Just when you thought it was safe to come back to my blog, I'm going to start talking about Egypt again. I've been uploading more of our Flip Videos to YouTube, and here's one Laura took of me just after (as I've mentioned earlier) I emerged from my journey to heart of the second pyramid. She, of course, is conducting the interview from off-camera:
Finally, for a little closure, clicking this photograph will take you to a Flickr set of my choices for the best pictures from our trip. Relax, there are only 148.
But if you want to see more, way more, you can sample this collection instead.
[I've only written 12,000 words so far about the big trip, so I suppose there's no reason not to go ahead and slap on a few more and close this out.]
Our lame-duck tour company had, belatedly, offered us some options for our Cairo sightseeing pleasure on Saturday, May 31. We could have a tour guide, or a driver, or a tour guide and a driver, or we could do it all on our own using public transportation and taxis. After some hasty private consultation, Laura and I opted for a driver only. We figured it would be useful to have someone who could take us where we wanted to go, but wouldn't get in our way or try to drag us off on annoying consumer side adventures.
We set off on our adventure first thing after our buffet breakfast at the hotel (which featured the best damn fresh orange juice I've had in a long time). We had three items on our sightseeing agenda: the Citadel, Islamic Cairo, and Coptic Cairo. Well, two out of three isn't bad.
Things started off well enough. Our driver whisked us away to the Citadel, that ancient fortress city built up by Saladin to defend against the Crusaders. We were especially enamored of the Mohammed Ali Mosque, a grand structure in the Ottoman Baroque style—even though Laura's carefully composed outfit was not proof against being wrapped in a green cloak as we entered. Our small playlist of five videos from the Citadel complex will give you an idea what we saw there. Or, if you prefer to see only one, try this video of Laura in the courtyard of the Mohammed Ali Mosque:
We wandered the streets around the Citadel for a while before the appointed time to meet our driver again, and that's when we received our first real baptism into the game we came to call "Cairo Frogger." Simply put, that's the way you cross most streets—like the hapless videogame character, boldly striding into the street and progressing from lane to lane as you see opportunities open up. The streets around the Citadel provided us our training round of Cairo Frogger. The expert levels would come later.
One agenda item down, two to go! But it was the next item that caused us problems. "Islamic Cairo" is a specific area of the city, filled with ancient mosques and markets. It's a common tourist destination. (We did not exactly realize it, but we were already on the edge of it.) But our driver did not seem to grok our drift. "Anywhere you look," he said, "that is Islamic Cairo. You want to see mosques. Anywhere you look, there are mosques."
Apparently the term does not translate well from English.
If we'd had a better idea what exactly we were looking for in Islamic Cairo, or maybe if we'd chosen guidebooks with better maps, we might have made some headway in this debate. As it was, we decided to curtail our mounting frustration and move on to the third agenda item. We figured we could always go back to the hotel, get some directions from the concierge, and take a cab to where we wanted to go later.
So it was that we skipped ahead to Coptic Cairo, where our frustrated driver parked and told us he'd meet us in an hour. The Hanging Church was marvelous, with elaborate cruciform woodwork all over the interior, and some of the more gruesome icons I've seen in a Christian church. Our driver had shadowed us from the car to the church, which creeped me out until I passed him lighting a candle and he sheepishly admitted to me that he was Christian and only got the opportunity to pray in church while squiring tourists around.
We saw some other cool stuff in the Coptic quarter, including the Roman Tower and the Church of St. George. In an underground market passage, as I was paying for a photographic print of a zeppelin over a mosque (possibly a Lehnert & Landrock bootleg, I'm not sure), I managed to knock a crocodile magnet off a wall and break it. The superglued croc is now stuck to our fridge.
After Coptic Cairo, we had our driver take us back to our hotel. We paid him and thanked him and sent him on his way. Then a very helpful fellow at the front desk assisted us in getting a taxi to the Khan al-Khalili, the ancient marketplace in Islamic Cairo we had hoped to see that morning. The taxi ride there was easy, and we spent an overawed hour getting lost in that complex, crowded maze of narrow merchant alleys. By now we had gotten pretty good at ignoring the hawkers' come-ons, so we actually had a fairly pleasant time.
Eventually we got hungry, so we found an attractive-looking cafe in a relatively uncrowded plaza and sat down for some coffee and falafel sandwiches. We chatted with a pair of tourists at the next table, and then somehow found ourselves wrapped up in a conversation with the owner of the restaurant. He was a distinguished-looking older gentleman dressed neatly in pristine Western business casual. He looked as if the heat did not dare touch him. When we told him how much we loved his falafels, he told us it had been his grandfather's restaurant, and that the place was listed in our guidebook as having the best falafels in Cairo. (Sure enough, it was.)
