sitting on a small 25-seater bus rolling under the Suez Canal and i'm finally starting to see clearly again. a minute or so in the tunnel and we're back out in the sunshine and into Sinai which is the (comparatively) little chunk of Egypt that connects to the Middle East. it's around 550km and 7 hours drive in total, and in another couple of hours we'll climb over a mountain pass and come in view of 4 countries: Israel to the north, Jordan to the east, Saudi Arabia south-east and of course Egypt under our feet.
two days ago i was being woken up at 4AM and ushered out of the hotel under cover of darkness. a short boat-ride across the Nile in the cold of morning where joyously i was provided with coffee, and as the sky began to lighten the pilot kicked off the burners and the hot air balloon i was standing in began to rise off the dusty ground, in time to get a hundred or so metres altitude before the sun crested the horizon through the smoke of the fires along the west-bank. we're not up for long, but it's long enough to see the sun rise and brighten the dawn into day. not to high, but high enough to see the beige desert become lush green become cool water become brown city become beige desert again. my brain's dribbling out my ears and my camera's strapped securely to my wrist, rattling off photos of anything, everything. i needed to be sleeping now, but wild horses couldn't have kept me from this. after almost drifting into the river we land in an angry farmer's paddock. i understand about 5 phrases in Arabic, all of which are friendly, and he wasn't using any of them. we seem to have come down in his garlic patch. bugger. we've been back on earth for all of 5 minutes, our pilot calling in an evac on his 2-way, burning gas to stop the balloon from draping any more on the plam tree we've landed in/next to, and the kids of the village think this is the most awesome thing they've ever seen since Achmed fell off his camel and into the dungheap. they're practicing their english on us, and at the age of 6 or so they already understand the concept of "you take a photo of me, you give me money" which the older English gent with a shitty Minolta faux-SLR finds out to his disgust.
the rescue crew shows up, running through the fields like a soccer team coming out to play and i can't help but laugh. soccer's big here. turn on the TV, and you're guaranteed to find a game on at least one channel, i've been told. i don't want to know what'd happen if the call to prayer came out in the middle of the final, but i can imagine people tearing themselves in half out of indecision.
the balloon's salvaged, the farmer's paid or fobbed off, we're on a bus down the road and meeting up with the rest of the crew for today's big activity. back at the beginning we rode camels for 15 minutes. today we're touring 2 different sites on the backs of donkeys (vegans, you can skip ahead a page or so now). donkeys are a major part of the regular Egyptian's life. bear in mind that much of Egypt is still peasant-class, and donkeys are strong, hardy animals you'll see them everywhere out in the country being put to all sorts of uses - pulling carts, tilling fields, carrying people where they need to go, eating grass and shitting cooking-fuel. you even see them in the cities, altough not as often. they're funny creatures to look at. a horse's head on a fat body and legs that look like they've been cut off short, dopy eyes with a resigned look and big bunny-ears flicking every which way. the donkey i've been assigned as a stocky little bastard and i decide that since we're going to be friends for something like 5 fucking hours i shall give him a name, and that name is Abdul. he's a strong little bastard. he's also a fucking sociopath. the only time he wants to move quicker than a stroll is when he's chasing another donkey. Abdul loves to bite ass (hee hee) and gets kicked in the face a few times for his troubles. he's not taking orders either (you say "yalla yalla" to go fast, say "hassssshhhhh" and pull the reigns back to go slow. Abdul mush have been asleep or got a sick-note for that day at donkey-school), so i generally let him do his thing unless he goes for humans. he likes Kim (Kiwi) and Angie (Aussie) for some reason and i manage to keep him clear most of the way to the Valley of the Kings. yeah, that's right. riding donkeys up the Valley of the Kings. i've got a grin on my face that threatens to unhinge the top-half of my head.
the Valley's like the Pyramids. you've heard of it unless the rock you're living under's particularly massive. Tutenkahmun's there, Ramses II, IV, VI and IX are all there. Seti I (father of Ramses II) has a tomb, and so do over 50 of their mates. it's just beyond the west bank of the river in a mountain range that looms out of place in a land of soil-erosion. the ancient egyptians believed in having their temples on the east bank to greet the sun and their tombs on the west bank to bid it farewell. it's dry, rocky and forbidding, but very well organised. of the 60 or so tombs discovered, there are generally 6 open to the public at any given time, plus King Tut's which carries an additional fee and has the man himself under glass and a modest cotton sheet with head and feet prodruding. no photos are allowed in the tombs in order to protect the fragile paint from harsh light and the revenue stream of the touts selling postcards out the front. walking through the corridors cut straight into the rock walls i can't help but think that if these guys didn't know how to live they sure as fuck knew how to die. while the relics have been stolen or shifted to the museums, you can see the ledges carved into the wall that have been painted with the icons that scream in any language "there was treasure here". the paintings are incredible - being sealed under rock and sand for thousands of years for the most part, and in the dry of a desert that sees rain maybe once or twice a year, they've been generally conserved in incredible conditio where Coptic refugees haven't hadn't taken up residence in the times of the Romans.
Louise, Mike and i run around doing our now usual thing until it's time to put more sun cream on and head for the donkeys again. it's hot but not stupid in the sun, pale desert and sandstone under our feet, blue sky above. it's not the cobalt-blue of home, but it's the clearest i've seen in six months. between the felucca and the temples my tan's coming back and my arms are going golden again. my vitamin D levels must be through the roof, but i really don't want to be burning so we're getting regular protection on. Louise is doing a good job of not going too red, but Mike didn't listen on the felucca and wound up copping a roasting - tomato face, raw shoulders, chest and back. i DID tell him so.
i can't find Abdul. where the fuck have you gone, you nasty little prick? wait... all the other donkeys have riders apart from that one with a black saddle who's trying to run off. i'll grab you one then. i shall call you Mohammed and sweet fuckery you do NOT like being behind anyone, do you? i seem to have nicked Mike's donkey - it was unintentional, i swear. i keep trying to slow him down so that i can be sociable, but he's charging ahead like nobody's business, and he knows the way. i'm rattling off more photos and manage to get a couple of good ones of Louise on her even-shorter-than-normal little steed. he's well behaved though, unlike Adbul the psycho or Mohammed the speed-freak. riding donkeys is fun, i have to say. ignore the sore groin and inside-leg, give your donkey a bit of free reign and you make a happy pair. i'm kinda digging the low carbon-footprint aspect of this part of the trip. there were a few teething problems at the start of course - mostly fecal related. an unfortunate aspect of the riding position is that if you're not careful your feet are right in the Dump Zone for any donkey in front and to either side. donkeys, like camels, will piss and shit whenever and wherever they want, including on the run. Bo and Megan both cop shoefulls. in open shoes. miles from running water. crap. thank fuck for jeans at Steel Blue boots...
an hour or so later we pull up at the Temple of Hapshetsut, one of Egypt's first ruling queens. she took the throne off her nephew Demoses III who may not may not have been a bit of a dingbat and ruled nicely for a while before he turned the tables, knocked her off and defaced her temple. it's built up the side of the Valley of the Queen and was been extensively rebuilt back in the 80's it's 3 levels, sloping back up the mountain and it's pretty much all pillars and statues. there's not much of it to see, but there are plenty of opportunities for photos. it's beautiful and incredible but i'm getting templed-out. ever since the Temple of Isis back near Aswan, and Abu Simbel out in the middle of fucking nowhere, i've been getting less and less out of them all, and we still haven't done Karnak yet.
back on the road and on Mohammed's back and the race is on. Jr (the most... effervescent of the americans) is riding side saddle and wants a race. Mohammed snorts and charges off leaving him in our dust. good Mohammed. yes, you may stop and eat some of that farmer's wheat. we've been riding through some incredible countryside - dusty, rocky desert baked by the sun, laughed at and photographed by tourists in their coaches, lush greenery with crops and palm trees, our donkeys grabbing quick bites to eat, main streets of villages, being waved and grinned at by the locals. Salaam allekum brother! Soobie tells us we're experiencing what the locals do every day. petrol's expensive but grass is cheap. beasts of burden are the tractor of choice for the peasant farmer. coaches and tour buses encapsulate you from the world around you and while i love air conditioning as much as anyone else for a couple of hours i'm swimming in it. rock up on a coach and the locals go "yeah, whatever, buy stuff." roll up with a sore arse and a shit-eating grin on a donkey and you're one of the boys (PS - "buy stuff").
it's time to say goodbye to Mohammed and cross back over to the east bank. i can see a bridge a kilometre or two down the river, but hopping a boat's quicker and an hour later we're at the Temple of Karnak with a stomach full of Maccas (it was quick and easy and we were short on time - that's my excuse and i'm sticking to it). it's the biggest of the temples in Egypt - 1.5 square kilometres of structures, pillars and rubble. there was a major earthquake a few hundred years ago which laid waste to a lot of these temples. Karnak was inhabited by a tribe of miscreants a millenia or so ago and when they finally got moved along they opened the retaining wall and flooded the entire thing with water from the Nile. by the time the damage was complete there were barely two stones standing one atop the other and since then it's been rebuilt and restored as best they could. it goes on and on, fields of massive pillars open into courtyards which lead through arches into open areas into closes and more courtyards. there's no time to explore the whole thing. factor half a day minimum if you want to eyeball every stone and carving in the place. for hundreds of years every king who came to power added to it, expanding, installing their own monuments, statues and halls. a single-minded intent to not just maintain but improve. Ramses II and III played parts in its construction and it's that sort of fame that makes the tour. Louise and i are shattered and wind up just wandering semi-randomly through as much of it as we can before sheltering in the cool and quiet of Ramses III's hall of pillars. it's peaceful and quiet and solemnly mind-melting. we've been moving pretty much constantly for 12 hours now and it's starting to bite. Karnak's the last temple on the tour and i'm as relieved as i am disappointed. i want to see more, but my brain can't process it.
getting back to the hotel we have 4 or so hours to shower, repack and find some food before we're moving on again on the night train back to Cairo. a hot shower helps to restore my sanity a little, and i finish posting my pre-written entries downstairs and editing out some glaring mistakes i'd made the day before. due to the lack of available (by which i mean free) internet i've been writing as i have the time. 8400 words have just been broadcasted to the ether which is immensely satisfying and terrifying at the same time.
there's a storm brewing between me and Louise and the first lightning strikes while we're sitting in an Egyptian takeaway. nerves have been raw since the first night on the felucca and the constant lack of sleep has helped not a jot. we've both got issues with the other and while nothing's said, we both know that the moment we have some time alone it's going to be on for young and old. my food's out fairly quickly all told, but hers is still in limbo by the time i'm finished mine. we get it to go and while walking back to the hotel i finally tear into a peddler who didn't take us ignoring him as a signal to leave us alone and is chasing us down the road waving a shirt at us. i've bad a gut full - of sleep deprivation, of questionable food, of buying litre after litre of water because you can't drink from the tap, of feeling like shit but still trying to smile, of never having a moment to myself, of being chased down the road by fucking peddlers and the look of terror and shock on his face when i looked over my shoulder and said mate, FUCK OFF! almost made it worth it.
things are icy all the way to the train and the moment it starts moving i grab my shoulder bag and set up my Eee in the bar carriage, beg the bartender to let me stay there without buying a drink and try to do some writing. Derek joins me and we start to have a chat when Louise shows up all smiles with her bottle of vodka stowed in her sleeping bag-bag and in a moment of aggravation and frustration i say louise, could you please just Go Away for like, 20 minutes? to which she says chirpily "No!" and storms out.
it all blows up the next morning in Cairo. i've slept on the train in as much as i closed my eyes and time passed, but i couldn't tell you anything i saw out of the window on the bus to the hotel. Louise heads off to get some breakfast and i grab a quick shower in lukewarm water and read my book while i'm waiting for the jewellery merchant to show up. he'd met us a couple of days beforehand in Luxor with a range of samples and i ordered a silver and black-rubber bracelet with my name on it in heiroglyphs. when i try it on it's too small and i'm promised that it'll be adjusted by the time we get back from Dahab and i leave it at that. i'm booked in to go for a wander through Cairo Market and a Perfumery where they deal in pure essential oils, but i'm fucked. completely fucking-fucked. Annabel Chong-fucked. out of my mind and out of my tree-fucked. others in the group seem to be able to sleep happily on the bus or the train. Louise is particularly good at it - she's barely in her seat before she's out like a light. i'm climbing into bed when she comes through the door the get her stuff together for the tour and she finally explodes at me before storming out the door. 5 hours later she's back in the room and i've had a couple of hours sleep and a bit of a sober think. she doesn't want to talk to me, but she pays attention when i ask can we talk please, because i need to work out whether i should be trying to get on the next plane to London. it's not an empty threat, either. an hour of tensions flared, grievances aired and home truths shared goes by and in the end i'm not calling Air Egypt or arranging a taxi to the airport. we've sorted out a lot in that hour and it's a shame it took a Category 4 Shitstorm to get some of that out in the open. things aren't perfect, but they'll be OK and downstairs in the pub when i ask so, are we cool? she takes my hand and says "Yeah."
i'd complain about the wasted day but i'd be wasting oxygen on a lie. i needed a day to rest and recuperate. a lot of the other tourists have taken the chance to catch some sleep before the next, last big push. we say goodbye to Soobie who's off home for a shower and some sleep and hello to Wally who'll be showing us around Dahab for the next 5 nightd. he promises no early starts, no wakeup calls, plenty of fucking around doing very little but also plenty of diversions that'll ensure that we're never bored while our wallets continue to empty at a steady pace. Louise and i join in an expedition afterwards to grab Egyptian KFC before kitting out in our beds and looking through some of the photos we've taken on my Eee until around 11PM and when the wakeup call comes through at 5AM i don't mind so much.
now i'm most of the way to Dahab on the bus crammed into a seat over the wheel-arch with my Eee on my lap. i managed an extra hour or so of sleep on the bus this morning before our fuel-stop, but the bumpy roads have prevented me from getting any more. i had a bit of a chat with our new guide Wally when he came down and wanted to check out what i was litening to. i introduced him to "Romance is dead" by Parkway Drive, he gave me his metal-face and put up the horns. all around is desert. i actually saw a guy on a camel shadowing the road a couple of minutes ago. there's actually mobile reception out here, if you'll believe it. we're on a major highway so i guess it's not that surprising, but i'll admit to being a little shocked when Wally's phone rang a little while ago. this is the second last of the sleepless days because tonight at 11PM we're getting our shit together and climbing Mt Sinai - 3 or 4 hours to the top so that we can watch the sun rise, then visit the Monostery of the Burning Bush. i've got a few things to say about that, but right now i'm tired and emotional and feel the need to be sociable so i'm going to save my battery and talk about it once i've been there, worked on my tan, swum in the Red Sea and had a good seafood dinner instead.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Egypt Day 6: all aboard Soobie's Sleep Deprivation Train...
i wake up with a jolt when the Nubian captains tie the feluccas up and cast off so that they can drift us down the Nile a few miles while we sleep. i wake up properly later once we're docked again and as i scramble to get my kit together i can hear the call to prayer and i know in my my water (which a short time later i'm dropping into a dodgy toilet at the docks) that it's going to be another long fucking day.
i'm still groggy from the day before - we're off the feluccas before the sun's high or the chill's burned off but two cups of instant coffee can't burn the haze out of my head. the bus arrives and takes us to Komombo Temple, then Edfu temple. more temples, more carved stone, more photos, but the details don't stick. i'm overwhelmed by pharohs and gods and temples and carvings and paintings, but each temple we go to i charge around taking photos. the tour i'm on is jam-packed and in order to make everything fit sleep is the first thing that gets sacrificed. everyone's feeling it, and everyone's muttering about the string of early starts. sleeping on a sitter-carriage on a train overnight sucks, but we all do that sort of thing when it's expedient. having a 2:30AM start the next night, then shifty sleep on a boat, then a 4AM start directly afterwards is turning into murder.
