Aegyptification

[rezendi]

ONE DAY IN EXPATLAND

9AM Wake in luxurious, high-ceilinged expat mansion in expensive Ma'adi
suburb. Drink grande cappucino. Host gives me keys to apartment,
introduces me to driver, tells me car and driver are at my disposal.

9:30AM Slightly confused by situation; unaccustomed to travelling with
own transport. Humbly request of driver that perhaps he could take me
to pyramids at Sakkara, if it isn't too much trouble. Apologize
profusely for taking up his day.

10AM Arrive Sakkara. Visit step pyramid. Hot out.

11AM Politely ask driver to stop to buy water and then go to Dashur
pyramids. No water stop. Remind driver of water request. Buy water,
visit Dashur pyramids. Very hot out.

1PM Ask driver for lunch recommendations. Driver recommends McDonald's.
Give driver sidelong look and have him take me to Nile Hilton for
lunch. Hilton pleasantly air-conditioned. Blistering heat makes
exterior difficult.

3PM Have driver take me to Giza Pyramids. Look around briefly. Glimpse
Sphinx from behind. Damn, it's hot.

3.15PM Argue with driver over whether I have spent enough time viewing
the majestic antiquities of Giza. Tersely inform driver that
conversation is over and instruct him to take me to Meridien Hotel.
Heat nearly unbearable.

3.30PM Read IHT over a beer in air-conditioned luxury. Occasionally
glance up at Nile visible through the window.

5PM Decide to go to another hotel for dinner. Driver observes that he
has a family and would like to see them tonight. Fix cold stare upon
driver until he ceases his bleating. Off to Four Seasons for dinner.
Driver requests that I leave at 7PM. Leave car without answering.

7.30PM While sitting in bar talking football with American expats,
driver approaches and suggests we leave. Tell driver in no uncertain
terms (well, possibly slightly uncertain, due to slurring of words) to
return to the Goddamn car and wait for me if he wants to keep his job.

9.30PM Stagger out to car and instruct driver to take me back to
Ma'adi. Upon arrival, order driver to go out and fetch me beer. Watch
satellite TV. Find self laughing at old rerun of "Married...With
Children."

10PM Beer arrives. Driver leaves. Discover beer is insufficiently cold.
Make mental note to have driver flogged tomorrow.

11PM Jean-Claude Van Damme filmfest is on satellite TV. Watch raptly.
Decide to stay here in air-conditioned comfort for the rest of my time
in Egypt, watching JCVD and colorized Turner Classic Movies, rather
than exposing myself to the heat and the elements. Catch myself wishing
wistfully that I had been born in the days of the Raj. Er, that is,
born British and upper-class, of course.


CAIRO

"Hell," Neitzsche once declared, "is other people."

He wouldn't have liked Cairo.

It's a monstrous, giddying, dizzing megalopolis, nineteen million
people crammed into the slender ribbon of the Nile Valley, piloting two
million cars through perpetual traffic jams despite the terrifyingly
efficient use of roads such that two lanes equals four columns of cars.
The occasional traffic light performs a useful decorative purpose and
serves to lure unsuspecting tourists to their doom. Dust, noise, smoke,
soot, blaring horns, bellowed Arabic, screeching brakes, tarnished gray
marble. Endless landscapes of concrete blocks sprouting bundles of
rebar from the ceiling. Huge hotel and office complexes towering over
the wide blue Nile. Rows of pale transplanted trees choking the smog.
Curbs a foot high in order to dissuade Cairenes from parking, or
driving, on the sidewalks. Robes, turbans, headscarfs, veils, Diesel
jeans, Armani suits, bare midriffs, 'N Sync posters. Pale filigreed
spires ascending into the sky from enormous, pristine mosques. Fields
thick with rotting trash, patrolled by flocks of goats. In the
southwest Giza district a block full of papyrus shops ends with a KFC.
Walk another hundred metres and you collide with the Sphinx. It's quite
a place.

It also boasts the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, a truly impressive
museum which contains a) the famous King Tut exhibit, in its entirety,
solid gold mask and coffin and all, b) approximately eighty thousand
enormous colossi, steles, columns, statues, busts, etc etc etc, much of
it five or six metres tall, casually distributed, barely categorized,
dusty, and occasionally stacked two or three high, the overall effect
being the attic of a forgetful pack-rat rather than one of the world's
great museums, which was fairly charming, and finally c) the Royal
Mummies, nine mummified pharaohs or consorts thereof in various states
of dishabille, very cool and creepy as hell.


THE SINAI

Previously, when I thought "Egypt", I did not instinctively associate
it with "scuba diving", but the Red Sea boasts some of the finest
diving in the world. The marine life isn't quite as varied or colourful
as Thailand or Australia, but the coral formations, particularly in Ras
Mohammed National Park, are staggering, featuring sheer coral cliffs
that drop for hundreds of metres and exquisite fan coral 3-4 metres in
radius. Other people saw manta rays and sharks as well; I, alas, had to
content myself with barracuda and a few huge schools of fish.

From the backpacker haven of Dahab I hired a private taxi to drive me
to Mount Sinai because there weren't any groups going there. The desert
was spellbinding. I spent a little more time in it than I intended to
because the taxi broke down halfway through. The driver seemed to know
only marginally more about engines than I do, which is absolutely
nothing, but through trial and error (mostly error), brute force, and
ignorance, we managed to reattach the fan belt and suffered only a few
seventh-degree burns from the overheated engine en route. OK,
technically first-degree burns, but they felt like seventh.

