Enduring Egypt

I've been returning to Egypt, both physically and in the realms of the imagination, for almost all of my life. I was just five years old when I first gazed at the smiling sphinx at Giza. And inshallah, as they invariably say as a prefix for any future plans, I'll be back there again this winter.

What draws me back is not just the unchanging splendours of its ancient civilizations, but the civilized warmth of ordinary Egyptians today.

Which is why, no matter whether my goal is to wander through the pharaohs' tombs in the Valley of the Kings or to glide through the Red Sea's limpid waters off Sharm el Sheikh, staring down at dazzling reef-fish and corals, I always try to spend some time in Cairo.

Just how its 20 million plus inhabitants manage to maintain such an easy grace amidst the traffic and hubbub and heat of this "mother of all cities" remains a mystery, but they do. It is apparent in the smallest of gestures, as in the way tea is poured at El Feshawi, the mirror-lined Belle Epoque café just opposite al-Azhar mosque and university, where Cairo's literati can still be found puffing away at their hubble-bubbles. Or in the delicacy with which a barber wielded his cut-throat razor when I needed a shave after an early morning visit to the magnificent Mamluk tombs, known as the "City of the Dead".

In Cairo we stayed at The Windsor, which remains a remarkable survivor of pre-Independence style with its splendid cage-lift and the kind of bar where Special Air Service officers might have quenched their thirst after a spot of recce in the Western Desert.

It stands in the old commercial quarter, just a short walk way from the Egyptian Museum. From there I wandered onwards to the Muski Bazaar and the Khan-el-Khali, where the halls of the old Turkish caravanserai selling carpets and antiques are surrounded by smaller workshops in which artisans noisily craft brass trays.

A driver was provided to take us out to the pyramids at Giza, after which we breakfasted on cheese and olives at the Mina House hotel where Winston Churchill liked to stay, before continuing to the step pyramid at Saqqara with its 4,000-year-old engravings of duck-farming and fishing along the Nile.

On the drive back into town he bought us lunch at a wayside restaurant — barbecued chicken with houmus and foules madames on the side. Not only did he insist on paying, he later refused my attempts at giving him a tip.

The great heritage hotels of Upper Egypt — the Old Cataract of Agatha Christie fame at Aswan and the Winter Palace at Luxor — retain much of their old world charm despite having vast new wings added by the Sofitel group. And there are "new" antiquities to be visited, from the avenue of the sphinxes in Luxor to the climate-controlled mummified body of Tutunkhamun across the river in the Valley of the Kings. Change is afoot, even in a landscape so unchanging as the Nile Valley.

The capital's new luxury hotel, the splendid Kempinski Nile, is situated in Garden City, close to the British Embassy. It boasts the capital's first Ottoman, or Osmanly, Restaurant, which in fact represents a return to the days when Egypt was a province of the Turkish Empire.