Quik Thinking

Having alternated between cultural and outdoorsy experiences during our time in Egypt so far, we continued the tradition by spending the last couple of days in Dahab. After a few initial hiccups involving a defective key at the Red Sea Relax hostel, we were thoroughly impressed by the feast they laid out for breakfast.

With our bellies full, we embarked on a snorkeling trip in the Red Sea itself at a spot called the Blue Hole. The goggles I was given were loose so seawater kept getting into my eyes and I had to take a break to find tighter goggles. On my next attempt I got better at using the flippers, although it was still a tiring experience. That said, looking at fish and coral underwater was quite an amazing experience.

Having worked up a hearty appetite, it was time for dinner. The boardwalk was lined with overpriced restaurants all competing intensely but with pretty much the same fare. After comparing prices and haggling a bit, we somewhat arbitrarily picked one. The food was actually delicious, although we weren't the only ones to think so as our dinner was plagued by cats, all hoping to get some of it.

The next day Luke, Dave and I decided to get a professional shave at the local barber. It was amusing to watch Luke's reaction when his face was threaded! I ended up looking strangely Egyptian after they were done.

We spent our last night in Egypt scaling Mt. Sinai. I prepped by drinking a cup of coffee; the first I'd had in years. It took about two hours to drive to the base of the mountain and then another 150 minutes to ascend it in the dark using flashlights. But we managed to snag an excellent spot from which to watch the sun rise. Once that was over, however, we had to contend with a zillion other people who all wanted to descend along with us. Going slowly was just as well though, since I found the steep descent to be hard on my joints.

Once we made it to the airport, getting from Cairo to Luxor was a relatively painless operation, as was finding our hostel, where we reunited with Yvonne and Luke, who had been exploring other parts of the country while we camped in the dessert. The hostel was offering guided tours of the West bank so we took them up on it the next morning. After our excellent experience with Hani in the dessert, we were greatly dismayed to discover that this guide could barely understand English; each time we asked him a question, he answered a completely different question!

The first stop was a temple that had been destroyed by an earthquake in 37 BC. Only a pair of giant pharaoh statues survived the quake, each of which has a miniature statue of his wife beside him. Apparently that was the thing to do back then. The second stop was the Valley of the Queens, so called because no kings were buried there, although sometimes princes who died in childhood ended up there as well. Before we could look at the burial chambers, the guide made us watch a crummy documentary whose sound was barely audible. While looking at the tombs, the guide fed us some outlandish tales about the queens, including one about a queen who fabricated a myth about her mom being impregnated by a god so that she could hang on to the throne without having to cede power to a husband.

The third stop was at an alleged artist workshop, where we saw how they make alabaster jars, although we came away with the strong feeling that the guide just took us there in the hopes that we would buy lots of overpriced crap that he probably gets a cut on. 

With that out of the way, it was on to the fourth stop: the Valley of the Kings, where we had only enough time to learn about three kings. Ramses III had 42 wives but still slept around with others and Sety II died young so they did an astonishingly sub-par job on his tomb. The highlight of this stop was a descent into the underground burial chamber of Thutmosis II, where we had a chance to examine very early hieroglyphs done is a style far simpler than anything I'd ever seen before.

Stop five was another temple, featuring two engravings of particular interest: one was a series of engravings of the fertility god, whose limbs were chopped off as punishment for impregnating a bunch of women; the other was a queen who swallowed the sun in the morning and expelled it through her vagina in the evening. The last stop on the tour was the residence of some old British guy that was only marginally interesting. The guide also tried to make us go through a sketchy papyrus factory but we refused unanimously.

That evening we visited the Luxor temple, which contained some fascinating relics from the Greek and Roman conquests of Egypt, including statues of Alexander the Great as a pharaoh and some Roman paintings that covered older Egyptian engravings. Outside the temple was a large courtyard lined with massive stone columns, many of which had statues of Ramses II beside them. But the most striking feature of the temple was a giant stone obelisk that rose several dozen feet from the ground.

On our final day in Luxor we visited the Karnak temple complex, this time ending up with an awesome guide. He explained that the complex had started out fairly small as the venue for the annual wedding ceremony for the Thebian trio of gods but had been successively enlarged by waves of pharaohs until it was the largest religious structure in the world. He also cleared up the fragmented stories we'd heard from the previous guide about queen Hatshetsup.

This is the long-delayed post about our dessert-camping experience from November.

