The idea came to me while I was sitting in the spring of the oasis at Farafra in the Western Desert, watching the sunset. My romantic notions of oases was that they are small pools surrounded by a dozen or so palm trees, a couple of Bedouin tents and Beau Geste wandering around in the background. No doubt this is many other people’s conception too. The reality is that I was sitting in a concrete tank, having warm but ferrous water pouring on me (and staining my clothes). There are indeed palm trees, but most of the oases are virtually cities, covering in some cases several thousand square kilometres.
So I resolved to write down some impressions of this trip, trying to get down my notes while I was still the wide-eyed innocent in the face of the new, before too much analysis and cynicism has set in. I would fail in the latter, of course – both analysis and cynicism come too easily. However they contribute to the overall goal – to give some sense of what this trip was like to others, without the inconvenience of the trip, as it were.
EGYPT
Cairo is a crazy city – the craziest one I’ve been in, and I’ve been in some pretty crazy ones. The pollution is as bad as Bankok’s – from the pyramids (on a hill a couple of miles away) you can hardly see the downtown area. Traffic lights are seen as more of a challenge than a warning. At least three people have told me that the way to cross the street is to close your eyes and pray to Allah.
It’s rather a grand city in some respects – areas such as Zamalek remind me rather of Buenos Aires (“the Paris of the South”) – but even these areas are in dire need of a lick of paint. Lots of plants sitting in building lobbies, but they’re covered in dust. It’s as if someone had had a grand design, but then decided it was simply too much effort to keep the place looking nice and the desert at bay.
Another astounding thing is the contrasts – you can walk 500 yards away from the supreme court, built like all similar ones to project grandeur, and be in the middle of slums, with narrow alleys filled with goats, straw and manure. The Islamic part of town is the most exciting – on the other side of the road from Khan il Khalili, the “touristy” bazaar, is the real souk, a warren of alleyways and workshops apparently unchanged since the middle ages. Since they don’t sell tourist souvenirs and there is no tourist map, tourists don’t venture there and it doesn’t change much. There are buildings there which date back a thousand years, next to a shack which might have been built last year (but is in dire need of repair).
One thing that is very galling to the visitor is the hassle/hustle approach the Egyptians use with tourists. A new person approaches you in the street – he is polite, wants to welcome you to his country, invite you to tea in his shop and exchange business cards. You say that you are in a hurry, you need to get to the bank before it closes (in six hours!), he is insistent, says that it would be rude to turn down his hospitality. You think that maybe this time he might be genuine, he is so polite and after all the only way to get out of it would be to be deliberately rude. Then you get to the perfume shop, your “friend” disappears and the shop owner takes over with the rather harder sell. I think they send everyone to the same hustle school – everyone says “you are from England? I have been to England. London Liverpool Manchester Yorkshire”. I haven’t been to Yorkshire, yet every street vendor knows someone in every town. In my whole time in Egypt, I was only approached two times by someone who didn’t want money – and one of those might well have wanted money as well, in return for what he had to offer!!
The strange thing is that the Egyptians are really rather lovely people – if you get off the beaten track and they do not have the equation “tourist = $” imprinted on their retina, they are really nice and friendly and you get some great beaming smiles back if you say hello in Arabic. Even the hustlers seem quite happy to invite you to their houses for tea after having tried to gouge you – it’s as if the mentality is “just because you did a bad business deal doesn’t mean we can’t be friends…”. You do develop a siege mentality after a while, looking down or away whenever someone comes near you in the street. Then again, I got hassled in every country, but it didn’t bother me so much so perhaps I just got used to it. But perhaps the Egyptians have a particularly insistent approach. And someone should really tell them that shouting “Hey, Mr No-Hair, you want taxi?” at me is not the way to win business.
So I resolved to write down some impressions of this trip, trying to get down my notes while I was still the wide-eyed innocent in the face of the new, before too much analysis and cynicism has set in. I would fail in the latter, of course – both analysis and cynicism come too easily. However they contribute to the overall goal – to give some sense of what this trip was like to others, without the inconvenience of the trip, as it were.
