i stepped off the train at Euston Station and into a wall of noise that slammed in through my optic nerve, London's high-density stimulus bombarding me like i'd spent a week in sensory deprivation and opened the casket to find i'd been left on the median strip of a freeway at rush hour. standing outside for a moment before hopping on the tube, rain pattering on my coat, it took a minute to remember what the fuck i was doing, where i was going, who am i again? it's only 7:35PM, it's not too late. no, it's 9:35PM. that means i was on that last train for 4 hours. no, that's not right. yes it is. fuck i'm tired, i've been travelling since midday to get back here. i can't be tired, i haven't done anything. shut the fuck up and get on the fucking train - you're not allowed to be in culture-shock, it's only London for fuck's sake. you know London. you're home again. do NOT argue that point with me now, you're not in the mood.
sir, yes sir. this is no time to be arguing with myself. don't fight a battle you know you're going to lose. follow your feet - they know where i'm going.
i've just got back from 8 days in Ireland, out of the green and into the grey. the tension i'd dumped at Euston on Wednesday-last waited for me like a faithful puppy-dog and immediately got back to humping my leg and getting slobber everywhere. it's no wonder i prefer cats. 9 days ago i'd walked into Euston Station with a spring in my step and the smell of escape in the air. another trip booked at the last minute, bag packed the night before and hidden so that it wouldn't be obvious i was going away and snagged on the way out the door. i've got a few things to do today, i'd said on the way out the door. a few things to do involve a tube, 2 trains and a ferry to the Emerald Isle followed by the location of a pub or three in Dublin. Virgin Trains have to be the most comfortable i've ever been on - they even have power points in the cheap seats which allowed me to bash out a couple of thousand words on the way to Chester. 15 minutes after arriving i'm on Arriva Wales and firing on towards Holyhead, a drab and somewhat charmless little village notable only for its ferry port. i pulled up to the Irish Ferrys counter an hour before scheduled departure with everything lining up nicely to find out that the 17:15 service had been cancelled due to poor weather on the Irish Sea.
fuck!
um... i've gotta be in Dublin in the morning. so what do i do?
"You can still get on the 02:40 service if you like. that gets in at 6:00AM"
riiiight. ok. no worries. shit happens i guess. so where's the nearest pub?
next thing i know i'm sitting more or less alone in a pleasant little pub called bar2two cruising the free wifi and making my drinks last, engaged in the fine art of killing time with 10 hours to slaughter. i'd complain, but what the hell? i wound up chatting with the locals for most of it, meeting a nice guy called Trev who was keen to learn about this wonderful thing we call the "interweb". suddenly it's midnight, i haven't bought a beer in a long long time despite there being quite the collection of pint glasses in front of me and the pub's closing. "I've got beers in the fridge - come back to my place. It's only 10 minutes down the road and I'll get you to the ferryport by 2," he says. how could i say no? by the time i stagger through check-in i'm sloshed and i've made a good friend in Holyhead. i've rolled out my sleeping bag on a bench and passed out for 3 hours sleep before the ship even leaves port.
7AM sees me standing outside the central bus station in Dublin, immigrated, a pocketfull of Euros, vaguely awake, looking bleary-eyed at the streets. i'd been fortunate to spot the pickup point for my tour - a hostel called "Paddy's Palace" - on the bus out of the ferryport so at least i didn't have to wander around in circles trying to find the place. i'd booked to stay there the night before and because of the 24 hour notice policy my fee was gone which sucked a little, making for an extremely expensive rushed shower, coffee and bowl of cornflakes. when i emerge from the kitchen the foyer's full of tourists. there are 4 different tours starting from here today - i've booked in for the 6-day All Ireland tour through Paddywagon. i used to be dubious of guided tours, but after Egypt i'm warming to the idea. doing the maths, i'd easily have blown the cost of the tour if i'd hired a car and booked my own hostels, let alone the entry fees for the parks and sites i wanted to go to, and i'd likely have missed a lot of the interesting things i got to see, or taken far too long to get to them when i missed turns or got lost. our guide/driver was a tall Irish guy called Tom who was, to be honest, a bit of a dick. that said, he was entertaining and knew his stuff. one thing you miss when you do these things on your own is the stories and commentary and over the days he drove us around we heard the history of the Protestant/Catholic conflict, folklore, tales and songs, explanations of the significance of a lot of what we were driving past - the colour which is lost if you only have a Lonely Planet as a guide.
