Egypt

The scale of Egypt's antiquity defeats most attempts to describe it. The pyramids are older than the concept of writing them down. Luxor's temples were ancient when Greece was young. And yet Egypt is not a country living in its past - Cairo is one of the most alive cities on earth, a place that runs on tea and argument and the particular energy of twenty million people who have decided that traffic is a philosophical condition rather than a practical problem. The Nile still organises everything: the land, the light, the reason any of it was possible.

Our guide is being written from the ground up, with the time this place deserves.

We are still gathering the notes that make a guide worth keeping: Cairo's backstreet ful carts, Nile felucca routes, temple timings and the Red Sea towns that exist almost entirely outside the resort strip.