where to go

Cairo isn't a gentle city. Home to more than 16 million Egyptians, Arabs, Africans and sundry other international hangers-on, the 'Mother of the World' is an all-out assault on the senses. Some days the most unambitious stroll around town can leave you with the same sort of feeling you might get after a sadistically vigorous massage: tender, unsteady on your feet and stingingly sweaty, but also strangely satisfied. Chaotic, noisy, polluted, totally unpredictable and seething with humanity, the sheer intensity of the city seduces some people but turns others off. In any event it's quite unlike any other place on earth. Life is what this city is about and, to paraphrase a cliché, only a person who's tired of life itself could fail to see the charm of Cairo.

The city doesn't have the resources for graceful boulevards and cobbled squares and the kind of dolled-up, prettified buildings that cry out to be photographed and stuck in an album. Historic buildings are buried in age-old quarters of the city that have yet to be tamed and made tourist-friendly in the way that they have in places such as Istanbul or Jerusalem. The high population density and lack of room to move throws up startling juxtapositions: mud-brick houses and towering modern office buildings, flashy cars and donkey-drawn carts. Cairenes see nothing strange in this. They aren't driven by the Western obsession to update and upgrade, possibly because they live in such close proximity to millennia of history (the Pyramids are visible from the upper storeys of buildings all over the city). The resulting pervasive sense of timelessness is one of the city's great charms.