He also owned an import/export business, he said, and, as he was the designated collector of alms for the poor from the businesses of the Khan, he claimed to know all the merchants around. This was an assertion he proceeded to back up by taking us on a whirlwind backstreet tour of the marketplace, where he helped us acquire all the gift items that remained on our Egyptian shopping list. Alabaster, mosaic glass, saffron, hibiscus tea, he helped us buy it all—or in point of fact, purchased it for us from the merchants in question. Along the way, he led us up backstairs and through the dusty workshops of the artisans who produced filigreed silver and mother-of-pearl-inlaid wood and more. He slapped backs and shook hands all around, everywhere we went. He and I both sneezed and needed to blow our noses in the covered spice market, where a hundred exotic scents hung heavy in the air, puffed up from open barrels and burlap bags with the tops turned down in neat cuffs.
It was a magical hour, and at the end of it, back in the gentleman's own shop, he had all our purchases wrapped up for us, and we settled with him personally for the amount of 400 Egyptian pounds (a little less than 80 bucks, which still seems a bargain for everything we bought). He cadged an additional 30 pounds from us as alms for the poor, helped us find an honest cab driver to take us back to our hotel, and bid us farewell.
If we were fleeced, then we were fleeced with gentility and urbanity, and we were happy to let it happen. Laura still wonders why he singled us out. I look at Laura and I don't wonder.
That evening, after stashing our booty at the hotel, we played several harrowing rounds of Cairo Frogger in the process of hunting down a place to have dinner. On a pleasant side street that for some reason had a series of signs advertising Activia running down its grassy median (I guess even Egyptians need yogurt that makes you poop), we found a restaurant called Prestige and took a table at the sidewalk. Over the course of about three horus, we drank fruity drinks, ate a small pizza, and smoked some shisha (watch us toke up here and here), while colorful Cairenes filled in the tables all around us. Altogether, it was a fine and civilized way to close out our Middle Eastern adventure.
We knew that Friday, May 30, as another long travel day, was going to suck. We just didn't know yet how badly it was going to suck.
Over dinner the evening before, Ra'ed had broken the news to us that there would be yet another change in our travel plans. It seems the tour company had not booked our return tickets on the morning ferry to Taba soon enough, and the earliest ferry with berths still remaining would not be until 7:00 pm. That would get us to Taba far, far too late to make any bus that would reach Cairo at any remotely reasonable hour.
The solution foisted upon us—dreamed up by that same favorite benefactor of ours in Cairo who only days before had failed to get us from Hurghada to Sharm al-Sheikh by boat—was overland travel. It seemed fairly straightforward, if tedious, on the face of it. Ra'ed would drive us back to Aqaba, hand us seventy American dollars, and drop us off at the border crossing to Eilat, Israel. Once in Israel, we would take a cab to the Egyptian border, where a driver would be waiting to spirit us south to Dahab to catch our bus.
It sounds so simple, doesn't it?
As it turned out, the crossing into Israel went just fine. There was only one dicey moment, when a large and scary immigration officer demanded to know the origin of my family name. ("I—I don't know," I said. "We're American or Canadian on both sides going back two hundred years." Now, I do know that my roots stretch back to England, Scotland, and Wales, but who can recall that when confronted by a hulking Israeli soldier who probably thinks your name sounds Aryan? Laura, obviously French in extraction, had no problem.) This, by the way, was the only man among all the border personnel we encountered on our adventure in Israel. The women were generally much more pleasant.
Once we made it through passport control, a border guard hailed a taxi for us, and we were on our way. The cab driver sped us through Eilat, pointing out with pride such consumer temples as Zara and Club Med. He seemed a little offended when I asked him if his accent was French, but I think I managed to smooth it over by saying we knew Israel was like our home in New York City, full of people who've migrated from all over the world. At the Egyptian border, the driver charged us $25 American. I gave him a fifry, and he gave me back 50 shekels in change. (Two shekels to the dollar!)
Our exit visas ended up costing us, much to the amusement of the woman at the exchange desk, 50 shekels plus 20 dollars plus 2 dinars. That meant our transit had cost us, thus far, approximately three dollars more than the travel company had spotted us at the outset. And there was still one more border left to cross.
Leaving Israel was perfectly pleasant. We crossed the long barren stretch of pavement between Israel and Egypt and entered the Taba border station. In all innocence, we strolled right up to the Egyptian passport control officer, handed him our passports ... and were denied entry to Egypt.
