My ambivalence towards Cairo aside, I love, love, loved Egypt on the whole. It is a fiesty and intriguing culture. Here are some of the highlights!
Red Sea Beach Camp: This was our first stop in Egypt after disembarking in the cacophanous harbour of Nuweiba (coming across from Aqaba in Jordan). If someone were to paint a mural of the Nuweiba port, it would show pairs and triads of mustachio´d men having heated arguments over boxes, and loading, hauling and cargo´ing said boxes with attitudes of menace. So going straight to the Red Sea Beach Camp was very chill. We lounged on cushions, drank wine and beer, ordered banana pancakes, snorkeled, and then lounged on other, different cushions. The Coral Reefs extend out forever and there are tons of fish to be seen. Sandia and I saw 2-banded clownfish, glassfish, masked butterfly fish, and blackspotted sweetlips!
Sometimes there were tough decisions to be made. Should I lounge in the hut, or on the beach? Or in the tent? Wine? Or beer? We celebrated Grahamses´ birthday here on a table out on the beach, and I will never forget the frosting on his cake. It tasted like those hard Halloween candies made from melted scraps of all the other leftover Halloween candies. Yum! On a side note, I was looking everywhere in Jordan and in Egypt for an Arabic birthday card, since we had four birthdays to celebrate on the trip, but couldn´t find anything. For my birthday, Beishan just made her own. I know extremists don´t celebrate birthdays, but it´s becoming a part of pop culture, so I guess Arabic birthday cards are just not a big hit.
Mt Sinai
We first went to the Greek Orthodox monastery of St Katherine to see the burning bush (not the original obviously, because, as the eponymous name suggests: it burned, baby!) but a bush nonetheless. Much like the promised land, it seemed fairly mundane to me, but I´m not religious, so maybe other people assigned it more import. Climbing Mount Sinai was much cooler as you felt a sense of accomplishment during the climb. Ian and I were originally going to climb the 3750 ´´Steps of Repentance" but Ian decided he´d rather see the real route, and it isn´t advisable to climb those steps alone, so we joined the others for the 3 hour hike. Some people wind up on camels while others climb, and you see the chilling sparsity of the desert with the sunset backlighting the panorama. It´s a bit hard to concentrate on the image of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments with the call-and-response catcalls of ¨Tea? Cafe? Cho-co-late? Tea? Cafe? Cho-co-late?¨, but I have to say that the hot chocolate I drank on Sinai, on top of that rock wall overlooking the sunset, was the best I´ve ever tasted. Served in a Styrofoam cup. (Actually, I´m in Argentina now, so the submarino hot chocolates are almost on par.)
Felucca
Our group travelled by felucca, a wooden sailboat with broad canvas sails, from Aswan to Luxor. It was an incredible experience. And far more relaxing than the night train from Cairo to Aswan which was patrolled by soldiers with guns. As Grahamses put it, ``Did I get up to use the toilet? No, once the guy with the shotgun passed me, I didn´t get up at all.`` The felucca´s deck was laid over with cushions placed end to end, and we lounged on these cushions (a practise we had perfected at the Red Sea Beach Camp), reading, chatting, and drinking copious amounts of Stella. I think I have a disproportionate sense of how much I can drink. We had to place orders for the boat, and afraid of getting dehydrated, (recalling my ´black tongue incident´ in Mexico), I ordered two bottles of water and four juice bottles to offset my six Stellas. Well, I could only drink one beer, because there is no W/C on the boat and I had to keep asking the Nubian guide to stop. He was getting annoyed with all the pitstops along the shore, so I got Latifah to ask for the next stop, but he clearly knew I was behind it and was giving me the evil eye. Graham kept chiding me on my lack of inebriation and urged me to drink more, but I couldn´t keep up. I had to ask for three washroom stops based on one Stella alone! We zigzagged along the Nile the full day, stopping only to jump in the river (like swimming in ice cubes with a really strong current! No Bilhazia here!) We passed the hotel where Agatha Christie wrote ``Death on the Nile``. At meal times we spread a tablecloth over the cushions and ate Eish Masri (pita breads) with dip, and at night we banked on shore, where Grahamses (a.k.a Ali) was commissioned to dig out the toilet tent. Really, I should have been the one to dig that out since I probably used it the most. I had five beers left to finish! but "Ali" had to earn his keep as an honourary Egyptian. We built a campfire and sang songs with the Nubians, before thrusting all our supplies below-deck (pirates) and rocking to sleep on the felucca in harbour.
