Cairo and the Western Desert

Cairo
We took a lovely bus ride - complete with the Arab world version of Bollywood films, the Koran on tape, people sitting in aisles, confused tourists, and smirking locals -from our paradise of Dahab to the crowded and filthy streets of Cairo.

After three days of relaxing, clean air, and breezy days; it was a tad disconcerting to be in this huge metropolis. Luckily we had our trusty "Let's Go" guide book (the only problem is it's 5 years old so the information, especially prices, is a little off) and were able to get a cab to a hotel that we had previously picked out. This way we avoided many of the touts (people that get paid on commission to lure you to a particular hotel or store).

We crashed at the Sun Hotel, which is appears to cater more to live-in Arabs than to tourists, but the place is clean, the staff are nice, and there's even a handy dandy travel agent built in. We got hit up within an hour of entering and after much debating, haggling, and quadruple checking we agreed on an itinerary for our time in Egypt. It seems ironic that in the one country where we buy a guide book with the intention of doing everything on our own, four days in and we've got the trip planned through someone else. The nicer thing though is that we made it so we have a day or two in every city that is just for us, so that we can check out the museums and markets that the tour doesn't cover.

Day one in Cairo started with a trip to the Giza pyramids. These are some of the most famous pyramids in Egypt and belong to a father-son-grandson set (Cheops-Chephren-Mycerinus). Each pyramids is smaller than its predecessor and each was covered in a precious stone that was pilfered by later denizens for use in other architectural creations. These pyramids, while impressive for their size and the work that went into them, are sadly anti-climatic. I was expecting something more exotic and revered, but instead these trophies of a time past sit in the backyard of a decaying part of the city and the ethereal trance that they inspire is broken by the continuous chorus of, "Buy this. Buy that. Do you want to ride a camel? Horse?" Also many of the entrances to the chambers are closed to the public or require more money.

Below the pyramids, is the Sphinx. That enigmatic creature that adds mystery to the Egyptian legends. While gigantic and an interesting piece of artwork, the scaffolding and fences, tend to distract from his natural beauty.

Em and I where tricked into thinking that we needed to rent horses to view the complex (everyone told us that it was a 13km area and couldn't be walked in a timely manner), so the driver dropped us off at a renter's shop a mile from the entrance and we acquired two horses and two guides (whom we didn't want and later found out that we were suppose to pay for)and set out. The only good thing to come out of having the horses, was that I convinced the boy guide (who was walking by the way) that I knew how to ride a horse and then went galloping a way while he ran to catch up. The other guide went with me (I think he was a afraid that I was either going to kidnap the horse or not be able to stop him). That was a lot of fun. I tried to get Em to do it, but she was afraid that she'd fall off. Ironically, it was I that fell off, but not until we were returning the horses and dismounting to give them back. It figures that I would look like I know what I'm doing when no ones around, but the minute there are a zillion people around, I get my foot caught in the stirrup, crash into the other horse next to me, and land on my butt.

After Giza, we made a trip to Saqqara where the famous Step Pyramid of Zoser I is. This is the world's oldest funerary monument and the inspiration for the pyramids. It was designed by the famous Egyptian architect, Imhotep.

At Saqqara, Em and I were once again duped. Em had convinced me to leave our guide book at home since this outing was arranged by the agent at the Hotel and we had no reason to believe what he told us would be wrong. As it turns out, this was a bad choice on our part. The admission ticket to Saqqara covers everything inside and the Step Pyramid is worth seeing. Out driver told us that it was extra and not worth seeing, so we skipped it. Everyone can shout out, "How naive!" and be done with it.

We did get to see two tombs though that were at least worth the admission price. These were the tombs of Teti and Merouka. Both have walls that are covered in hieroglyphics and other pictures. There are pillars and storage rooms, stellas and statues in the former, while there is a giant basalt coffin (empty now) in the latter. To get to the Tomb of Merouka you have to descend down a 25m ramp in a crouch and then through a tunnel (still in a crouch). We bribed a "guard" to let us take some photographs.

The trip was supposed to include Memphis as well, but the driver once again told us that this was no worth seeing. I later looked it up in the guidebook and it seems he was for once telling a whole truth. Memphis was the town where the pyramid builders lived 5000 years ago. Now the only thing of note is a 14m tall statue of Ramses II, that isn't noted to be worth the entrance fee to the small museum that houses it. The town was interesting to drive through as it was like going back in time (or at least to a simpler time). There where little kids playing in the street or riding their donkeys to the market, mothers with huge containers perfectly balanced on their heads, and men smoking hooka as the lazy day passed.

The above part of the blog is not meant to discourage anyone from visiting the Pyramids at Giza or any of the neighboring monuments. It's only meant to convey my version of the trip and to serve as a warning that you should make sure to view everything with your own eyes before believing what anyone tells you. Also don't give into pressure from a guide or driver, take your time and see everything there is to see. I think that I will one day come back here and do this the right way.