loaded up on the bus, we headed north towards Derry (or Londonderry, depending on your political bias) past a couple of sites of interest - the town of Drogheda to see the cathedral which is home to the mummified head of St. Oliver Plunket (where i managed to find some desperately-needed energy drinks), and a picturesque little cemetery wherein there is a Round Tower (where monks would hide in times of Viking raids) for us to wander around and take pictures of. we spent a lot of time on the bus - 6 days isn't really a very long time to see all of a place like Ireland, so a lot of our stops were "quick, jump out, take some photos and then we're off again" sort of affairs. the last thing i wanted to do was to sleep on the bus - not when the scenery was rolling by to show another beautiful view every 84 seconds. in Egypt i read or blogged while we cruised through the desert. once you've seen half an hour of desert you've pretty much seen the lot. in Ireland i wound up sitting around with my eyes glued to the window and my camera in my hand, trying to capture what i was seeing at 100kph and knowing that it just wouldn't be the same in 2D.
by the time we pulled into Derry and loaded into the hostel i'd made friends with Paul and Jodie - a pair of Kiwi siblings having their last hurrah before she went off to Cypress for a while and he went back to Edinburgh, and Jordan and Jamie - Canadian siblings doing something similar. we were all to be met by a local who took us for a wander through the walled city (the only one remaining in Europe, apparently), then down to the Bogside to see the political murals. Derry is in the far north of Northern Ireland. the change from the Republic of Ireland to Northern Ireland is marked, even to this day. once upon a time there'd have been a checkpoint on the road manned by British Army soldiers carrying live ammunition. now it's just a sudden change of steet-signs and currency: RoA uses the Euro, NA still has the Pound. Derry is a charming little town which is fairly peaceful now, but still obviously divided. the hardline Loyalist areas wear the blue, red and white of the Union Jack on the kerbs and light poles. Republican areas wear green and RIRA graffiti. in the times of the Troubles Derry was the site of a number of the Civil Rights marches demanding the right to vote for Catholics (as well as the abolition of various other abuses of human rights), the most famous of which ended in the massacre called Bloody Sunday. Bogside is a low-rent area which became a Catholic ghetto so named because... well, it used to be a bog (i don't make this shit up, i just regurgitate. blame the Irish). when you walk out of the walled city and down the hillside you can see the neat rows of estate housing in a broad bowl, marked by a wall on which is painted "YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY" - a declaration and a challenge to the Powers That Be with the flag of Palestine flying overhead in a show of solidarity. all around on any wall big enough you'll see the murals painted over the years by the Bogside Artists - 2 storey high political artworks illustrating the oppression of the Catholics in the area. not far from the "FREE DERRY" sign is a small monument to Bloody Sunday inscribed with the names of the dead. there are still fresh flowers sitting around its base. the memories do not fade quickly in this place, part of why a conflict that started 400 years ago with Oliver Cromwell simmers on to this day.
it's still sinking in when we get our shit together a little while later to go find some food and head to the pub we've been recommended for the evening - the Peadar O'Donnell's which we're told is still IRA owned and run to this day, and where there'll be traditional Irish music. the political bias of the place is obvious when you walk in the door - it's a lovely little pub with the Irish, Palestinian and Basque flags pinned to the ceiling. there's a bastardised Australian flag too, with the Irish green, white and orange covering the Union Jack which makes me smile, so i snap a photo, trigger-happy as ever (there are over 1100 photos sitting on my Eee to sort through making for a snap-rate of around double my time in Egypt). by the time i walk out of there i'm feeling like i've just had the longest day in memory, but the night air is cool and clean, i've a skin-full of Guinness and as far as i'm concerned things are right with the world. the trip's only just begun, but i can smell the makings of a craic'in good time on the horizon and that night i sleep better than i have in months.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Thursday, May 7, 2009
the zen art of looking for answers that you know don't exist...