Temples in Luxor
Exploring the temples with my travelmate Beishan in Luxor was a real treat, especially since we did it by bicycle. Mine was a bright pink bicycle that screeched like a broken parrot every time I rode it, replete with basket, and of course, no helmet. There is no respect for bikes in Aswan, so you just have to chance it and hope for the best. We hefted our bikes onto the morning ferry to the West Bank, glimpsing the sunrise of Luxor, and on the way back, we completed the cycle with a sunset ferry ride. Landing on the West Bank we biked past the two giant Colossi of Memnon, guarding the entryway to the famous Valley of the Kings and Queens, where they started burying the Pharoahs after the pyramids were looted a few too many times. Beishan and I spent the day exploring, getting lost, and promising marriage proposals and baksheesh to avoid getting our bicycles stolen.
The tombs are decorated in dilapidated murals depicting stories of the gods. You have to love the Egyptian stories and Gods: Seth is jealous of Osiris for being King. Makes him a custom-made "Cinderella" coffin and sends him off down the Nile. Wife, Isis, freaks out and recovers the coffin to give husband a proper burial. Seth reacts and dismembers Osiris, for finality. Isis recovers individual body parts and uses dismembered penis to impregnate herself.
The murals painted in the tombs all depict stories like this and since everyone was marrying their brothers and sisters and killing one another, there are lots of stories to be told. Some are dilapidated and faded, but the ones protected by glass leave the paintings in vivid and clear detail. As a group, we were cautioned against buying a separate ticket to view King Tut´s Tomb, as there is "nothing much to see" and it´s "expensive" (20 bucks), but having studied Ancient Civ. with my Grade Five class, and having talked about King Tut ad nauseum, I felt I had to see the real deal. You descend down a ramp into the tomb, which isn´t very big, only about four metres wide, and there on one side you see King Tut, encased in glass, a tiny shrivelled up cadaver of a teenager. He looks incredibly small, and crusty, like a mummified raisin. As the Tour Guides say, the only memorable thing King Tut did was die. Still it´s amazing to know that King Tut died in 1346 BC and is still there for the world to see. Granted, most of his burial treasures are at the Antiquities Museum in Cairo (since looted in the Mubarek riots), but it´s eerie to see the place that Howard Carter unearthed, unleashing the hex that befell him and his men.
There are tons of touts in the Valley of the Kings, all chasing you for baksheesh. Everyone´s got a story, and after awhile the stories recycle themselves through the same prologue-to-sale. One guy I met, said, "Ah, you are from Canada? Canada Dry! Never die!" (I happen to like this one. So much more original than, "Hello! You dropped something! It´s my heart!")
"You are from English side or French side? (Everyone asks this as though Canada had a big red line down the middle.)Yes, I can parler francais aussi, I used to live in Montreal!"
I said, "Oh really? Which street? I know Montreal quite well."
"Ah, well, it was a long time ago. I don´t really know."
"Oh, mais vous parlez Francais. C´est marveilleux!"
"My French isn´t that good. But hablo español."
"Really? Good. My Spanish is better than my French. ¿Como apprendiste Español?"
Then, exasperated he said, "You buy my book, Valley of the Kings, good price!"
Ah, yes, now we have it. The crux of the matter. This goes on outside every tomb, every valley, with an entourage of vendors trying to sell you books, flashlights, scarves, jewelry, and memory cards.
