CAIRO – The sunset is when the Nile in Cairo comes to life, the party boats shine like Vegas, the couples on the Qasr el-Nil bridge linger in the breeze, the cafes along the river sound of trade past the bedtime of most cities .
By 6am, when the rest are home, the rowers arrive in Cairo who knows little else: no traffic, no crowds, little chaos. Even the birds are audible this morning, when the city’s battalions with car horns offer only tough competition and the winter mist fades the five-star hotels along the shore. In the boat, the rowing blades smear and scrape the river like knives over cream cheese. Rhythm replaces thought: Dip the paddles. Press with the legs. Pull back. Repeat.
“When you’ve on the water early in the morning, where you think of nothing but following the person in front of you, it takes you out of town,” said Abeer Aly, 34, who founded the Nile Dragons Academy. rowing school in central Cairo. “A lot of people think about their problems in the shower. I think of mine during rowing. ”
Ms Aly’s problems these days do not include a lack of business. Just a few years after she opened the school in 2013, she has a waiting list of hundreds of people; there are now so many Cairenes interested in amateur rowing, that half a dozen water sports centers offer classes up and down the river.
The Nile gave birth to Egyptian civilization thousands of years ago, with its salt water providing agricultural wealth that built an empire and still maintains it. Cairo residents can have coffee at a floating restaurant or aboard a felucca for an hour-long cruise; Nile water flows from their taps and grows their food. But mornings on the river are the closest most rowers have ever come to the body of water itself.
“When people hear me rowing, it’s like, ‘Rowing? Where to? ” Says Nadine Abaza, 43, who started rowing three months ago at ScullnBlades, a rowing school near her home in Maadi, a wealthy Cairo suburb. “You see it driving across the Nile, but you do not see it as something you can do.”
For most Cairenes, the river without which their land would not exist has simply become a natural beauty. Suppose it can be seen.
A river promenade, the Corniche, once allowed drivers to travel from the south of Cairo to the northern extension without interrupting their view of the river.
But in much of Cairo’s city center, private clubs and restaurants built on the banks of the river for the past four decades or permanently parked on stationary voyages have hidden the Nile for all but those who can afford it. Many important places are owned by organizations belonging to the army, the police and the judiciary.
Granted, there are other reasons to stay away from a river that collects sewage, garbage and other pollutants miles away before flowing, green-brown and occasionally sharp, to Cairo. The rowers share the water not only with police boats, fishermen and ferries, but also occasionally an archipelago of rubbish and – at least once – a dead cow.
“If we have existed for thousands of years,” said Amir Gohar, an urban and landscape planner who studied the Egyptians’ relationship with the Nile, “now we are destroying it and we are ignoring it.”
Some parts of the corniche remain open for walking, and in poor neighborhoods in Cairo and other parts of Egypt, people go to the Nile to swim, fish, and, if they have no running water, their dishes, clothes, and to scrub animals. But compared to the Cairenes past, the inhabitants of today maintain a very distant relationship with the river.
Antique carvings and model boats found in tombs suggest that people rowed up the Nile to transport supplies, including the massive stone blocks of the Great Pyramids, to celebrate and just to get around. The ancient Egyptians believed that it was by boat that the sun crossed the sky and crossed the dead to the afterlife.
Perhaps this explains why Amenhotep II, a pharaoh who ruled Egypt from about 1426 to 1400 BC, was eager to show off his rowing skills. While Amenhotep’s 200 rowers were ‘weak, limp and breathless’ after rowing half a mile, claiming one carving, the king -‘ strong of arms, untiring when he took the paddle ‘- stopped’ only after he rowed three miles without interrupting his stroke. ”
The Europeans who dominated Egypt in the early 1900s were the first to establish modern rowing clubs along the Nile. The sport was reserved for decades for foreigners and elite Egyptians, with races mentioned in French.
After the monarchy fell and foreigners fled after the Egyptian revolution in 1952, the Nile, like so much else in Egypt, was transformed under President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s socialist vision. While Nasser set up new unions to look after their members’ needs from housing to health care, these syndicates were granted land on the Nile Front to build clubs where members could relax and in some cases row.
In the 1970s, after the tourists wanted to return to Egypt after a war with Israel, the government brought regattas to the stage that pulled top rowers from Europe and the United States, who raced along the temples of Luxor and through Cairo . Among Egyptians, however, rowing never stood a chance against popular sports such as soccer.
Private clubs along the Nile still belong to the engineering syndicate, the judging club, the police and others. But as later governments rejected Nasserism for capitalism, private developers built much of the river in cafes and expensive housing.
This in a city with less than five square centimeters of green space per inhabitant.
“You’re talking about Cairo, which now has 20 million people, but it has very little public space or green space,” said Yahia Shawkat, an urban researcher. “And with everything you have on the Nile, it’s not only exclusive, but you’re also blinded to see or enjoy the river.”
Egyptians pass the riverfront where they can, some traveling to the outskirts of the city in search of a free pop-up park. Every night Cairenes gathers on the Nile bridges for the view and the cool breeze. Some fish. Families buy snacks of stewed chickpeas and roasted sweet potatoes from vendors who set up unlicensed sidewalk cafes. Couples take selfies.
Rowing classes cost about $ 7 to $ 13 per hour, out of reach for most Egyptians. But for young professionals and upper-middle-class families who can afford it, rowing has become a fast-growing niche, the contents of which are easy to row; some were forced to join amateur races.
Water sports schools say they reported newcomers in their twenties to the 60s, part of a fitness trend that emerged in Egypt’s revolution in 2011. Social media helped, as did the pandemic: ScullnBlades received twice as many reports after hit the coronavirus, due to the outside.
“It was not accessible until recently,” says Emma Benany, 31, who was co-founder of Cairow, a water sports academy in the Dokki area. When she started rowing in 2011, she only found student teams or private clubs, almost nothing for amateurs; new academies, including hers, still work from club-owned docks. “You would not be able to be in your thirties and decide to row.”
One can guess that you also can not be afraid of the Nile and decide to climb into a boat. Yet many new rowers come up with questions like: If I invade, I will not drown? Are there no bubbles? Will I not get bilharzia, a local disease caused by freshwater parasites?
You will not, there are not and parasites do not thrive in moving water, the coaches explain, although the current can be more difficult to swim than a pool. Me. Aly, of the Nile Dragons Academy, said she even drank directly from the Nile to reassure empty rowers.
Those who have studied the pollution of the river may not approve of it. But still: Point taken.
“Before, I was afraid of the Nile,” said Cairow coach Mariam Rashad. “I now feel the Nile is an important part of my day.”
Nada Rashwan reported.