Let's back up over a week, to the day we flew into Cairo. The very first person to meet us there was a travel facilitator from our tour company. His job was to provide immigration with a "guarantee" for our stay in Egypt—proof that our travel was all prearranged and would be supervised by the company for the duration of our time in country. This allowed him to purchase our fifteen-dollar entry visas for us. Without such a guarantor, the only way for us to enter the country would have been for us to acquire visas at an Egyptian consulate before leaving the U.S.
The passport officer at Taba pointed to the visas in our passports, which had been closed out when we left Egypt for Jordan two days earlier. "If you don't have a company here to purchase your visas," he rather impatiently explained, "then you can go back to Eilat and apply for visas at the consulate there."
Of course, it was a Friday, and in that region of the world the weekend is Friday and Saturday. The consulate in Eilat would not be open until Sunday.
"We were probably in a rush, and missed our tour guide," I said. "We'll go back and find him. Sorry."
It turns out that in our hurry to reach passport control we had strolled right past a small group of tour guides inside the border station. We went back to them and asked which of them was from our company.
Ahem. None was.
The tour guides were as helpful to us as they could be, though. They got on the phone to our accursed travel agent in Cairo, who, when the cell phone was passed to me, seemed utterly mystified that we hadn't been able to waltz through the border like Fred and Ginger. "You don't need another visa," he said.
"Um, yes, we do. Now, where's the guy who can get it for us?"
I won't detail the further phone calls and mounting anger and frustration we experienced over the next couple of hours, stymied at the border as we were. A driver was waiting for us on the far side of the crossing, but he wasn't authorized to make the kind of guarantee required by Immigration. A helpful and friendly tour guide explained to us apologetically that there were guides who could be bribed to provide such a guarantee, but that his was a reputable company which could not assist us in that regard.
Eventually our nimrod in Cairo called with a brainstorm. "Do you have e-tickets for your flight out of Cairo?"
"Yes."
"You have your flight itinerary handy?"
"Yes." I had taken to a certain measure of curtness in my dealings with him.
"Take it to the passport control officer. Explain that you've been in Egypt already, and you need to enter again in order to leave."
Next to the currency exchange, there was an office marked "Immigration." The door was open. I shrugged, and Laura and I walked over to peek through the door. Inside was a tall, stern-looking man in an immaculate white uniform seated behind a desk. His hair was steel-gray and receding, and his nose was a thin curving blade. I sat down, laid the itinerary before him, and explained the situation—adding that our travel agent in Cairo was an obvious loser with a camel and a donkey for parents. (Okay, maybe I only said I didn't know why their man wasn't there.)
The immigration officer said, carefully, "I am only immigration officer. I am sorry, I can do nothing. But perhaps I have possible solve for you."
He went on to explain, as the reputable tour guide had, that certain companies would provide guarantees to tourists for a fee of $35 American. He pressed a button and went to the door. After a moment a fellow appeared in the doorway. The immigration officer raised his hands, palms forward. "I am only immigration officer. I know nothing of these things."
To truncate a long story, the man at the door wrote out a travel guarantee for us, purchased two visas from the bank, walked us through passport control where the same officer who had denied us entry stamped our visas with a cynical smirk, and walked us outside to the parking lot beyond. That's where I forked over 380 Egyptian pounds, the equivalent of 70 bucks—30 for the visas, 40 for the grease.
And that's what it took. We were back in Egypt.
And hopping mad.
We met our driver and set off south in his van. It was now 1:00 pm. We had missed our 12:30 bus from Dahab. The next bus would leave Dahab at 2:30. It was a two-hour drive from Taba to Dahab. By now we were impervious to terror on tortuous, twisting desert highways. Our driver got us there in ninety minutes. We barely had time to pee, and then our bus was off and rolling.
It was a large, comfortable coach-style bus, but with no restroom on board. We tried not to drink much water for the duration of the ride. We'd been told the trip would take six hours. Actually, it took eight. Having traveled south down the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba, we then drove west across the Sinai Peninsula, back north up the coast of the Gulf of Suez, and then through the tunnel back underneath the Suez Canal. There was one rest stop in the middle of all this, but it was only a quickie so the men on the bus (Laura was the only woman) could have a smoke and pee in the sand. I held it, in solidarity with Laura.
Here, Laura interviews me on the bus:
We reached Cairo at 10:30 pm. Our guide Shiko was there at the bus station—had been, for a couple of hours—with a van driver. Our dear friend the travel agent was waiting to meet us at the hotel. Believe me, when you haven't peed for eight hours, the man who put you in that situation is is the last person you want to find standing between you and the nearest plumbing.
The idiot didn't even realize that we had another full day in Cairo ahead of us. He tried to tell us that our van would be there at five in the morning to take us to the airport.