We also saw the Mortuary of Hatshepsut. She is my favorite Pharoah by far, a female Pharaoh who kicked butt in the world of business while maintaining a salacious affair with her courier, Senenmut. She always portrayed herself in the guise of a man and convinced the people to follow her by telling them the Sun God, Amun had assumed the form of a bird and impregnated her mother, giving Hatshepsut a holy lineage. She was married to her half brother, or step brother, Tuthmosis the Second (hence the need for a salacious affair) who later had a child with Isis: her evil stepson, Tuthmosis the Third. At the Temple of Karnak, you can see the obelisks she had erected, which her jealous stepson Tuthmosis the Third had scratched off to expunge any record of her. He was jealous of her 22 year reign and hated her so much that when she later disappeared, he was suspected of having murdered her. (Though our Tour Guide told us that the Antiquities Commission just found new information to suggest that she actually died in her 50s of bone cancer.) Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis the Third had a strange relationship because she was his Step-Mom, his aunt, and I think his Mother-in-Law, all-in-one. Gotta love the Ancient Egyptians!
The Pyramids
The Pyramids were of course, amazing, though it´s really the history and execution that you marvel at (and the fact that these people invested more time as the architects of their afterlives, than of their current realities), because when you see the Pyramids they are after all, just big triangular rocks. We were told that going inside the Great Pyramid of Giza (the biggest pyramid-Pyramid of Khufu) was a waste of money, when you can go inside the Pyramid of Menkaura, the third Pyramid, for a lot less. But, again, having just taught Ancient Civ. as part of the Grade Five curriculum, I felt compelled to go inside the biggest and the best and do the ´Real Deal´. So, as with King Tut, I paid my 100 Egyptian pounds and in I went. The Great Pyramid is 139 metres tall and weighs about 5.9 million tons and they say it took about 20 years to build it.
True to tale, there isn´t much to see inside other than a great chamber, but I waited until there were no tourists other than me inside (that took awhile) and climbed inside the sarcophagus in the King´s Chamber, and just laid down inside, imagining what the Ancient Egyptians must have thought their Afterlives would have included. Then, to document the occasion, I texted my friend Sandy, back in Canada: I´m inside the sarcophagus inside the Great Pyramid! (though I couldn´t send it of course. No SMS reception in the AfterLife!) So I just chilled for a bit inside until I heard the footsteps of the next group of tourists. [Side note: When I was lying in that sarcophagus, I was wondering if that was going to bring me good luck or bad luck. I am now in Brazil writing this, and I just met a fantastic guy at a Salvadorenan salsa club called ``Sarcophagus``. Coincidence? I think not!]
Camel Riding
What would Egypt be without a camel ride? Technically, I missed my opportunity for this by not going when I was at Mt. Sinai, but Mohamed, our group leader, went to bat for me since I was dying to ride a camel for my birthday, and some of the others hadn´t yet had a chance to ride either. Usually when you do the camel thing it is very touristy and you are lead by a Camel Boy, however our guide meant business. He taught us how to actually guide and steer our own camels, because he thinks this business of the camel boys is a bunch of touristic bull roar. It´s kind of like riding a horse, except that the camels do what they want, and aren´t in a hurry to do it. My camel was in a bit of a depression from a miscarriage, so the guide attached a baby camel to mine, to give her the sense that she did have a child. Camel psychology. Camels also give kisses. If you say ``bosa`` (the Arabic word for ´´kiss´´), the camel twists its rubbery lips against your cheek!
The Desert
For my birthday, I had the incredible experience of being in the middle of the White Desert. We explored the White and Black deserts by 4WD, at 200 km an hour!! And we did not have the Americans in our jeep, so no speed control. The natural rock formations created by wind erosion are incredible, and we had fun doing photo shoots in the desert. We had had a couple of birthday celebrations on the trip already, and Mohamed pulled me aside and said, ``Listen, Jennifer, I can´t do this for your birthday, because we are gonna be in the middle of the desert and there´s nothing there, I mean nothing!`` I was happy just being in the desert, and getting a homemade Arabic card signed by everyone and random presents from my travelmates. So you can imagine my suprise when, after an amazing Bedouin dinner cooked over the campfire, (the best roasted chicken!), they came out with this cake and candles! I was so touched. Mo and the guys had to bring all the ingredients out to the desert separately (since we were speeding around the sand at 200 km an hour) and then put it all together in the camp, fashioned from 3 walls of vehicles parked in a U shape with carpets pegged against them to make a cozy little enclave. That said, sleeping the night there was subterraneally cold. I wore my Silver Space Suit and my travelmates were wondering if the Mother Ship was coming to reclaim me for my 37th birthday.