Komombo and Edfu Temples are beautiful examples of ancient Egyptian architecture and excess in their worship. after seeing the painted engravings at Abu Simbel you start seeing these places in a new light - imagining them as they once must have been - covered in paint and gold-leaf, shining under the clear blue skies and the Egyptian sun. Edfu especially has hidden nooks and crannies, passageways to locked-off rooftops that beg to be explored. when Mike, Louise and i venture up one of them an elderly bedouin points out points of interest on the walls before putting his hand out to receive couple of Egyptian Pounds. up another corridor and a surly local makes way so we can get through. 30 seconds his hand's out too but we make the "we have no money" gesture and he grunts at us. you don't get a handout just for standing there, bucko. i find out that the Cleopatra i saw in the British Museum wasn't actually the famous one - that was Cleopatra VII, last of the Ptolemy line who were Greek rulers, but much loved by the Egyptians because not only did they allow them to continue practicing their religion, they participated, bringing with them new ideas on architecture, art and sanitation.
the last few days are a blur - i had to ask Kate and Andy (Kiwis) what we did afterwards before i could remember. keeping track of everything has been a battle against fatigue and depression, grabbing snatches of sleep whenever we're on a bus or sitting still for more than 10 minutes. getting to Luxor on the bus a few hours later Louise and i collapsed into our room, and i had a desperately needed shower and changed into clean clothes for the first time in days before we hit the street to find the Luxor Museum which Soobie recommended as being like the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, but better organised. a couple of wrong turns walking the streets of the old capital (the capital has changed location a few times over the millenia. Luxor was the capital of Ramses II, although i'll have to check whether it was him who moved it there. when the Alexander of Macedon showed up he moved the capital to the new city of Alexandria - he was a modest lad, after all - and Luxor was renamed "Thebes" for a thousand years or so. now it's Cairo, although that's a story i don't know) we found ourselves in the right place, but with not enough time to really get through it so we save our cash and move on. it was a little disappointing, but what do you do? in the interests of not wasting the last 2 hours we have in free-time i manage to get a free wifi signal for the first time in nearly a week and get online to post some blog entries and let people know i'm not dead (just dead on my feet).
6PM rolls up and my Eee's on the charge again upstairs. the tourists are footing it to the Temple of Luxor to see it all lit in the evening. i've been knocked out of my socks so many times this trip that i'm seriously considering not wearing them anymore and i'm getting sick of typing the words "beautiful" and "magnificent", but here we go again. Soobie's got the biggest grin on his face - he loves his country and he loves his job. ask him just about anything about ancient Egypt and he has the answer and he's getting a kick out of seeing the looks on our faces when he takes us to these places. the Temple of Luxor is one of two which were built in the actual city, and when Egypt was at the height of its glory it was linked to the Temple of Karnak 3km distant by the Avenue of the Sphynxs then the Avenue of the Rams. being the capital, it was the home of the pharoh and since that was a religious as much as a governance role he (or she a few times) needed to be close to the main temples so that he could easily take part in ceremonies.
we grab a feed at a restaurant where Soobie's organised a buffet dinner for us - at the cost of around GBP£4 we stuff ourselves full of good, healthy food before getting some of our devices charged and photos backed up in the hotel and crashing. we've got another early start the next day and it's going to be the long-day to end all long-days...
i'm still groggy from the day before - we're off the feluccas before the sun's high or the chill's burned off but two cups of instant coffee can't burn the haze out of my head. the bus arrives and takes us to Komombo Temple, then Edfu temple. more temples, more carved stone, more photos, but the details don't stick. i'm overwhelmed by pharohs and gods and temples and carvings and paintings, but each temple we go to i charge around taking photos. the tour i'm on is jam-packed and in order to make everything fit sleep is the first thing that gets sacrificed. everyone's feeling it, and everyone's muttering about the string of early starts. sleeping on a sitter-carriage on a train overnight sucks, but we all do that sort of thing when it's expedient. having a 2:30AM start the next night, then shifty sleep on a boat, then a 4AM start directly afterwards is turning into murder.
Komombo and Edfu Temples are beautiful examples of ancient Egyptian architecture and excess in their worship. after seeing the painted engravings at Abu Simbel you start seeing these places in a new light - imagining them as they once must have been - covered in paint and gold-leaf, shining under the clear blue skies and the Egyptian sun. Edfu especially has hidden nooks and crannies, passageways to locked-off rooftops that beg to be explored. when Mike, Louise and i venture up one of them an elderly bedouin points out points of interest on the walls before putting his hand out to receive couple of Egyptian Pounds. up another corridor and a surly local makes way so we can get through. 30 seconds his hand's out too but we make the "we have no money" gesture and he grunts at us. you don't get a handout just for standing there, bucko. i find out that the Cleopatra i saw in the British Museum wasn't actually the famous one - that was Cleopatra VII, last of the Ptolemy line who were Greek rulers, but much loved by the Egyptians because not only did they allow them to continue practicing their religion, they participated, bringing with them new ideas on architecture, art and sanitation.
the last few days are a blur - i had to ask Kate and Andy (Kiwis) what we did afterwards before i could remember. keeping track of everything has been a battle against fatigue and depression, grabbing snatches of sleep whenever we're on a bus or sitting still for more than 10 minutes. getting to Luxor on the bus a few hours later Louise and i collapsed into our room, and i had a desperately needed shower and changed into clean clothes for the first time in days before we hit the street to find the Luxor Museum which Soobie recommended as being like the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, but better organised. a couple of wrong turns walking the streets of the old capital (the capital has changed location a few times over the millenia. Luxor was the capital of Ramses II, although i'll have to check whether it was him who moved it there. when the Alexander of Macedon showed up he moved the capital to the new city of Alexandria - he was a modest lad, after all - and Luxor was renamed "Thebes" for a thousand years or so. now it's Cairo, although that's a story i don't know) we found ourselves in the right place, but with not enough time to really get through it so we save our cash and move on. it was a little disappointing, but what do you do? in the interests of not wasting the last 2 hours we have in free-time i manage to get a free wifi signal for the first time in nearly a week and get online to post some blog entries and let people know i'm not dead (just dead on my feet).
6PM rolls up and my Eee's on the charge again upstairs. the tourists are footing it to the Temple of Luxor to see it all lit in the evening. i've been knocked out of my socks so many times this trip that i'm seriously considering not wearing them anymore and i'm getting sick of typing the words "beautiful" and "magnificent", but here we go again. Soobie's got the biggest grin on his face - he loves his country and he loves his job. ask him just about anything about ancient Egypt and he has the answer and he's getting a kick out of seeing the looks on our faces when he takes us to these places. the Temple of Luxor is one of two which were built in the actual city, and when Egypt was at the height of its glory it was linked to the Temple of Karnak 3km distant by the Avenue of the Sphynxs then the Avenue of the Rams. being the capital, it was the home of the pharoh and since that was a religious as much as a governance role he (or she a few times) needed to be close to the main temples so that he could easily take part in ceremonies.
we grab a feed at a restaurant where Soobie's organised a buffet dinner for us - at the cost of around GBP£4 we stuff ourselves full of good, healthy food before getting some of our devices charged and photos backed up in the hotel and crashing. we've got another early start the next day and it's going to be the long-day to end all long-days...
Friday, March 27, 2009
Egypt Day 5: the Black Dog attacks (some things are too good to last)...
waking up on the felucca on the west bank of the Nile i can hear the call to prayer. spinning while we drift in the current, the two boats lashed to each other while the captains eat and i can hear the to call to prayer. faith is such a big part of these people's lives and it intrudes itself into the core of the experience. everywhere you go there's a mosque. you can set your watch by the time that you hear the song over the wind. from what Soobie's been saying, religion has been a major part of the Egyptian mindset for over 4000 years. they had 3 seasons: the sowing, the harvest and the flood. without anything better to do in the flooding season they'd build temples - it was the national passtime. in ancient times they were worried more about their life after death than the one they were living. everything they did was about ensuring a good afterlife in the paradise-eternal which is why they put so much effort into their temples and burial, going to rest surrounded by representations of their belongings and servants. unlike to other regions, servants weren't killed and buried with their masters when they were buried. statues and paintings were gifts for the dead, like burning paper-money for the Chinese so that when Osiris took their souls they'd be set up and happy in the world beyond. it seems that the living-to-die mentality hasn't changed much - people still live in wretched misery with the belief that they'll be ok once their heart stops beating. me, my faith isn't that strong so i choose to live in the now... next week at the latest.
getting a bit of the morning sun, slinging my poi around on the bow of the boat with my shirt off i'm not sure what i'm doing or where i'm going, but i have motion and light and i'm going to go with it. the river is a road to ride and the felucca captains keep us drifting. today is idle-time. rest, relax, swim, don't think too hard, watch the palm trees slide by and work on our tans. i'm determined to go back to London with some colour and looking at the golden brown my Macedonian heritage has given me i think i'm going to be OK on that front.
the black dog's been chasing me since Aswan and when we're parked on the side of the river for lunch and a swim it catches up, rips a chunk out of my hamstring then tears my throat out. we've been horsing around, swimming in the Nile, the americans have their shisha pipe out and are going at it like troopers. the shisha pipe is never far away with these boys. every time we stop it gets pulled out and they've been playing with different mixtures in the bottle. it started with purified water, then sometime last night Jr got the bright idea of putting coke and bacardi in it (which worked astonishingly well). after drying off i was about to put my hat back on and realised that i'd been sitting there for 10 minutes with it in my hands, staring at it. 20 minutes later i was lying in the fetal position staring off into space with Parkway Drive screaming in my ears, shaking. keeping my eyes open seemed like too much of a chore so i closed them and lay there as alone as i could be on a small boat full of people while the captains pushed off and got back to sailing. in at shore, up the bank and down the little goat trail towards some trees convenient for toilet use it's dry and hot. in the middle of the river, tacking northwards the wind is stong and cold so i managed to reach over and pull a blanket over me and lay there, aware of my surroundings only peripherally. at one point i know that it blew off me and someone pulled it over me again while i stared at my hand. i'd have thanked them, but if i was in any state to speak i could have done it myself. some time later i slept. i must have done, because time had passed. the game of eye-spy was still going strong, but i'm pretty sure i'd lost time in there somewhere. somehow i was able to function through the rest of the afternoon, PSD in my ears while i read Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross, but after eating i was down again... i don't know how long for. In Flames was in my ears - one of my favourite things to listen to when i want to scream and pull my hair out and rip off my own skin but can't.
after a while i noticed that the bonfire was going and our Nubian hosts were singing and drumming and i pulled myself up and went over to join in... or at least, be there, but standing in the circle looking into the fire with the tourists singing and dancing along i couldn't find any joy in it. the Kiwi boys took their shirts off and did the Haka and it didn't grab me, although they did it convincingly and well. when Soobie tried to get some belly dancing going i cleared a space, pulled my poi out and flung them around to the shocked looks of the Nubians who seemed to have finally seen a tourist do something new, but once the adrenaline wore off i was back where i started so i wandered back to the felucca to write it all down.
this is not how you want to be on holidays. spending hours at a time semi-catatonic is about as much fun as it sounds. Louise is no help - i need someone who can sit with me and hold me through it and that isn't going to be her. she leaves me alone at least, which is the next best thing. now i'm lying here with a view of the dying embers of the fire wondering what the fuck i'm going to do. i've had a couple of these attacks in the last few months and i'm out of ideas. it's not my blood-sugar (i've been checking)... my mind's just shutting down and my brain runs rampage trying to fill in the gaps. Mike checked in on me a couple of times but i don't have it in me to explain it to him. his answer was to force yourself to have a good time and i couldn't find the words to tell him that if anything that's the sort of behavior that'll finish me off. i'm lost and adrift and the only solutions i can come up with don't bear thinking about... at least, not yet.
walking back to the felucca when i could hear the call to prayer drifting across the river, and it gave no solace. there are no answers to be had. i'm exhausted from the exertion of keeping my eyes open and my head up and i know as much as i know anything that i'll be one of the first to sleep tonight. will i feel any better tomorrow? who knows. it's going to be another early start and the end's far from sight. between now and then i'm going to go, stare at the stars and try to be sociable for a little bit but i don't think the drunken tourists will be of much help. i'm in no state to be drinking anything stronger than water and i haven't been. the thought of alcohol holds no attraction right now. i know precisely where i want to be right now and that's further away from here than Oz is from Kansas... and just as mythical. i'm surrounded by interesting people who are opening their homes and their lands to me so that i can see their way of life in a fairytale land on a boat traveling down one of the most whispered about rivers in the world and all i want is to be somewhere that no longer exists... and right now i can't think of anything more tragic.
getting a bit of the morning sun, slinging my poi around on the bow of the boat with my shirt off i'm not sure what i'm doing or where i'm going, but i have motion and light and i'm going to go with it. the river is a road to ride and the felucca captains keep us drifting. today is idle-time. rest, relax, swim, don't think too hard, watch the palm trees slide by and work on our tans. i'm determined to go back to London with some colour and looking at the golden brown my Macedonian heritage has given me i think i'm going to be OK on that front.
the black dog's been chasing me since Aswan and when we're parked on the side of the river for lunch and a swim it catches up, rips a chunk out of my hamstring then tears my throat out. we've been horsing around, swimming in the Nile, the americans have their shisha pipe out and are going at it like troopers. the shisha pipe is never far away with these boys. every time we stop it gets pulled out and they've been playing with different mixtures in the bottle. it started with purified water, then sometime last night Jr got the bright idea of putting coke and bacardi in it (which worked astonishingly well). after drying off i was about to put my hat back on and realised that i'd been sitting there for 10 minutes with it in my hands, staring at it. 20 minutes later i was lying in the fetal position staring off into space with Parkway Drive screaming in my ears, shaking. keeping my eyes open seemed like too much of a chore so i closed them and lay there as alone as i could be on a small boat full of people while the captains pushed off and got back to sailing. in at shore, up the bank and down the little goat trail towards some trees convenient for toilet use it's dry and hot. in the middle of the river, tacking northwards the wind is stong and cold so i managed to reach over and pull a blanket over me and lay there, aware of my surroundings only peripherally. at one point i know that it blew off me and someone pulled it over me again while i stared at my hand. i'd have thanked them, but if i was in any state to speak i could have done it myself. some time later i slept. i must have done, because time had passed. the game of eye-spy was still going strong, but i'm pretty sure i'd lost time in there somewhere. somehow i was able to function through the rest of the afternoon, PSD in my ears while i read Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross, but after eating i was down again... i don't know how long for. In Flames was in my ears - one of my favourite things to listen to when i want to scream and pull my hair out and rip off my own skin but can't.
