Egypt, 1990

My journey through Egypt was shaped by a unique atmosphere during the weeks of tension, uncertainty, and anxiety leading up to the first Gulf War in 1990.

While I was still celebrating New Year’s Eve with exuberant locals in the streets of Cairo, the following weeks revealed a country largely abandoned by tourists. I found this quite pleasant; for instance, there were no queues at the Pyramids of Giza or the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. For the Egyptians, however, this caused serious economic hardship, as customers were simply missing and the livelihood of many families for the coming days was uncertain. Consequently, daily survival dominated people’s lives more than the conflict in the Persian Gulf, which felt quite distant.

Nevertheless, I experienced the fascination of modern Egypt’s current culture and way of life, as well as the impressive witnesses of many thousands of years of history: from New Year’s Eve in Cairo to the sunrise on Mount Moses and the Sinai, the Grand Tour to the Pyramids, the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, Luxor and Karnak, the Nile Dam and the Temple of Abu Simbel, my path led back through the seclusion of the western oases of Qurna and Farafra.

The trip to Egypt was also my first flight and took me outside Europe into a foreign culture for the first time. Until then, I hadn’t travelled particularly far: a bit of Italy, France, and Switzerland. On this trip, I took photos with my father’s old camera – a Revue 400S (a Cosina or Minolta licensed build for Quelle) with a 1:2.8 38 mm lens – and didn’t have any great photographic ambitions yet, other than capturing a few impressions.

New Year’s Eve in Cairo was impressive. With two other travellers, we first went to a restaurant, then bought a bottle of wine, which we drank somewhat well-hidden on one of the crowded Nile bridges at midnight. The night ended with locals under the bridge, who kept having beer brought to them. On the bus journey to the Sinai, I met an Egyptian with whom I climbed Mount Moses the next morning. Since it was bitterly cold, I used my old German army sleeping bag as a jacket – it could be opened at the hip and rolled up.