EGYPT
Cairo is a crazy city – the craziest one I’ve been in, and I’ve been in some pretty crazy ones. The pollution is as bad as Bankok’s – from the pyramids (on a hill a couple of miles away) you can hardly see the downtown area. Traffic lights are seen as more of a challenge than a warning. At least three people have told me that the way to cross the street is to close your eyes and pray to Allah.
It’s rather a grand city in some respects – areas such as Zamalek remind me rather of Buenos Aires (“the Paris of the South”) – but even these areas are in dire need of a lick of paint. Lots of plants sitting in building lobbies, but they’re covered in dust. It’s as if someone had had a grand design, but then decided it was simply too much effort to keep the place looking nice and the desert at bay.
Another astounding thing is the contrasts – you can walk 500 yards away from the supreme court, built like all similar ones to project grandeur, and be in the middle of slums, with narrow alleys filled with goats, straw and manure. The Islamic part of town is the most exciting – on the other side of the road from Khan il Khalili, the “touristy” bazaar, is the real souk, a warren of alleyways and workshops apparently unchanged since the middle ages. Since they don’t sell tourist souvenirs and there is no tourist map, tourists don’t venture there and it doesn’t change much. There are buildings there which date back a thousand years, next to a shack which might have been built last year (but is in dire need of repair).
One thing that is very galling to the visitor is the hassle/hustle approach the Egyptians use with tourists. A new person approaches you in the street – he is polite, wants to welcome you to his country, invite you to tea in his shop and exchange business cards. You say that you are in a hurry, you need to get to the bank before it closes (in six hours!), he is insistent, says that it would be rude to turn down his hospitality. You think that maybe this time he might be genuine, he is so polite and after all the only way to get out of it would be to be deliberately rude. Then you get to the perfume shop, your “friend” disappears and the shop owner takes over with the rather harder sell. I think they send everyone to the same hustle school – everyone says “you are from England? I have been to England. London Liverpool Manchester Yorkshire”. I haven’t been to Yorkshire, yet every street vendor knows someone in every town. In my whole time in Egypt, I was only approached two times by someone who didn’t want money – and one of those might well have wanted money as well, in return for what he had to offer!!
The strange thing is that the Egyptians are really rather lovely people – if you get off the beaten track and they do not have the equation “tourist = $” imprinted on their retina, they are really nice and friendly and you get some great beaming smiles back if you say hello in Arabic. Even the hustlers seem quite happy to invite you to their houses for tea after having tried to gouge you – it’s as if the mentality is “just because you did a bad business deal doesn’t mean we can’t be friends…”. You do develop a siege mentality after a while, looking down or away whenever someone comes near you in the street. Then again, I got hassled in every country, but it didn’t bother me so much so perhaps I just got used to it. But perhaps the Egyptians have a particularly insistent approach. And someone should really tell them that shouting “Hey, Mr No-Hair, you want taxi?” at me is not the way to win business.
The other strange thing about the Egyptians (and in fact was common about all of the countries I visited, but particularly so of the Egyptians) was the propensity to ask what Westerners would consider personal questions. This covered not only “how old are you” (always) but also “are you married?”, usually followed by an incredulous look, sometimes followed by “why not?”. [Not, as you might think, because of my devastating good looks, but because arranged marriages are fairly common, women’s careers usually not, and in the countryside in particular the economics of a family unit are just too compelling to let irrelevancies like feelings intrude]. On even asked me “Have you ever had sex? How many times?”.
Of course the main reason people come to Egypt is for the antiquities, and they truly are stunning. Luxor in particular is worth the trip on its own, although it is there that the hustlers have really refined their art. There are two temples, one in Luxor itself and one a couple of miles away at Karnak, which was built up over a thousand year period. Across the Nile is not only the Valley of the Kings, were the tombs are found, but several other monuments including Hatsepshut’s temple.
The West Bank of the Nile at Luxor
THE MASSACRE –
One week before I arrived in Egypt 57 tourists were massacred at Hatsepshut’s temple on the West Bank at Luxor. This made this photograph rather incongruous and seems to have tickled most of the tourists intrepid or crazy enough to make the trip anyway.
One week before I arrived in Egypt 57 tourists were massacred at Hatsepshut’s temple on the West Bank at Luxor. This made this photograph rather incongruous and seems to have tickled most of the tourists intrepid or crazy enough to make the trip anyway.