i haven't written anything more serious than an email in 3 weeks. i'm not even sure i can string a sentence together now, but i'm in a train with a power point and 2 hours to kill so i swear i'm going to try. when the emails started coming in asking if i had writers block i knew i had a problem. when my phone started to ring i knew it was serious. for the last 3 weeks i've been looking for answers, mind spiralling through the outer reaches of sanity while i desperately try to keep it together and keep putting one foot in front of another, utterly lacking in direction, going with the flow of the current, anything to avoid feeling like i'm standing still. i'm blind and mapless, internal compass in freespin like i'm standing at the magnetic pole and everywhere from here is south, blank and devoid of landmarks to give me a sign and when every direction looks equally unpalatable all i've been able to do is wander around in circles with a dumb look on my face while i wait for something to pop out of the snow and say "this way".
i got back from Egypt, glad to see London again and get some time to sort myself out. 3 days of work materialised out of nowhere which kept me commuting back and forth from Heathrow again for the remainder of the week. by the end of that week louise and i weren't talking again and we've spent the fortnight hence in stony silence and narky staccato conversation, quietly tearing chunks out of each other in a decaying orbit of mutually assured destruction. i wasn't in any state to sit there and deal with it so less than a week after getting back to London i was heading out of it again - a hire car booked on the spur of the moment, a route worked out on the way, a destination picked out because it was somewhere i'd be forced to turn around again and submit to the gravitiational pull of the capital.
over 2 days i drove 712 miles through the English countryside, hitting Land's End and coming back again. i kept the 5" tall map of the UK donated to the cause by Shadow's folks on the passenger seat, folded up so the last 6 inches of useful page were visible and more or less navigated by which town sounded nice, or which road looked most interesting. from London to Bournemouth to Dorcester to Exeter to Plymouth i explored the English countryside, driving past rolling hills and pretty villages, stopping every once in a while to take a photo. the countryside was lush and gentle, hedgerows stitching the pastures together and i remember standing there alongside some lonely road wishing i could spread myself thin over the countryside and be absorbed into the green. i found a cozy little B&B in Plymouth and spent the evening drinking with the locals measuring carefully from the £30 i had to my name and finding vast entertainment regardless. back on the road at 9 the next morning i headed down a tasty-looking A-road which led in the vague direction of Penzance and was a joy to drive, stopping when i saw a sign for the Eden Project which i'd heard about but hadn't expected to actually find. after walking the gardens and the biodomes i was back in the car to Lizard Point (the southern-most point of the mainland) to Penzance to Land's End where i saw a while and ate the pasty i'd picked up in the last town. this was part of the vague notion i'd had when i set out - get to Devon and have Devonshire Tea, get to Cornwall and have a Cornish Pasty. i had my cream tea sitting at the quayside in Exeter. i had my pasty on the rocks over the cliffs of Land's End (from a shop recommended by a hitchhiker i picked up a few miles out of Penzance). back in the car and it was back through Penzance to Newquay where i'd intended on staying the night, but by the time i found somewhere to park and i was wasn't feeling it so i moved on, picking Launceston more or less randomly because it was in the right direction, i'd never been and it has the same name as a place in Australia.
the first place i found to park was right next door to Launceston Castle which i decided to at least go and look at (it was 6PM by this point, still bright thanks to Daylight Savings) and wound up lying around on the soft grass overlooking the rolling green hills and village in the valley beyond for the best part of an hour while i tried to work out what the fuck i was going to do from here. eventually i realised that i'd seen enough of the english countryside and that from here on in what i really needed to do was drive. just drive and drive and drive, set the cruise to the speed limit and go until i ran out of road, fell asleep at the wheel or got back to London, which is why i wound up driving down some of the now-familiar streets of Mayfair and Westminster at midnight, through Knightsbridge past Harrods, all lit up like a Vegas casino, down Piccadilly and through Piccadilly Circus, around Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall to Westminster where i did a U-turn and went back, cruising down The Strand and Fleet St, dropping right at Monument so that i could drive across London Bridge, through Elephant & Castle and off down Kennington Park Rd and back to basecamp.
