This post is not easy for me to write but is a turbulent story of how I fell in love with Egypt. For many years I have struggled with mental health issues and during my first year at university, in London, my anxiety heightened massively - I had moved away from a town where I knew everyone and everything and had spent my whole life, to a university where I knew no-one. I got into a relationship with the guy across the hallway and barely went to lectures; I spent my first year anxious to step out of my room, demotivated and severely depressed but didn’t seek help from any of the people I had surrounding me. This culminated in me attempting to kill myself on the 18th of May 2015 with an overdose of 37 varying painkillers. Everything had become overbearing and for the first time in my struggles with mental health, I stopped believing there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
I returned from the hospital the next morning and me and my boyfriend, at the time, decided the best thing was to go to his home country, Egypt. We booked our flights, packed our rooms up and moved everything to the empty flat we had waiting for the second year and headed to the airport the next day to catch our flight. Fate was not with us and we missed it, so we headed back to our flat we slept on the floor and flew the next day.
For me this was an overwhelming decision, I had been through such a turbulent time and to make it worse I decided to spend the next 42 days in Egypt, a place I'd never been, a country I knew little about in every aspect and a country with a language I barely knew. We landed in Cairo and I felt a small part of the anger, sadness, depression and loneliness dissolve. I felt like a stranger in an even stranger land with a protective hand keeping me safe. I felt completely anonymous.
The air was thick and hot, the runway was almost boiling and the soles of my shoes stuck to it slightly, the arrivals hall was a big, empty and a chaotic room full of money exchanges and a persistent smell of cigarettes. The border control officers at the desks were stern and had a judgemental eye, looking at me with inquisition as to why I was here, and probably why I was arriving with an Egyptian national; the days of busy touristic summers were long gone for Cairo and this was shown by the tired arrivals hall. Never in my life had I been anywhere like this, a novel place, an unplanned trip, no constraints or resorts and instead of anxiousness, I felt excitement.
The next 42 days were a frenzied whirlwind, laced with ups and downs, backwards and forwards, countless phone calls home, late nights drinking costa coffee, early morning awakenings by the sound of the call to prayer echoing in the dusk and a quick adjustment to a country I was rapidly falling in love with.
Our base was Cairo, an old furnished flat on a high up floor in Al Rehab City. In Cairo we spent much time with friends, driving around, seeing the sights, chilling in people's flats and reading countless books. The (now old) Egyptian Museum was an endless labyrinth of dusty glass, encasing enthralling and awe-inspiring artefacts; it was a hint at the by-gone 2000’s era of tourism but embodied adventure and discovery with a colonial, ‘glory-days’ feeling about it. Old town Cairo, specifically Giza, seemed almost ancient and unchanged from the photo’s that I had looked at of Egypt, as a child. Seemingly the only change were the lively streets roaring with the sound of engines, car horns, laughter and jostling people.
The pyramids themselves, although I never entered them, did not compare to photos. I sat in disbelief at the sheer scale and magnificence of them even from a rooftop just under a kilometre away. We ate the most beautiful foods in Al-Azhar Park under the hot summer sun whilst gazing on exquisite gardens and The Citadel, we drove through Tahrir Square as I heard stories of the revolution and felt the tense atmosphere that still lay over the square almost 3 years later. We took a light up, music booming boat for a short trip along The Nile as the boys danced around and laughed with each other while I soaked up every last bit of beauty I could from Cairo.
Between all of this, we journeyed to so many places. We drove through Sinai to Sharm El-Sheik; the landscape was sparse, the ochre orangey yellow sand had a bittersweet shimmer under the harsh sunlight as we sped along a seemingly endless strip of tarmac. The road curved and contoured with the biblical landscape, through mountain ranges that even my imagination couldn’t create, hugging the shoreline of The Red Sea. When finally arriving in Sharm El-Sheik the air got hotter, even though I thought it couldn’t, it was humid and close and we spent hours in a cafe built out of fabric, with pathetic fans merely blowing more hot air at me - if anything I think they made it worse. We spent a short time in Sharm El-Sheik, and although a seemingly crappy tourist destination the water was incredible to swim in and I wished I never had to leave it, we scuba-dived, went clubbing in an old quarry in the mountains, quad-biked through the desert to spend an evening smoking shisha and listening to Arabic music. Although not my favourite place, there was still beauty here and kindness in people's hearts.
We spent a week at Porto Marina, on The North Coast. This was like a life I could live every day, we spent mornings sleeping and afternoons relaxing on the man-made beaches at the side of the canals if that's what you’d call them. We had elaborate barbeques and countless meals cooking enough to feed an army even though there were only 5 of us. We stayed up all night to make it to the mornings to watch incredible sunrises, like none I have ever seen before, and although we bickered and squabbled like 5 siblings we did laugh and yes I cried, but this week is engrained on my mind for the utter beauty and how drastically it changed my outlook on life.
We spent a long time in Port Said, a city that is traditional and almost unknown to regular tourists - it sits at the mouth of The Suez Canal and its sister city rests just across the water, Port Fuad. The time I spent here was during Ramadan and although a sleepy city during the long and hard days it truly sprang to life at night. This is the place where I saw the culture and appreciated the country for what it was, here I experienced kindness like I never have before in my life. Although not everyone was accepting the majority were open-armed and open-hearted. I was given a bed whilst the family I stayed with were squished in two rooms, people who did not have a lot gave me everything they could beyond their means, I found a home in a city that I never knew existed until 8 months earlier. I realised how difficult Ramadan is and how much it brings a community together, I did half-fasts each day which left me starving and gasping and quite frankly hungry-angry but it was an experience I cannot forget.
At the end of all of this, I think my experience can be summarised in one single memory that perhaps best describes my feeling during this massive journey. The first night when I heard the call to prayer my hairs stood on end across the back of my neck as the realisation hit that I was in Egypt for real, I was away and unconstrained. I was stirred, captivated, impatient and eagerly anticipating the coming weeks, this feeling never really left but it did replace all the negative ones that were there before. I'm not saying that every time an ordeal happens in your life you should run away for nearly 50 days, but for me, Egypt genuinely saved me and helped me find a piece of myself along the road that I forgot I'd lost.
