Travellers arrive in Cairo searching for antiquity. What they leave remembering is human warmth. This is Cairo’s most significant travel secret — not that its monuments are extraordinary, which they are, but that the spaces between the monuments are animated by a quality of social generosity that few other cities in the world produce so consistently. The Egyptian Museum offers the deepest available collection of ancient artefacts. The National Museum of Egyptian Civilization presents Egyptian civilisation as a continuous living narrative. Khan El Khalili’s six-hundred-year-old bazaar preserves the specific social choreography of a culture whose commerce has always been inseparable from conversation. And on the road to Ain Sokhna, Ahmed and his son — reachable at +201060521218 — provide the experience that no monument can: the specific warmth of two people who understand that the most significant thing they can offer a visitor to their country is not information but presence.