As my early morning bus out of Cairo left for Alexandria on Saturday, September 6, we spent at least an hour just getting out of the city proper. At one point I was idly looking at the grim apartment buildings passing my window when a pyramid slipped by between a couple of them. In my groggy state of mind it took a second sighting for it to sink in that this wasn't just any pyramid, it wasn't the hotel in Las Vegas or the Tower of the Americas in San Francisco or a random pyramid-shaped pile of rocks, it was The Pyramid. I stared wide-eyed and slack-jawed, reveling in the sight, obviously the only tourist on the bus.
Siwa was my favorite part of Egypt so far. It is an oasis about 100 km by 50 km not far from the Libyan border and a few hours south of the Mediterranean coast. To get there I had to take a full day of buses through Alexandria and then west along some electric turquoise beaches that I regretted I wouldn't be able to explore this time around. When I stepped off the bus at Marsa Matruh I was pretty sure I'd missed the next bus to Siwa. I still don't know how or why this happened, but a guy met me coming off the bus and arranged my ticket for three hours later and got me a taxi for driving through Marsa Matruh just to take a look. It's a working-class holiday destination, and women are forbidden from wearing anything more revealing than the normal clothes, veil and all, which seems to me like it would seriously increase the drowning risk but might make up for it in cancer prevention.
Afterwards he and ordered me a big meal at a friend's restaurant, and granted I paid a bit too much, but it's hard to complain about a hot, filling meal for $2.50. He was a friendly guy and knew a little bit of English, but he didn't hassle me or ask for anything, he mostly just helped me out. Then I caught another bus south through the Western Desert to a big green oval in the sand.
I arrived at Siwa five hours later at 9:00 in the evening and was met by a nine-year-old boy who showed me to the tourist office and then gave me a donkey cart ride to my hotel. When we got there I asked what I owed him, and he cleverly shrugged and said, "Whatever you think." I gave him 3 Egyptian pounds, about 50 cents, which was clearly too much, but I'm a sucker for young businessmen. I remember pulling the same trick when Val and I had our roadside pumpkin business 14 years ago in Canadian.
I chose the Yousif Hotel for its reputation of being clean and it's price of 8 pounds ($1.30) per night. When I was walking up the stairs, I met a couple from the Channel Islands between France and England named Howard and Lorna. They said they were just heading out for tea and invited me along. We walked through the peaceful dusty streets to the East West Restaurant and ordered sweet black tea infused with fresh mint. Sitting on wicker chairs in the warm-cool night, looking at the stars through the palm trees, talking and sipping tea, I didn't think life could get much better.
The next day I joined Lorna and Howard and an old Siwan guy for a trek in the desert in his 4WD truck. We rattled along until the dirt road ended and the dunes began, and the driver turned the engine off and stepped out of the car. He looked at us still sitting in the back of his truck looking politely confused and said, "Trip finished." We chuckled nervously, and then he laughed and shook his head and started letting some air out of the tires. Howard remarked in his cool English way, "Nice to know the guy's got a sense of humor." I guessed the tire business was to increase the surface area so he could power over the sand better. He got back in and we took off.
Our first stop was on the crest of a dune with a great view of Siwa and its salt lakes and surrounding flat-top mountains and the endless dunes all around. We wondered how he'd back up off the thing, because it looked like a sheer drop off the other face of the dune. When he started inching forward, we thought he was joking again, but suddenly we were falling/sliding sickeningly down the sheer sand cliff, and then at length there was enough traction to hit the gas hard, and now we were careening towards the wall of sand that filled our field of vision, and then... we were level again, bouncing along, and everything was fine. He repeated this move several times as the day went along, and we learned to grit our teeth and enjoy it once we realized he was a pro and we probably weren't in mortal danger. The way he cackled when he did it was a bit disconcerting, though.
We pulled up at a small spring next, a dark blue pool surrounded by dark green reeds nestled in the folds of the yellow dunes, and took some strong, sweet, black mint tea in a shack by its shores. Howard stripped right down and jumped in, but women are supposed to be more demure, and we decided to wait for the bigger spring to bother jumping in fully clothed.
Then we stopped at a fossil field, mostly sea shells and sea stars, exposed and white on the desert floor. We knelt down to look at the mostly broken and picked-over remains. I don't know how many years its been since the land of the Sahara Desert was under the ocean, but looking at the evidence of it, it occurred to me that any monuments I might see in Egypt were really very young in the scale of things. 6,000 years is a trivially small amount of geologic time. Our guide found a particularly good sea star specimen and showed it to us. "This is good one. Baby. Before there were many many. Now... many tourists." He shook his head and shrugged.