Okay, let's fast-forward past the discussion that followed. It was past midnight by the time we managed to get rid of the tour people and get settled in our room. That's when Laura and I set out in search of food. All we had eaten since breakfast seventeen hours earlier in Jordan was a banana apiece and some of those crumbly chocolate-creme sandwich cookies that come in a tube. I had spotted a sidewalk cafe a couple of blocks away on the way to the hotel that looked inviting, and it wasn't difficult for us to walk there. Our waiter was funny and nice, and I ended up eating a dish called koshary, sort of a kitchen-sink affair built from lentils, chickpeas, tomato sauce, rice, pasta, chunked meat, and assorted other ingredients. It damn well hit the spot. Laura had chicken shawarma, and we took turns feeding bits of meat on the sly to the two stray cats that prowled up to our table from beneath a parked car.
It was a good way to close out an interesting but ultimately shitty day.
Petra is an ancient city established in what is now Jordan in the 6th century B.C. by a tribe called the Nabateans. The city inhabits an extensive valley defended by a narrow canyon called the Siq. The Nabateans carved open channels into the canyon walls to bring irrigation water into the city, and covered channels for drinking water. In this way they were able to defend against numerous invaders over the centuries, establishing Petra as an important center of commerce on the trading routes between Arabia and the Mediterranean. Petra finally fell to Rome in A.D. 106 after a lengthy siege, but continued as an important population center until being crippled by an earthquake in 363.
The most notable archaeological feature of Petra is the proliferation of elaborate tombs or temples, and smaller shrines, carved into the faces of the area's sandstone cliffs. The best preserved example of this beautiful Greek-influenced architecture is al-Khazneh, or the Treasury, which has survived as long as it has thanks to the protective overhang beneath which it was carved. The Treasury may be most recognizable in popular culture as the exterior of the temple containing the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
The drive from our hotel to the entrance to the Petra site took all of two minutes, first thing on Thursday, May 29. We had been told that we would be riding horses in as part of our tour. I pictured us arriving at the Treasury like Indy Jones, riding out of the Siq in a thunder of hooves. This turned out, disappointingly, not to be the case. Instead, our grand horse ride took us from just inside the site entrance to near the upper end of the Siq, a distance of only 200 meters. Our Arabians were led by their grooms. There was no free riding. Well, Laura somehow managed to convince her groom to let her take the reins from him. Me, I completely failed to communicate to my groom that I could ride a horse all on my own, or even that I knew how to mount and dismount by myself.
That turned out to be the only disappointing thing about Petra. No, there were two disappointing things about Petra. First was the horse ride, second was the fact that the battery of our borrowed digital camera (as it so often did on this trip) died just as we were getting to the good stuff. Everything else was spectacular (although when you imagine how a site like this is going to be, you rarely picture the proliferation of tourists and merchants cluttering it all up).
Fortunately, we also had a little Flip Video camera with us, so I'll just offer a quick rundown of our visit before letting the shaky footage we shot do the talking.
We walked the kilometer or so down the narrow Siq, studying shrines and irrigation channels and the remnants of statues as our temporary guide Hamad explained the history and religion of the Nabateans. Our first glimpse of the Treasury, a sliver of rosy sandstone architecture between jagged cliffs, was heart-stopping. After a goodly amount of time exploring there, we continued along to the Royal Tombs, the Amphitheatre, the colonnaded Roman road, and beyond.
After a visit to a small archaeological museum, Hamad left us to our own devices. It was 11:00 am by now, so Laura and I figured we had time for the optional hike up to al-Deir, or the Monastery, before lunch. The climb, along a winding route of 900 stairs cut into the mountain rock, took us about 45 minutes. I don't think either of us knew what to expect from the Monastery, but even if we had it would have exceeded our expectations. Much larger than the facade of the Treasury, the Monastery is more weathered and not so elaborately carved, but is still overwhelming in its size. Like most of the structures in Petra, there's only really one big bare room carved out behind the facade, but that facade is amazing.
After climbing further to overlook the vertiginous mountainous vista of the "Sacrifice View" (which came complete with a Bedouin merchant tent at the tippy top of its narrow promontory), Laura and I hiked back down to the Basin Restaurant in the center of Petra, where we had a reservation. We loaded up at the lunch buffet, going back time and again for the fresh falafels, which were the best we'd ever had. From the point, the hike back out past everything we'd already seen, scorning the frequent offers of donkey rides, took about another hour. All told, we spent over seven delirious hours at Petra. (And when I say "delirious," I sometimes mean it literally. It was hot out.)
