For three months, adventure filmmaker and author Karin Muller traveled alone across Egypt - living with Cairo's garbage collectors, drinking tea with camel sellers, and fasting through the blistering heat of Islam's Holy Month. Karin begins her journey in a Cairo slum among Egypt's 50,000 Coptic Christian garbage collectors. Cairo recycles a higher percentage of its refuse than any other city in the world. For two weeks Karin sorts garbage amidst the flies and pigs. The Zabaleen take her into their homes, teach her how to survive off Cairo's waste and show her just how much you can learn about a culture from what it throws away. They allow her into their backyard workshops, share their struggles with a hostile government, and reveal the secret of their happiness in the midst of Cairo's filthiest slum. The Egyptians refer to Cairo as Um-Ad-Dunya - the Mother of the World. It is home to 22 million people, and over 60% of the city has developed in a completely unregulated free-for-all. As a result many neighborhoods are extraordinarily dense, leaving little room for schools, hospitals, or police stations. Streets are often too narrow for a fire truck or even an ambulance So where do you go if you live in a Cairo slum and yearn to see a tree or two? Al-Azhar Park - built, appropriately, on a garbage dump. For many children, it's their first experience with real grass. It's also a popular retreat for young couples looking for a bit of privacy, despite its proximity to the ultra-conservative Islamic Cairo. The walled city has changed little since Muhammad's time. Children play in its cobble-stoned streets and the air is filled with the smell of freshly baked bread, delivered every morning and evening by an army of young boys. Egyptians eat more bread per capita than any other country in the world. Cairo is justifiably proud of its metro system - one of only two in all of Africa. It's efficient, inexpensive, and - even in the middle of a revolution - never breaks down. Each train has several carriages reserved for women, making it one of the safest forms of transportation in all of Egypt. The metro is the city's saving grace, because the one thing you don't want to do in Cairo is drive. Cairenos are notorious for their creative indifference to the rules of the road. If you miss your exit, it's okay to drive the wrong way down a four-lane highway. If you do arrive at your destination in one piece then you still have to find a place to park. Munadis - self- appointed car parkers - have staked out spots along the city's most congested streets and operate on tips. They even take phone reservations. Of course, the hottest ride in town didn't always come with a steering wheel. Bir'ash, just 35 miles outside of Cairo, still hosts the largest camel market in the Middle East. Like the pyramids, camels are a point of pride in Egypt - a part of their collective heritage. If you're not ready to buy a piece of Egyptian history, you can always pick up a bottle or two of camel milk, smoke a sheesha pipe, and hang out for an hour before the Friday call to prayers. You will never truly understand Egypt if you don't understand Islam, and Ramadan - Islam's holiest month - is the time to do it. To Muslims, Ramadan is Christmas and Thanksgiving all rolled into one. Throughout Egypt, strangers are invited to share Iftar, the breaking of the daily fast. During Ramadan, Muller is given access to life behind the walls of one of Cairo's more conservative mosques, where she discovers an unexpected world of workout gyms and boxing clubs, libraries and theatre groups. There is more to Egypt than Cairo. Hurghada, once a poor fishing village, is now a premiere resort area - a 20-mile-long dense band of concrete on the fabled Red Sea. Unfortunately the explosion of tourism has done enormous damage to the reefs and forced the Bedouin out of their ancestral lands. Some of the more innovative nomads have started using their goats to help sort through and recycle garbage, providing them a crucial new source of income but also forcing them to settle down and give up their thousand-year old lifestyle. Cairo, Undercover reveals the many faces of this complicated land, where a fundamentally kind and generous people struggle to emerge from six decades of brutal dictatorship, fear, and propaganda.