2 days of driving, the best part of 18 hours behind the wheel with my PSD (Personal Sanity Device) strapped to my head, occasionally listening to BBC2, alone and with nothing to distract me from the chaos in my head, i had a lot of time to think and get my head straight. it didn't work... not entirely. by the end of it i still couldn't make a decision about what i was going to do with myself long-term and when i walked back into basecamp my calm evaporated like petrol, leaving an oily, explosive fume which has coiled in the air ever since.
i've been completely incapable of making any real decisions for a while now, so many of them i've offloaded onto other people who are more than happy to make them for me. the support i've had from around the globe has been unbelievable. i've got Shadow working to replace the rusted ruin that used to be a spine and replace it with a fresh rod of steel. Rapunzel makes the decisions i'm too indecisive for or simply don't want to make. i've got Sandra to keep me smiling and my eyes forward, SpeedFox and Daywalker who've fed me beers and listened to my ranting, always good for distraction. SiJ has filled in the cracks with movies and pleasant conversation and pushed me to cruise the meetup groups, which is why i've wound up meeting firedancers in Green Park for the last 2 weekends.
my poi hadn't had a whole lot of use until a couple of weeks ago. i've played around here and there, got a bit of my skillz back, then pulled them out when i could in my wanderings, usually so that i could say i'd spun them in interesting places (seriously, there has to be someone else who's spun poi on top of Mt Sinai at dawn, but i challenge you to find them). suddenly i'm in a park in the middle of town with a dozen other circus-types and i've been flinging staff or poi or juggling balls or devil sticks around for 4 and a half hours. the buzz from that day took half a week to fade, and by wednesday i was dying for sunday to come again, just for the like-minded company and the joy of spin. louise accused me of only doing it to show off, but for the first time in longer than i could remember i actually felt happy and energised. i hadn't realised how much i missed hanging with a bunch of people who all want to play and learn and have no agenda past meeting up every once in a while and doing something fun, where drinks in the pub are an afterthought not the main event, where you have a common interest past being bored.
the best thing is that while i've had a chance to just go off in the park, i've also met some hugely interesting people. 2 night ago i went to a play written by one of the guys from the park which was actually really good - you take a bit of a risk with these things when some guy you meet in the park begs you to come see the play he wrote. this once, i got lucky. afterwards he grabbed me and asked if i was coming to the pub and how could i say no? 2 hours later i'm heading off with a tentative invitation to head back to Scotland for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the thought rattling around my head of wait... what exactly did he mean when he said "perform"???
it's the people who make life worth living. i've been remembering that more and more. every time i've started feeling fucked and abandoned i hop on Facebook and wind up having an hours-long conversation which leaves me smiling and helps get me through the day. one of them ended with the following, after which she promptly went offline so i couldn't reply:
"remember this , one of you most endearing qualities that you have it that you want to be better and stronger than you were and you are always striving to be happy...... you are better than you believe yourself to be, you just have to look at yourself in the mirror and see what the rest of us see"
the strangest thing is the patterns that are emerging. in the last fortnight i've had 5 different people use the phrase "Remember who you are," and 3 who've sagely whispered in my ear "I think the universe is trying to tell you something." two is a coincidence. 5??? 5 separate people in 3 cities. the problem is that they're right. life in London has ground me down. a couple of days before leaving for Egypt i was on the bus back to base from doing some shopping and i overheard a conversation between a middle-aged black guy and a Russian teenager on tour:
"Have you lived in London before?"
"No"
"Well you should! It'll make a hard man out of you. You learn to suffer in London..."
and i couldn't help but grin and think i'm blogging this...
it's true though. you know how you always hurt the ones you love? well it works both ways (thankyou Fight Club), and i have been loving London. the other problem is that i've been on the receiving end of an avalanche of derisive, demeaning bullshit and i've made the mistake of listening to it. somewhere along the way i've been blessed with a horde of irreplaceable friends but i've managed to lose sight of the knowledge that i'm well loved amongst them. it's a shame to see a friendship spanning years come to dust and blow away on the wind, but there comes a time when enough's enough. it's been a long, long time since i've had to write off a good friend, but i've finally run out of cope and the pen's in my hand. the only person who should be allowed to make me miserable is me godsdammit. i'm not entirely the victim here - human interraction is a 2-way street, but i'm sick of feeling like i'm standing in the middle of the road with my hand out-stretched.
i hate having to write off a friend but if the wisdom of crowds is anything to go by, too many people in two different countries seem to think i should have done it a long time ago and since i patently can't make a decision of my own at the moment, who am i to second-guess? if there are still people who look up to me, even in my reduced and demolished state, shouldn't i at least try to hold my head up high and make it worth their while? when the screaming majority keep saying you have worth, won't even the most self-deprecating eventually stop, listen and maybe even start to believe?