Western Desert

Day two of our trip had us on a 6 hour bus ride into the Western Desert to a place called the Bahariyya Oasis. This bus was worse than the previous bus from Dahab to Cairo, but the company was better. There were about 7 of us foreign folk and the driver wanted to keep us all together, so we sat and chatted amicably for much of the ride.

We arrived and were instantly surrounded by touts all clamoring for us to go too their respective establishments. Luckily we had ours already set up and the man himself greeted us. Badr's Safari Camp became our home for the next two and a half days.

Seeing as this was the low season, we were the only people in the camp while we were there. There was a couple from Oregon that was a day ahead of us and therefore we only saw them for an hour before they left on our second day, and there was a girl from London that came about an hour before we left to go back to Cairo on the third day.

The set up of the camp is that the guests arrive around 2pm, when the bus deposits them, lunch is served and then you stare at the shrubbery for about an hour before someone informs you that it's too hot to go anywhere until 5pm and therefore you can do as you like till then. The camp itself is nice in the "I've been cast-away to a tropical island" kind of way, until you realize that it's actually sand and not water that surrounds you. The area is filled with underground springs that the inhabitants tap into and exploit for water to use in their gardens and farmland. It also adds a sense of wonder to see all this greenery surrounded by miles and miles of wasteland.

A 5pm we set out for one of the local springs. This spring comes from about 1000m underground and shells out lukewarm water that felt wonderful after the heat of the day. We stayed there and soaked (the sulfur and other minerals in the waters are supposed to be healing and good for the mind and the body). Em made a deal with Badr that she would jump in the Hot spring if he would stop trying to throw her in this one. Little did we know that hot meant boiling. The water is about 40 degrees Celsius with roughly translates to 106 degrees Fahrenheit. So you can imagine just how fast Em jumped back out after going in. It was quite funny. Badr then proceeded to show us that he had no nerve endings left in his lower appendages by leaving his feet in the fryer for 10 minutes.

That night I got Badr to purchase some henna for me in town and we drew henna designs with sticks. They where awful (well the one that Em let Badr draw on her) so it was good that they only lasted for a day.

Day two at the camp sort of began like day one in that we sat around wondering when we were going to set out on the desert trek. This turned out to be 12:30pm, which really meant 4pm because we stopped at two small stores on the way out of town where we had tea and Badr talked with the owners for a long time.

Finally we hit the open road and visited many places. First stop was the Black Desert. This is known for its dark mesas that are littered with volcanic remnants from millenias past.

Next we made our way to Crystal Mountain, where the rest of the tourists happened to be. It appears to been on the "camp itinerary " of many camps. Crystal Mountain is a small hill right off the road that is filled with quartz deposits. It makes everything sparkle and is interesting, but not all that exciting. It was entertaining though to watch how our desert that previously had only held us, filled with a bus load of French, and jeeps carrying single pairs of tourists from Germany and Japan, made the desert seem that much smaller.

At the Crystal Mountain we left the comforts of the paved path and headed inland over the sand dunes. Here we stopped at the "Flower Garden." This used to bed the ocean floor (didn't everything) about 65 million years ago and as a result there are many fossilized coral and basalt stones in weird shapes. Many of these formations appear like many pointed stars or flowers and thus the name of the place. They are actually quite interesting and Em and I both collected a few or our favorites as souvenirs.

A right from the Flower Garden and a few twist, turns, and miles later you end up at the Magic Spring of the al-Wadi Oasis. This is a set of palm trees complete with mini hut and hanging flour and a spring. It looks straight from a cast-away movie or our of the mind of a person that has begun to hallucinate from lack of water. It's gorgeous, if a little theatrical.

Our last stop of the day was in the White Desert. Here there are towering limestone protrusions that form random shapes and invoke the same imaginative skills as cloud-watching. In the White Desert we ran into two brothers whom we meet on the bus ride down. They ended up camping with their guide about five minutes by foot from us and trekked over around 10pm for entertainment. So for Em and my's 24th birthday, we danced like idiots to a hand drum, hung out with two brothers that look more like twins than we do, learned some Arabic from three bedouins, played games that had no purpose but to make us look like fools (which they accomplished many times over), invited a couple of foxes (that looked like scraggly cats with bat ears) to dinner, and camped in the middle of a beautiful desert. It was fabulous.

To put a smile on everyone's face, I will recount a few of the ways that we humiliated ourselves for the benefit of others. Firstly, we held our ear with one hand and then pointed the other directly downward. Then we turned in a circle in the same place, with the finger pointing down always on the ground, ten times and then tried to grab a bottle of water that was ten feet away. As you can image, this only lead to people falling over, some due to dizziness and others due to mirth.

The second game called for one person to stand with their back to everyone else and have one hand cover their eyes while the other faced backwards towards the others. One of those behind the person would touch the hand facing towards them and the blind person would have to guess who had touched them. This game reminded me of "Heads Up, Seven Up" from elementary school. Anyone remember that game? There's basically no logic to the game or point, but it's entertaining, especially when people start singing to distract you or using feet or trading locations and so forth.