The big spring was next, and already there were three Egyptian-Canadians climbing an enormous dune for the view and a Canadian girl yelling at them to stop all that nonsense. We asked her how the water was and how many clothes she had worn to swim in, and she said, "Oh, normal swim suit, no problem. Even in town I was wearing my bathing suit. It's OK, they're used to it." The Siwans have been a fairly isolated Berber/Muslim society for hundreds of years, and the women have to go around in blue-grey dresses and veils that cover everything but their eyes and hands, and they clearly ask you on the map everyone is given to respect their sensibilities and not dress scantily or show affection in public. Lorna and I and dove in in our clothes.
There's little better than cool, fresh water in a hot, dry land, and treading water in the still pool, talking and diving and taking in the colors, gold and vibrant green and baby blue, we couldn't believe we felt so refreshed and peaceful in an endless sea of sand and sun. I imagined all the people who had come here for some much-needed refreshment long before tourists began coming by in trucks.
We headed afterwards to a tiny oasis, just big enough for one family's garden, and the water that made it possible came out hot and sulphurous. The owner invited us to sit in his small, rather slimy stone hot tub. Palm trees swayed overhead, the golden sands stretched far, and hot water bubbled from the earth in front of us. For the third time in two days, I didn't think life could get much better.
Finally we drove on, dune after dune, racing the setting sun until we found the dune he wanted. I don't know how he tells the dunes apart, but from the one he found we could see 360 degrees around. We watched as the sky turned deeper and deeper cornflower blue and the dunes went all soft and pale, like a lizard's belly. Mars appeared sharp and bright as the red sun sank out of sight and the lights of Siwa blinked on. It seemed like no words were appropriate for the moment, but nonetheless I turned to Lorna and said, "It's nice that there are some moments in life that are perfect." She smiled. She and her husband had quit it all and sold it all to travel the world while they're still young.
Back in town we walked to the East West to meet up with a German guy I'd met earlier, and after another gorgeous meal the German guy needed to go to some mid-range hotel to get a permit to see a hugely expensive VIP hotel out by the bigger of the salt lakes that was supposedly ecologically perfect, but only if you're very rich. Having no better plan, I followed him, and the manager there told him he didn't need a permit if he was going by bike. Then he rather mechanically invited us up for tea, as if he'd done it so many thousands of times before that by now it was just a tic.
We followed him to the roof terrace and thought we'd stepped into a movie. It was impossibly idyllic. Stars, palm trees, soft lighting, a long, low table surrounded by lazy white cushions, tasteful desert-toned architecture with nice niches filled with hand-crafted metal vessels. It turned out the reason it was so impossibly idyllic was because it was designed by a French company to capture the essense of Siwan desert life, in other words to appeal to the sophisticated tourist's taste for comfortable nonsense. But it was quite comfortable, and with a handful of Siwans and a 25-year-old Bedouin guy to chat with, some tea and fresh dates (the dates just ripening on the palms were at roof level), it seemed like if the French wanted to come build us a little paradise, it wasn't so bad.
The Bedouin guy was no skinny nomad in a Shriner's cap. I have a lot of cartoonish images of the world in my head, and it's fun to blast them with much more nuanced and interesting reality. He was from Marsa Matruh up north but was working long hours at the hotel for now, spoke English as well as Arabic, Siwan, and Bedouin, wore a white T-shirt and jeans and had smiling black eyes. I was interested to ask him some things, like how many of the Bedouins had settled down and how they were doing and what was his phone number. But the owner, a skinny schmoozer in a red Yasser Arafat style turban named Ali, monopolised most of the conversation. It was fine, though, and we all trekked out to the desert together a while later to look at the stars, and I saw the Southern Cross properly for the first time. This was the farthest south I had ever been, and I felt a bit dizzy seeing new stars. There's a whole other hemisphere of them. I was a little chilly walking back, and Ali gave me his red Arafat scarf. I was surprised how it warmed me up to wrap it around my head. When I tried to give it back later, he said I could keep it as a gift.
The next day Ali said he'd be happy to show me around to all the best stuff in Siwa if I liked, and since I had only one day left in Siwa, it sounded like a good plan. We rented bikes and he took me first to Dead Mountain, the site of dozens or maybe hundreds of tombs, some Greek, some Roman, many ancient Egyptian, and almost all of them robbed of all but the walls and a few mummies. He roused the caretaker who produced some keys and took me to a tomb with colors so vibrant I thought it must be a hoax. They looked maybe a couple hundred years old; certainly not thousands. Next we visited a tomb with cobras sculpted and painted above the burial chamber and paler paintings, but still exquisite in detail and composition. I didn't know then that they would end up being some of the best I would see in Egypt, and so up close and personal and hassle-free.