To supplement our dead camera and Laura's iPhone, we shot 26 short videos at Petra, which I have arranged into a YouTube playlist to help give you an idea of what we saw. If you'd rather watch just one, I would recommend the eighth here, which offers the clearest shots of the Treasury, with our temporary guide Hamad almost audible lecturing about its history and design:
Anyway, we got back to our hotel, on foot, at about 3:30 pm. We cooled off with a couple of Petra lagers in the bar, while watching a disquieting television documentary/recreation of the Air France Flight 358 runway overshoot in 2005. Then we returned to the room and passed out until evening.
Our guide Ra'ed picked us up at the hotel at 8:00 pm. He drove us out of town into the hills, to the spring that issues from, tradition has it, the very rock that Moses struck with his staff, "and the water came out abundantly" (Numbers 20:10-11). The rock has since been enclosed in a simple domed structure to keep the elements out, but anyone can enter and have a drink. The spring has produced fresh water continuously for millennia, and the water is damn good.
We drove back into town where Ra'ed took us to a little cafe for coffee, tea, hummus, tahini, and so forth. Over dinner, he talked to us about Islam for two hours—pretty much everything a Westerner might want to know but was afraid to ask. Fascinating conversation, though I'm naturally suspicious of fourth-hand accounts of scientific findings that prove the divine origin of the Qu'ran (or the Bible, or the Book of Mormon, or Dianetics). Yes, folks, it turns out there is1 a valid reason that if a fly lands in your food you should dip the little beastie in it before flicking it away. At least if you trust hearsay.
Nonetheless, it was an educational and encouraging evening, and we were sad to see our trip's last major day of sightseeing end.
[Now that we've been back for more than a week, maybe I should get cracking on these last few trip updates.]
Wednesday, May 28, was another travel day, though we did get to enjoy another fine hotel buffet for breakfast and some more relaxation on the Dahab shore before the next van came calling for us. We loaded up at 11:00 am, then rushed north up the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba to Taba.
Our ferry was supposed to leave for Aqaba, Jordan, at 2:00 pm. At the appointed hour, however, it hadn't yet arrived, so our guide and driver Hassan suggested we retire to a nearby cafe and have some coffee while we waited. From the open-air cafe, we had a perfect view of the ferry's long approach, so we were back to the dock in plenty of time to get run through customs and have our Egyptian exit visas stamped in our passports.
In the process, an X-ray machine detected the presence in my suitcase of a fancy multi-tool pocketknife, and I discovered that the word "Leatherman" is one of the unexpected words in the lexicon of Egyptian immigration officers. As in, "Your Leatherman must stay with the captain of the ferry during your transit."
I never did get it back.
Even from out in the middle of it, the Red Sea has water of the most incredible, pure, deep, inky blue that I have ever seen. Still, I don't like water very much, so by the time over an hour and a half later when what we had been told would be a voyage of forty minutes or so was over, I was more than ready to put that incredible color behind me. The trip was not without its excitement, though. At one point Laura and I were staring aft from the passenger deck (otherwise crowded with a Brazilian tour group) when suddenly a flapping Egyptian flag went rocketing into the water from the deck above. Obviously you can't sail into a foreign port without your colors flying, so the ferry circled around so a young hand could try to fish the flag out of the sea with a boathook. Unfortunately, the flag became waterlogged and sank before it could be retrieved. No worries, though. There was a spare flag belowdecks, and soon we were on our way again.
A lot of countries are clustered there around the north end of the Gulf of Aqaba. Egypt has the western coast and Saudi Arabia the eastern. In between, both Israel and Jordan have a few miles of coastline. For Jordan, Aqaba is its only port city, and it's not hard to make out which port it is, not with a giant Jordanian flag larger than some ships flying from a towering pole on the shore. If that flag had gotten loose and landed on our ferry, we would have been in serious trouble.
Our Jordanian guide and driver, Ra'ed, met us at the port, helped us clear immigration, and then took us for falafel sandwiches at a sidewalk cafe in the city. The first thing you notice about Aqaba is how much cleaner and more entirely modern it seems than any city in Egypt. You can spot the poverty if you look a little closer though; most of the menial workers, kitchen help and the like, are Egyptian.
We had a tense few minutes when the first and second ATMs I tried in Aqaba refused to give me any dinars. Laura and I were afraid our bank had finally gotten sick of seeing all these Middle Eastern transactions and cut us off. Then I realized that the error message I was getting said "Invalid amount." So instead of trying to withdraw 150 dinars at a pop, I withdrew 50 dinars twice and 100 dinars once. So glad transaction limits are in place.
As evening fell, Ra'ed drove us north through the Wadi Rum, the spectacular desert valley where Lawrence of Arabia based his operations during the Arab Revolt (and where David Lean filmed the movie). We saw many Bedouin encampments as we wended our way into the mountains. (Certain Bedouin tribes are allowed to wander at will across the Jordanian–Saudi Arabian border.) Many fancy Bedouin pickup trucks, too.
