Recipe for Egypt:
- Start with Las Vegas
- Blow the whole place up and let dry in the sun for 4,000 years
- Crudely the whole glue back together.
- Then you fill the country with several million very aggressive peddlers all selling the same trinkets and good-naturedly exaggerating (read lying) when asked questions.
Some of the new facts we were told include:
- The pyramids are made of cast concrete.
- The Statue of Liberty was of an Egyptian woman and was slated for the entrance to the Suez Canal but the deal fell through and New York got it second hand.
- Women wear headscarves because they have just jumped out of the shower and are late for work so rather than deal with their hair they just toss on a scarf.
And most of the Egyptian men we got to know love to make hints of their randy young selves with American and English girlfriends. Funny, I do the same thing.
In other words Egypt is my kind of place!
Then there is the death part. I have never been anywhere else where the people so concerned about death. This from a cabdriver in Cairo: “An Egypt man buys his grave before he buys house.” It is this fatalism which seeps into the daily life of the Egyptian. And why wouldn’t it if you spend your time in the tourist business which revolves around giving guided tours of graveyards. Oh, and a trip to Egypt is also about guns, lots and lots of guns, machine guns actually. When an Egyptian boy is born he is given a pack of cigarettes, his hand is glued to a car horn and he is handed a machine gun, or so it seems.
Today the Egyptian police are the most heavily armed and the most ubiquitous of any country which is not actually at war. Every hotel, riverboat, marketplace and street corner is bristling with Kalashnikovs most of them with gleaming bayonet. And the police were on high alert when we arrived as there had been a bombing in the main bizarre the day before which took out a few tourists. Hey it’s still safe than a trip to East LA. But then you might not consider East LA a vacation spot.
When I was in Egypt in the 90’s Egypt held the record for the most tourists gunned down in the decade but the 2000’s have been pretty quiet, until now. A couple of recent incidents have brought out the police in legendary numbers and they are truly everywhere. Back in the old days we could take a cab from Luxor the 20 miles to the airport at Aswan but now you have top go by armed convoy.
A visit to Egypt always means to me means a climb to the top of the Great Pyramid at night after slipping the guards a little palm oil. This time they simply weren’t having it! What is this place coming to if you can’t bribe a pyramid guard? We had to be content to climb the smallest of the three largest pyramids. It’s the bronze medal of pyramid climbing. We did get into the lion den at the Cairo Zoo and fooled around with the lions which more than made up for missing the Great Pyramid climb. I called Rowan, Daniel, for the rest of the trip. Can you imagine getting away with this in San Francisco? Anyway the bites and scratches are healing nicely.
Everyone is familiar with the postcard attractions but there is a good deal more than ancient Egypt. Dominating the skyline from a small stone mountain in the center of Cairo is the fortified Citadel topped by the Mosque of Mohammed Ali. Just as Napoleon was not French and Che was not Cuban, Ali was not from Egypt but actually from Albania. It was Muhammad `Ali or Pasha the Great who in the early 1800’s unified modern Egypt. Back then Ali was tight with the French and you can see French influences today in palaces (which are now hotels) and civic buildings around town. Ali did get hoodwinked at one point by some sharp dealers from Paris. He once traded a 100 foot tall 4,000 year old obelisk for a smallish bronze clock. The clock gazes forlornly from the face of the Citadel, long having ticked its last, an embarrassing reminder of the ol’ beads-for-islands trading con. Obelisks were the primo collectable of the ancient and not so ancient world. The Romans grabbed no less than two dozen and there is even one in Central Park in NYC.
Just below the Citadel is The City of the Dead. This is a vast network of above ground tombs where one goes to pay respects to one’s ancestors. It isn’t particularly old as it only dates back or 600 years or so but the very best people mare buried there. Because so many of the tombs are far nicer than a lot of local homes they are now occupied by caretakers. It is a little strange to see TV antennas sprouting out of the graves. The descendants of Muhammed Ali are all there and if you plonked a few trees in the yard these digs would strand up well (except for all the corpses) in Palm Beach.
Down country is to go up the Nile and it was near the Aswan Dam where we really captured the mood of olden times. We spotted some ruins on the other side of the river and we decided to go have a look. We hired a falooka which is a roomy sail boat about 35 feet long. This is the same sort of vessel you see painted on the walls of the tombs and is very little changed in 5,000 years. First we stopped at what they call the Garden Island which was the winter house of the Aga Khan. He was a Persian who liked spending time on the upper Nile at a time when the night life was even thinner than it is now. He was the father of the Hollywood playboy Ali Kahn who married Rita Hayworth. They tout the island as a remarkable green oasis in country otherwise composed of rock and dust. It was sort of greenish but the real highlight was watching three Egyptian teenagers throwing chairs and trashcans on what I took to be a huge Cleopatra-killing poison asp. It turned out to be 12” garden snake, decidedly flatter for the encounter.
Setting sail once again we made our way to the far shore and disembarked at the Aga Kahns’ tomb (tombs, everywhere tombs) and haggled with some camel drivers for a ride to the ruins on the hill. I think my poor camel was looking for a tomb for himself and I felt and if I was being carried to the top by a furry little old man in the 100 degree heat.
We reached to the top after a truly perilous ride as we were in constant fear of being pitched face first onto the rocks but once there we found ourselves alone in the midst of a 2,000-year-old village ruined Nubian town made stone and mud. It was in remarkable good shape and we claimed to the highest point perhaps four stories up. The place caps a stony hill overlooking the Nile the west and the beginning of the Sahara, the greatest of all deserts stretching to Morocco in the west.
This place was so untouristed that they could mange only one machine toting guard. We came upon him eating his lunch which consisted off a single red onion. This was the very definition of a lonely outpost.
A stopover in Dubai and Oman
After Egypt we dropped over to the Arabian Peninsula with is many tiny kingdoms and it was oh so different from Egypt. B now everyone has heard of Dubai with its ubelieveable construction boom and vast wealth. Dubai is one of seven Emirates each ruled by a sultan. Dubai is quiet e vacation spot for Middle Easterners and Europeans but it will never catch on with Americans. This is because it looks like Los Angeles but without much style. It truly is one big shopping center. The beach is what you might expect, two inch waves breaking a dull gray beach. The place does have its funny side. Imagine paying $5,000 a day to stay at fancy hotel and your view is of a cheesy water slide park. They are on building binge like no one else. They have just broken ground on the world’s tallest building and it is expected to be completed in just two years.
We rented a car and drove out of town and in fact out of the country ending up in Oman.
We drove for 8 hours through the country and saw almost no one. Picture four lane freeway with winding through the mountains with tunnels, streetlights, over passes and even tees planted along the road side but no actual cars. In 30 miles there was one small town. At the end of the freeway there was a featureless beach with a single sign in Arabic and English which said, “No Swimming.” Driving back we noticed that the camels roamed on the freeway and then we hit a sandstorm of biblical proportions. I just noticed through the fog of sand a traffic cop whose hat had blown off. We figured he would just wait for it to blow around the world and pick it up on his next shift. The sandstorm was actually one for the books and it shut down airport as far away as Greece.
The it was off to Grece. But that is another story.