enough of this shit. life's too short and i have forward to worry about rather than back. it's taken me 3 weeks to sift through the entrails and work out in which direction they point. as the days go by the range of choices gets shorter and shorter, and what i want becomes gradually clearer. the lighter i get the easier movement becomes so we'll have to see how the world looks when i'm free of the last of the deadweight.
i got back from Egypt, glad to see London again and get some time to sort myself out. 3 days of work materialised out of nowhere which kept me commuting back and forth from Heathrow again for the remainder of the week. by the end of that week louise and i weren't talking again and we've spent the fortnight hence in stony silence and narky staccato conversation, quietly tearing chunks out of each other in a decaying orbit of mutually assured destruction. i wasn't in any state to sit there and deal with it so less than a week after getting back to London i was heading out of it again - a hire car booked on the spur of the moment, a route worked out on the way, a destination picked out because it was somewhere i'd be forced to turn around again and submit to the gravitiational pull of the capital.
over 2 days i drove 712 miles through the English countryside, hitting Land's End and coming back again. i kept the 5" tall map of the UK donated to the cause by Shadow's folks on the passenger seat, folded up so the last 6 inches of useful page were visible and more or less navigated by which town sounded nice, or which road looked most interesting. from London to Bournemouth to Dorcester to Exeter to Plymouth i explored the English countryside, driving past rolling hills and pretty villages, stopping every once in a while to take a photo. the countryside was lush and gentle, hedgerows stitching the pastures together and i remember standing there alongside some lonely road wishing i could spread myself thin over the countryside and be absorbed into the green. i found a cozy little B&B in Plymouth and spent the evening drinking with the locals measuring carefully from the £30 i had to my name and finding vast entertainment regardless. back on the road at 9 the next morning i headed down a tasty-looking A-road which led in the vague direction of Penzance and was a joy to drive, stopping when i saw a sign for the Eden Project which i'd heard about but hadn't expected to actually find. after walking the gardens and the biodomes i was back in the car to Lizard Point (the southern-most point of the mainland) to Penzance to Land's End where i saw a while and ate the pasty i'd picked up in the last town. this was part of the vague notion i'd had when i set out - get to Devon and have Devonshire Tea, get to Cornwall and have a Cornish Pasty. i had my cream tea sitting at the quayside in Exeter. i had my pasty on the rocks over the cliffs of Land's End (from a shop recommended by a hitchhiker i picked up a few miles out of Penzance). back in the car and it was back through Penzance to Newquay where i'd intended on staying the night, but by the time i found somewhere to park and i was wasn't feeling it so i moved on, picking Launceston more or less randomly because it was in the right direction, i'd never been and it has the same name as a place in Australia.
the first place i found to park was right next door to Launceston Castle which i decided to at least go and look at (it was 6PM by this point, still bright thanks to Daylight Savings) and wound up lying around on the soft grass overlooking the rolling green hills and village in the valley beyond for the best part of an hour while i tried to work out what the fuck i was going to do from here. eventually i realised that i'd seen enough of the english countryside and that from here on in what i really needed to do was drive. just drive and drive and drive, set the cruise to the speed limit and go until i ran out of road, fell asleep at the wheel or got back to London, which is why i wound up driving down some of the now-familiar streets of Mayfair and Westminster at midnight, through Knightsbridge past Harrods, all lit up like a Vegas casino, down Piccadilly and through Piccadilly Circus, around Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall to Westminster where i did a U-turn and went back, cruising down The Strand and Fleet St, dropping right at Monument so that i could drive across London Bridge, through Elephant & Castle and off down Kennington Park Rd and back to basecamp.
2 days of driving, the best part of 18 hours behind the wheel with my PSD (Personal Sanity Device) strapped to my head, occasionally listening to BBC2, alone and with nothing to distract me from the chaos in my head, i had a lot of time to think and get my head straight. it didn't work... not entirely. by the end of it i still couldn't make a decision about what i was going to do with myself long-term and when i walked back into basecamp my calm evaporated like petrol, leaving an oily, explosive fume which has coiled in the air ever since.