The Desert Oases we went to were unforgettable. In the Siwa Oasis, a town of salt and clay buildings with palm tree thickets and hot springs, the women are dressed in Black Burquas whose only openings are eye slits bound by an elastic. The Laws of the Land there are very strict and even to swim we had to wear clothes, which float around you like lily pads and really inhibit the sleek feeling of swimming. It reminded me of an Indian Womens´ Lit course I took in Uni where one book spoke of women drowning in their Burquas, the cloth caught in drains or on logs. I was dying for a massage and Grahamses found something in the Lonely Planet to indicate that there was a Thai woman living in Siwa giving Thai massages. However, when I went to investigate, it was in fact a Siwan man. I asked Mohamed what he thought about that, as Vicky, Jiwon, Fiona and I were all keen to get massages. His response: ``Jennifer, these are men who never see a woman. Then a man from Siwa makes a massage parlour for tourists...I think you better wait to get the massage in Alexandria.`` At night, Jiwon and I went to a hot springs designed for tourists, so you could actually wear a bathing suit. We twisted Jan´s arm to come with us, so we would at least have a guy as backup. It was divine, but true to form, infiltrated by Siwan onlookers who are desperate for a glimpse of skin. Poor guys there, very repressed. This one Siwan guy asked if he could swim, but then took off his bathing suit in the hot springs. And we couldn´t see his hands...so even though we had a guy with us, we had to evacuate!
Arabic
If I had more time, I would love to learn Arabic. The script winds across the page like the footprints of a snake and the sounds of Arabic are succulent. Even learning small bits and pieces of phrases was like a key to chambers of the culture. My favorite expressions are ``A la tool!`` (straight ahead) and ``moutachefer``, which means hospital. I just imagine all these cartoon men with handlebar moustaches having a fair on the hospital grounds. In Siwa, we saw a man running pell mell down the street, chased by another man. Two minutes later another man came in hot pursuit. Beishan and I screamed ``A la tool! A la tool!`` pointing in the direction the other man had fled. And ``beautiful camel`` is ``gamel gameela``.
Alexandria
As a city, I adored Alexandria. Far more than Cairo. It was built in 331 BC, honoring Alexander the Great, and has a winding boardwalk along the water, decadent cake and chocolate shops, and fruit stands with bobbles and necklaces of hanging fresh fruit in the millions of fruiterias. Sadly, on New Year´s Eve there was a bombing outside one of the churches. 80 people leaving the candlelit vigil were killed. They say it was retaliation by Islamic militants but who knows. We stayed in a colonial period hotel, with balconies overlooking the sea, and here we planned a surprise party for Mohammed who was born on New Year´s Day. We all went out to dinner and then Sue and Joe detained Mohamed to buy a special kind of map while the rest of us went back to the lobby to blow up balloons and get out the cake which we´d bought at the infamous Trianon restaurant. Mohamed was actually surprised since we´d gone to a coffee shop the night before and ordered a slice of cake for him with a candle, and smoked cherry sheesha while watching Lebanese music videos. So he didn´t actually anticipate a celebration.
My trip ended back in Cairo, and though of course I had no sense of the chaos that would soon erupt against Mubarek, I still felt restless to leave Cairo, the oppressive patriarchal streets crammed with Mom and Pop auto parts shops and cell phone stalls, the Nile fetid and stale, and the corrugation of impatient traffic and horns. But, like I said, Cairo aside, I love, love, loved Egypt and am happy that the youth have won their battle and are carving out a new Egypt.