Unlike the car that was supposed to take us to the pyramids but never materialized, our guide for the Sahara camping trip arrived slightly early. His name was Hani (or something that sounded a lot like that) and he spoke English fluently, which put us all at ease. He'd brought along somebody else to drive the van, which initially seemed inefficient until I realized that this specialization of duties was quite effective; the driver zipped along at close to 150 mph while Hani was free to answer our numerous questions about the Sahara. In fact, we even picked up a police officer and gave him a ride to the police checkpoint in the dessert, which facilitated getting us through it without any hassle.

Once we were in the dessert, we stopped at the El Bahriya oasis and switched to a land rover that allowed us to roll down sand dunes without much ado. I was soon mesmerized by the sheer quantity of sand surrounding us; there was often nothing else to see in any direction! The first time we stopped to take photographs of the sand dunes, we struck the clichéd "walk like an Egyptian" pose, only to have Hani inform us that Egyptians no longer walk like that. I'd always assumed the pose was entirely fabricated for dramatic effect but he went on to explain that it was once used during religious ceremonies in ancient Egypt.

At lunch time we ate in a rest stop while surrounded by flies. I hate flies so much. After lunch Hani took us down a road built by the Brits during WWII to see the black sands formed by volcanic ashes. We even saw the flat-topped dormant volcanoes that had once spewed all this ash. Next we went to the "white dessert", which is composed of chalk. There were some very odd chalk formations that usually resembled mushrooms, although one of them actually looked like a chicken. This is where we set up camp for the night.

Hani and the driver cooked us a fine dinner of BBQ chicken and potato stew over a fire that also kept us warm once the cold dessert night set in. After eating, we slept under camel fur blankets. Although we'd been hoping to see stars, the full moon pretty much crowded them out. Aware that it is made of cheese, Don tried to eat it but to no avail.

Our second day in the Sahara devolved into a hellish amount of driving. But first we had to sit around for a long time at the oasis while the seats in the land rover were replaced. We killed some time by wandering around in some Coptic ruins from the 7th century. The Egyptians weren't too excited about those because they were "only 1300 years old", a sentiment only possible amongst people whose recorded history goes back for millennia.

With the new seats finally in place, we headed off in search of the Valley of the Whales. Unfortunately, Hani got a bit lost and we could not find the valley before nightfall so we just camped in the white dessert again. Such is the downside of navigating via old tyre tracks instead of GPS. On the plus side, this time we were able to see more stars before the moon came out in force.

In the morning we finally made it to the valley, which was dotted with fossils and striated rock formations, having once been a sea some 40 million yeas ago. Finding sea shells in the Sahara dessert is truly an eye-opening experience. Once we'd had our fill of this oddity, Hani took us to see a massive artificial lake that had been created from treated agricultural runoff and is now stocked with fish. That too was a bit surreal.

It was then time to leave the dessert, although we stopped at Imhotep's step pyramid on the way back to Cairo to see the first pyramid ever built. Unshockingly, it was far less impressive than the great ones at Giza and in a far worse state of disrepair. More interestingly, I noticed that there was an enormous difference in the quality of walls used to build dwellings for the pyramid workers VS the temple, although both were built by the same people at around the same time.

Once in Egypt, we needed to take a cab to the airport. Dave assumed that the cabbies would all speak English but after getting into one, we discovered that he thought we wanted to go to the Sheraton! I tried miming an airport but it only left him bewildered. Fortunately, he had the resourcefulness to take us to a police station where somebody could translate and we then headed for the airport.

On our first proper day in Cairo, we attempted to take a cab from our hostel to Coptic Cairo. We were thwarted by our complete inability to communicate in Arabic, since none of the cabbies knew any English either. In the end we were forced to have one of the hostel staff members haggle with cabs for us.

Coptic Cairo wasn't nearly as exciting as we'd hoped. Perhaps it would have been better with a guide. Actually, in what would turn out to be a portend of things to come, a random Egyptian attempted to weasel his way into being our tour guide. We paid him what his information was worth: 17 cents. One interesting thing we did encounter in Coptic Cairo was a series of paintings that date back to around 18 A.D. Most of them seemed to have been preserved remarkably well, prompting me to wonder about the accuracy of whomever dated them.