after a while i noticed that the bonfire was going and our Nubian hosts were singing and drumming and i pulled myself up and went over to join in... or at least, be there, but standing in the circle looking into the fire with the tourists singing and dancing along i couldn't find any joy in it. the Kiwi boys took their shirts off and did the Haka and it didn't grab me, although they did it convincingly and well. when Soobie tried to get some belly dancing going i cleared a space, pulled my poi out and flung them around to the shocked looks of the Nubians who seemed to have finally seen a tourist do something new, but once the adrenaline wore off i was back where i started so i wandered back to the felucca to write it all down.
this is not how you want to be on holidays. spending hours at a time semi-catatonic is about as much fun as it sounds. Louise is no help - i need someone who can sit with me and hold me through it and that isn't going to be her. she leaves me alone at least, which is the next best thing. now i'm lying here with a view of the dying embers of the fire wondering what the fuck i'm going to do. i've had a couple of these attacks in the last few months and i'm out of ideas. it's not my blood-sugar (i've been checking)... my mind's just shutting down and my brain runs rampage trying to fill in the gaps. Mike checked in on me a couple of times but i don't have it in me to explain it to him. his answer was to force yourself to have a good time and i couldn't find the words to tell him that if anything that's the sort of behavior that'll finish me off. i'm lost and adrift and the only solutions i can come up with don't bear thinking about... at least, not yet.
walking back to the felucca when i could hear the call to prayer drifting across the river, and it gave no solace. there are no answers to be had. i'm exhausted from the exertion of keeping my eyes open and my head up and i know as much as i know anything that i'll be one of the first to sleep tonight. will i feel any better tomorrow? who knows. it's going to be another early start and the end's far from sight. between now and then i'm going to go, stare at the stars and try to be sociable for a little bit but i don't think the drunken tourists will be of much help. i'm in no state to be drinking anything stronger than water and i haven't been. the thought of alcohol holds no attraction right now. i know precisely where i want to be right now and that's further away from here than Oz is from Kansas... and just as mythical. i'm surrounded by interesting people who are opening their homes and their lands to me so that i can see their way of life in a fairytale land on a boat traveling down one of the most whispered about rivers in the world and all i want is to be somewhere that no longer exists... and right now i can't think of anything more tragic.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Egypt Day 4: sail like an Egyptian...
i'm lying out on the felucca that is to be our home for the next couple of days, my Eee in the middle of the boat and my legs hanging out over the side as the sun comes and goes from my feet. i've been in a cone of isolation with my PSD plugged in for the last 2 and a half hours while the tourists laze and play around me. the Nile flows from the south, but the wind blows from the north so we're tacking up the river. i didn't sleep well last night - my mind churning and fried and refusing to settle itself. i woke up at around 3AM and couldn't find my spectacles when i went to find a bush and i freaked the fuck out. i'm not particularly blind - lying here i can see the other felucca well enough 300metres south of ours (22 of us split evenly across 2 boats that will hold ~14 each well enough), but trying to look for too long without them hurts my brain. i can rely in sunnies in the day, but without my regular specs i'm blind at night or when we're in a darkened temple. after hopping off the boat to empty my bladder i spend half an hour scrabbling around with the light of my mobile phone, oscillating into an OCD-fit until finally i find them next to Soobie's torch... but only after losing one of my ear plugs. i hit a tailspin last night not long before bed and this is REALLY not helping, but once my specs are secured and i'm sure my camera hasn't fallen off the side i manage to pass out for another few hours.
2:30AM is not a time to be waking - it's a time to be getting to sleep. my body clock's not liking this one bit, but i'm up and i'm moving, out in the cold of the cusp of Aswan's late-night/early-morning. everyone's luggage is loaded up into 3 hotel rooms where we'll get a chance to repack, recharge and clean up later, and the corpus is loaded into the bus where everyone promptly passes out again. Soobie's pissed off - he got maybe an hour of sleep after the yanks took off into the night to buy a shisha-pipe and lost Jr. he had a happy hour haggling with the shopkeep and still got done on the price. everyone else expected him to have been kidnapped and the police were called, only to have him show up with a big shit-eating grin and two big boxes. the story goes that a couple of years ago the companies had to employ armed guards if they had any americans on the tour because of the "increased risk of terrorism". that's no longer the case, but the paranoia remains, and if a US-national happened to get kidnapped i can see it fucking things up for everyone else. Soobie passed out early and Jr partied into the night smoking shisha like the bottom had dropped out of the market.
i manage to get a couple of hours nap-time on the bus, waking at dawn to see the sun rise over the desert. it's pretty much what you expect - yellow sand, black rocky outcrops. it's freezing cold on the bus and freezing cold when we get out of it and i'm thanking Allah that i decided to bring my hoodie (the only piece of really warm clothing i brought on this trip) with me. there's no chicken-strips of lush greenery here. here the desert gets biblical-friendly with Lake Nasser and at night the desert is fucking cold.
the Temples of Abu Simbel were built as a monument to Ramses II and his favourite wife (he had 46 to choose from) Nefariti. the larger of the two was to be a demonstration of Ramses II's military prowess, his great wisdom and strength. he's colloquially referred to as Ramses the Builder because of the many works constructed during his reign. it's also theorised that he may be the pharoh from the biblical story of Moses and the Israelites which would explain why he got so much done. one way or another, he's much referred and Louise is bonkers for anything with his name on it. 4 statues of him sit out the front (although the second-left has been destroyed somewhere in the last 3000 years. these things happen you know. i lose things all the time), and the interior is incredibly well preserved. the carvings have been painted and where in many of the temples these have been exposed to the elements and faded or eroded away, Abu Simbel was buried in sand so much of it remains. the light through the doors of the temples shines through to 4 statues in the far end- designed so that the light will shine through several archways onto statues of Emon-Ra, Isis and Ramses II, but never on the god of the darkness who sits on the far-left. clever fucking Egyptians. Louise and i are flying around like usual grabbing photos (not inside though - for fear that the flashes will damage what remains of the paint photography is forbidden. it doesn't stop people touching the fucking paintings and i tell off a few different tourists who proceed to give me a look of "what do you mean don't touch the fucking monument?" we've teamed up with Mike again, as has become our habit, so no matter what's going on we always have someone to take a photo of ourselves.
Nefariti's Temple is smaller (male-dominated society and all), but no less beautiful. we don't have a lot of time. 3 hours there, 3 hours back? 20 minutes of historical explanation and 85 minutes of exploration. there's not enough time. not even close. you could spend 3 hours easily appreciating the decoration, fighting through the (we estimate) thousand or so tourists who are there at any given time with more arriving by bus and, i shit you not, aeroplane (there's an airport so that people can fly down here into the middle of fucking nowhere, 1200-odd-km south of Cairo and see this place before flying back again), beheading the occasional French or Italian pensioner who has no fucking respect. lack of respect seems to be common in these parts. there are carvings in the statues out the front with peoples names, dated back to the early 1800's. you can see the same in the pyramids... everywhere really. writing "Jonno waz ere" isn't limited to the last couple of decades. every forgettable motherfucker wants to chip a piece off to take with him, or leave his names so his rude countrymen can see it when they too come to destroy a piece of an ancient wonder. Berlisconi wasn't the first, and he won't be the last, and i manage to not break anyone's fingers however tempted i am. the last thing i really need right now is to cause an international incident and be dragged off at the business-end of an AK-47. in the Temple of Isis half of the gods carved into the walls have been taken to with chisels - the outlines remain, but the features have been rendered into chip-marks by (scum-sucking, donkey-fucking, child-raping, living-afterbirth) christians who, in order to convert the locals, showed that their gods had no power by defacing their temples, carving crosses into the walls over the face of Isis and Osiris and converting it into a monastery. when i break your nose and piss into the puncture wounds in your lungs i'll be asking you where's your fictional fucking figment of a god now, fucker??? while you drown in my urine and your own blood.
sorry - some things i feel a bit strongly about. anyway...
sitting on the felucca as it sets sail and starts its zig-zagging trip northwards i can hear the call to prayer, bidding us farewell. there was sleep had on the bus. not enough, but i'm feeling ok about it by the time we pull up back in Aswan and while people are showering and changing i'm set up in the restaurant hogging just about every power point in the place, charging cameras and mp3 players, copying photos and backing up data while i try to scribble some words on the page before we have to move on again. 2 hours after pulling in we're off again and loading up on the feluccas.. at first everyone's excited and want to run around the place as we do whenever we get anywhere new. then no one knows what to do and feels a bit lost. Greg's come down with something resembling food poisoning and really isn't liking the cold wind so he's wrapped in his sleeping bag. everyone blames the fish from the night before. i had the fish. i'm fine, thanks for asking. thankyou, cast-iron stomach. Mike's getting the sea-sickness going, but he's keeping a brave face. me, i'm lying around reading my book, constantly getting interrupted... but then that's OK. i don't want to finish it too quickly, and i keep getting up and rattling off more photos, trying to get in a few of them myself. after a couple of hours and 10km or so we pull up on the west bank near to the West Of Aswan village - a Nubian settlement where a family have thrown open their house to tourists.
sitting on a rug in the sandy courtyard while i drink my peppermint tea and take drags on a shisha-pipe i can hear the call to prayer. 22 tourists sitting around buying drinks, shisha, beads and cigarettes - the price of the Nubian's hospitality is one i pay gladly, with a smile on my face. we're smiles and guilty fascination. they're grins and satisfaction, sharing a couple of hours of their daily lives so that we can see how they live day-to-day, rather than having our only concept of them being the tourist-touts. it's a traditional Nubian house - mud brick and plaster, an open courtyard and domed roofs, an industrial-strength air conditioner in the courtyard and satellite dish on the roof. the Egyptian methodology of building seems to be more or less: build some walls in a squarish fashion, then forget to cover most of them with whatever's handy. while i was on the train to Aswan i kept seeing this sort of thing and couldn't quite tell whether anyone was living there or not. sometimes they make a roof out of wood and plaster, sometimes out of reeds, leaves and branches, sometimes they just don't. when it's 45degrees in the shade you don't want to be out of the wind, so you invite it in and give it a place at the table. it doesn't rain much here - a couple of days a year, so it's far more important to deal with the sun and the dust than what piddly water falls from the sky.
goodbyes made and thanks given, we're back on the feluccas to eat and from there everything gets a bit indistinct. i have a couple of drinks, although not enough to really make an impact, by my head's gone south chasing a plot i seem to have lost somewhere back in Aswan. whether it's just exhaustion and night-after-night of poor sleep or what, i don't know. one thing's for sure: i'm not in a happy place. by the time i climb into my sleeping bag and pull a blanket over me i'm shaking and trying to curl into a ball. eventually the rocking of the boat lulls me to sleep, but it's hours after waking before i feel any better.
2:30AM is not a time to be waking - it's a time to be getting to sleep. my body clock's not liking this one bit, but i'm up and i'm moving, out in the cold of the cusp of Aswan's late-night/early-morning. everyone's luggage is loaded up into 3 hotel rooms where we'll get a chance to repack, recharge and clean up later, and the corpus is loaded into the bus where everyone promptly passes out again. Soobie's pissed off - he got maybe an hour of sleep after the yanks took off into the night to buy a shisha-pipe and lost Jr. he had a happy hour haggling with the shopkeep and still got done on the price. everyone else expected him to have been kidnapped and the police were called, only to have him show up with a big shit-eating grin and two big boxes. the story goes that a couple of years ago the companies had to employ armed guards if they had any americans on the tour because of the "increased risk of terrorism". that's no longer the case, but the paranoia remains, and if a US-national happened to get kidnapped i can see it fucking things up for everyone else. Soobie passed out early and Jr partied into the night smoking shisha like the bottom had dropped out of the market.
i manage to get a couple of hours nap-time on the bus, waking at dawn to see the sun rise over the desert. it's pretty much what you expect - yellow sand, black rocky outcrops. it's freezing cold on the bus and freezing cold when we get out of it and i'm thanking Allah that i decided to bring my hoodie (the only piece of really warm clothing i brought on this trip) with me. there's no chicken-strips of lush greenery here. here the desert gets biblical-friendly with Lake Nasser and at night the desert is fucking cold.
the Temples of Abu Simbel were built as a monument to Ramses II and his favourite wife (he had 46 to choose from) Nefariti. the larger of the two was to be a demonstration of Ramses II's military prowess, his great wisdom and strength. he's colloquially referred to as Ramses the Builder because of the many works constructed during his reign. it's also theorised that he may be the pharoh from the biblical story of Moses and the Israelites which would explain why he got so much done. one way or another, he's much referred and Louise is bonkers for anything with his name on it. 4 statues of him sit out the front (although the second-left has been destroyed somewhere in the last 3000 years. these things happen you know. i lose things all the time), and the interior is incredibly well preserved. the carvings have been painted and where in many of the temples these have been exposed to the elements and faded or eroded away, Abu Simbel was buried in sand so much of it remains. the light through the doors of the temples shines through to 4 statues in the far end- designed so that the light will shine through several archways onto statues of Emon-Ra, Isis and Ramses II, but never on the god of the darkness who sits on the far-left. clever fucking Egyptians. Louise and i are flying around like usual grabbing photos (not inside though - for fear that the flashes will damage what remains of the paint photography is forbidden. it doesn't stop people touching the fucking paintings and i tell off a few different tourists who proceed to give me a look of "what do you mean don't touch the fucking monument?" we've teamed up with Mike again, as has become our habit, so no matter what's going on we always have someone to take a photo of ourselves.
