yamani (who became stuck in the lift).

Moorish archways and arabesque screens slip a lattice of shadows across the comings and goings in the lobby. The Sphinx, aloof from such matters of little consequence, waits patiently beyond the pool. You can wander at any time onto your balcony - whether your room is in the fabled Old Wing or the so-so New Wing - and check that Cheops' Pyramid is still there, right where he left it four and a half millennia ago.

Cairo's Egyptian Museum and the loot of a thousand tombs reminds us that few countries, if any, have a history as deep as Egypt's. Some 3,000 years before Christ, Egyptians lived under an orderly government, built great structures and had acquired the art of writing. Be warned: a day in this museum can leave you wondering whether even a week would be enough to appreciate the trove of sublime art and its arcane technologies of the after-life.

Mute evidence of this is in the Museum's re-opened Royal Mummy Room. Here, the tiny, linen-wrapped shells of 14 royals gaze out through their unblinking ceramic eyes, past hooked noses and bird-like fingers. Some are in sweet repose, while the face of Ramses II, over 3220 years dead, is stark and taut. A modern postmortem showed high levels of salinity in his body, suggesting death by immersion in the sea, reaffirming the possibility that this might be the Pharaoh who, according to the Bible, pursued Moses through the Red Sea to his own annihilation.

Egyptian food can be the very best in the Middle East, with dips, unleavened breads, falaffel, lamb, chicken and spices. But where do you find it on your first days in Cairo? Touristic, yet still authentic, is the Falfella restaurant, between Tahrir and Talaat Harb squares in central Cairo. Or, if you're ready for the full-force gale of the bazaar, head for the Khan El Khalili restaurant in the famous bazaar of the same name - built in 1382, it is the world's oldest bazaar. The restaurant's oriental cuisine (mezza and tagen) is state of the art, and its Naguib Mahfouz Coffee Shop (named for Egypt's 1988 Nobel Laureate in Literature) is the place to sample a "shisha" while observing the shenanigans of the bazaar and all who hustle within it.

After a day in the bazaar, you can either wind-down or wind-up with a cup of Turkish coffee in the historic Groppi's restaurant on Talaat Harb Square. The service can be studiously bad (in a country of otherwise courteous waiters) and the decor was ruined in the 1950s by some renovator's fight-to-the-death with "modern design", but the coffee (with grounds as thick as Nile silt) is, like the clientele, full of character.

"How secure is travel in Egypt?" you may ask. Mostly, it is very secure; travellers to Egypt are back in numbers and the violence of Islamic religious extremists of several years ago has abated. The streets of central Cairo, Luxor and Aswan are more secure for the ambler than those in the inner-city regions of many Western capitals.

"Billy Dancer Tonight", says a hotel sign. I investigate. It turns out not to be some bootscooter, but a beaming woman who ripples in sequence (and sequins) every inch of her substantial being, from finger to flank to hidden dimples, while the wailing, thundering strings, reeds and drums of the orchestra urge her on.

There's much more to Egypt than its capital. North of Cairo, near the mouth of the Nile, in Alexandria - that crumbling Belle epoque city that novelist Lawrence Durrell called "the capital of memory" - one of the greatest pleasures is to ride in a horse-drawn carriage along its elegant Mediterranean waterfront corniche, part of the evening promenade. And to imagine which, among the old Art Deco palaces and mirrored cafes such as Le Trianon, were the hang-outs of E.M. Forster and ("at a slight angle to the universe") the poet Cavafy, or of Durrell's beguiling character Justine.

In front of Alexandria's once-elegant Hotel Cecil (where Durrell wrote part of The Alexandria Quartet), Mustafa, an ironic old gent in whose carriage I have ambled along the corniche, accepts my too modest tip. Without sarcasm, he describes it as, "A gift for my horse."