At last we reached the city of Petra, where we were installed in the Petra Palace Hotel. After settling in, Laura and I descended to the bar for a couple of pints of the locally brewed Petra lager, and a couple of games of foozball. We struck up an acquaintance with a local named Ibrahim, a horse-handler at the ruins who regaled us with the tale of how he met and wooed his British tour-guide wife as he kicked my ass at foozball.
As excited as we were to see the famous ruins the next day, it wasn't difficult to get to sleep that night.
[Writing in Cairo hotel room, hoping to stay up all night in preparation for sleeping through our 7:35 am flight to Paris.]
According to the original plan, we shouldn't have been on that overnight train back to Cairo at all. This was the first leg of our two-day journey from Luxor to Petra, and it was supposed to have started first thing Tuesday with a drive east to Hurghada, a resort city on the western shore of the Red Sea. From there we were to take a ferry to Sharm al-Sheikh, another Egyptian resort city, this one on the western shore of the Gulf of Aqaba. We would spend the night in Dahab (yes, another resort city), and then continue on our way from there.
We had been informed of the change in plan on Friday evening, our first evening in Cairo. We were sitting at an outdoor cafe near the train station at the end of our sightseeing day with Shiko our guide and our three new Australian friends. I was smoking a shisha, and Shiko was favoring a distinctly reluctant Jemima with a rather flirtatious palm-reading when the Egyptian agent of our tour company showed up. He had some news for Laura and me.
It seemed he had just learned that the ferry from Hurghada to Sharm al-Sheikh would not be running the day we needed it. It seemed, also, that he had known this might be a possibility, but hadn't let us know any sooner. His alternate plan would be for us to take a train back to Cairo from Luxor, then ride a bus from Cairo to Dahab. He said the bus would take six hours.
Let's just say of the very calm argument that followed that it is an unwise man who gets on Laura's bad side. Especially over poor planning. And doubly especially when the unwise man is trying to tell her a bus ride will be a good thing, when bus rides make Laura carsick.
To make a long story short, we arrived back in Cairo on the train Tuesday morning only an hour late. Shiko and the travel agent were both there to greet us, together with the news that the company had decided to offer us a private van instead of the bus. And that fast, we were hustled into the van and the van was on its way.
What is there to say about a seven-hour van ride across the Sinai Peninsula? It was no Death Race 2008, though it did have its harrowing moments. We were becoming more accustomed to the idea that Egyptians regard lane markers and dividing lines as little more than interesting suggestions, especially on empty two-lane desert highways, but we hadn't yet come to terms with it fully.
There were cool moments, too. Did you know that one crosses the Suez Canal by taking a tunnel under it? I didn't. And did you know that camels enjoy hanging out at filling stations? Well, here's proof:
Dahab, when we reached it, was a revelation. The Sinai Peninsula juts south into the Red Sea, splitting it in two at its north end. The western arm is the Gulf of Suez, while the eastern arm is the Gulf of Aqaba. That's the one our hotel in Dahab looked out on, and the water had a pure, deep, inky blue color I have never seen the like of. If we had to have a way station on the journey to Petra, this would definitely do.
Laura and I spent the afternoon walking along the beach, lounging with books under umbrellas, and napping. For dinner, we enjoyed a sumptuous and delicious Egyptian buffet in the hotel restaurant, looking out of course at the water. And that night, after dark, we took the hotel shuttle into Dahab proper, strolled along their equivalent of the Boardwalk looking at souvenirs and dive shops, tarried a while at an internet cafe, and sorta kicked ourselves for eating at the hotel and not saving ourselves for one of the cabanalike restaurants serving tropical drinks on the water.
We stopped in at a T-shirt shop for some souvenirs specifically because the owner didn't hassle us as we strolled down the street. Laura picked out three shirts, then proceeded to haggle for them like a pro. She managed to work the price down from 150 LE to 125. My favorite line of the whole exchange came from the young merchant, as he slashed beneath his chin with an extended finger: "Seventy-five pounds?! That is cut-my-throat price! One-forty."
And then we rode the shuttle back to the hotel and turned in. It was the most relaxing day of our trip.
[Writing in our hotel room back in Cairo again. I have an internet connection, but can't seem to reach the mail relay server that will let me send email.]
After about four hours on the train Sunday evening, we reached Luxor. It was not exactly a comfortable train ride, since we didn't have a private sleeper car and we were hot and cramped. But we were determined to put the bad and discouraging aspects of our trip behind us.