Nefariti's Temple is smaller (male-dominated society and all), but no less beautiful. we don't have a lot of time. 3 hours there, 3 hours back? 20 minutes of historical explanation and 85 minutes of exploration. there's not enough time. not even close. you could spend 3 hours easily appreciating the decoration, fighting through the (we estimate) thousand or so tourists who are there at any given time with more arriving by bus and, i shit you not, aeroplane (there's an airport so that people can fly down here into the middle of fucking nowhere, 1200-odd-km south of Cairo and see this place before flying back again), beheading the occasional French or Italian pensioner who has no fucking respect. lack of respect seems to be common in these parts. there are carvings in the statues out the front with peoples names, dated back to the early 1800's. you can see the same in the pyramids... everywhere really. writing "Jonno waz ere" isn't limited to the last couple of decades. every forgettable motherfucker wants to chip a piece off to take with him, or leave his names so his rude countrymen can see it when they too come to destroy a piece of an ancient wonder. Berlisconi wasn't the first, and he won't be the last, and i manage to not break anyone's fingers however tempted i am. the last thing i really need right now is to cause an international incident and be dragged off at the business-end of an AK-47. in the Temple of Isis half of the gods carved into the walls have been taken to with chisels - the outlines remain, but the features have been rendered into chip-marks by (scum-sucking, donkey-fucking, child-raping, living-afterbirth) christians who, in order to convert the locals, showed that their gods had no power by defacing their temples, carving crosses into the walls over the face of Isis and Osiris and converting it into a monastery. when i break your nose and piss into the puncture wounds in your lungs i'll be asking you where's your fictional fucking figment of a god now, fucker??? while you drown in my urine and your own blood.
sorry - some things i feel a bit strongly about. anyway...
sitting on the felucca as it sets sail and starts its zig-zagging trip northwards i can hear the call to prayer, bidding us farewell. there was sleep had on the bus. not enough, but i'm feeling ok about it by the time we pull up back in Aswan and while people are showering and changing i'm set up in the restaurant hogging just about every power point in the place, charging cameras and mp3 players, copying photos and backing up data while i try to scribble some words on the page before we have to move on again. 2 hours after pulling in we're off again and loading up on the feluccas.. at first everyone's excited and want to run around the place as we do whenever we get anywhere new. then no one knows what to do and feels a bit lost. Greg's come down with something resembling food poisoning and really isn't liking the cold wind so he's wrapped in his sleeping bag. everyone blames the fish from the night before. i had the fish. i'm fine, thanks for asking. thankyou, cast-iron stomach. Mike's getting the sea-sickness going, but he's keeping a brave face. me, i'm lying around reading my book, constantly getting interrupted... but then that's OK. i don't want to finish it too quickly, and i keep getting up and rattling off more photos, trying to get in a few of them myself. after a couple of hours and 10km or so we pull up on the west bank near to the West Of Aswan village - a Nubian settlement where a family have thrown open their house to tourists.
sitting on a rug in the sandy courtyard while i drink my peppermint tea and take drags on a shisha-pipe i can hear the call to prayer. 22 tourists sitting around buying drinks, shisha, beads and cigarettes - the price of the Nubian's hospitality is one i pay gladly, with a smile on my face. we're smiles and guilty fascination. they're grins and satisfaction, sharing a couple of hours of their daily lives so that we can see how they live day-to-day, rather than having our only concept of them being the tourist-touts. it's a traditional Nubian house - mud brick and plaster, an open courtyard and domed roofs, an industrial-strength air conditioner in the courtyard and satellite dish on the roof. the Egyptian methodology of building seems to be more or less: build some walls in a squarish fashion, then forget to cover most of them with whatever's handy. while i was on the train to Aswan i kept seeing this sort of thing and couldn't quite tell whether anyone was living there or not. sometimes they make a roof out of wood and plaster, sometimes out of reeds, leaves and branches, sometimes they just don't. when it's 45degrees in the shade you don't want to be out of the wind, so you invite it in and give it a place at the table. it doesn't rain much here - a couple of days a year, so it's far more important to deal with the sun and the dust than what piddly water falls from the sky.
goodbyes made and thanks given, we're back on the feluccas to eat and from there everything gets a bit indistinct. i have a couple of drinks, although not enough to really make an impact, by my head's gone south chasing a plot i seem to have lost somewhere back in Aswan. whether it's just exhaustion and night-after-night of poor sleep or what, i don't know. one thing's for sure: i'm not in a happy place. by the time i climb into my sleeping bag and pull a blanket over me i'm shaking and trying to curl into a ball. eventually the rocking of the boat lulls me to sleep, but it's hours after waking before i feel any better.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Egypt Day 3: Aswan is Nubian country...
i'm standing on the rough rooftop of the Nile Hotel in Aswan and i can hear the call to prayer from three different directions in three different voices. i can spot two of the mosques from where i'm standing - what sounds like a female voice is coming from behind me somewhere. Louise and i are on the fourth floor of the hotel, the stairwell leads straight up from there into the sunlight glinting off the river. the view from the balcony of our room is spectacular. the view from the rooftop is even more so - the river to the west, the crest of a desert ridge in the distance spotted with little domed buildings of unknown purpose. river boats are pootling up and down the Nile while horse-and-buggies ply the tourist trade on the road. i can hear the conversations of the driver's horns from 6 storeys up and on the whole it sounds friendly as drivers honk to say they're coming out into traffic, or that they need to get by please, or please, merge ahead of me. pedestrians make their way across the street with an air of confidence. i've seen 3 lanes of drivers pull to a stop while men assist their wives across the road. it looks daunting, but you get in the swing, it seems. i've managed to venture across a few roads now and it helps to do as Soobie says and keep an Egyptian to my left (they're French-side on the roads here) if at all possible. they know what's going on - me, i'm just guessing.
we pulled into the Aswan Train Station at around 9:15AM, 13 hours and 925km after leaving Cairo. Soobie woke me at somewhere around 7 with a breakfast box. i think i'd been asleep for around 8 hours, but with my mobile phone turned off and in my shoulder bag i had no real idea. i remember waking up a couple of times through the night, pulling the tshirt off my face and looking out the window to see darkness, whereupon i shifted position and went back to sleep again. it wasn't until we were in the hotel at Aswan and drying off from the shower that i started to feel vaguely together. i chowed through the leftovers from the day before's breakfast (i could have sworn i'd seen that bread roll before...) - croissant, stale bread, a couple of slices of plastic cheese, some natural yoghurt and, i shit you not, Fig Jam. i took one look at that and lost it laughing, the entire carriage wanting to know what i was making such a fuss over. how was it? "Fuck It's Good, Just Ask Me" - it's amazing no one hit me.
i wanted coffee. i craved coffee. i took one look at the coffee being served and said no. i got a good smell too - Soobie knocked over his full mug of it and the look on his face what you'd expect if you'd told him his mother'd died. he REALLY needed that coffee, and Derek was good enough to go and get him a fresh one. a happier man i've not seen in so long it warmed my heart. for the next hour and a half i sat and vaguely watched out the window as the scenery rolled by - small children playing in the street, farmers tending to fields of wheat with the river a hundred or so metres to one side and the desert to the other, 3 donkey-drawn carts loaded with gas-cylinders waiting at a level crossing for the train to pass, pyres burning yesterday's rubbish. the fertile land surrounding the Nile is thin in many parts - at one point the tracks seemed to act as the terminator between life and death with fields stretching a stone's throw to the bank of the river on the right and nothing but rocky sand to the left. on one side it's lush and green, the other: desolate.
out of the train station, on a 5 minute bus ride and into the hotel where we get our briefing, keys, and a couple of hours to sort ourselves out before lunch and today's tour. i waste my time showering, changing, wiping the worst of the dust off my clothes and kit then blogging. i'd meant to on the train but couldn't get my mind in gear. at one point Mike wandered into our room to say g'day and i didn't notice him for a full five minutes - lying on my bed, Trapt in my ears, a white screen full of words in front of me while the cursor worked its way across the page. i never did get my coffee - if i don't get one tomorrow i'll kill someone and drink their blood in exchange.
the Nile Hotel sits along the river facing the cruise boats that sit stately in their docks, flanked by an Exchange with decent rates and a duty-free shop with prices in US$, catering to tourists. remember, this is a Muslem country, so no passports, no service. is clean and tidy, nondescript apart from the splashings of marble and rose-granite. in Oz or the UK marble staircases and urinal dividers would be ostentatious. here they're just matter-of-fact. this country has them in spades so they throw it around like lino. the lift's decided not to work when we arrive so i wind up carrying Louise's 20kg bag up 6 flights of stairs. they HAD to give us the room on the top fucking floor...
more felafel sandwiches down my throat, skin raw from a blistering-hot and much needed shower and a small group of us are out the door to check out the Aswan High Dam and the Temple of Isis on Filay Island. Aswan High Dam was build 40-odd years after the Old Dam, commencing in 1960 and finishing in 1971. President Nasser - the first democratically elected President of the country after the British finally got around to fucking off - embarked on an orgy of nation-building from the moment his arse hit the chair. first he nationalised the Suez Canal - Egypt's single highest source of foreign income - and leveraged that to build the dam which now provides around 10% of the country's power needs through its hydro-electric turbines. pissed off at the British and Americans who'd been happily raping the country through corporate control of the Canal, Nasser opened ties with the Soviets and floated a long-term loan from an Estonian Bank. Egypt was modernised overnight - villages and cities which had lived in darkess now had light, the annual floods ceased with the now-regulated waterflow, roads were built linking towns and cities, the people gained the chance to start to catch up with the western world and the Russians got a chance to piss off the yanks and the Brits without a shot being fired in anger or protest. you get the impression that the Egyptians were happy enough with both sides of the equation - after thousands of years of being conquered and walked over by the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, christians, French, British and now american-backed corporations, getting one in for themselves must have felt as good as the scrawny nerd who finally gets one over on the bully... and likes it. give them another 10-20 years and the Nile will be flanked by wind turbines. this is a nation on the fast-track.
to the south of the dam there is Lake Nasser - full of crocodiles. north runs the Nile which is crocodile-free, i've been assured (any that try to get north get chumped by the turbines). when we arrive my camera decides that now is the time to crap out. my indescretions in the duststorm yesterday have taken their toll - it sounds like it's all through the small plastic cogs and gears that run the zoom and focus mechanisms. i finally manage to get it to close through gentle prodding and blowing, and as we drive off it decides that it's happy again. i'm pissed off for all of 10 minutes - i'm going to have to be careful. we're on the 3rd day of a 3 week trip here and if i don't get to go snap-happy with the photos i'm going to be madder than a cut snake in a vinegar factory.
there's really not a lot to see at the Aswan High Dam - enough limestone and concrete and sand to build another pyramid and a collosal concrete monument built to resemble a Lotus flower which commemorates the alliance and friendship between Egypt and the USSR standing proud and beige as the desert sand all around. it's an impressive piece of engineering. Louise, Mike and i sit around afterwards talking about more impressive dams - Hoover in the states, the 3 Gorges in China... but Aswan's the symbol of the little country that could and i'm really glad i got to stand on it and look around, even if just for 20 minutes.
the bus drops us off 20 minutes later at a stone jetty surrounded by motor boats. Soobie sorts out the details as he always does and we're off to Filay Island and the Temple of Isis, Mike looking a little pale and warning of motion- and sea-sickness. the Temple of Isis is one of the many which were saved from the creation of Lake Nasser by the Egyptian Government and UNESCO (whenever Soobie mentions speaks of them he does it with a reverent, near-awed tone), like the more-famous Abu Simbel which we're off to see tomorrow. in thanks to some of the countries who helped with the recovery and restorations some of the smaller temples were crated off and gifted to countries such as Belgium, Switzerland and the USA. it's magnificent - every available surface has been carved with artwork and inscriptions, inside and out. the fact that it was half-submerged when they saved it makes it even more impressive. we're flying around the place taking photo after photo of ourselves, each other, everything, preserving what our fragile memories can't even begin to hold.
standing in the Aswan Markets i can hear the call to prayer loud and clear, singing in Arabic from the green-lit mosque spire above my head. Louise and i are wandering in the hour allotted, playing with the shopkeeps, scoping out the souveniers and i have to admit that she's having a much better time of it than i am. she's much better at ignoring people than i am, and she's enjoying the haggle. the locals are constantly walking up to you, standing in your way forcing you to walk around and fend them off with a raised hand. me, i'm keeping their hands in view which is part of why my leading hand is up, blocking theirs, watching the other from my peripheral. we bolt for the meeting point with a couple of minutes to spare, a couple of carved basalt statues (a cat for her, Anubis-as-Jackal for me) and a handfull of ceramic scarabs (hers) in my shoulder bag. tonight we're on another litte ferry over to a small island where we're enjoying a Nubian dinner - Nile Perch, chicken or beef cooked in a tomato, sesame seed and onion sause in a clay pot (like a tagine, but not quite). the food's excellent - hearty, strongly spiced (Aswan is famous for its spices, Soobie tells us) and rich. food finished, the drummers come out, dancing, playing, fooling around. half of the restaurant is dragged up to form a snaking conga-line and we're having an absolute fucking ball, laughing like drains and mugging for any camera that might point our way. back in our seats and a big Nubian grabs a few of the croud for pantomime. he's yelling phrases at his victims, making them reply in kind and half of them can't speak for the laughter. we skidaddle back to the east bank for an early night. we're waking up at 2:30AM tonight for a 3:15AM departure so that we can get in the Tourist Police convoy headed for Abu Simbel - 280km and 3 hours drive away by bus. we still need to pack up and be prepared for a big day tomorrow and somehow i know that despite the serious lack of rest i'm about to have, sleep's going to be a long time coming...
we pulled into the Aswan Train Station at around 9:15AM, 13 hours and 925km after leaving Cairo. Soobie woke me at somewhere around 7 with a breakfast box. i think i'd been asleep for around 8 hours, but with my mobile phone turned off and in my shoulder bag i had no real idea. i remember waking up a couple of times through the night, pulling the tshirt off my face and looking out the window to see darkness, whereupon i shifted position and went back to sleep again. it wasn't until we were in the hotel at Aswan and drying off from the shower that i started to feel vaguely together. i chowed through the leftovers from the day before's breakfast (i could have sworn i'd seen that bread roll before...) - croissant, stale bread, a couple of slices of plastic cheese, some natural yoghurt and, i shit you not, Fig Jam. i took one look at that and lost it laughing, the entire carriage wanting to know what i was making such a fuss over. how was it? "Fuck It's Good, Just Ask Me" - it's amazing no one hit me.
i wanted coffee. i craved coffee. i took one look at the coffee being served and said no. i got a good smell too - Soobie knocked over his full mug of it and the look on his face what you'd expect if you'd told him his mother'd died. he REALLY needed that coffee, and Derek was good enough to go and get him a fresh one. a happier man i've not seen in so long it warmed my heart. for the next hour and a half i sat and vaguely watched out the window as the scenery rolled by - small children playing in the street, farmers tending to fields of wheat with the river a hundred or so metres to one side and the desert to the other, 3 donkey-drawn carts loaded with gas-cylinders waiting at a level crossing for the train to pass, pyres burning yesterday's rubbish. the fertile land surrounding the Nile is thin in many parts - at one point the tracks seemed to act as the terminator between life and death with fields stretching a stone's throw to the bank of the river on the right and nothing but rocky sand to the left. on one side it's lush and green, the other: desolate.
out of the train station, on a 5 minute bus ride and into the hotel where we get our briefing, keys, and a couple of hours to sort ourselves out before lunch and today's tour. i waste my time showering, changing, wiping the worst of the dust off my clothes and kit then blogging. i'd meant to on the train but couldn't get my mind in gear. at one point Mike wandered into our room to say g'day and i didn't notice him for a full five minutes - lying on my bed, Trapt in my ears, a white screen full of words in front of me while the cursor worked its way across the page. i never did get my coffee - if i don't get one tomorrow i'll kill someone and drink their blood in exchange.
the Nile Hotel sits along the river facing the cruise boats that sit stately in their docks, flanked by an Exchange with decent rates and a duty-free shop with prices in US$, catering to tourists. remember, this is a Muslem country, so no passports, no service. is clean and tidy, nondescript apart from the splashings of marble and rose-granite. in Oz or the UK marble staircases and urinal dividers would be ostentatious. here they're just matter-of-fact. this country has them in spades so they throw it around like lino. the lift's decided not to work when we arrive so i wind up carrying Louise's 20kg bag up 6 flights of stairs. they HAD to give us the room on the top fucking floor...