Following in the footsteps of yesteryear's "Grand Tourists", I make my way 900 km south on a comfortable Wagons-Lits sleeper train to Aswan. There's little "new" here - and that's the glory of Aswan. With its Nile-side corniche awash with fellahin peasants and regal women in dark burqua gowns, this is unmistakably the gateway to Nubia and Africa. For travellers, it's also the gateway to Abul Simbel.

I engage here in one of those conveyor belt experiences that are the hallmark of modern tourism. Firstly, one climbs into a jet crammed to the scuppers with domestic and foreign tourists, thence to fly more rapidly than Moses ever did across the desert. Three hundred kilometres later, we are disgorged at the temple Abu Simbel, Pharaoh Ramses II's attempt at self-deification in stone.

The twin temple complex of Abu Simbel is now 61 metres above where Ramses originally placed it - thanks at the 1960s UNESCO project in which the whole temple was sawed into 1050 giant blocks and reassembled above the rising waters of the newly-created Lake Nasser. Its grandiose statuary stares out across the windy blue span of the lake. Within its statued, frescoed interior, guards call "No flash! Who flash?" at low-tech tourists who are incapable of turning off either their automatic flashes or the equally automatic compulsion to take photographs, regardless.

The creative eloquence of its colossi, frescoes and the Temple of Hathor contrasts with the equally eloquent silence of the surrounding desert and lake. Almost before I know it, we are heading back to the plane for the return flight. As the dun coloured desert slides below us, I find myself wondering if I have really travelled so far in order to give the glory of Ramses - and the tiny, graceful likeness of his consort, Queen Nefertari - less than two hours of my time?

At Aswan, the Grand Tour invariably included the Old Cataract Hotel, an elegant pile of archways and dancing shadows that overlooks the Nile rapids. The hotel - which looks like a Byzantine chocolate cake - is always threatening to fall on good times again and indeed has been spruced up in recent years. Whether you're in residence here or not, don't miss taking tea or Turkish coffee on its riverside balcony, there to view the eponymous cataracts and the scimitar sails of the feluccas.

From here, the Grand Tour headed north by river. The steamers of Agatha Christie's "Death on the Nile" era have been replaced by scores of cruise ships, floating resorts, of varying degrees of comfort and cleanliness. Eschewing turbine power, I once joined a small group of travellers to drift in a felucca, the kind of open boat that has forever ferried life along this river.

At night the boatmen pulled the little craft into a beach between the reeds where we would sleep on deck, sometimes to be woken by the dawn chant of the muezzin in a hidden village mosque. In the cities, some clerics bray like the Ayatollah of Hollers - a strident nagging to prayer or perdition. By contrast, one Nile morning we were woken by a dawn call that itself was, even to our infidel ears, as lovely as a prayer.

I watched the mists lift and the day define itself. It was one of those moments - of Ford's in his flivver and Allah's on the river - for everyone, except perhaps the stoic boatman alone in mid-stream, who, heading south, was rowing at a standstill against the Nile's northerly flow.

The Nile flows on to Luxor, gateway to ancient Thebes and the great temples of Karnak. Leaving the felucca, I retraced the old Grand Tour route through the Valley of the Kings and the Queens. Stone colossi and tombs some four millennia old - of Memnon, Queen Hatshepsut, Nefertari and Tutankhamen - all flashed before my eyes in a crash course in Egyptology. The experience was kept contemporary by dodging tour groups of assertive Germans, sun-worshipping, shirtless Frenchmen and voluble Italians, not to mention representatives of the Alabaster Factory Gift Shop - much, I suspect, as earlier Grand Tourists like Flaubert, Rimbaud, Forster, Miss Christie and even the Duke of Windsor had done in their respective eras.

Reminded by all this antiquity of how brief a blip on the screen of time is one's own life, I retired to slurp gin fizzes in the Royal Bar of Luxor's Winter Palace Hotel, a 1905 watering hole for the Grand Touring set. As I watched, the sun sank into the Theban necropolis and the glistening river ran on like the great fuse of history it has ever been. The perfect setting for a little ego death on the Nile before hopping the sleeper train back to Cairo.

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