Robert Twigger has lived in Cairo for two years and 271 days. He reflects on his 1,001 nights spent in the city
The One Thousand and One Nights is the most famous collection of Arabic stories in the world. Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and Sinbad are just three of many tales that originated within its pages. The tales come from India, Persia, Arabia and Egypt, and it was in Cairo, from the 11th century, that the stories were expanded. The tales centre on a despotic king and his new wife, Scheherazade, who weaves a new story every night, ending on a suitable cliff-hanger, so as to keep her husband amused and end his penchant for killing a succession of his virgin brides after their wedding night.
Cairo is now a vast city of 18 million people. It can be dry, dusty, noisy and traffic filled; daunting by day. Only by night does it approach the marvellous mystery of One Thousand and One Nights. Lights flicker across the Nile, pleasure boats and feluccas (small wooden sailing boats) ply the river, and while the roads are no less clogged, crossing them becomes a kind of Zen experience. You launch out, lock eyes with the driver and put your trust in him; keep moving, never hesitating, flattening out sideways in extreme conditions. Taking your first 12-lane thoroughfare of snarling Ladas feels like a milestone akin to when you first rode a bicycle without stabilisers.
Cairo is now at your fingertips. Winter nights can be cool, but never so chilly that you have to sit indoors. Summer nights are perfect, since the breezes off the Nile ventilate the city and make the air less sweltering than I have felt in New York or Tokyo. There is a softness about the night and though the stars are hardly visible, the moon is, rising behind the pyramids in majestic orange-tinted colours.
The best place to watch the moon rise and the sun set ought to be the famous Mena House Oberoi Hotel, except the place has aloof staff and poor service. Winston Churchill and Agatha Christie both favoured the establishment for its position overlooking the pyramids. However, after my residency of 1,001 nights, I have come to favour the fourth-floor pool bar of the Sofitel Cairo Maadi Towers by the Nile.
Find a spot about half an hour before sunset, order your cold Stella beer and observe the big red sun sinking behind the grandest structures in the world, splintering red and gold across the mighty river Nile.
The revolving restaurant and bar on the 41st and 40th floors respectively of the Grand Hyatt used to be the place to go. By all means drop in for the view, but do not expect a drink. New Saudi owner Abdel Aziz Ibrahim has declared the hotel dry and ordered staff to tip down the drain EGP8.5m ($1.6m) worth of Louis Roederer champagne, Rothschild claret and Glenfiddich whisky, not to mention a river of beer. The view, though, is still incredible. Like being in an aeroplane swooping low over the endless lights of the city.
So you need a drink. After 1,001 nights, I have sampled a fair few hostelries, from the elegant but now defunct Sand Bar to the spit and sawdust inns on Alfi Bei Street. Here I saw an enormous robe-clad man in a white turban suddenly vomit up what looked like a dozen beers onto the neigh-bouring table, while the staff, instead of kicking him out, just mopped him down and sat him in the corner with a red bucket between his knees. More salubriously there is the old-time Barrel Bar at the Windsor Hotel, a former officers’ club, with ibex antlers on the wall and old wood and brass furniture. Despite the telly, you can almost fool yourself that it is 1935 and Britain still has an empire.
There are other bars with a similar old-time feel, but better views. The Hotel Longchamps roof bar on Zamalek island cannot be bettered as a place to sip beer and observe the night lights of the city twinkle and intrigue.
Norwegian architect and Cairo resident for 25 years Yan Olafsen introduced me to this gem. ‘The beer tastes colder the higher you are from the ground in Cairo,’ he told me. Another rooftop tip-off, the slightly decaying Odeon Palace Hotel roof bar: ‘Go at night – the lift has a hole in the ceiling and it’s less worrying when you can’t actually see daylight through it.’ The nights in Cairo are infinitely elastic and there is always somewhere open. In summer especially, though the temperatures soar, the nightlife rarely heats up before midnight, and if it is belly dancing you are after then all the good places start around 2am. One of my favourite places for a down-market belly-dancing experience is the decidedly lowbrow New Arizona. As well as the usual plump, if not overweight, dancers, you can sometimes glimpse belly-dancing midgets, whirling dervishes who are about as authentic as a plastic pyramid, and bronzed strongmen performing stick dances.