Red Sea Beach Camp: This was our first stop in Egypt after disembarking in the cacophanous harbour of Nuweiba (coming across from Aqaba in Jordan). If someone were to paint a mural of the Nuweiba port, it would show pairs and triads of mustachio´d men having heated arguments over boxes, and loading, hauling and cargo´ing said boxes with attitudes of menace. So going straight to the Red Sea Beach Camp was very chill. We lounged on cushions, drank wine and beer, ordered banana pancakes, snorkeled, and then lounged on other, different cushions. The Coral Reefs extend out forever and there are tons of fish to be seen. Sandia and I saw 2-banded clownfish, glassfish, masked butterfly fish, and blackspotted sweetlips!
Sometimes there were tough decisions to be made. Should I lounge in the hut, or on the beach? Or in the tent? Wine? Or beer? We celebrated Grahamses´ birthday here on a table out on the beach, and I will never forget the frosting on his cake. It tasted like those hard Halloween candies made from melted scraps of all the other leftover Halloween candies. Yum! On a side note, I was looking everywhere in Jordan and in Egypt for an Arabic birthday card, since we had four birthdays to celebrate on the trip, but couldn´t find anything. For my birthday, Beishan just made her own. I know extremists don´t celebrate birthdays, but it´s becoming a part of pop culture, so I guess Arabic birthday cards are just not a big hit.
Mt Sinai
We first went to the Greek Orthodox monastery of St Katherine to see the burning bush (not the original obviously, because, as the eponymous name suggests: it burned, baby!) but a bush nonetheless. Much like the promised land, it seemed fairly mundane to me, but I´m not religious, so maybe other people assigned it more import. Climbing Mount Sinai was much cooler as you felt a sense of accomplishment during the climb. Ian and I were originally going to climb the 3750 ´´Steps of Repentance" but Ian decided he´d rather see the real route, and it isn´t advisable to climb those steps alone, so we joined the others for the 3 hour hike. Some people wind up on camels while others climb, and you see the chilling sparsity of the desert with the sunset backlighting the panorama. It´s a bit hard to concentrate on the image of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments with the call-and-response catcalls of ¨Tea? Cafe? Cho-co-late? Tea? Cafe? Cho-co-late?¨, but I have to say that the hot chocolate I drank on Sinai, on top of that rock wall overlooking the sunset, was the best I´ve ever tasted. Served in a Styrofoam cup. (Actually, I´m in Argentina now, so the submarino hot chocolates are almost on par.)
Felucca
Our group travelled by felucca, a wooden sailboat with broad canvas sails, from Aswan to Luxor. It was an incredible experience. And far more relaxing than the night train from Cairo to Aswan which was patrolled by soldiers with guns. As Grahamses put it, ``Did I get up to use the toilet? No, once the guy with the shotgun passed me, I didn´t get up at all.`` The felucca´s deck was laid over with cushions placed end to end, and we lounged on these cushions (a practise we had perfected at the Red Sea Beach Camp), reading, chatting, and drinking copious amounts of Stella. I think I have a disproportionate sense of how much I can drink. We had to place orders for the boat, and afraid of getting dehydrated, (recalling my ´black tongue incident´ in Mexico), I ordered two bottles of water and four juice bottles to offset my six Stellas. Well, I could only drink one beer, because there is no W/C on the boat and I had to keep asking the Nubian guide to stop. He was getting annoyed with all the pitstops along the shore, so I got Latifah to ask for the next stop, but he clearly knew I was behind it and was giving me the evil eye. Graham kept chiding me on my lack of inebriation and urged me to drink more, but I couldn´t keep up. I had to ask for three washroom stops based on one Stella alone! We zigzagged along the Nile the full day, stopping only to jump in the river (like swimming in ice cubes with a really strong current! No Bilhazia here!) We passed the hotel where Agatha Christie wrote ``Death on the Nile``. At meal times we spread a tablecloth over the cushions and ate Eish Masri (pita breads) with dip, and at night we banked on shore, where Grahamses (a.k.a Ali) was commissioned to dig out the toilet tent. Really, I should have been the one to dig that out since I probably used it the most. I had five beers left to finish! but "Ali" had to earn his keep as an honourary Egyptian. We built a campfire and sang songs with the Nubians, before thrusting all our supplies below-deck (pirates) and rocking to sleep on the felucca in harbour.