more felafel sandwiches down my throat, skin raw from a blistering-hot and much needed shower and a small group of us are out the door to check out the Aswan High Dam and the Temple of Isis on Filay Island. Aswan High Dam was build 40-odd years after the Old Dam, commencing in 1960 and finishing in 1971. President Nasser - the first democratically elected President of the country after the British finally got around to fucking off - embarked on an orgy of nation-building from the moment his arse hit the chair. first he nationalised the Suez Canal - Egypt's single highest source of foreign income - and leveraged that to build the dam which now provides around 10% of the country's power needs through its hydro-electric turbines. pissed off at the British and Americans who'd been happily raping the country through corporate control of the Canal, Nasser opened ties with the Soviets and floated a long-term loan from an Estonian Bank. Egypt was modernised overnight - villages and cities which had lived in darkess now had light, the annual floods ceased with the now-regulated waterflow, roads were built linking towns and cities, the people gained the chance to start to catch up with the western world and the Russians got a chance to piss off the yanks and the Brits without a shot being fired in anger or protest. you get the impression that the Egyptians were happy enough with both sides of the equation - after thousands of years of being conquered and walked over by the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, christians, French, British and now american-backed corporations, getting one in for themselves must have felt as good as the scrawny nerd who finally gets one over on the bully... and likes it. give them another 10-20 years and the Nile will be flanked by wind turbines. this is a nation on the fast-track.
to the south of the dam there is Lake Nasser - full of crocodiles. north runs the Nile which is crocodile-free, i've been assured (any that try to get north get chumped by the turbines). when we arrive my camera decides that now is the time to crap out. my indescretions in the duststorm yesterday have taken their toll - it sounds like it's all through the small plastic cogs and gears that run the zoom and focus mechanisms. i finally manage to get it to close through gentle prodding and blowing, and as we drive off it decides that it's happy again. i'm pissed off for all of 10 minutes - i'm going to have to be careful. we're on the 3rd day of a 3 week trip here and if i don't get to go snap-happy with the photos i'm going to be madder than a cut snake in a vinegar factory.
there's really not a lot to see at the Aswan High Dam - enough limestone and concrete and sand to build another pyramid and a collosal concrete monument built to resemble a Lotus flower which commemorates the alliance and friendship between Egypt and the USSR standing proud and beige as the desert sand all around. it's an impressive piece of engineering. Louise, Mike and i sit around afterwards talking about more impressive dams - Hoover in the states, the 3 Gorges in China... but Aswan's the symbol of the little country that could and i'm really glad i got to stand on it and look around, even if just for 20 minutes.
the bus drops us off 20 minutes later at a stone jetty surrounded by motor boats. Soobie sorts out the details as he always does and we're off to Filay Island and the Temple of Isis, Mike looking a little pale and warning of motion- and sea-sickness. the Temple of Isis is one of the many which were saved from the creation of Lake Nasser by the Egyptian Government and UNESCO (whenever Soobie mentions speaks of them he does it with a reverent, near-awed tone), like the more-famous Abu Simbel which we're off to see tomorrow. in thanks to some of the countries who helped with the recovery and restorations some of the smaller temples were crated off and gifted to countries such as Belgium, Switzerland and the USA. it's magnificent - every available surface has been carved with artwork and inscriptions, inside and out. the fact that it was half-submerged when they saved it makes it even more impressive. we're flying around the place taking photo after photo of ourselves, each other, everything, preserving what our fragile memories can't even begin to hold.
standing in the Aswan Markets i can hear the call to prayer loud and clear, singing in Arabic from the green-lit mosque spire above my head. Louise and i are wandering in the hour allotted, playing with the shopkeeps, scoping out the souveniers and i have to admit that she's having a much better time of it than i am. she's much better at ignoring people than i am, and she's enjoying the haggle. the locals are constantly walking up to you, standing in your way forcing you to walk around and fend them off with a raised hand. me, i'm keeping their hands in view which is part of why my leading hand is up, blocking theirs, watching the other from my peripheral. we bolt for the meeting point with a couple of minutes to spare, a couple of carved basalt statues (a cat for her, Anubis-as-Jackal for me) and a handfull of ceramic scarabs (hers) in my shoulder bag. tonight we're on another litte ferry over to a small island where we're enjoying a Nubian dinner - Nile Perch, chicken or beef cooked in a tomato, sesame seed and onion sause in a clay pot (like a tagine, but not quite). the food's excellent - hearty, strongly spiced (Aswan is famous for its spices, Soobie tells us) and rich. food finished, the drummers come out, dancing, playing, fooling around. half of the restaurant is dragged up to form a snaking conga-line and we're having an absolute fucking ball, laughing like drains and mugging for any camera that might point our way. back in our seats and a big Nubian grabs a few of the croud for pantomime. he's yelling phrases at his victims, making them reply in kind and half of them can't speak for the laughter. we skidaddle back to the east bank for an early night. we're waking up at 2:30AM tonight for a 3:15AM departure so that we can get in the Tourist Police convoy headed for Abu Simbel - 280km and 3 hours drive away by bus. we still need to pack up and be prepared for a big day tomorrow and somehow i know that despite the serious lack of rest i'm about to have, sleep's going to be a long time coming...
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Egypty Days 1-2: run like an Egyptian...
11:04AM 24/3 Cairo/Giza
i'm waiting for the group outside the Hotel Zayed in Cairo and i can hear the call to prayer echoing off the buildings. i'm standing outside the Papyrus Temple in Giza and the call to prayer is going out over the tannoy at a nearby mosque. i barely notice the church spires in London, although if i search my memory i know that there are many. here the mosques are everywhere and when you're not used to seeing their tall, cylindrical spires then you notice them every time they break up the skyline. Egypt's been taken over time and again over the millenia since its own military power faded. they used to be the major power in the region, regularly fighting off the tribes of what is now Libya, the Nubians to the south and the Hittites from the East. since then the Persians (Xerxes), the Greeks (Alexander of Macedon), the Romans (Julius Ceasar), then later by the French (Napoleon) and English (who really cares? the English love taking over places - i swear they dived on Egypt so that they wouldn't feel left out). they've all left their mark in one way or another, but Islam stuck as it has a habit to, and now over 80% of the country is Moslem, the rest being Coptic Orthodox (yet another flavor of christian) and "Other".
flying into Cairo i didn't get to see much - sitting over the wing makes for shithouse mid-air sight-seeing. the BMI flight touched down in un-noteworthy fashion and parked. no terminal arms for these guys - it's an aeroplane car park. everyone hops out and onto buses that take you to the entrance. US$15 buys you a visa from the bank which gets pasted into your passport, then a surly looking guy stamps it and you're in Egypt. standing just inside the doors in no-man's-land were a couple of guys in suits or polo shirts waving clipboards with the tour company's names on them. hopping a tour seems the be one of the most popular ways to see this place. the signs are in Arabic. the people have a very different custom to where we're used to and getting around can be a nightmare even if you live here so why the fuck not? pay over some coin and let someone else deal with the mess while you get led around by the nose. GoBus have kept an eye on us every step of the way since we pulled up and there's been sights and tours and buses to everywhere we've been scheduled to go, but also with plenty of optional activities that you can take or leave if you just want some downtime or do your own thing.
the busload of people flying in from the UK for the tour assembled, shook hands, got to know and bummed smokes off each other outside the airport and we were loaded into a minibus to head for the hotel down an avenue lined with policemen every 50 metres or so (the President went for a drive earlier, so the coppers were out to keep an eye on things. apparently he can't understand why people think Cairo has a traffic problem) until suddenly the coppers were gone and the drivers threw their good behavior out of the window along with the rest of their rubbish. driving in Malaysia is a little daunting. roads in Thailand are pretty insane. Cairo's off the fucking charts. lanes? red lights? an Egyptian craves not these things. everyone's going everywhere and somehow, miraculously, i haven't seen any crashes or fatalities. Allah watches over these people or they'd all be fucking dead.
the tour company has deals going with hotels in the various tourist cities, or at least the prominent joint-signage leads me to believe. the bus pulls into a back-alley area of Cairo and disgorges wild-eyed tourists. the hotel's clean and tidy - two security guards ignore the beeping metal detector built into the doorway and the bar staff nod and smile while we eventually stop trying to work out what the fuck's going on and start to go with the flow. our passports disappear for a while, and eventually Louise and i are handed a room key and led up the elevator which's been painted with ancient-Egyptian themes. there are more of them in our comfortable little room and of course i can't resist taking photos. downstairs is a cafe with a room full of rugs, cushions and a low table with a hookah in pride of place - a couple of the Americans are already into the Shisha and there's a vibe of "what the hell?" floating around the place while the Aussies and the Kiwis start trying out the local brew. Louise and i have signed up for the evening's cultural event - a cuise down the Nile with a buffet and entertainment: a live DJ with singers and a troupe of drummers playing for the dervish and the belly dancer who come out after we've all finished eating and play with the crowd. she boogies on down, dragging the occasional member of the audience out to dance like a monkey before going table to table, cleavage flashing for the "professional" photographers who'll take your photo, get it printed out quick and try to sell it to you afterwards. it's popular around here, a slightly less sleazy version of "pay me 5 dollars for this photo or my father will beat me" game. yay! i'm in a photo with a half-naked (and very attractive) Egyptian girl! thanks but no my friend. the Dervish comes out, all copper-toned arabic good looks and a cheeky sense of humor, spinning like... well, a Dervish really. castinettes and skirts, pouring a glass of water and drinking it without stopping and spinning one of his skirts over his head while he goes over to give the ancient shrieking Cuban a kiss, which just makes him go off more. he was a old, white-haired gent who can't be long for this world, but he was having the time of his life... or what's left of it. i swear though, if he believes in reincarnation he's coming back as a fucking London Ambulance siren.
our friend the Dervish takes a break and his little buddy comes back. as something of a warmup there was a midget who came out to spin around and get some laughs. he was good though, and it's kinda nice to see that he's found a profession. where he can make some money and milk the tourist dollar. tourism is Egypt's 2nd biggest foreign-income. what the first is i've not yet been told but i'll pass it on if i find out. everything's designed to get you to come and spend up while you're here. it's a Developing Country, and with one of the Seven Ancient Wonders (unless they changed the list on me), on top of the beautiful temples and mysterious tombs, the beauty of the Nile and the fruits of its banks people are coming here in droves. if you come anyway, maybe you buy some postcards? i have beautiful statues. take a look at these laser-engraved pyramids my friend? i love your moustache! you look like Arab! where are you from! Aussie aussie aussie!
after a well needed crash we're up and downstairs in the restaurant by 7 for breakfast - a buffet of odds and sods - before loading up in the bus to head for the Cairo Museum. our guide is a funny Egyptian called Souphi, or Soobie as we're all calling him. he knows enough about the museum to be a guide there, and it shows. i thought the British Museum was a bit over the top. the Egyptian Museum in Cairo was once an impressive buiding, now run down with dust everywhere and the paint peeling. it's huge, and stuffed to the rafters with as many monuments, statues and relics as they can squeeze in there. this is where you can find pretty much the entirety of Tutenkahmun's Tomb, encased in glass and polished to perfection. Tut's was one of the few tombs that wasn't looted over the centuries - when they found it it was perfect, and because they didn't find it until after the British stopped being imperialistic arseholes they didn't get to nick any of it, so EVERYTHING is there, either gold or covered in gold leaf. it's impressive enough to knock you for 6, gaudy enough to make a Fillipino blush, as magnificent as anything i've ever seen. Tut died around the age of 19 in what archaeologists think may have been a hunting accident and the people were ao agrieved that he hadn't had the chance to build up much by way of riches that they went insane, loading him with everything they could find. the Pharohs were the sons of the Sun God Emon-Ra, and the glory shone on the king was reflected on his people. that generation must have gone to a VERY happy place.
Louise and i were left to our own devices for a while. there was the option to pay an extra 100 Egyption Pounds and get into the special exhibit where they have a dozen of the mummies of some of ancient Egypt's greatest kings, including Ramses II, but we decided instead to wander around and see as much as possible. we emerged into the sunshine and the garden out the front to meet back up with the group and head off - onwards to Giza and the (famous) pyramids (because there are more strewn around the contry) via the Papyrus Temple. the name is a bit confusing - it's a shop selling hand-painted knockoffs of classical pieces from antiquity on genuine papyrus paper, complete with a demonstration of how it's made. the were pretty, but i wasn't really caring much so wound up standing out the front watching the cars manage to not crash, pedestrians not die, and horse-buggy drivers not give a fuck about any of them. back on the bus and we were handed fantastic felafel sandwiches fron a nearby takeaway which the tourists crammed into themselves as we drove up to the pyramids.
"This is what you've waited your whole lives for!" proclaimed Soobie into the dodgy bus-mic as the bus pulled up in front of the man-made mountains that just about everyone not living in Bhutan heard or seen photos of. what can i say about it that hasn't been said before? they're fucking huge, beige and surrounded by touts. the tourists were running around like excited children, taking silly photos and climbing as far as they were allowed while trying to avoid being accosted by children postcards, and bedouins trying to steal their cameras. one of the popular ones is for a guy to come up and ask if he'd like a photo on his camel. once up there either the kid scarpers with the camera, or won't let the mark down until he pays up something exorbident. from Cheops Pyramid we bus up to the Panorama which affords some of the best views and we get back to running through our memory cards. we'd been briefed - whenever we're on the bus there's another briefing - and Louise and i are doing the optional extra: we're riding camels, baby!
you've heard of camels. big, smelly, foul-tempered, a penchance for dropping their bladders whenever the fuck they feel like it. ships of the desert. mainstay of the intrepid desert explorer. they're not particularly noble, but then neither am i and i'm riding one. loosen up your hips, roll with the rock, sit back and enjoy the view... or in my case, capture as much of it through the CCD of my camera as humanly possible. Louise and i are on different camels because a) it costs the same either way, b) this way we can get photos of each other and swap later and c) it's not as if we're attached at the hip or anything. she's struggling and i'm laughing, having a wild-good time. Mike (from Adelaide) and i have reached a mutual-imagery pact where i'll get as many good ones of him as i can and he'll return the favour. he was the first person on the tour to make a comment about my "Support Piracy" shirt, outing himself as a geek. he's got about as much available storage and backup as i have and we're snap-happy like Japanese tourists. i catch up to Louise again and we head back to the meeting point as the wind starts to pick up and drops of rain begin to fall. it's raining, however feebly, at the pyramids. how many people can say they've seen that?
meanwhile, the dust has started to kick up with the wind and it's stinging. this is nowhere near the legendary dust- and sandstorms you've heard about. this is a flurry and the locals seem barely fazed but for a bunch of whities it's murder. i'm starting to get an idea for how fucked up it can be in the desert as the dust gets in and around everything - the inside of my Oakleys has a thick coating by the time we get back to the second pyramid - the cheaper of the two to get into since it's a) not the Great Pyramid and b) a little further away from the entrance so most tours don't bother. the bus picks us up from the bedouin-boys and drops us off out the front - we could walk around there, but this gives us the biggest bang for the least ticks of the minute-hand. you go into a hole a metre high sloping at somewhere between 30 and 40 degrees for around 14 metres and the air gets thick and hot. fuck all ventilation, fuckloads of tourists sweating their ways in and out. across a short tunnel and you're heading up again around the same amount of space which spits you out into another small tunnel into the main chamber. it's spartan - an angled roof over square walls, an empty sarcophagus at the far end. it's hot and stuffy but Louise and i are standing there with looks on our faces that scream wonder and excitement. so much of the excitement of this trip has been freaking out that we're Actually Fucking Here and right now we're in a fucking pyrarmid! not for long though - it's hard to breathe in here and the only thing to see is the graffiti on the wall announcing that a mad Italian called Berlisconi was there in 1818 - he led the crews who were trying to get in and have a look around. there's a vertical hole in the 3rd pyramid from where he used dynamite to find the entrance, only to discover that the entrance is actually in the base, not half-way up. dickhead.