The journalist Khalid Davood brought me here and taught me much of the negotiating skill I now use without thinking. On leaving the New Arizona, he kept smiling and protesting but still moving towards our car. ‘Never get angry about being begged for more tips – a place like this is a machine for extracting money from people. Just accept that, but keep saying no and never stop walking.’
Davood also took me on my first night visit to the El-Fishawi Café in Khan elKhalili souk, which is one of the most extensive and labyrinthine bazaars in the world. From the well-trodden central tourist area it spreads down alleys and passages for miles. A shop selling old lamps sits between two medieval gateways, like a scene out of Aladdin.
Twisting and turning, you find your way to the coffee shop, which at night boasts local Egyptian patrons and vibrancy. It was this area that inspired the Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz’s famous book Midaq Alley.
Though he died in 2006 I did meet him once, at one of his soirées (night time, of course) at the Napoleon Bar in Shepheard Hotel, one of the most expensive bars in Cairo.
Mahfouz was very deaf and one of his acolytes read the newspaper to him very loud right next to his ear. He struck me as a very calm man at ease with himself and the world. To his credit, Mahfouz said: ‘At my age [he was 94 at the time] it is unseemly to be pessimistic’.
The night is long and you have to eat. Restaurants have come on a great deal in the last 1,001 nights. When I arrived in 2005 I despaired of eating as well as one can in Europe. Now it is possible, and for far less money. One of the most expensive restaurants, and with the best food, I have been to still has main courses at around $30 each. I was taken there by a group of French travel industry professionals in Cairo for a conference. Philippe, their boss, has visited the city on business 32 times. He told me, ‘I have eaten at every place and for Arabic food there is nowhere better than the new Nile-side restaurant at the Sofitel El Gezirah.’ It would be hard not to agree.
For cheaper food and wine I was early on taken to the Greek Club right above the famous Groppi café – the fashionable place to be seen in the 1920s (sadly now rather irrelevant.) Not so the ebullient Greek Club, where, in summer, intellectuals, film directors, actors and writers converge on the big terrace upstairs.
My guide here was writer Maria Golia, author of City of Sand, one of the classic books about Cairo. Maria is originally from the US, though she has lived in Egypt for over 20 years and speaks perfect Arabic. Normally there is a charge to enter the Greek Club, but Golia said: ‘When you have been here as long as I have you just chat a little and they let you in free.’ They did, though when I went back I had to pay.
The Egyptians love music and there are lots of places to hear it at night. One place I like is the grouping of sofas that overlooks the Nile at the El Sawy Culture Wheel. When some new Egyptian pop band is playing too loud you can sit outside and watch the sailing boats go by, and still hear the music through the wall.
A fellow night owl, when she is not walking her camels across the Sahara, is Dutch explorer Arita Baaijens. She introduced me to the club After Eight and its miraculous Russian jazz band that only plays on Wednesdays. ‘This is my Cairo at night,’ she said, ‘The best music in town.’
You can sit at After Eight all night if you want. But time passes and eventually you have to go home. The sun rises over the Moqattam Hills which are on the other side of the river to the pyramids, but which supplied the stone to build them. Winging home in a taxi past the Citadel, the vast fortress below Moqattam, I see the wondrous sight of the sun breaking the skyline in a sudden burst of light. Another day dawns in Cairo, my 1,002nd to be precise, I look forward to getting some sleep, ready again for more Cairo nights. As Mahfouz said of his writing:
‘We used the Western style to express our own themes and stories. But don’t forget that our heritage includes the One Thousand and One Nights.’
WHERE TO STAY
Grand Hyatt Cairo
Corniche El Nile
Tel: (+20) 2 3651 234
www.hyatt.com
InterContinental Cairo
Omar Ibn El Khattab Street
Tel: (+20) 2 2480 0100
www.ichotelsgroup.com
JW Marriott Mirage City
Ring Road, Mirage City
Tel: (+20) 2 4115 588
www.marriott.com
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