The final tomb was something I was not prepared for. Ali said there would be mummies inside, and I conjured up images of Frankenstein-like bodies loosely wrapped in tattered linen strips, another cartoon. But inside were two rather short human bodies, wrapped tightly in almost petrified linen and another body lying without any cloth, with its hands crossed against its chest, one of which was broken off at the wrist and hanging by a thread. On the other side, lying next to another mummy, were some piles of bones and a lone human head in a box, the skin still clinging like leather to its face but its teeth clearly visible. "Look," Ali said, "The head still has hair." I blinked a few times, and then gingerly crept toward the head, praparing to carefully and reverently peer around and see as best I could even though the position it had lain for millennia made it hard to see much of the hair. The caretaker got impatient with all my creeping and reverence and grabbed the skull by the temples and jammed the back of it in my face. "See?" he said, "Hair."
I left the Mountain of the Dead in a jubilantly subdued state of mind. It was the first time in my life I ever felt even remotely like Indiana Jones.
We biked to the Temple of Amun, the spot where Alexander the Great traveled to consult the Oracle and confirm that he was the son of the god Amun and legal heir to the pharoahs and generally anything else he wanted to hear. Impressive and very well-preserved pictures and hieroglyphics were carved into the sandstone. I'd like to say the sense of history was overwhelming, but honestly the sun at the time was moreso, so we went to a spring called Cleopatra's Bath.
It was about 30 feet in circumference and 25 feet deep, and the grey stones around the perimeter were laid in ancient Roman times. The water was crystal clear azure and some boys were swimming in it. We took some tea and then I walked over to the pool and the boys motioned me in enthusiastically. Luckily I still had my goggles thrown in my backpack, and I put them on and dove again and again, looking at the bubbling vents and the waving plants and the tiny fishes. The boys raced me a few times at swimming, and I let them use my goggles.
Ali showed me his garden next, mostly dates and olives, but also some hot peppers, cucumbers, and pumpkins. I tasted an olive fresh off the vine and learned why they always pickle them. Yuck.
For dinner I had Molokhiya, a green slimy savory soup, a sweet chicken dish and guava juice in a cafe with a bunch of men sitting around the low table chatting in Arabic. They looked like a cross between exotic Arabian men fresh off the caravan and a bunch of guys at a local coffeeshop, and I wished I could understand what they were talking about. Local gossip most likely.
At sunset we took a donkey cart out to his friend's place on Fatnas Island in the big salt lake. Another great spring was there, like Cleopatra's but smaller, and we had tea and more dates and watched the sun set.
Then we went back up to the idyllic roof and I had more of a chance to talk to the Bedouin guy, whose name is Mohammed but who goes by Kamps. I thought Russia was bad for having only 12 possible names for guys, but here they only have four. 90% of the guys I've met are named Mohammad, Ali, Ahmed, or Mahmoud. Anyway, I learned that Kamps had two different pen pals in Syria whom he'd never met, and he loved living in Siwa but the long hours would be no good once it came time to get married, and anyway his family was in Marsa Matruh and his wife's family probably would be, too. Fluent in four languages, civilized and hard-working and eager to learn but living in a country without many opportunities and with almost worthless currency, I wondered what would become of him.
I can't remember who brought it up, but we started talking about the current political situation, and I said I was a bit hesitant sometimes to admit I was from the U.S. because people here might be upset that I come from what many consider to be an unapologetic bully of a country at best. Ali said, "Of course we don't blame you for your government. We make a clear distinction between a country's government and its people. The government is bad sometimes, but the people are good, and you are welcome. We don't like our government either."
Later we were interrupted when Ali's cell phone went off and some very rich clients were jetting in from Cairo in their special desert SUV and they had to drop everything and prepare rooms and a big feast for them. I sat on a cushion behind a bunch of dates and lazily picked some off and ate them while I stargazed some more. When things calmed down again I said my good-byes and exchanged addresses with Bedouin Boy and got a bit of sleep before catching another early bus back to reality.
The next day was September 10 when my friend Olivier from France joined me, and I'll write about what went on between then and now later. The short version is, we spent a week hitting the monuments hard, the Pyramids and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Philae and Abu Simbel in Aswam, Karnak and the Valley of the Kings and Queens in Luxor, etc. It was 10% unforgettable magic and 90% hot, dusty, lying, cheating, hassling tourist hell. We're spending five days recovering in the village of Dahab in Sinai on the sapphire Gulf of Aqaba where the number one activity is doing nothing whatsoever while drinking tea and milkshakes, and the number two activity is scuba diving. Today I did the former, tomorrow I start three days of doing the latter and hope to get my advanced open-water certification by the end of it. My budget is pulverized, so I may be coming home a bit early, but here and now none of that seems to matter.
Pam