Below is Hatsepshut’s temple – an impressive structure which has been extensively restored given the pictures I saw from the 1930’s. It was built about 3500 years ago and at the entrance there are two tree stumps which may have formed an avenue all the way to the Nile a couple of miles away. It is believed that the whole area was once green and fertile – Egypt used to be seen as Europe’s bread basket by the Romans.
Rather more poignant than the “Smile” picture is this one. Someone had stuck this rose in the stones of the wall leading up to the temple. There were also flowers strewn in the first level corridor.
The whole structure is quite shallow, with the colonnade in the first level being only a few feet wide. The terrorists chased the tourists in and out of this colonnade for 45 minutes in a sort of game of hide and seek, then mutilated the corpses with knives in a (successful) attempt to gain maximum shock value.
The whole structure is quite shallow, with the colonnade in the first level being only a few feet wide. The terrorists chased the tourists in and out of this colonnade for 45 minutes in a sort of game of hide and seek, then mutilated the corpses with knives in a (successful) attempt to gain maximum shock value.
THE DESERT –
The extraordinary thing about the desert is that a) it is not that deserted (oases can be fairly large towns, and there is a good paved road running in between each one), b) part of it are really quite green and you can see water by the side of the road (at least in winter) and c) most of it is not sand. On occasion you come across a dune, and the wind patterns can be quite amazing. There is also the Great Sand Sea, which I didn’t see but sounds amazing. But for the most part you get a tundra, as you can see on the right side of this picture – a sort of moonscape.
The extraordinary thing about the desert is that a) it is not that deserted (oases can be fairly large towns, and there is a good paved road running in between each one), b) part of it are really quite green and you can see water by the side of the road (at least in winter) and c) most of it is not sand. On occasion you come across a dune, and the wind patterns can be quite amazing. There is also the Great Sand Sea, which I didn’t see but sounds amazing. But for the most part you get a tundra, as you can see on the right side of this picture – a sort of moonscape.
There is also the White Desert which is even more moonlike. This is made of limestone and can produce some pretty interesting shapes when the harder parts have been eroded by wind or water.
I got within a couple of hundred kms of the Gilf Kibir and therefore did my best Ralph Fiennes impression – then again, the man’s a clothes horse so the baggy shorts didn’t quite look so good on me.
Finally, the Pyramids. Perhaps the most magical view of them (one of them, at least) was when I drove out into the desert as part of the Oasis tour, over a week before I was to make a trip specially to Giza where the Great Pyramid of Cheops is. I looked over to the left as we were driving and, over the top of several buildings, I could just make out a hazy outline of the top of a pyramid. From that distance it looked majestic and quite enormous.
When you get up close it can be disappointing – you have to fight your way through the touts selling trinkets or pretending to be tour guides (or even ticket collectors), local tourists having a picnic on an ancient lump of sandstone, and pick your way amongst the camel crap left behind by some of the tourist attractions. The pyramids themselves seem rather smaller than you imagine.
At Giza there are three pyramids in various states of (dis) repair. I didn’t make it to the other sites. Giza has the edge because it is really close to Cairo and also has the Sphynx, whose nose, incidentally, was shot off by Napoleon’s troops who used it as target practice.
Finally, the Pyramids. Perhaps the most magical view of them (one of them, at least) was when I drove out into the desert as part of the Oasis tour, over a week before I was to make a trip specially to Giza where the Great Pyramid of Cheops is. I looked over to the left as we were driving and, over the top of several buildings, I could just make out a hazy outline of the top of a pyramid. From that distance it looked majestic and quite enormous.
When you get up close it can be disappointing – you have to fight your way through the touts selling trinkets or pretending to be tour guides (or even ticket collectors), local tourists having a picnic on an ancient lump of sandstone, and pick your way amongst the camel crap left behind by some of the tourist attractions. The pyramids themselves seem rather smaller than you imagine.
At Giza there are three pyramids in various states of (dis) repair. I didn’t make it to the other sites. Giza has the edge because it is really close to Cairo and also has the Sphynx, whose nose, incidentally, was shot off by Napoleon’s troops who used it as target practice.
view all pics at http://picasaweb.google.com/justin.woddis/Egypt1998
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