Temples in Luxor
Exploring the temples with my travelmate Beishan in Luxor was a real treat, especially since we did it by bicycle. Mine was a bright pink bicycle that screeched like a broken parrot every time I rode it, replete with basket, and of course, no helmet. There is no respect for bikes in Aswan, so you just have to chance it and hope for the best. We hefted our bikes onto the morning ferry to the West Bank, glimpsing the sunrise of Luxor, and on the way back, we completed the cycle with a sunset ferry ride. Landing on the West Bank we biked past the two giant Colossi of Memnon, guarding the entryway to the famous Valley of the Kings and Queens, where they started burying the Pharoahs after the pyramids were looted a few too many times. Beishan and I spent the day exploring, getting lost, and promising marriage proposals and baksheesh to avoid getting our bicycles stolen.
The tombs are decorated in dilapidated murals depicting stories of the gods. You have to love the Egyptian stories and Gods: Seth is jealous of Osiris for being King. Makes him a custom-made "Cinderella" coffin and sends him off down the Nile. Wife, Isis, freaks out and recovers the coffin to give husband a proper burial. Seth reacts and dismembers Osiris, for finality. Isis recovers individual body parts and uses dismembered penis to impregnate herself.
The murals painted in the tombs all depict stories like this and since everyone was marrying their brothers and sisters and killing one another, there are lots of stories to be told. Some are dilapidated and faded, but the ones protected by glass leave the paintings in vivid and clear detail. As a group, we were cautioned against buying a separate ticket to view King Tut´s Tomb, as there is "nothing much to see" and it´s "expensive" (20 bucks), but having studied Ancient Civ. with my Grade Five class, and having talked about King Tut ad nauseum, I felt I had to see the real deal. You descend down a ramp into the tomb, which isn´t very big, only about four metres wide, and there on one side you see King Tut, encased in glass, a tiny shrivelled up cadaver of a teenager. He looks incredibly small, and crusty, like a mummified raisin. As the Tour Guides say, the only memorable thing King Tut did was die. Still it´s amazing to know that King Tut died in 1346 BC and is still there for the world to see. Granted, most of his burial treasures are at the Antiquities Museum in Cairo (since looted in the Mubarek riots), but it´s eerie to see the place that Howard Carter unearthed, unleashing the hex that befell him and his men.
There are tons of touts in the Valley of the Kings, all chasing you for baksheesh. Everyone´s got a story, and after awhile the stories recycle themselves through the same prologue-to-sale. One guy I met, said, "Ah, you are from Canada? Canada Dry! Never die!" (I happen to like this one. So much more original than, "Hello! You dropped something! It´s my heart!")
"You are from English side or French side? (Everyone asks this as though Canada had a big red line down the middle.)Yes, I can parler francais aussi, I used to live in Montreal!"
I said, "Oh really? Which street? I know Montreal quite well."
"Ah, well, it was a long time ago. I don´t really know."
"Oh, mais vous parlez Francais. C´est marveilleux!"
"My French isn´t that good. But hablo español."
"Really? Good. My Spanish is better than my French. ¿Como apprendiste Español?"
Then, exasperated he said, "You buy my book, Valley of the Kings, good price!"
Ah, yes, now we have it. The crux of the matter. This goes on outside every tomb, every valley, with an entourage of vendors trying to sell you books, flashlights, scarves, jewelry, and memory cards.