i've been completely incapable of making any real decisions for a while now, so many of them i've offloaded onto other people who are more than happy to make them for me. the support i've had from around the globe has been unbelievable. i've got Shadow working to replace the rusted ruin that used to be a spine and replace it with a fresh rod of steel. Rapunzel makes the decisions i'm too indecisive for or simply don't want to make. i've got Sandra to keep me smiling and my eyes forward, SpeedFox and Daywalker who've fed me beers and listened to my ranting, always good for distraction. SiJ has filled in the cracks with movies and pleasant conversation and pushed me to cruise the meetup groups, which is why i've wound up meeting firedancers in Green Park for the last 2 weekends.
my poi hadn't had a whole lot of use until a couple of weeks ago. i've played around here and there, got a bit of my skillz back, then pulled them out when i could in my wanderings, usually so that i could say i'd spun them in interesting places (seriously, there has to be someone else who's spun poi on top of Mt Sinai at dawn, but i challenge you to find them). suddenly i'm in a park in the middle of town with a dozen other circus-types and i've been flinging staff or poi or juggling balls or devil sticks around for 4 and a half hours. the buzz from that day took half a week to fade, and by wednesday i was dying for sunday to come again, just for the like-minded company and the joy of spin. louise accused me of only doing it to show off, but for the first time in longer than i could remember i actually felt happy and energised. i hadn't realised how much i missed hanging with a bunch of people who all want to play and learn and have no agenda past meeting up every once in a while and doing something fun, where drinks in the pub are an afterthought not the main event, where you have a common interest past being bored.
the best thing is that while i've had a chance to just go off in the park, i've also met some hugely interesting people. 2 night ago i went to a play written by one of the guys from the park which was actually really good - you take a bit of a risk with these things when some guy you meet in the park begs you to come see the play he wrote. this once, i got lucky. afterwards he grabbed me and asked if i was coming to the pub and how could i say no? 2 hours later i'm heading off with a tentative invitation to head back to Scotland for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the thought rattling around my head of wait... what exactly did he mean when he said "perform"???
it's the people who make life worth living. i've been remembering that more and more. every time i've started feeling fucked and abandoned i hop on Facebook and wind up having an hours-long conversation which leaves me smiling and helps get me through the day. one of them ended with the following, after which she promptly went offline so i couldn't reply:
"remember this , one of you most endearing qualities that you have it that you want to be better and stronger than you were and you are always striving to be happy...... you are better than you believe yourself to be, you just have to look at yourself in the mirror and see what the rest of us see"
the strangest thing is the patterns that are emerging. in the last fortnight i've had 5 different people use the phrase "Remember who you are," and 3 who've sagely whispered in my ear "I think the universe is trying to tell you something." two is a coincidence. 5??? 5 separate people in 3 cities. the problem is that they're right. life in London has ground me down. a couple of days before leaving for Egypt i was on the bus back to base from doing some shopping and i overheard a conversation between a middle-aged black guy and a Russian teenager on tour:
"Have you lived in London before?"
"No"
"Well you should! It'll make a hard man out of you. You learn to suffer in London..."
and i couldn't help but grin and think i'm blogging this...
it's true though. you know how you always hurt the ones you love? well it works both ways (thankyou Fight Club), and i have been loving London. the other problem is that i've been on the receiving end of an avalanche of derisive, demeaning bullshit and i've made the mistake of listening to it. somewhere along the way i've been blessed with a horde of irreplaceable friends but i've managed to lose sight of the knowledge that i'm well loved amongst them. it's a shame to see a friendship spanning years come to dust and blow away on the wind, but there comes a time when enough's enough. it's been a long, long time since i've had to write off a good friend, but i've finally run out of cope and the pen's in my hand. the only person who should be allowed to make me miserable is me godsdammit. i'm not entirely the victim here - human interraction is a 2-way street, but i'm sick of feeling like i'm standing in the middle of the road with my hand out-stretched.
i hate having to write off a friend but if the wisdom of crowds is anything to go by, too many people in two different countries seem to think i should have done it a long time ago and since i patently can't make a decision of my own at the moment, who am i to second-guess? if there are still people who look up to me, even in my reduced and demolished state, shouldn't i at least try to hold my head up high and make it worth their while? when the screaming majority keep saying you have worth, won't even the most self-deprecating eventually stop, listen and maybe even start to believe?
enough of this shit. life's too short and i have forward to worry about rather than back. it's taken me 3 weeks to sift through the entrails and work out in which direction they point. as the days go by the range of choices gets shorter and shorter, and what i want becomes gradually clearer. the lighter i get the easier movement becomes so we'll have to see how the world looks when i'm free of the last of the deadweight.
