Cairo - Egypt

Awe-struck by the buzz of the city, I decided to chance my bargaining hand at the Khan al-Khalili bazaar. I bargained hard that first day. I was in The Zone. I believed transactions the world over should be this bold and honest and theatrical. Little did I know I was experiencing something of a haggling honeymoon. I skipped away, chest out, bearing ceramic scarab beetles, authentic papyrus and a set of concertinaed postcards. I genuinely believed I had cracked an eons-old code through a tricky mixture of innocence and guile. That was until I boasted to some fellow travellers, only to find that everyone else had mysteriously bargained their way down to the very same, 'exclusive' prices.

I decided to investigate the Cairo Museum next. To be fiddling with a DVD remote in London one day, and staring up the nose of a first-century ruler named Ramses the next, is amazing in itself. But the Cairo Museum plays metaphor for a complexity that begins to explain just how curious Egypt can be. Where else could a rumoured one hundred crates full of mummies, carvings and jewelled treasures be 'forgotten' for eighty years, simply because someone neglected to stocktake a section of the lower floor? Which other country could haemorrhage national treasures - enough to fill the coffers of museums in London, Paris and Washington - and still have over 120,000 pieces to display? The sheer volume of Egypt's antiquities feels farcical at times. I felt like if I didn't watch my step I was likely to stub my toe on a statue of Ahhenaten or bang my head on the stone beak of Thoth.

Like a glutton for Egyptology, I had to go see the pyramids that same first day. They really are one of the handful of top-drawer 'wait-til-you-sees' that exceed expectation. If it weren't for the lousy touts and their mind-numbing persistence, and the bald, blistering heat of the Egyptian sun, most visitors to Cheops, Micerinus and Cephren would still be there now, gazing up, dumbfounded.

Little did I know I was experiencing something of a haggling honeymoon.Now home, lurking outside the travel agent window and wondering where to go next, I notice brochures for Cairo promoting belly dancers and Tutankhamen's tomb. I wonder if that's selling Cairo short. Of course Cairo is about monuments marking history, but it's also about shotgun-toting guards strolling hand-in-hand; it's about waking up at 5am to the Mussien calls to prayer, then waking up at 7am to the Mussien calls to prayer. It's about ducking into Cairo University for a fake student card. It's about donkeys and traffic and hunching over a game of dominoes, smoking ma'assil from a sheesha pipe as tall as your second cousin.

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