Given our previous failure at catching a cab, we decided to try the Metro instead. That turned out to be a good idea because the Metro in Cairo is frequent, fast and dirt cheap. It cost a piddling 17 cents per ride, encouraging us to use it often during our stay there. In addition to taking the Metro, we also walked around a fair bit. While most street-crossings were tests of will and bravado, the few traffic signals we saw were delightful to watch because the little green walking man on them would speed up as time went by until he was sprinting at a good clip just before the sign changed to the red hand.

The reason for all this subway-riding and walking was our quest for lunch. But not any old lunch; we were searching for the best kushari in Cairo (and therefore the world). Kushari is a dish that originated in Cairo and is made from a combination of rice, macaroni, lentils, chickpeas, browned onions, garlic infused vinegar and tomato sauce. The word on the street was that the best place to eat it was a restaurant called Abou Tarek, which served nothing else. It took us a while to locate that place but we were rewarded by what I consider to be one of the best meals I've had in ages. I badly wanted to chow down a second bowl of the stuff but somebody else's better judgement prevailed.

Now sated, we ambled over to the Egyptian museum, where we got a guide to show us around. He was pretty good, although he kept telling us how he had recently discovered rather momentous facts about ancient Egypt, which made me suspicious about the veracity of his tales. But then I've never been one to let facts get in the way of a good story. The museum was quite interesting but after walking around in it for a couple of hours we were worn out so we headed back to our hostel for a rest.

That evening, I decided to get a haircut at the nearby barber. He didn't speak any English but the previous customer did and translated for me. To my surprise, after cutting my hair, he whipped out a length of thread and proceeded to thread my face with it. Having never experienced this before, it was an interesting sensation, albeit slightly painful at times.

With my newly coiffured look, we set off to watch the whirling dervishes or, as they are known locally, sufi dancers. The sufi are a mystical sect of Islam who believe that by whirling around they enter into a divine frenzy. Sounds vaguely like Thupasam, minus the sharp hooks! To our pleasant surprise, the event was free, having been sponsored by a cultural grant from the government. In addition to the dancing and whirling, they also played music on horns that had only one volume level: loud. The dancers wore brightly coloured skirts that looked awesome when they whirled around.

Having gotten our fill of mystics twirling in gaudy skirts, we ventured into the surrounding bazaar, known as the Khan-el-Khalili. I had been curious about a local spice called gad and at one point we found some for sale at a spice store but the proprietor evidently had better things to do than talk to a bunch of tourists so we moved on. We hadn't gone very far, however, when an English-speaking local who claimed he was a doctor offered to show us around the spice store. He seemed harmless enough so we took up his offer. He certainly did show us all manners of curiosities in the store, including dessicated and shrunken animals. In the end we bought some spices, only to discover that we'd paid an order of magnitude more for them than the going rate. 

No trip to Egypt would be complete without a visit to the great pyramids of Giza (and the accompanying Sphinx). Conveniently, Giza is right outside Cairo. Our original plan had been to hire a car to drive us there and back but the car broke down the morning we were to go there. Ever resourceful, we thought it would be a good idea to take the Metro to Giza and then either take a cab or microbus to the pyramids. Our guide book warned us that many locals would try to scam us into entering through the gate designated for Egyptian students and then make us shell out for a camel ride across the dessert. Sure enough, as soon as we got off the subway in Giza, we were set upon by a small horde of annoyingly persistent cabbies all trying to convince us that we should pretend to be Egyptian students in order to pay the much lower entrance fare. We must have lost half an hour trying to get them off our backs before we found a microbus that took us to the pyramids - but not before they also tried to convince us that we should pretend to be Egyptian students.

The pestering didn't end once we finally reached the pyramids; it just changed form. Now we were being offered horribly overpriced bottled water and camel rides. Between all these fascinating offers, we managed to sneak a few glances at the 4500 year old pyramids. Although the were a bevy of tourists around, none of them ventured to the far side of the pyramids so once we got there, we had relatively unobstructed views of the giant structures. Despite being so close, however, we did not touch them because doing so is forbidden in order to protect them against further decay. There are guards stations to enforce this rule, although, based on what we saw, their loyalties can be swayed by filthy lucre.

Later in the day we went for a cruise down in a Nile in a felucca. Having been conditioned to bargain for everything, we were dismayed to realize that the felucca owners had no interest in bargaining. Eventually we realized why: they were all situated across the street from a clutch of 5-star hotels whose patrons probably couldn't be bothered to bargain for anything.

We ended our stay in Cairo by visiting a hookah bar where Luke and I schooled the others in the fine art of nasally exhaling smoke.