another bus ride gets us the the Sphynx and the duststorm's starting to find it's legs, and from the sounds of things the inner workings of my camera. arse. we get led through the Embalming Temple before being let loose on the Sphynx, sitting proud before the pyramids in the background - a lion guarding the Necropolis. if standing at the feet of Cheops' Pyramid didn't, this view captures your imagination, folds it into a crane and flings it out into Wonderland. you start to imagine someone coming across this all 3000 years ago and marveling at it all, the words of Ozymandias shuddering through your head: "Look upon my works ye mortals, and tremble." of course, we're bouncing around the place like hyperactive retards taking the stupid photos you've seen online - "hey look! i'm kissing the Sphynx!" or "i'm riding it woo!!"
it's fucking stupid, but by-gods i'm having fun trying to line up some of these shots. the duststorm's got its shoes and learned to run. visibility's started to fall and if you turn into the wind you'll be blinking dust, wraparounds or no. i've lost Louise - i thought she was with Derek (from Sydney), but while i'm waiting at the meeting point he's shown up but she hasn't. everyone else has made for the bus but i'm waiting - it's just her and the four americans left and i'm a little worried but no, there she is. the yanks can fend for themselves so we head for the bus and get the hell out of the wind.
it's back to the hotel now, via a local supermarket we've been told has non-tourist prices and we're stocking up on water and snacks for a couple of days from now when we'll be sailing for 2 nights up the Nile on fellucas - Egyptian yachts. you don't drink the water in Egypt unless you have the time to acclimatise to it. usually when people talk about not drinking the water you think of parasites, bacteria and other nasties. Egypt's solved that little problem, but not in a way that makes it any easier for the rest of us: it's incredibly, heavily chlorinated. take a shower and it feels and smells like you're in a swimming pool. i ask one of the Australians who works for the tour company and he said that he's gotten himself used to it, but seriously: steer clear, so it's bottled water for us.
tea's been arranged at the hotel. another buffet awaits with a mixture of vaguely-Egyptian and western food, but it's tasty enough so i'm not fussed. we're not sitting still for long afterwards because we need to get to Giza Train Station for our overnight to Aswan. we're delayed by phychotic trafic, but still on time and after milling around the station ("smoke em if you got em!") we're on our sitter-carriage. our group takes up more than half the cabin... for about 5 minutes before a pile of us head forward to find the smoky, cramped, but comfortable Bar Carriage and sit in sinking beers to make sleeping easier. Egypt heard about the whole "no smoking indoors" buisiness, thought about it for a minute, then presented a raised middle finger to the Eurocrats and announced they were having none of it. times they are a changing, but not very quickly. we're on reclining seats - bigger and with better leg-room than cattle-class on a flight, but not quite as swanky as business - the train's noisy (thankfully i have ear plugs) and the lights are left on all night. it's obvious that these trains were once quite grand, but years of neglect have left them feeling shoddy. the loo is utilitarian, but the seats ARE comfortable enough to get to sleep in. a couple of Luxor Classics and i'm in my seat, boots off but clothes on, a tshirt draped over my eyes and soon enough i'm out like a light.
i'm waiting for the group outside the Hotel Zayed in Cairo and i can hear the call to prayer echoing off the buildings. i'm standing outside the Papyrus Temple in Giza and the call to prayer is going out over the tannoy at a nearby mosque. i barely notice the church spires in London, although if i search my memory i know that there are many. here the mosques are everywhere and when you're not used to seeing their tall, cylindrical spires then you notice them every time they break up the skyline. Egypt's been taken over time and again over the millenia since its own military power faded. they used to be the major power in the region, regularly fighting off the tribes of what is now Libya, the Nubians to the south and the Hittites from the East. since then the Persians (Xerxes), the Greeks (Alexander of Macedon), the Romans (Julius Ceasar), then later by the French (Napoleon) and English (who really cares? the English love taking over places - i swear they dived on Egypt so that they wouldn't feel left out). they've all left their mark in one way or another, but Islam stuck as it has a habit to, and now over 80% of the country is Moslem, the rest being Coptic Orthodox (yet another flavor of christian) and "Other".
flying into Cairo i didn't get to see much - sitting over the wing makes for shithouse mid-air sight-seeing. the BMI flight touched down in un-noteworthy fashion and parked. no terminal arms for these guys - it's an aeroplane car park. everyone hops out and onto buses that take you to the entrance. US$15 buys you a visa from the bank which gets pasted into your passport, then a surly looking guy stamps it and you're in Egypt. standing just inside the doors in no-man's-land were a couple of guys in suits or polo shirts waving clipboards with the tour company's names on them. hopping a tour seems the be one of the most popular ways to see this place. the signs are in Arabic. the people have a very different custom to where we're used to and getting around can be a nightmare even if you live here so why the fuck not? pay over some coin and let someone else deal with the mess while you get led around by the nose. GoBus have kept an eye on us every step of the way since we pulled up and there's been sights and tours and buses to everywhere we've been scheduled to go, but also with plenty of optional activities that you can take or leave if you just want some downtime or do your own thing.
the busload of people flying in from the UK for the tour assembled, shook hands, got to know and bummed smokes off each other outside the airport and we were loaded into a minibus to head for the hotel down an avenue lined with policemen every 50 metres or so (the President went for a drive earlier, so the coppers were out to keep an eye on things. apparently he can't understand why people think Cairo has a traffic problem) until suddenly the coppers were gone and the drivers threw their good behavior out of the window along with the rest of their rubbish. driving in Malaysia is a little daunting. roads in Thailand are pretty insane. Cairo's off the fucking charts. lanes? red lights? an Egyptian craves not these things. everyone's going everywhere and somehow, miraculously, i haven't seen any crashes or fatalities. Allah watches over these people or they'd all be fucking dead.
the tour company has deals going with hotels in the various tourist cities, or at least the prominent joint-signage leads me to believe. the bus pulls into a back-alley area of Cairo and disgorges wild-eyed tourists. the hotel's clean and tidy - two security guards ignore the beeping metal detector built into the doorway and the bar staff nod and smile while we eventually stop trying to work out what the fuck's going on and start to go with the flow. our passports disappear for a while, and eventually Louise and i are handed a room key and led up the elevator which's been painted with ancient-Egyptian themes. there are more of them in our comfortable little room and of course i can't resist taking photos. downstairs is a cafe with a room full of rugs, cushions and a low table with a hookah in pride of place - a couple of the Americans are already into the Shisha and there's a vibe of "what the hell?" floating around the place while the Aussies and the Kiwis start trying out the local brew. Louise and i have signed up for the evening's cultural event - a cuise down the Nile with a buffet and entertainment: a live DJ with singers and a troupe of drummers playing for the dervish and the belly dancer who come out after we've all finished eating and play with the crowd. she boogies on down, dragging the occasional member of the audience out to dance like a monkey before going table to table, cleavage flashing for the "professional" photographers who'll take your photo, get it printed out quick and try to sell it to you afterwards. it's popular around here, a slightly less sleazy version of "pay me 5 dollars for this photo or my father will beat me" game. yay! i'm in a photo with a half-naked (and very attractive) Egyptian girl! thanks but no my friend. the Dervish comes out, all copper-toned arabic good looks and a cheeky sense of humor, spinning like... well, a Dervish really. castinettes and skirts, pouring a glass of water and drinking it without stopping and spinning one of his skirts over his head while he goes over to give the ancient shrieking Cuban a kiss, which just makes him go off more. he was a old, white-haired gent who can't be long for this world, but he was having the time of his life... or what's left of it. i swear though, if he believes in reincarnation he's coming back as a fucking London Ambulance siren.
our friend the Dervish takes a break and his little buddy comes back. as something of a warmup there was a midget who came out to spin around and get some laughs. he was good though, and it's kinda nice to see that he's found a profession. where he can make some money and milk the tourist dollar. tourism is Egypt's 2nd biggest foreign-income. what the first is i've not yet been told but i'll pass it on if i find out. everything's designed to get you to come and spend up while you're here. it's a Developing Country, and with one of the Seven Ancient Wonders (unless they changed the list on me), on top of the beautiful temples and mysterious tombs, the beauty of the Nile and the fruits of its banks people are coming here in droves. if you come anyway, maybe you buy some postcards? i have beautiful statues. take a look at these laser-engraved pyramids my friend? i love your moustache! you look like Arab! where are you from! Aussie aussie aussie!
after a well needed crash we're up and downstairs in the restaurant by 7 for breakfast - a buffet of odds and sods - before loading up in the bus to head for the Cairo Museum. our guide is a funny Egyptian called Souphi, or Soobie as we're all calling him. he knows enough about the museum to be a guide there, and it shows. i thought the British Museum was a bit over the top. the Egyptian Museum in Cairo was once an impressive buiding, now run down with dust everywhere and the paint peeling. it's huge, and stuffed to the rafters with as many monuments, statues and relics as they can squeeze in there. this is where you can find pretty much the entirety of Tutenkahmun's Tomb, encased in glass and polished to perfection. Tut's was one of the few tombs that wasn't looted over the centuries - when they found it it was perfect, and because they didn't find it until after the British stopped being imperialistic arseholes they didn't get to nick any of it, so EVERYTHING is there, either gold or covered in gold leaf. it's impressive enough to knock you for 6, gaudy enough to make a Fillipino blush, as magnificent as anything i've ever seen. Tut died around the age of 19 in what archaeologists think may have been a hunting accident and the people were ao agrieved that he hadn't had the chance to build up much by way of riches that they went insane, loading him with everything they could find. the Pharohs were the sons of the Sun God Emon-Ra, and the glory shone on the king was reflected on his people. that generation must have gone to a VERY happy place.
Louise and i were left to our own devices for a while. there was the option to pay an extra 100 Egyption Pounds and get into the special exhibit where they have a dozen of the mummies of some of ancient Egypt's greatest kings, including Ramses II, but we decided instead to wander around and see as much as possible. we emerged into the sunshine and the garden out the front to meet back up with the group and head off - onwards to Giza and the (famous) pyramids (because there are more strewn around the contry) via the Papyrus Temple. the name is a bit confusing - it's a shop selling hand-painted knockoffs of classical pieces from antiquity on genuine papyrus paper, complete with a demonstration of how it's made. the were pretty, but i wasn't really caring much so wound up standing out the front watching the cars manage to not crash, pedestrians not die, and horse-buggy drivers not give a fuck about any of them. back on the bus and we were handed fantastic felafel sandwiches fron a nearby takeaway which the tourists crammed into themselves as we drove up to the pyramids.
"This is what you've waited your whole lives for!" proclaimed Soobie into the dodgy bus-mic as the bus pulled up in front of the man-made mountains that just about everyone not living in Bhutan heard or seen photos of. what can i say about it that hasn't been said before? they're fucking huge, beige and surrounded by touts. the tourists were running around like excited children, taking silly photos and climbing as far as they were allowed while trying to avoid being accosted by children postcards, and bedouins trying to steal their cameras. one of the popular ones is for a guy to come up and ask if he'd like a photo on his camel. once up there either the kid scarpers with the camera, or won't let the mark down until he pays up something exorbident. from Cheops Pyramid we bus up to the Panorama which affords some of the best views and we get back to running through our memory cards. we'd been briefed - whenever we're on the bus there's another briefing - and Louise and i are doing the optional extra: we're riding camels, baby!
you've heard of camels. big, smelly, foul-tempered, a penchance for dropping their bladders whenever the fuck they feel like it. ships of the desert. mainstay of the intrepid desert explorer. they're not particularly noble, but then neither am i and i'm riding one. loosen up your hips, roll with the rock, sit back and enjoy the view... or in my case, capture as much of it through the CCD of my camera as humanly possible. Louise and i are on different camels because a) it costs the same either way, b) this way we can get photos of each other and swap later and c) it's not as if we're attached at the hip or anything. she's struggling and i'm laughing, having a wild-good time. Mike (from Adelaide) and i have reached a mutual-imagery pact where i'll get as many good ones of him as i can and he'll return the favour. he was the first person on the tour to make a comment about my "Support Piracy" shirt, outing himself as a geek. he's got about as much available storage and backup as i have and we're snap-happy like Japanese tourists. i catch up to Louise again and we head back to the meeting point as the wind starts to pick up and drops of rain begin to fall. it's raining, however feebly, at the pyramids. how many people can say they've seen that?
meanwhile, the dust has started to kick up with the wind and it's stinging. this is nowhere near the legendary dust- and sandstorms you've heard about. this is a flurry and the locals seem barely fazed but for a bunch of whities it's murder. i'm starting to get an idea for how fucked up it can be in the desert as the dust gets in and around everything - the inside of my Oakleys has a thick coating by the time we get back to the second pyramid - the cheaper of the two to get into since it's a) not the Great Pyramid and b) a little further away from the entrance so most tours don't bother. the bus picks us up from the bedouin-boys and drops us off out the front - we could walk around there, but this gives us the biggest bang for the least ticks of the minute-hand. you go into a hole a metre high sloping at somewhere between 30 and 40 degrees for around 14 metres and the air gets thick and hot. fuck all ventilation, fuckloads of tourists sweating their ways in and out. across a short tunnel and you're heading up again around the same amount of space which spits you out into another small tunnel into the main chamber. it's spartan - an angled roof over square walls, an empty sarcophagus at the far end. it's hot and stuffy but Louise and i are standing there with looks on our faces that scream wonder and excitement. so much of the excitement of this trip has been freaking out that we're Actually Fucking Here and right now we're in a fucking pyrarmid! not for long though - it's hard to breathe in here and the only thing to see is the graffiti on the wall announcing that a mad Italian called Berlisconi was there in 1818 - he led the crews who were trying to get in and have a look around. there's a vertical hole in the 3rd pyramid from where he used dynamite to find the entrance, only to discover that the entrance is actually in the base, not half-way up. dickhead.
another bus ride gets us the the Sphynx and the duststorm's starting to find it's legs, and from the sounds of things the inner workings of my camera. arse. we get led through the Embalming Temple before being let loose on the Sphynx, sitting proud before the pyramids in the background - a lion guarding the Necropolis. if standing at the feet of Cheops' Pyramid didn't, this view captures your imagination, folds it into a crane and flings it out into Wonderland. you start to imagine someone coming across this all 3000 years ago and marveling at it all, the words of Ozymandias shuddering through your head: "Look upon my works ye mortals, and tremble." of course, we're bouncing around the place like hyperactive retards taking the stupid photos you've seen online - "hey look! i'm kissing the Sphynx!" or "i'm riding it woo!!"
it's fucking stupid, but by-gods i'm having fun trying to line up some of these shots. the duststorm's got its shoes and learned to run. visibility's started to fall and if you turn into the wind you'll be blinking dust, wraparounds or no. i've lost Louise - i thought she was with Derek (from Sydney), but while i'm waiting at the meeting point he's shown up but she hasn't. everyone else has made for the bus but i'm waiting - it's just her and the four americans left and i'm a little worried but no, there she is. the yanks can fend for themselves so we head for the bus and get the hell out of the wind.
