Copyright © Tanya Piejus, 1999

'Can you see the pyramids?' I asked my boyfriend. We peered out of our fish-bowl aeroplane window as Cairo's night-time illuminations zig-zagged below us, but the desert's blackness masked Egypt's mystic past from our rapidly descending gaze. Not to worry, I thought, there would be plenty of time in the coming fortnight to marvel at the spiritual home of the Nile Valley's first Sons of the Light.

Customs, passport control and baggage reclaim were a breeze and the airport coughed out its processed arrivals into the super-heated night, at the mercy of a twinkly-eyed mass of Cairenes hopefully chanting 'Taxi, taxi?' at the bewildered faces. Hand on horn, we stopped and started our way through the permanent rush-hour that is downtown Cairo with a chatty, but grumbling, driver. He frequently waved at darkened frontages saying 'President Nasser house' or 'Farouk's Palace' as necessary between whinges about the traffic. On reaching what he called 'Centre, centre Cairo', we knew we must be near our hotel.

The entrance to the Pensione Roma looked decidedly unpromising. A dusty, dingy alleyway housed three men sitting on boxes who followed us with three pairs of mildly curious eyes as we stared up the feebly-lit stair-well that we hoped led to a hot shower and a decent night's sleep. The apparent death-trap of a lift seemed a better option than four flights of stone stairs. Taking our lives in our hands we climbed in and it wheezed and growled like an asthmatic washing-machine up to the pension. The Roma had a clinical, colonial feel in its heavy, dark furniture, sturdy pot-plants and cool black and white tiled floors.

Hauling on the pulley of the gargantuan iron shutters let the Cairo night flood into our £8 room in all its hot, heavy, cacophonous glory. Voices yelled, dogs yelped and the round-the-clock car horns whinnied as Cairo's 20 million citizens went about their nocturnal business. We steeled ourselves to join them and, leaving our guide book behind in a moment of pioneering bravado, bounded down the four flights to street level. For reasons we never quite understood, the lift only went up.

We memorised the nearest landmarks and set off amongst the sharply-dressed Cairene couples promenading arm-in-arm along the wide pavements. Groups of teenage boys strolled along with linked arms or holding hands as a natural extension of their camaraderie and friendship. If this had been London, we would have just assumed they were gay. Islam teaches that charity is a high virtue and Egyptians look after their own. Another striking difference from our familiar London environment was the lack of beggars with their hands out for spare change.

Our newly-adopted part of Cairo seemed, in fact, to be bursting with wealth and prosperity. From our hotel window we had looked across rooftops thick with broken furniture, abandoned electrical appliances and all manner of domestic detritus. All this urban-dweller's junk was caked in a cloying, grey dust, undoubtedly a mixture of wind-dumped desert sand and the sticky, stinking pollution that we could feel in our throats and noses. This decrepit scene had led us to think that we were on the wrong side of the tracks, but a short walk outside and we realised we were in the posh part of town.

Neon-lit shops pumped out Europop and strained local rock music. Their windows were crowded with more designer labels than any in Oxford Street - Levi's, Nike, Reebok, Caterpillar. Real or fake?, we wondered. Deciphering the Arabic price tags, we decided fake.

Turning a corner into a side street we wandered past a panoply of hair-dryers, lawnmowers, kitchen gadgets, machine tools and every kind of spare part. Shop after shop was stuffed with these wonders of modern invention and we christened it Widget Street. One shop sold nothing but fire-fighting equipment from domestic extinguishers to a small-scale engine, hoses and all. Despite it being an hour before midnight, all the shops were still open. And had customers.

Having successfully found our way back to the Roma, we shut out the Cairo night and crawled between our heavily-starched sheets knowing that we had arrived in a special and exciting place. After all, where else in the world can you buy a miniature fire-engine at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night?

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