Friday, April 24, 2009
System Failure: Please Reboot...
somewhere in the last week or two i completely lost the ability to write anything coherent or meaningful. i think they may have confiscated it at customs or something. i've applied to have it returned but this is British Bureaucracy we're talking about here so there may be a wait involved. otherwise, i might try wandering around the markets in camden to see if i can find a cheap chinese knockoff.
regular service will resume once i can find and install the missing components. thankyou for your patience.
regular service will resume once i can find and install the missing components. thankyou for your patience.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Egypt Interlude: breaking the 4th wall for fun and profit...
Deafening Silence by Machine Head's echoing in my ears when i pull my Eee out of my shoulder bag and try to work out what the fuck i'm going to say about Alexandria... and right now i've got nothing. i've been sitting in seat 24H of this 777 for nearly 2 hours reading a Bill Bryson book while i try to get the mojo up to say something interesting and i have the feeling it'll be later tonight or tomorrow that i go and sit in the kitchen of Louise and my flat in Kennington before i have the spare capacity available to process. looks like i'll have to do another retroactive. i hate having to do that - backdating something i meant to write so that i don't have weeks-long gaps in my content followed by hard busts of output. on this trip it's been unavoidable sometimes - i don't always get the chance to sit and write stuff as it happens and wind up bashing out 4 days' worth of entries on a long bus ride before my battery dies, checking it in my hotel room while the battery charges and my PSD and Louise's iPod hang off by their USB cables, then run downstairs to get them uploaded and set everything back on the charge before we run out for the evening.
before getting on the feluca i held court in the restaurant of the hotel we were in like that - rotating between 3 different power adapters, shuffling 3 camera chargers, 3 mp3 players, 2 phones and my Eee so that everything had enough juice to handle the next 2 nights away from power and flushing toilets. i just about got everything done, too - Mike's iPod didn't get a full charge and neither did my camera, but then neither ran out of charge before we could charge them again either so it all worked out.
it's all been a little insane on the blogging-front over the last 3 weeks. when Louise has been sleeping on the bus i've had my Eee out, bashing at the keys. any time that hasn't been spent sleeping, doing stuff, or on trips too short to make it worth booting up have been spent bashing keys or editing. here's a rough idea of what i do to get a post up online:
while i'm wandering around taking photos, seeing things or (if i'm not travelling) living the life, i'm drafting. witty or useful or insightful phrases or ideas that come to mind get filed away for later. sometimes i'll have entire paragraphs, or themes, or ways that i'm going to proceed with explaining something sitting in my head for weeks before i actually commit them to print. while on tour it's a lot easier - my framework is what i do with my day, and everything else flows or segues out from there. once the ideas are together i sit down to bash it out. almost every blog entry comes out fully-formed and ready to run with. no half-finished artifacts lying around on my Eee's hard drive, no fragments or drafts that need completing, no planning or writing-plans. i've always been like this. back in high school when they said you had to show yoour planning i'd fake it - write what i wanted in my essay and throw the "plan" together afterwards. that's just how i work: start with an idea and run with it until the spool runs out of string. the the only exception to this is when i'm writing something long and i get interrupted, which has happened a few times in the last couple of weeks, whereupon i have to pick up the flow again from where i left off which i always hate. each entry is the child of the mood i was in when i was writing, and that's going to be different 6 hours later. it's a pain in the fucking arse, which is why i wind up re-reading through what i've done already and often re-write the last paragraph so that the next flows the way i want it to. sometimes i go in with something resembling a plan or framework, sometimes i go open up my text editor with nothing more than a topic and my randon-simile-combinatron running in my headmeats.
music's important. i'm not sure if words can express just how important, but you could consider trying to drive a car without any bearings. i've tried, it doesn't work. crank the speakers, plug in earphones, doesn't matter, but give me noise. what it is doesn't seem to effect the flavour of the product, either. i've written angry while listening to Death Cab for Cutie, mellow and melancholy to In Flames and depressed to Blink-182. right now i've skipped through to Parkway Drive because after the last 3 weeks i desperately need metal. i've been listening to a LOT of Parkway Drive and Inhale Exhale of late, especially "Romance is Dead" and "I'll with no friends (and a grin on my face)".