it's back to the hotel now, via a local supermarket we've been told has non-tourist prices and we're stocking up on water and snacks for a couple of days from now when we'll be sailing for 2 nights up the Nile on fellucas - Egyptian yachts. you don't drink the water in Egypt unless you have the time to acclimatise to it. usually when people talk about not drinking the water you think of parasites, bacteria and other nasties. Egypt's solved that little problem, but not in a way that makes it any easier for the rest of us: it's incredibly, heavily chlorinated. take a shower and it feels and smells like you're in a swimming pool. i ask one of the Australians who works for the tour company and he said that he's gotten himself used to it, but seriously: steer clear, so it's bottled water for us.
tea's been arranged at the hotel. another buffet awaits with a mixture of vaguely-Egyptian and western food, but it's tasty enough so i'm not fussed. we're not sitting still for long afterwards because we need to get to Giza Train Station for our overnight to Aswan. we're delayed by phychotic trafic, but still on time and after milling around the station ("smoke em if you got em!") we're on our sitter-carriage. our group takes up more than half the cabin... for about 5 minutes before a pile of us head forward to find the smoky, cramped, but comfortable Bar Carriage and sit in sinking beers to make sleeping easier. Egypt heard about the whole "no smoking indoors" buisiness, thought about it for a minute, then presented a raised middle finger to the Eurocrats and announced they were having none of it. times they are a changing, but not very quickly. we're on reclining seats - bigger and with better leg-room than cattle-class on a flight, but not quite as swanky as business - the train's noisy (thankfully i have ear plugs) and the lights are left on all night. it's obvious that these trains were once quite grand, but years of neglect have left them feeling shoddy. the loo is utilitarian, but the seats ARE comfortable enough to get to sleep in. a couple of Luxor Classics and i'm in my seat, boots off but clothes on, a tshirt draped over my eyes and soon enough i'm out like a light.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Egypt Prolog: fly like an Egyptian...
sitting in a comfortable reclining seat on British Airways with all the legroom in the world while sipping on single malt Speyside Scotch that's older than the girl sitting to my left and burns like a slow-burning cedar fire is a wonderful way to start a trip. it's a shame that i'm crammed into a shitty little seat on bumpy BMI flight drinking Johnny Walker Red and Pepsi which is more like a kerosene lamp belching smoke in a rude mud-hut. BMI seems to be roughly where Qantas Domestic was a decade or so ago - screens hanging from the ceiling, not the seat-back, seat-separation designed to comfortably accommodate 12-year olds, cheap fucking scotch... actually, i don't think Qantas has changed in that particular regard. at least the drinks are laid on, unlike fucking Tiger. do i sound grumpy? i guess i must do. being woken up before 5 after passing out somewhat after 1AM is not high on the list of things that will put me in a great mood. being woken up before 10AM comes under the "you better be making this worth my while, preferably orally" category of irritations. that said, getting to Heathrow on time for the flight to Cairo fits that particular requirement and so no one died by my hand this morning. i'm being a little harsh - the Hosties are polite and friendly and the food is actually some of the best i've had on an airline. forget Coon or Cracker Barrel - these guys had good quality aged blue and decent fucking crackers. the chicken was actually chicken, not something congealed to look and taste right and the coffee doesn't make me want to go Scalding Jihad on the cabin crew.
the last week has been another one of 3-4 hours/day on the tube, working myself into a supersonic oscillation and not getting enough sleep. i've had no particular interest in going out and doing things, choosing instead to sit around the house of an evening, cook, watch a movie, pass out with the notable exception being Tuesday. St Patrick's Day is one of those festivals i like to observe when i can. Chinese New Year is another. it's almost like Ireland's version of Anzac Day. it means something important, but everyone just sees it as an opportunity to have a holiday and get drunk and i'm all for an excuse to get drinking (you know, like that the name of today ends in a "y". it's a miracle! you get the beers, i'll pick a lemon! i swear that Louise and London have teamed up in an unholy union to turn me back into an alcoholic). leaving work early turned into arriving at base-camp late thanks to a tube that decided to stop every 500 metres to have a rest. down 12km of track. i staggered in the door, sat down to read my email and had the amusing sensation of the room starting to spin around my head. i took myself back upstairs, pricked my finger and got a glucose reading of 14.3. i was pondering the consequences of this when my head decided that enough was enough and made a break for the floor. i was sitting in bed at the time and managed to divert it towards my pillow, where i proceeded to lie for the next couple of hours. Louise wandered in after a while - Inspector Morse had arrived to join in on some beers for the evening and i'd sent her to let him in just as i was about to eject from the cockpit and she'd popped in to check on me and see if i'd be coming to grab a bite to eat. i tried to say oh sweet jebus i don't feel very good and i'm afraid i'm not actually able to move at present. please come and give me a reassuring hug before you head off to eat. i was thinking it REALLY loudly. what came out was more along the lines of groan, moan, whimper which didn't really seem to get the point across because at this point she turned the light off and left. apparently i had the most shocked look she'd ever seen on my face when she walked in. somehow i'm not surprised - the whole experience was surreal like Dali.
regardless, by the time she and Dan got back from the Oval Lounge i'd managed to get back on my feet and was strapping on my boots to come find them, swaying on my feet as we went. i felt drunk. not tipsy, but seriously, appropriately drunk regardless of my drink-deficit. i felt cheated - all the effects with none of the joy of actually drinking the stuff, but then i had a couple of pints of Guinness and everything started to line up nicely. come Wednesday morning i woke up, dragged myself out of bed and through the shower before deciding that work was just not going to happen that day and called in. i slept square away until midday and spent the rest of the day feeling fuzzy in the head and enjoying the occasional dizzy-spell. by the end of Friday i was unemployed again - another contract come, gone and passed on to another temp. he made a comment as we walked out to the bus to GTFO that it was one of the most comprehensive handovers he'd had to date, and i basked in the glow of reflected professionalism. an hour and a half later Louise and i was catching the last 10 minutes of Happy Hour at the Bar Bar Black Sheep down the road from base-camp and working out way though a jug of freshly made Long Island Iced Tea. i'm liking the idea of celebrating the end of a working week with cocktails - the week beforehand it had been Gin+Tonic w/Lime slices. i'm going to have to get another job pronto so we can finish off the bottle of tequila we got started on after i finished cooking the Chicken Korma.
there's nothing like getting back in the swing of things again - getting the job done, digging into problems and being able to tell a user it's all sorted. you're good to go. after being out of the game for half a year i was actually looking forward to getting to work each day, almost as much as i'm looking forward to eventually getting paid for it. that all said, finishing my contract meant the imminent departure for the fossilised remains of one of the oldest civilisations on earth, nestled in a land of sand, disease, carnivorous lizards and millions of people who are desperate to walk away with some of my money. you might say i'm a little conflicted about it all, but i kinda like being on holiday and i cna get another job when i get back. maybe. hopefully. cross your fingers and toes.
yesterday i had two key tasks to complete: packing for Egypt and watching the last (ever!!!) episode of Battlestar Galactica. everything stopped for BSG - a double-length episode that promised to wrap up all of the loose ends and mysteries? i wasn't getting distracted from that. we managed to get a few other unimportant details sorted out, like getting our clothes washed and dried, having hour-long Skype video conversations (Louise's folks are looking healthy and Sandra's hair's grown down her shoulders - looks good!) and making an appearance at Jeff's 30th at Tiger Tiger (one of Piccadilly Circus's most popular, and thereby exclusive clubs. i fucking hated it and every motherfucker in it - 5 minutes after migrating from the restaurant to the club area my fighting-instincts were high-alert, my adrenaline was pumping and i was primed and ready for the first pretentious fucktard to get in my face. we got out of there REALLY soon after that). i'm somewhat relieved we thought to check the tube times for the morning before getting some shut-eye though - we had to change route at the last second when we realised that there was no tube that'd get us to Heathrow early enough to be SURE we'd be on time and wound up having to bus it to Paddington (the shops near the station are FULL of Paddington Bear plushies. awwwwww...) then take the Heathrow Express. great. a £3.80 tube ride suddenly morphed into a £17.50 bus+train ride. joy! not...
there seem to be express services to all of the airports if you know where to look. Victoria does them to Gatwick, Heathrow is from Paddington. Luton, City and Stanstead i've not seen yet, but i'm sure they're out there. they're all considerably quicker than regular tube or overland services, with the trade-off being that they're also considerably more expensive. still, we didn't have a lot of choice this morning so in these situations you do what you have to, which is why two bleary-eyed Australians were standing at the bus stop around the corner from Oval Station this morning at a quarter to 6 this morning. a Red Bull each vaguely took the edge off, but not in the same way that a Sugarfree Rockstar, half a litre of coffee and a double-nosefull of Columbian Snow would have. unfortunately, i've not found anyone stocking the Sugarfree around my place in Kennington, there wasn't time for coffee and i wouldn't know where to get cocaine (although i've been reliably informed that it's easy enough to score in London) so you go with what you can. the good thing about it all is that while it takes around an hour to get from Leicester Square to Heathrow Terminals 1,2&3 by tube, it's nominally 15 minutes by overland from Paddington, so if you're in a rush and don't give a fuck how much it costs then it's the way to
go.
at least getting through security and immigration at Heathrow was quick and easy. immigration especially - it wasn't there. no one checked my passport, no stamp to indicate exit. my paranoia circuits triggered at that one. with nothing to prove i've left the country and no passport swipe on the system i'm unsubstantiated. maybe it's just memories of the constant fear in Singapore - checking all the passports at each step to ensure exit and entry stamps all in the right places to avoid spending the next few months as a guest of the Malaysian government. Heathrow Terminal 1 is big enough to classify as a Decently Sized International Airport. what fucks you up is that it's one of five, and Terminal 5 is FUCKING HUGE. sitting in a plane looking across the apron is like looking out over a suburb. in fact, if they add another runway rumour has it that they'll have to concrete over an area the size of Croydon to do it. the joke is that they might as well just concrete over Croydon and call it a draw. look at it all on a map or an aerial view and you realise that it's big enough to have its own postal area code. the island i spent a few days on in Fiji would fit into the area of Heathrow and have room left over for the reefs and lagoon. do not underestimate the scale of that place. keeping it all working and operating with any efficiency must drive perfectly normal men grey before their time. for mere mortals like me, we just have to follow the bouncing ball until we realise we're sitting in the plane out on the tarmac waiting for our 30 second window in a never-ending queue of aeroplanes who are all wasting fuel while they wait for their turn to GTFO.
what can i say? i'm looking forward to landing and being surprised. my head tells me that i'll be showing up in a crumbling dust-bowl, but i've seen too many recent war-movies like Spy Game and Black Hawk Down so my perception's skewed. as long as i have somewhere (vaguely) secure to dump my kit and some streets to walk down while it's still light before i retreat to something resembling a bar to drink cheap Egyptian beer i'll be happy. come tomorrow the adventure really begins and i find out how many of my assumptions are real and how many will get blown out of the water like an unfortunate dolphin who became overly friendly with a sea-mine.
oh, and somewhere in there i anticipate i'll be trying to get some sleep. right after i finish trying once again to drink myself happy...
the last week has been another one of 3-4 hours/day on the tube, working myself into a supersonic oscillation and not getting enough sleep. i've had no particular interest in going out and doing things, choosing instead to sit around the house of an evening, cook, watch a movie, pass out with the notable exception being Tuesday. St Patrick's Day is one of those festivals i like to observe when i can. Chinese New Year is another. it's almost like Ireland's version of Anzac Day. it means something important, but everyone just sees it as an opportunity to have a holiday and get drunk and i'm all for an excuse to get drinking (you know, like that the name of today ends in a "y". it's a miracle! you get the beers, i'll pick a lemon! i swear that Louise and London have teamed up in an unholy union to turn me back into an alcoholic). leaving work early turned into arriving at base-camp late thanks to a tube that decided to stop every 500 metres to have a rest. down 12km of track. i staggered in the door, sat down to read my email and had the amusing sensation of the room starting to spin around my head. i took myself back upstairs, pricked my finger and got a glucose reading of 14.3. i was pondering the consequences of this when my head decided that enough was enough and made a break for the floor. i was sitting in bed at the time and managed to divert it towards my pillow, where i proceeded to lie for the next couple of hours. Louise wandered in after a while - Inspector Morse had arrived to join in on some beers for the evening and i'd sent her to let him in just as i was about to eject from the cockpit and she'd popped in to check on me and see if i'd be coming to grab a bite to eat. i tried to say oh sweet jebus i don't feel very good and i'm afraid i'm not actually able to move at present. please come and give me a reassuring hug before you head off to eat. i was thinking it REALLY loudly. what came out was more along the lines of groan, moan, whimper which didn't really seem to get the point across because at this point she turned the light off and left. apparently i had the most shocked look she'd ever seen on my face when she walked in. somehow i'm not surprised - the whole experience was surreal like Dali.
regardless, by the time she and Dan got back from the Oval Lounge i'd managed to get back on my feet and was strapping on my boots to come find them, swaying on my feet as we went. i felt drunk. not tipsy, but seriously, appropriately drunk regardless of my drink-deficit. i felt cheated - all the effects with none of the joy of actually drinking the stuff, but then i had a couple of pints of Guinness and everything started to line up nicely. come Wednesday morning i woke up, dragged myself out of bed and through the shower before deciding that work was just not going to happen that day and called in. i slept square away until midday and spent the rest of the day feeling fuzzy in the head and enjoying the occasional dizzy-spell. by the end of Friday i was unemployed again - another contract come, gone and passed on to another temp. he made a comment as we walked out to the bus to GTFO that it was one of the most comprehensive handovers he'd had to date, and i basked in the glow of reflected professionalism. an hour and a half later Louise and i was catching the last 10 minutes of Happy Hour at the Bar Bar Black Sheep down the road from base-camp and working out way though a jug of freshly made Long Island Iced Tea. i'm liking the idea of celebrating the end of a working week with cocktails - the week beforehand it had been Gin+Tonic w/Lime slices. i'm going to have to get another job pronto so we can finish off the bottle of tequila we got started on after i finished cooking the Chicken Korma.
there's nothing like getting back in the swing of things again - getting the job done, digging into problems and being able to tell a user it's all sorted. you're good to go. after being out of the game for half a year i was actually looking forward to getting to work each day, almost as much as i'm looking forward to eventually getting paid for it. that all said, finishing my contract meant the imminent departure for the fossilised remains of one of the oldest civilisations on earth, nestled in a land of sand, disease, carnivorous lizards and millions of people who are desperate to walk away with some of my money. you might say i'm a little conflicted about it all, but i kinda like being on holiday and i cna get another job when i get back. maybe. hopefully. cross your fingers and toes.
