It’s a personal bias, but I knew from the start that Egypt would be my favorite episode of An Idiot Abroad. I heard that India is insane with its over a billion people, cramped alleyways and crowded streets, sometimes riots, and this Youtube video. But earlier this year, I was in Egypt, so I know firsthand what an awesome clusterfuck Cairo is. Cairo is nineteen million pushy, grabby citizens dragging you into their shops or onto their camels or holding out their hands for baksheeh because they walked next to you while you crossed the street. It’s a game of human Frogger — cars speed around town within inches of each other, within inches of goats and donkeys, within inches of pedestrians. It’s a city where you say “No thanks” and they hear “You’re not trying hard enough.”
Plus there’s the stuff you expect from Egypt: it’s dusty, it’s all in Arabic, and it’s hot as fuck.
Karl, we know, hates all of this, the Western civilization version of all of this — “It does me ‘ead in, ‘aving to live in London. It’s too much.” And I don’t think Ricky and Steve appreciated the extent of Karl-Egypt incompatibility (nor do I think that Ricky would care if he did), but for me, it put the rest of the Karl’s travelogue in some sort of perspective. The show could’ve done, for example, without Karl’s fleabag hotel, or the multi-day camel trek in Jordan, total comedic miscalculations. Karl’s feelings and reactions are irritating and melodramatic, it’s his polarized, stubborn misunderstandings that are the series’ gold, the way he compares our ordinary to his ordinary, where “me neighbor ‘ad a ‘orse in ‘er ‘ouse” and his dad “put a Forrest Gump in a wheelie bin… ‘e was lovin’ it.” The best scenes for me were where Karl accosted by one teahouse’s several owners, all named Sharif, engaged in a strange battle of obliviousness with Karl, one after another inviting him to the same teahouse under different names, and then Karl’s chaperone teaching him to bargain in the Khan al-Khalili medieval market. Karl’s such an insular, unassuming character that even the ulterior motives in a mock negotiation elude him.
Less successful were the Egyptian dinner, since we’ve already seen Karl needing to be spoon fed in China and he clearly had no idea what he was eating here. I thought the editors got in a good joke, though, cutting between Karl complaining about hummus and couscous and the chefs cooking up animal genitalia for him. (Another nice touch for the fans: Karl follows through and does eat a nob at night.)
It takes till the final act before Karl gets to most tourists’ number one destination: the Pyramids. The Pyramids are literally right outside Cairo, so I had some trouble figuring out the geography of Karl’s pyramid tour — he seemed to spend more time at a scenic lookout point on a hill near the Pyramids than at the Pyramids themselves. Maybe that made for better cinematography, more shots of Karl plus all three Pyramids, but it also dulled the intellectual disparity between what Karl was experiencing and the Karl-isms describing how he’s experiencing it, his laser-like focus on the mundane and superhuman inability to see the forest for the trees. His incredulous, “It’s like a game of Jenga gone mad,” was brilliant; the more distant idea that Cairo and its suburbs are a mess was less necessary. At every site in Egypt, we all thought, “There’s a ton of garbage and ungulate poo here,” but that almost immediately shifted to something like, “Can you imagine how much work this must have been, to erect this temple and then carve hieroglyphs over every single inch of the thing?”
I feel like there’s a note in Karl’s travel journal that asks of those ancient masons, “Why bother?” I just wish we’d gotten that in the show.