All credit to Moses. Nowadays Mount Sinai is a straightforward two-hour
hike up a well-worn trail, but three millennia ago it must have been
absolute murder.

I was expecting a mob of people and was amazed to find myself
absolutely alone at the summit for sunset. Amazed and grateful.
Standing atop a fantasyland of jagged, pitted, striated crags and
canyons, eroded by the wind into twisted coiled dragon-shapes, stained
by the last crimson rays of the sun, on the very mountain where Moses,
so legend has it, received the Ten Commandments -- a magical moment.

I suppose I can't in good conscience leave you with the notion that I
have become lone-wolf-in-the-wilderness Intrepid Man. I wasn't that
alone. Not far below the summit are a half-dozen Bedouin huts/shops
providing tea, Coke, chocolate, and mattress/blanket rental; two more
overnighters showed up shortly after sunset; and just before dawn an
Italian tour-group horde arrived. But still.

In the middle of the night, unless all three of us independently
dreamed the very same thing, twenty or thirty monks assembled around
the ancient chapel near the summit, and sang haunting Latin hymns for
half an hour.

I found no burning bush up there. But at the foot of the mountain, in
the seventeen-century-old Monastery of St. Catherine, grows what is
alleged to be an offshoot of the very same bush that spoke to Moses.
They claim that no other bush like it is found in all the Sinai
peninsula, and that all the many attempts to cultivate cuttings from
this bush in other places have failed.


LUXOR & ASWAN

Old stuff. Egypt's got a lot of it. Seriously old. When Herodotus
visited the Pyramids in 500 BC, they were as old to him as he is to us.
And seriously big. The ruins of the temple of Karnak, in Luxor, cover
more than 80 acres, and the great hall of columns is twice the size of
St. Paul's Cathedral. The trouble is that it's all so sprawlingly
enormous, and ancient, and elaborately intricately carved with
heiroglyphs, and so familiar from countless pictures and documentaries
and movie backdrops, that it is actually very difficult to convince
yourself that these are in fact real 4000-year-old antiquities and not
some theme-park reconstruction. Wandering around Karnak I wouldn't have
been entirely surprised if Mickey Mouse and Goofy walked out from
behind an obelisk.

The summer heat in Upper Egypt is blistering, oppressive, average daily
highs of 45C/110F. On the other hand it does keep the number of package
tourists down. I went to Karnak at 2PM and had the entire site pretty
much to myself. The Valley of the Kings, which is a little too
well-groomed these days to be as haunting as I hoped, was thick with
Japanese, but they were far more polite and respectful than the
Italians. There were plenty of street hustlers, but even they seemed
enervated by the heat, and their cries of "Felucca!" "Taxi!" "See my
shop!" "What country?" "Where you going?" were halfhearted and rarely
repeated. My increasingly surreal responses (my favourite being "I come
from outer space and I seek the Holy Grail") might have had something
to do with their quick disengagement as well.

The Nile Valley really is remarkably beautiful and remarkably slender.
For most of the train journey from Aswan to Cairo you can look through
the windows on either side and see desert hills in the distance.
Egypt's reliance on the Nile's vicissitudes used to be absolute, but in
1967 the Russians built them the Aswan High Dam, one of the Earth's
great mute testimonies to man's occasional dominion over nature, and
being a hacker tourist I went to investigate. It wasn't near as big or
impressive as I expected -- in fact it seemed smaller than, say,
Zimbabwe's Kariba Dam -- but it's extraordinary to look south from the
dam and to think that this basically simple stone structure created an
artifical lake that stretches all the way into Sudan and, whatever its
environmental downsides, has saved Egypt from both terrible flood and
desperate drought since its creation.

From Aswan I also went to Abu Simbel. I went, but I did not arrive. I
took a taxi to the airport; I checked in; I went through three equally
pathetic levels of security; I boarded the airplane; I buckled my seat
belt; I heard the captain announce the magic word "Crosscheck" meaning
that takeoff is imminent -- and then there was a horrible grinding
noise beneath our feet, and the lights flickered on and off. This
repeated for some time. After ten minutes the captain announced that
there was a very, very minor snag with the engine and we would be en
route shortly. Those passengers along the left-hand side windows were
skeptical, as we could see a dozen engineers had already removed the
cowling from the port engine and seemed to being doing their best to
entirely disassemble it in record time. After half an hour the pilot
admitted that, and I quote, "the airplane is broken," and we were
ferried back to the terminal building again. The EgyptAir staff gave us
vague cryptic hints of a replacement plane possibly being flown down
from Cairo, possibly this week. I decided to save Abu Simbel for the
next trip.


ALEXANDRIA

I would have liked to have spent more time in Alexandria, a pleasant,
relaxed, ocean-breeze-blown waterfront city, even thicker with
(relatively recent) history than the rest of Egypt, but a quick day
trip was all I could manage. I liked it a great deal. In part this was
because of the Bibliotecha Alexandrina, the fantastic new Great Library
Of Alexandria built in the last decade in a bold attempt to echo that
burnt (along with more than half of all recorded European writings of
the time) by a fundamentalist bishop about 1650 years ago. It's a great
building, and the collection looks pretty impressive too.



GOODBYE, FAREWELL, AMEN

You will be sad to know that this is my last travel update from this
trip. Shut up and pretend to be sad already. I am back in London, where
I will spend a few days before heading back to Canada and on to
California, with stops in Vancouver and New York next month. Hope
you're all well, and I'll see you all whenever...