yesterday i had two key tasks to complete: packing for Egypt and watching the last (ever!!!) episode of Battlestar Galactica. everything stopped for BSG - a double-length episode that promised to wrap up all of the loose ends and mysteries? i wasn't getting distracted from that. we managed to get a few other unimportant details sorted out, like getting our clothes washed and dried, having hour-long Skype video conversations (Louise's folks are looking healthy and Sandra's hair's grown down her shoulders - looks good!) and making an appearance at Jeff's 30th at Tiger Tiger (one of Piccadilly Circus's most popular, and thereby exclusive clubs. i fucking hated it and every motherfucker in it - 5 minutes after migrating from the restaurant to the club area my fighting-instincts were high-alert, my adrenaline was pumping and i was primed and ready for the first pretentious fucktard to get in my face. we got out of there REALLY soon after that). i'm somewhat relieved we thought to check the tube times for the morning before getting some shut-eye though - we had to change route at the last second when we realised that there was no tube that'd get us to Heathrow early enough to be SURE we'd be on time and wound up having to bus it to Paddington (the shops near the station are FULL of Paddington Bear plushies. awwwwww...) then take the Heathrow Express. great. a £3.80 tube ride suddenly morphed into a £17.50 bus+train ride. joy! not...
there seem to be express services to all of the airports if you know where to look. Victoria does them to Gatwick, Heathrow is from Paddington. Luton, City and Stanstead i've not seen yet, but i'm sure they're out there. they're all considerably quicker than regular tube or overland services, with the trade-off being that they're also considerably more expensive. still, we didn't have a lot of choice this morning so in these situations you do what you have to, which is why two bleary-eyed Australians were standing at the bus stop around the corner from Oval Station this morning at a quarter to 6 this morning. a Red Bull each vaguely took the edge off, but not in the same way that a Sugarfree Rockstar, half a litre of coffee and a double-nosefull of Columbian Snow would have. unfortunately, i've not found anyone stocking the Sugarfree around my place in Kennington, there wasn't time for coffee and i wouldn't know where to get cocaine (although i've been reliably informed that it's easy enough to score in London) so you go with what you can. the good thing about it all is that while it takes around an hour to get from Leicester Square to Heathrow Terminals 1,2&3 by tube, it's nominally 15 minutes by overland from Paddington, so if you're in a rush and don't give a fuck how much it costs then it's the way to
go.
at least getting through security and immigration at Heathrow was quick and easy. immigration especially - it wasn't there. no one checked my passport, no stamp to indicate exit. my paranoia circuits triggered at that one. with nothing to prove i've left the country and no passport swipe on the system i'm unsubstantiated. maybe it's just memories of the constant fear in Singapore - checking all the passports at each step to ensure exit and entry stamps all in the right places to avoid spending the next few months as a guest of the Malaysian government. Heathrow Terminal 1 is big enough to classify as a Decently Sized International Airport. what fucks you up is that it's one of five, and Terminal 5 is FUCKING HUGE. sitting in a plane looking across the apron is like looking out over a suburb. in fact, if they add another runway rumour has it that they'll have to concrete over an area the size of Croydon to do it. the joke is that they might as well just concrete over Croydon and call it a draw. look at it all on a map or an aerial view and you realise that it's big enough to have its own postal area code. the island i spent a few days on in Fiji would fit into the area of Heathrow and have room left over for the reefs and lagoon. do not underestimate the scale of that place. keeping it all working and operating with any efficiency must drive perfectly normal men grey before their time. for mere mortals like me, we just have to follow the bouncing ball until we realise we're sitting in the plane out on the tarmac waiting for our 30 second window in a never-ending queue of aeroplanes who are all wasting fuel while they wait for their turn to GTFO.
what can i say? i'm looking forward to landing and being surprised. my head tells me that i'll be showing up in a crumbling dust-bowl, but i've seen too many recent war-movies like Spy Game and Black Hawk Down so my perception's skewed. as long as i have somewhere (vaguely) secure to dump my kit and some streets to walk down while it's still light before i retreat to something resembling a bar to drink cheap Egyptian beer i'll be happy. come tomorrow the adventure really begins and i find out how many of my assumptions are real and how many will get blown out of the water like an unfortunate dolphin who became overly friendly with a sea-mine.
oh, and somewhere in there i anticipate i'll be trying to get some sleep. right after i finish trying once again to drink myself happy...
Friday, March 13, 2009
... and then there was one.
i logged on to facebook an hour or so ago while i was sitting in the kitchen waiting for my pasties to crisp up in the oven and got an IM window from my kid brother saying
"hey, can you come to Perth for your birthday?"
i was half-way through typing a sarcastic reply when his status changed to
"[The Boy] isnt not getting married on the 26th of september this year."
at which point i nearly fell out of my chair. it was one of those things that shouldn't surprise me - 4 months ago we were talking about how he was going to pop the question 2 days before he went and did it. he was talking about asking her something like a year and a half ago and chickened out. it's been coming for a while, but having a date set makes it seem like it's like it's already happened so the way it hit me it might as well have happened yesterday. i was really glad when he finally did. Theresa's a beautiful, lovely girl who seems way too good for him - how she puts up with the little shit i have no idea, although i'll admit i'm biased.
it's a bit of a strange feeling to know that sooner rather than later i'll be the last one standing - my sister got married a couple of years ago, a year or so after her son John (named for our grandfather) was born. i got nicely drunk at the reception. come September i intend on being drunk at the ceremony (note to self - ensure that new suit has pockets that will fit a hip-flask). i'm the eldest of three, rapidly accellerating into the role of bachelor-uncle. it's funny, because it's always been a mark of some small pride to me - i've known for years that i was fated to stand alone while the rest of my generation coupled up. a penchant for mental-instability and changing cites every few years is not a basis for long-term relationships. even before i left Perth and built a new life on the of side of the country i was woeful at the "long-term relationship" game. i've been looking forward to being the favourite crazy, angry uncle to my siblings and friends kids, the single guy who makes the odd number at the dinner party before heading off drunk to his one-bedroom apartment. of course, having it actually smack you in the face and force you to confront the cold reality of it is entirely different.
yeah, i'm a little depressed about it all now - in 6 months time i'll be in Perth, standing next to my sister and her husband, my brother and his wife and our folks, posing for a photo that'll forever look lopsided. i'm torn between grinning through it defiantly and seeing if i can con one of my friends into coming as a Rent-A-Babe... i wonder if Sandra would be up for a trip to Perth? something about that smells cheap though, and dishonest. getting a mate to stand in so that i don't look like a loser in The Boy's wedding photos just sounds sad - like the obnoxious cock who shows up to his 10-year high school reunion in a rented Ferrari with a model he's paid for the night.
the other thing is, of course, that in 6 months i'm going to have to be in Perth. it's been floating around in the back of my mind that due to the investment of cash and time required to get to the other side of the world, i'd quietly intended that the next time i set foot on home-soil it'd be with a view of not leaving again for a while. i can't help but laugh that 24 hours ago i was saying that i had nothing impending that required me to make a decision one way or another and that i had the time to sort my shit out... now i have a fucking deadline, and inside of the next few months i'll need to make a call as to whether, when i book this flight, it's one-way or return. try to make a decision and the universe will make it impossible. refuse to make a decision and it'll find a way to force you. if you want to make the gods laugh, tell them your plans. i was planning on sitting around with my thumb up my arse for a while and see where the world rolled before i jumped one way or another. turns out: not so much.
"hey, can you come to Perth for your birthday?"
i was half-way through typing a sarcastic reply when his status changed to
"[The Boy] isnt not getting married on the 26th of september this year."
at which point i nearly fell out of my chair. it was one of those things that shouldn't surprise me - 4 months ago we were talking about how he was going to pop the question 2 days before he went and did it. he was talking about asking her something like a year and a half ago and chickened out. it's been coming for a while, but having a date set makes it seem like it's like it's already happened so the way it hit me it might as well have happened yesterday. i was really glad when he finally did. Theresa's a beautiful, lovely girl who seems way too good for him - how she puts up with the little shit i have no idea, although i'll admit i'm biased.
it's a bit of a strange feeling to know that sooner rather than later i'll be the last one standing - my sister got married a couple of years ago, a year or so after her son John (named for our grandfather) was born. i got nicely drunk at the reception. come September i intend on being drunk at the ceremony (note to self - ensure that new suit has pockets that will fit a hip-flask). i'm the eldest of three, rapidly accellerating into the role of bachelor-uncle. it's funny, because it's always been a mark of some small pride to me - i've known for years that i was fated to stand alone while the rest of my generation coupled up. a penchant for mental-instability and changing cites every few years is not a basis for long-term relationships. even before i left Perth and built a new life on the of side of the country i was woeful at the "long-term relationship" game. i've been looking forward to being the favourite crazy, angry uncle to my siblings and friends kids, the single guy who makes the odd number at the dinner party before heading off drunk to his one-bedroom apartment. of course, having it actually smack you in the face and force you to confront the cold reality of it is entirely different.
yeah, i'm a little depressed about it all now - in 6 months time i'll be in Perth, standing next to my sister and her husband, my brother and his wife and our folks, posing for a photo that'll forever look lopsided. i'm torn between grinning through it defiantly and seeing if i can con one of my friends into coming as a Rent-A-Babe... i wonder if Sandra would be up for a trip to Perth? something about that smells cheap though, and dishonest. getting a mate to stand in so that i don't look like a loser in The Boy's wedding photos just sounds sad - like the obnoxious cock who shows up to his 10-year high school reunion in a rented Ferrari with a model he's paid for the night.
the other thing is, of course, that in 6 months i'm going to have to be in Perth. it's been floating around in the back of my mind that due to the investment of cash and time required to get to the other side of the world, i'd quietly intended that the next time i set foot on home-soil it'd be with a view of not leaving again for a while. i can't help but laugh that 24 hours ago i was saying that i had nothing impending that required me to make a decision one way or another and that i had the time to sort my shit out... now i have a fucking deadline, and inside of the next few months i'll need to make a call as to whether, when i book this flight, it's one-way or return. try to make a decision and the universe will make it impossible. refuse to make a decision and it'll find a way to force you. if you want to make the gods laugh, tell them your plans. i was planning on sitting around with my thumb up my arse for a while and see where the world rolled before i jumped one way or another. turns out: not so much.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
i feel so good, i feel so numb...
i walked out of the tube startion at Heathrow as the bus was pulling up to the stop, the doors opening just as i approached so that i didn't even have to break stride to step up and on and i knew i was going to have a good day. i was late for work again - the last remnants of my cold giving me a crap night's sleep and i couldn't count the number of times i woke up coughing just to fall asleep again when my head met back up with the pillow. leaving the office for the now-familiar walk to the bus stop the sky was steel-grey, but that was ok because i'm wearing black. a dark blot on an indistinct horizon casting no shadow in the diffused light of a heavy blanket of cloud.
there's nothing like a good solid day's work to perk up your mood - if you don't believe me, if you think the idea of a 5-month holiday sounds like a grand idea i suggest you try it and let me know how you do. i love taking holidays as much as anyone else, but sitting around with no purpose to your days gets old, then starts to decompose, rotting your brain along with it. after a week of solidly kicking arse and noting the names down in a spreadsheet i can feel my blade sharpening and my mind feels clear and hard as crystal. i'm in a fucking good mood - untouchable and ready for someone to try it on.
last night i crashed back into the room just before 11 having finally completed an goal i'd set for myself a couple of months ago. i started this blog a year ago yesterday, and since then, between Phase Shifting and Futility Overdrive i've posted 100 entries, just squeezing #100 in before the date changed. it was inconsequential and means almost nothing to anyone, but it was something i wanted to achieve and it feels great to have done it. we're talking roughly 2 entries a week, distilling my life into something readable and coherent that people seem to want to read. the last week's been a flurry of over 9400 words - there was a two week period starting just before i went to Amsterdam where i just couldn't string a sentance together in any meaningful way, and had to wait until my headmeats cleared up my perception so that i could see what i was doing again. now i look down the list of old entries and see hours spent and cups of tea drained, pulling my days apart so that i can see the threads and then tie them back up to paint a picture. another one of Shadow's favourite sayings is from Socrates, who said that "The unexamined life is not worth living," and i try to convince myself that it's this, not narcisism that keeps me carrying my Eee wherever i go. i've even gone and paid extra on my travel insurance so that i can take it with me to Egypt, capturing the moment at the time rather than trying to stuff it back in a box at a later date.
it's a glorious feeling to be simultaneously numb and hyper - i'm as free commitment as i can be given the circumstances, which means that i don't have anything forcing me to make a decision about anything any time soon. a clean slate and a clear calendar after mid-April, plenty of pages left in the passport and enough cash to keep drifting for as long as it entertains me. my general care-factor is low, low, low. i've Given Up on plenty in the last little while, so a little bit more isn't going to stress me.
in the meantime, i'm going to try to take a break from blogging for a little while. spend some hours asleep in bed, playing games, getting around to watching the Godfather Trilogy. i have no idea how frequently i'll be online when i'm in Egypt, but i'll be trying to post when i can. in the meantime i'm having a holiday from my holiday, and a vacation from my blog... unless i get bored or have something that needs to be said.
later...
there's nothing like a good solid day's work to perk up your mood - if you don't believe me, if you think the idea of a 5-month holiday sounds like a grand idea i suggest you try it and let me know how you do. i love taking holidays as much as anyone else, but sitting around with no purpose to your days gets old, then starts to decompose, rotting your brain along with it. after a week of solidly kicking arse and noting the names down in a spreadsheet i can feel my blade sharpening and my mind feels clear and hard as crystal. i'm in a fucking good mood - untouchable and ready for someone to try it on.
last night i crashed back into the room just before 11 having finally completed an goal i'd set for myself a couple of months ago. i started this blog a year ago yesterday, and since then, between Phase Shifting and Futility Overdrive i've posted 100 entries, just squeezing #100 in before the date changed. it was inconsequential and means almost nothing to anyone, but it was something i wanted to achieve and it feels great to have done it. we're talking roughly 2 entries a week, distilling my life into something readable and coherent that people seem to want to read. the last week's been a flurry of over 9400 words - there was a two week period starting just before i went to Amsterdam where i just couldn't string a sentance together in any meaningful way, and had to wait until my headmeats cleared up my perception so that i could see what i was doing again. now i look down the list of old entries and see hours spent and cups of tea drained, pulling my days apart so that i can see the threads and then tie them back up to paint a picture. another one of Shadow's favourite sayings is from Socrates, who said that "The unexamined life is not worth living," and i try to convince myself that it's this, not narcisism that keeps me carrying my Eee wherever i go. i've even gone and paid extra on my travel insurance so that i can take it with me to Egypt, capturing the moment at the time rather than trying to stuff it back in a box at a later date.
it's a glorious feeling to be simultaneously numb and hyper - i'm as free commitment as i can be given the circumstances, which means that i don't have anything forcing me to make a decision about anything any time soon. a clean slate and a clear calendar after mid-April, plenty of pages left in the passport and enough cash to keep drifting for as long as it entertains me. my general care-factor is low, low, low. i've Given Up on plenty in the last little while, so a little bit more isn't going to stress me.
in the meantime, i'm going to try to take a break from blogging for a little while. spend some hours asleep in bed, playing games, getting around to watching the Godfather Trilogy. i have no idea how frequently i'll be online when i'm in Egypt, but i'll be trying to post when i can. in the meantime i'm having a holiday from my holiday, and a vacation from my blog... unless i get bored or have something that needs to be said.
later...
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