As soon as our new guide Ibram met us at the station (and, by the way, I am certain that I am massacring even the loose art of transliteration with all our guides' names), we felt the tide had turned. Young, short, and rotund, Ibram was nonetheless filled with a contagious enthusiasm about Luxor. Laura asked him if we could stop for fast food on the way to the hotel, and he and our driver were more than happy to accommodate our wish. We scored some tasty falafel and shawarma sandwiches from a walk-up cafe, and we polished them off long before reaching the hotel.
The hotel itself was beautiful, and from the balcony—yes, balcony!—of our spacious fifth-floor room we could see out across the Nile. When we awoke on Monday, colorful hot-air balloons were drifting through that view, over a glistening, glimmering green landscape on the far side of the river. Our morning itinerary was set, but the for the afternoon itinerary we had three options to choose from, one of which was a balloon ride. Seeing the balloons there in the morning light made me a little sad that we hadn't selected that option. But not too sad, because I really had no desire to see Laura huddled in an acrophobic lump on the floor of a gondola.
We had chosen to start our tour bright and early, and the hotel provided boxed breakfasts for us to take with us. Our first destination was the Valley of the Kings, where we entered three of the sixty-two tombs that have been discovered there and excavated: the tombs of Ramses I, Ramses III, and Ramses IV. Next stop: Hatshepsut's Temple at Deir el-Bahri, a magnificent site that can be seen from the city of Luxor, miles away up a mountainside. After that we hit the Valley of the Queens, where we entered the amazingly colorful tomb of Nefertari, wife of Ramses II. We also saw the tombs of two of the sons of Ramses III, which also meant seeing the mummified baby or fetus that was found near the sarcophagus of Amun-her-khepeshef. I felt like I was seeing something from "Ripley's Believe It or Not." Laura was just creeped out.
We closed out the morning with a stop at the Memnon Colossi, then broke for lunch. Ibram deposited us at a riverside buffet restaurant where we, once again, gorged ourselves. Then he took us to Luxor and Karnak Temples, which was our choice of afternoon activity. Let me say that neither of us was prepared for the scale of Luxor Temple, and triply unprepared to have the scale of Karnak Temple dwarf that. "Blown away" would be putting it mildly. I can only hope that the awe in our voices comes through on the video we shot, which I'll try to get uploaded to YouTube shortly after we return.
After that, we whiled away a lazy afternoon and evening. We wandered a few blocks from our hotel, fending off unusually aggressive merchants (and this in a country of aggressive merchants). While Laura read on the hotel's back patio, I slipped over to the next hotel to spend an hour on a computer in their business center (since the Lotus's own connection was down). I then joined her on the patio, where we drank mineral water and read. Eventually we wandered down to the railing at the edge of the Nile to watch the sun slip below the horizon. Then we wandered back up to our table on the patio to read peacefully and—
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
It was a noise like a giant lawnmower, coming from the direction of the water. Suddenly employees of the Lotus wer hurrying out to the patio, urging everyone to get inside, shouting a word I couldn't quite grasp. Laura and I didn't know what was going on, but one of them was reaching for my water glass and bottle, picking up my backpack.
A roiling cloud of white smoke suddenly appeared between the patio and the water, rising up like a wall, dramatic in the dusk light. Then men burst through the wall, men crouched low and running, carrying what looked like personal cannons slung low at hip level.
The white smoke was issuing from the barrels of the cannons.
That's when the word the hotel staff was shouting clicked: "Mosquito!"
Some group or another, official or not I don't know, was spraying for mosquitos—and they had turned the effort into the charge of the light brigade.
Laura and I scooped up the rest of our stuff and ran inside, trying not to breathe. In the dining room, with the door secured behind us, we watched through floor-to-ceiling glass as the blurry shapes of the men rushed past. Even inside, we could smell the foul stuff, that poisonous taste that lodges in the back of your throat and won't cough loose. We were horrified to see that the men doing the spraying were not wearing masks of any kind.
We could still smell the gas even inside the dining room, so Laura and I ascended one floor to the lobby and watched the white cloud dissipate. I felt sick for a while that evening, but I don't think there was any permanent damage.
At 8:45 pm, Ibram and our driver showed up to drive us to our train. We liked Ibram a great deal, and apparently our non-English-speaking driver liked us, because not only did he give us banana Chiclets, he also pulled over at a sidewalk cafe on the way to the station and bought us each a glass of his favorite drink—raw cane sugar juice. Well, it's better than mosquito spray.
Our train left at nine. It was a sleeper train again, this time north to Cairo. Dinner was served in our compartment, and this time we turned in early, looking forward to a 6:00 am arrival.
[Written Sunday afternoon in the Sara Hotel, Aswan.]