We also saw the Mortuary of Hatshepsut. She is my favorite Pharoah by far, a female Pharaoh who kicked butt in the world of business while maintaining a salacious affair with her courier, Senenmut. She always portrayed herself in the guise of a man and convinced the people to follow her by telling them the Sun God, Amun had assumed the form of a bird and impregnated her mother, giving Hatshepsut a holy lineage. She was married to her half brother, or step brother, Tuthmosis the Second (hence the need for a salacious affair) who later had a child with Isis: her evil stepson, Tuthmosis the Third. At the Temple of Karnak, you can see the obelisks she had erected, which her jealous stepson Tuthmosis the Third had scratched off to expunge any record of her. He was jealous of her 22 year reign and hated her so much that when she later disappeared, he was suspected of having murdered her. (Though our Tour Guide told us that the Antiquities Commission just found new information to suggest that she actually died in her 50s of bone cancer.) Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis the Third had a strange relationship because she was his Step-Mom, his aunt, and I think his Mother-in-Law, all-in-one. Gotta love the Ancient Egyptians!
The Pyramids
The Pyramids were of course, amazing, though it´s really the history and execution that you marvel at (and the fact that these people invested more time as the architects of their afterlives, than of their current realities), because when you see the Pyramids they are after all, just big triangular rocks. We were told that going inside the Great Pyramid of Giza (the biggest pyramid-Pyramid of Khufu) was a waste of money, when you can go inside the Pyramid of Menkaura, the third Pyramid, for a lot less. But, again, having just taught Ancient Civ. as part of the Grade Five curriculum, I felt compelled to go inside the biggest and the best and do the ´Real Deal´. So, as with King Tut, I paid my 100 Egyptian pounds and in I went. The Great Pyramid is 139 metres tall and weighs about 5.9 million tons and they say it took about 20 years to build it.
True to tale, there isn´t much to see inside other than a great chamber, but I waited until there were no tourists other than me inside (that took awhile) and climbed inside the sarcophagus in the King´s Chamber, and just laid down inside, imagining what the Ancient Egyptians must have thought their Afterlives would have included. Then, to document the occasion, I texted my friend Sandy, back in Canada: I´m inside the sarcophagus inside the Great Pyramid! (though I couldn´t send it of course. No SMS reception in the AfterLife!) So I just chilled for a bit inside until I heard the footsteps of the next group of tourists. [Side note: When I was lying in that sarcophagus, I was wondering if that was going to bring me good luck or bad luck. I am now in Brazil writing this, and I just met a fantastic guy at a Salvadorenan salsa club called ``Sarcophagus``. Coincidence? I think not!]
Camel Riding
What would Egypt be without a camel ride? Technically, I missed my opportunity for this by not going when I was at Mt. Sinai, but Mohamed, our group leader, went to bat for me since I was dying to ride a camel for my birthday, and some of the others hadn´t yet had a chance to ride either. Usually when you do the camel thing it is very touristy and you are lead by a Camel Boy, however our guide meant business. He taught us how to actually guide and steer our own camels, because he thinks this business of the camel boys is a bunch of touristic bull roar. It´s kind of like riding a horse, except that the camels do what they want, and aren´t in a hurry to do it. My camel was in a bit of a depression from a miscarriage, so the guide attached a baby camel to mine, to give her the sense that she did have a child. Camel psychology. Camels also give kisses. If you say ``bosa`` (the Arabic word for ´´kiss´´), the camel twists its rubbery lips against your cheek!
The Desert
For my birthday, I had the incredible experience of being in the middle of the White Desert. We explored the White and Black deserts by 4WD, at 200 km an hour!! And we did not have the Americans in our jeep, so no speed control. The natural rock formations created by wind erosion are incredible, and we had fun doing photo shoots in the desert. We had had a couple of birthday celebrations on the trip already, and Mohamed pulled me aside and said, ``Listen, Jennifer, I can´t do this for your birthday, because we are gonna be in the middle of the desert and there´s nothing there, I mean nothing!`` I was happy just being in the desert, and getting a homemade Arabic card signed by everyone and random presents from my travelmates. So you can imagine my suprise when, after an amazing Bedouin dinner cooked over the campfire, (the best roasted chicken!), they came out with this cake and candles! I was so touched. Mo and the guys had to bring all the ingredients out to the desert separately (since we were speeding around the sand at 200 km an hour) and then put it all together in the camp, fashioned from 3 walls of vehicles parked in a U shape with carpets pegged against them to make a cozy little enclave. That said, sleeping the night there was subterraneally cold. I wore my Silver Space Suit and my travelmates were wondering if the Mother Ship was coming to reclaim me for my 37th birthday.