The last humiliation of the night belonged solely to me and apparently will provide many with smiles for days, if not weeks into the future. The guide that was from the boys' camp set me and one of the boys, Nief (no sure on the spelling, but sounds like knife), in a line and then leap-frogged over us. After that he convinced me that I should try and he swapped places with me. After a nice warning and disclaimer from me that I take no responsibility for clocking him in the head with my feet, I got ready to attempt to jump over. Can anyone guess where this is going? Timing it perfectly, Mister Joker, flattened himself just as I was vaulting, which had the desired affect of causing me to face plant into the sand where he used to be. Pride shattered by peals of laughter I chased him and tackled him to the ground for revenge. This soothed my pride some, but the damage had been done and for the rest of the night and even the next day people randomly burst out laughing and then turned to me and said, "You should have seen your face. That was just classic." I hope that this retelling has brought a smile to someone else's day as well.

The next day we headed back to camp, said good bye, hopped the Koran singing express back to Cairo.

Cairo Part Deux
As per our wish, we had a day and a half in Cairo to ourselves upon our return from the desert. Today, the first day back, we decided to headed to the Islamic Quarter, filled with its hodge-podge or architecture, mosques, churches, peddlers, and cemeteries. We didn't realize tell last night though that it was Friday, the equivalent of Sunday in the States and thus many things are either closed all day or between 11am and 2pm for pray. So by the time we made it to the Islamic quarter (you'd be surprised how useless a map becomes when there are no street signs), pray had begun and everything was closed for the next three hours. We wondered around for a bit admiring the architecture and getting further lost, before hailing a taxi and asking to be dropped off at the Khan al-Khalili bazaar. Even here we got lost (why was our decent sense of direction abandoning us now?). We wandered into the locals bazaar instead of the tourist one and where wondering why there were no people and nothing but household products and clothing. No trinkets anywhere. We did visit a mosque here and climbed the minaret to get a grand view of the city and some pretty pictures.

Eventually we deduced, that we were in the wrong marketplace and went walking looking for the correct marketplace. As we left, we noticed, as any normal person would, that there were van load after van load of army and police, full with riot gear, lining the street for the as far as the eye could see (roughly a mile and a half stretch of road), as well as lining the streets. There most have been a few thousand of them and most of them were just crammed into van that looked like Holocaust boxcars. It was quite odd and we were trying to determine whether there was a planned protect or other that we should know about and subsequently avoid. This question was never answered.

After some wondering and asking for directions we, quite by accident, found the correct marketplace. I as eager to test my bargaining skills (as that's what the bazaars in Egypt where created for) and see what cheap trinkets I could acquire as gifts for those back home. I think that we did quite well, coming away with some "papyrus" (banana leaf) bookmarks, a soccer jersey for Em, a few stone pyramids, and a bunch of scarab bracelets and necklaces, plus a henna tattoo (with black henna though that's not too great for your skin and doesn't last that long) or both of us, for less than $25.

After some over-priced refreshments to reinvigorated ourselves we decided to head back into the heart of Islamic Cairo and visit the Necropolis. Although this place is called the City of the Dead (there really are two Cities as it's split into a North and a South Cemetery), but really is a city of both the living and the dead. There was a housing shortage in the 1960s and as a result lower-income Egyptians were given housing in the mausoleums of the dead. Yep, people actually live next to, atop, below, and surrounded by the corpses of millions. A creepy thought, but and interesting social experience nonetheless. Once again the lack of street signs helped us not at all and we found ourselves wandering aimlessly along a road that wasn't meant for pedestrians. As soon as we gave up on trying to actually find the Necropolis and just started heading in the direction of a mosque that we'd seen earlier in the day, we found the City of the Dead. Funny how that works. Even more coincidentally, if you believe in that sort of thing, is that the Necropolis was the area that we'd become lost in during the beginning of our day (in the morning) and we had found ourselves at the end of the road from which we'd hitched a cap five hours earlier. How's that for full circle?

So we wandered around the cemetery and took some photographs. We still didn't have a clue where in it we were (not even if it was the North or the South Cemetery) and thus couldn't find any of the landmarks from our guidebook. Yeah, we aren't utilizing our resources nearly enough.

We decided that we wanted to visited this mosque that we believed to be The Citadel, the home to many of the rulers of Egypt from the 13th century to 1876, including Muhammad Ali. After walking around it for 45 minutes and not finding an entrance, we admitted defeat and caught a cap back to the hotel.

So to sum up our day, we set out to explore what is stated to take 2-3 days to explore, got lost repeatedly, saw nothing that was in the guidebook aside from the market, saw more cops in one place than there should peacefully be, bargained, explored, took pictures, proved just how bad of tourists (or how good depending on you view) we really are, and generally had a good time. Next time I come, I think that I need to invest in a tour guide that knows where things are so that I can actually see some of these spectacular buildings from the inside, that and maybe not go on a Friday. We live and we learn.

This excerpt of the novel is now complete. I hope that if any of you venture to Cairo you will learn from our mistakes and have a more fulfilling trip.