We awoke at 2:45 am today. Well, I awoke earlier to deal with the unsavory consequences of our delicious meal at Makka. Sorry, Ali! I promise my heart will never stray again!
The reason for the early hour was to meet our guide Ahmet at 3:30 am, and thence to meet the Abu Simbel convoy at 4:00 am. Access to Abu Simbel is restricted to certain hours of the day, so buses and cars collect at the entry point to the route in Aswan, then are released to proceed at either 4:00 or 4:30, depending on how many vehicles have gathered.
When we heard the word "convoy," we thought of a rather stately, sedate procession. What actually transpired was a road race. For three white-knuckled hours, Ahmet piloted our van through the desert like the utter fucking lunatic he is, using whichever lane was most convenient, overtaking other drivers, tailgating another van for miles at a distance of a couple of feet at I-shit-you-not what had to be eighty miles and hour or more. I'm sure there were times we hit a hundred. Laura and I were each locked in our own private hells. All we could do was try to keep our eyes closed and pretend to be asleep.
As Ahmet explained once we arrived, he had to drive fast to beat all the other guides, because he has to give us his history spiel outside the temple site because guides aren't allowed to accompany tourists into the temples because of the cacophony that produces and he needs to give us the spiel while it's still quiet on the cafeteria plaza.
Right, whatever. He's still an utter fucking lunatic.
Abu Simbel consists of another pair of temples rescued from rising Lake Nasser. The site, now on the shores of the lake, is 280 kilometers south of Aswan (a distance we covered in two and a half hours) and only 50 miles north of the Sudan border. The temples themselves are amazing, one dedicated by Ramses II to himself, with colossal Ramses II statues outside and inside, and another dedicated by Ramses II to his favorite wife Nefertari, with colossal Ramses II statues outside. Oh, and a couple of Nefertari statues, too.
It was quite startling to think that we saw the actual mummified body on Friday of the man depicted on those statues. Very weird and wonderful.
Another harrowing race through the desert followed this blissful interlude, only this time Ahmet gave a lift to an Egyptian soldier who was fairly careless with his automatic rifle. It was only pointing toward me from the front seat for a few moments before Ahmet sort of resettled it more to his liking, but now added to the thrill of the chase was the expectation that any moment a stray bump would send a volley of lead spraying through the van. Lovely.
We made it back to the hotel, though, shaken and stirred, and now are resting until our evening train to Luxor at 5:45 pm.
[Written Sunday afternoon in the Sara Hotel, Aswan.]
Saturday morning we slept in. Conveniently, our train had had some engine trouble during the night, so we wouldn't be reaching Aswan in the south of Egypt until after 11:00 am, which put us over two hours behind schedule. But this was good news for the exhausted lazyheads from Friday, who didn't have to be up at the asscrack of dawn.
In Aswan, at last, after more than fifteen hours on the train, our local tour representatives installed us in the Sara Hotel, a lovely hotel in a dusty, hilly neighborhood that's either half built or half decayed. Our guide that afternoon was a woman whose English was so thickly accented she was hard to understand for a while. (We were spoiled by Shiko's perfect English in Cairo.) She took us to the Aswan High Dam, rattling off facts and figures at a pace that was hard to follow.
After that, we drove a ways and then sailed by fellukah down the waters of Lake Nasser to the island site of Philae Temple. Philae is a temple from the Ptolemaic period, unmistakably Egyptian but with unmistakable Greek influences. It is one of the many temples and monuments that were relocated by UNESCO during the building of the Aswan Dam in the '60s. Otherwise they would have been flooded and lost.
Philae is a temple to Isis, and our guide took pains to point out the strong role of women in ancient Egypt. "Things are not so equal now," she said, the only political comment we would hear her make. (This is contrasted with hale, male Shiko, who took pains to point out to us on Friday how Egyptians still rever women.)
That evening, Laura and I took a shuttle from the hotel into town, where we had dinner at a small restaurant the desk clerk had recommended. Gorged ourselves, to be more accurate. Lamb roasted in vegetables, shish kabab, kofta, white beans, tahini, tabouli, rice, pita, mint tea ... we ate until we could eat no more, and then we ate some more. Sorry, Ali, but until later that night we were considering anointing a new Egyptian restaurant our favorite in the world.
After dinner we wandered through Aswan's souk, the market that extends blocks and blocks in every direction. We had become better at fending off pushy merchants, which is almost all of them, and then out on the main drag we got some more practice fending off beggars and hustlers. Our shuttle arrived at the prearranged location at almost the prearranged time, and whisked us back to the hotel for a few scant hours of rest.
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Inhuman Swill in the mediterranean adventure 2008 category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
