The art of Egyptian bus travel

I was stuck on a bus travelling from the Mediterranean town of Marsa Matrouh back to Cairo, watching the nerdy, diminuitive, slapstick actor, Mohamed Henedy, who despite (or perhaps because of) appearing no more than five feet tall with a baby face, feels the need to shout his way through every movie. Napoleonic complex, if ever I saw one.  Having said that, he’s a prolific little bugger, his new movie, Prince of the Sea, is out now, and he has 12,600 fans on Facebook.

In the bus movie, he’s got thick glasses and a comb-over, and is teaching a few young boys a lesson for staring at his girl (who is inevitably tall and beautiful) and whips off his slippers to give them a good hiding.

He’s also making them slap their faces, which women do when they’re screaming with angst at, say, the death of a loved one; amply demonstrated in the following movie where the naughty Lebanese actress Haifa flashes her knickers and gets slapped around a lot: if you were looking for women’s rights in Egyptian cinema, you’d have to be looking hard.

Bus travel in Egypt is cheap - US$10 will get you across half the vast country, but it's not necessarily fast, thanks to the revered tea stop. It's a test of patience, however, I'm becoming Egyptian in at one aspect: stuffing my face with sugar at hourly intervals while on the road.

The chemically-enhanced taste of Twinkies sponge and fake cream (do you remember the ads for them in Archie magazines???) have worn out their welcome with me, and I never got into the hard stuff, the solid sugar hit of basbousa, but Egypt is a biscuit culture and I'm a culture vulture. When in Rome. Or Egypt, in this case. 

Of course, there must be tea at every break, even in the middle of the night in grim roadside cafes full of hard-faced microbus drivers, their vans piled twice their height with everything from sofas to antique wheelchairs and, in this one's case, a wheelbarrow hanging off the front. 

Who knows how they manage to achieve such death-defying speeds: I heard that one hit a camel that was sleeping on the warm road on the stretch out to Siwa last week.