The Desert Oases we went to were unforgettable. In the Siwa Oasis, a town of salt and clay buildings with palm tree thickets and hot springs, the women are dressed in Black Burquas whose only openings are eye slits bound by an elastic. The Laws of the Land there are very strict and even to swim we had to wear clothes, which float around you like lily pads and really inhibit the sleek feeling of swimming. It reminded me of an Indian Womens´ Lit course I took in Uni where one book spoke of women drowning in their Burquas, the cloth caught in drains or on logs. I was dying for a massage and Grahamses found something in the Lonely Planet to indicate that there was a Thai woman living in Siwa giving Thai massages. However, when I went to investigate, it was in fact a Siwan man. I asked Mohamed what he thought about that, as Vicky, Jiwon, Fiona and I were all keen to get massages. His response: ``Jennifer, these are men who never see a woman. Then a man from Siwa makes a massage parlour for tourists...I think you better wait to get the massage in Alexandria.`` At night, Jiwon and I went to a hot springs designed for tourists, so you could actually wear a bathing suit. We twisted Jan´s arm to come with us, so we would at least have a guy as backup. It was divine, but true to form, infiltrated by Siwan onlookers who are desperate for a glimpse of skin. Poor guys there, very repressed. This one Siwan guy asked if he could swim, but then took off his bathing suit in the hot springs. And we couldn´t see his hands...so even though we had a guy with us, we had to evacuate!
Arabic
If I had more time, I would love to learn Arabic. The script winds across the page like the footprints of a snake and the sounds of Arabic are succulent. Even learning small bits and pieces of phrases was like a key to chambers of the culture. My favorite expressions are ``A la tool!`` (straight ahead) and ``moutachefer``, which means hospital. I just imagine all these cartoon men with handlebar moustaches having a fair on the hospital grounds. In Siwa, we saw a man running pell mell down the street, chased by another man. Two minutes later another man came in hot pursuit. Beishan and I screamed ``A la tool! A la tool!`` pointing in the direction the other man had fled. And ``beautiful camel`` is ``gamel gameela``.
Alexandria
As a city, I adored Alexandria. Far more than Cairo. It was built in 331 BC, honoring Alexander the Great, and has a winding boardwalk along the water, decadent cake and chocolate shops, and fruit stands with bobbles and necklaces of hanging fresh fruit in the millions of fruiterias. Sadly, on New Year´s Eve there was a bombing outside one of the churches. 80 people leaving the candlelit vigil were killed. They say it was retaliation by Islamic militants but who knows. We stayed in a colonial period hotel, with balconies overlooking the sea, and here we planned a surprise party for Mohammed who was born on New Year´s Day. We all went out to dinner and then Sue and Joe detained Mohamed to buy a special kind of map while the rest of us went back to the lobby to blow up balloons and get out the cake which we´d bought at the infamous Trianon restaurant. Mohamed was actually surprised since we´d gone to a coffee shop the night before and ordered a slice of cake for him with a candle, and smoked cherry sheesha while watching Lebanese music videos. So he didn´t actually anticipate a celebration.
My trip ended back in Cairo, and though of course I had no sense of the chaos that would soon erupt against Mubarek, I still felt restless to leave Cairo, the oppressive patriarchal streets crammed with Mom and Pop auto parts shops and cell phone stalls, the Nile fetid and stale, and the corrugation of impatient traffic and horns. But, like I said, Cairo aside, I love, love, loved Egypt and am happy that the youth have won their battle and are carving out a new Egypt.
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