Kisses and Kalashnikovs along the Nile

Since the attacks on tourists in the mid-90s, security forces have ruthlessly quelled Egypt's terrorist activities and tourists are flocking back. DAVID MAY reports.

Gunning their battered black and white bangers through, around and often into traffic reminiscent of a Pamplona bull run they make Auckland cabbies look like wimps.

But unlike their New Zealand counterparts, Cairo's taxi drivers are a taciturn breed, about the only source of silence in this riotous old city.

Car horns, truck horns, bus horns and sirens with enough ear-splitting variety to constitute a punk band at full volume give Africa's largest city the ambience of a dust-laden disco.

If that isn't enough, religious loudspeakers delivering sermons and calls to prayer overpower even the din of the traffic.

There are 1.5 million cars in a city intended to accommodate only half a million. They drive three abreast along two-lane roads around donkey carts, people, horse-drawn buggies, tractors and the occasional camel train.

Cairo is not a city for the faint-hearted but one that draws them back like some esoteric Pharaonic curse.

What makes it so puzzlingly seductive? Stroll through the ancient gates of the Khan al Khalili Bazaars, into the cool, calming interior of the Citadel that Saladin built, past lovers arm in arm along a broad modern boulevard called the Nile Corniche that hugs the east bank of Egypt's legendary "lifeblood" or to a belly dance on a moonlit Nile cruise and you'll begin to understand.

In a cloud of mind-numbing antiquity, Cairo is an amalgam of characters and nationalities neatly summed up by a Cairo Times journalist as "pouty-lipped debutantes, embittered Arab nationalists, good-timing Gulfies, earnest Scandinavian development workers, Ugandan disco jockeys, battle-scarred Chechens and wall-eyed, babbling Cairo Times journalists".

He forgot to mention the wall-eyed, babbling touts. Every man you meet in the street, mostly friendly and helpful, curiously seems to have a relative in New Zealand.

A taciturn taxi driver who preserves his brake pads by using the horn races me through traffic from downtown Cairo toward the city's most famous markets. We pass women flower sellers covered in black chadors on donkey carts trundling to their allotted trading spaces near the City of the Dead, a huge necropolis where the living exist near, and often in, their ancestors' tombs, some dating from the 12th century.

Lining the road, small teashops, some white-tiled, others of dark stained-wood, attract older men to gossip and smoke apple and honey flavoured tobacco from tall bubbling shishas (water pipes).

They read Arabic newspapers, sip muddy tea flavoured with dried mint, and tut-tut at the modern young Muslim girls wobbling past in jeans and platform shoes. They are the old-fashioned critics of Egypt's tolerant face of Islam.

Just past a billboard advertising the El Shark Engineering Company, the cabbie screeches to a stop, accepts the £E15 ($9.50) fare with a pleasant nod and points to the entrance of the Khan al Khalili Bazaar, billed as the greatest oriental bazaar in the world.

"Hullo sah. Hullo sah," the persistent, sleeve-tugging salutation greets me immediately and at every subsequent turn in the canvas-covered streets of this enormous market that has echoed with the humbug of salesmen since 1382. "Silver, alabaster, jewellery, gold? I have special price, just for you, sah."

Where Count Almasy followed Katharine in The English Patient urging her to bargain, I plunge into the same dizzying maze of shops, tents and restaurants fired by the fragrances of herbs and exotic spices and the unmistakable scents of musk and ambergris. The array of merchandise is staggering.

There are bins of crimson hibiscus, precious saffron, myrrh and henna, glorious silks, amber, copper and brass things, elegant Egyptian perfume bottles, incredibly cheap bedclothes of quality Egyptian cotton and if it isn't available, the friendly merchants, most of whom speak some English, will invite you in for mint tea while they get it. I pass up the chance to bump into Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author, Naguib Mahfouz who still frequents the El-Fishawi Cafe, the Cafe of Mirrors, once a meeting place for local artists and purveyors of fine Egyptian cuisine, to pay a visit to the pride of Saladin.

High on a spur of limestone, the Citadel is an enormous walled fortress with stunning views of the city and the home of Egypt's rulers for 700 years since Saladin built it to withstand the Crusaders.

From any point in Cairo, you can see the spires, minarets and domes of the Mohammad Ali Mosque within its walls. The cool breezes and relative silence within provide a welcome respite from the chaos outside.

My mind awash with Coptic churches, a bewildering array of mosques and flashbacks of King Tut's treasures in the Egyptian Museum, I break a vow and succumb to the lure of the pyramids. Giza is now within the urban sprawl of Cairo and the pinnacle of the great pyramid of Cheops peeps over the tourist hotels in the shadow of the great monument.

A phalanx of tour buses covers every metre of the vast pyramids parking lot, each greeted by an army of touts and vendors offering everything from postcards to "precious stones" to camel rides, who greet you like back-slapping old pals.

"Please accept this bead sah, no money, oh no sah," grins a shifty old bloke in a burnous that looks like Yasser Arafat's. "I am a Bedouin, sah. I will take you into the desert for a better view of the pyramids. Come with me sah."

In spite of the theme park atmosphere and the omnipresent perfume of camel piddle, these awesome structures really are intoxicating, more so than the little nearby Sphinx with its feline features and busted nose.

I'm told the way to appreciate the pyramids is to rent a horse and ride into the desert at sunset. I settle for a coffee and the view from the Sphinx Cafe.

It's sunset and back in town arm in arm lovers join the armed security police strolling Nileside.

As feluccas bob and weave over the eternal green waters of this fabled river, it's all kisses and Kalashnikovs on the Nile Corniche.