when i'm sitting in the kitchen in Kennington with a reliable connection i'll usually write straight into the text entry field on the blogger site. out in the world i use a text editor and save it locally until i can get online. raw-text files from the last couple of months still litters the home folder on my Eee because i can't quite bring myself to delete them despite their having been uploaded weeks ago. once the file's saved it tends to sit for a while, hours or days, before i go through for an edit. read, correct, fix typos, add detail, rearrange sometimes. usually it's just a case of adding a few lines of information i missed out the first time around, embellishments or extra words to make the picture clear, sometimes a whole paragraph needs rewriting. these things you do for the sake of art...
whenever i have to work offline i'll note down the time and date i started so that i can fill in the timedate stamp when i finally get it up online. if i'm writing a retro i'll usually project the time i WOULD have been working if i hadn't been drunk, tired, distracted or generally not in the fucking mood to stare at a screen for hours on end. sometimes i try to string a sentence together and it just doesn't happen and if i try to force it all i get is drivel, a foul mood and a dead battery. i had that problem after getting back from Amsterdam - for a week and a half i couldn't write to save me and then spent the following 2 weeks catching up, retro's all the way.
once all that's done it's down to getting onto the net for 10 minutes, pasting all the appropriate words in the appropriate text fields, making sure it's tagged correctly (so you can click on the "UK" tag and only get my UK-related posts, for example) and hitting "Publish". sometimes i'll load up the page to see how it looks online, but since i don't use images or funky layout i don't usually bother. generally i'll spend an hour writing a thousand-word entry, do a quick read-through and post. i've improved my output in recent weeks and the other night in the hotel room in Cairo i was able to bash out 4700 words in around 3 hours, including a couple of breaks. i wound up adding a bit of content and splitting the entry into two for reasons of pace, so the editing-session took around 45 minutes. bearing in mind that i've posted near 24k words so far, you can guess how much time i've been spending in the cracks and quiet moments, on buses, trains, plains and boats. i'd have blogged in the fucking donkey if i'd had somewhere the rest the Eee - don't think i wasn't tempted, or that Louise didn't jokingly suggest it. 24k words and i'm nowhere near done.. i still have to worry about that fucking day in Alexandria, then try to capture the atmosphere of the last couple of days in Cairo... then somewhere in there i need to put together the exposition piece i've been planning since yesterday evening, but have no idea yet just how i'm going to make work.
sometimes when i sit here looking at my Eee i just can't bring myself even to start. sometimes i attack the keys with a focused fervour that would make an OCD-sufferer on cocaine blush. sometimes i sit down to say something i thought would be interesting, like... say... what i did in Alexandria, and wind up talking about something completely different. whatever it is i upload, i try to keep it fresh and interesting and people keep reading it so i guess i can't be doing too poorly. i often get perplexed when people i've only met recently tell me that they enjoy the blog, but i won't try to pretent it's not gratifying. meanwhile, i'm planning to continue with this until i get sick of the idea... or when people stop yelling when i don't post for a while. getting things out of my head and onto the screen tends to help reduce my desire to kill people, and the feeling of getting an entry that i've written, edited and feel good about posted is, while less than post-orgasmic, still a real buzz.
meanwhile, i need to eat more of the monster Toblerone i bought at Cairo International Airport (i was feeling shite and wanted chocolate. no preaching about my diabetes, i'm SO not in the fucking mood) and get Alexandria out of the way. i need something to get me in the mood... hmm... Slipknot brings a smile to my face. "Subliminal Verses" it is...
before getting on the feluca i held court in the restaurant of the hotel we were in like that - rotating between 3 different power adapters, shuffling 3 camera chargers, 3 mp3 players, 2 phones and my Eee so that everything had enough juice to handle the next 2 nights away from power and flushing toilets. i just about got everything done, too - Mike's iPod didn't get a full charge and neither did my camera, but then neither ran out of charge before we could charge them again either so it all worked out.
it's all been a little insane on the blogging-front over the last 3 weeks. when Louise has been sleeping on the bus i've had my Eee out, bashing at the keys. any time that hasn't been spent sleeping, doing stuff, or on trips too short to make it worth booting up have been spent bashing keys or editing. here's a rough idea of what i do to get a post up online:
while i'm wandering around taking photos, seeing things or (if i'm not travelling) living the life, i'm drafting. witty or useful or insightful phrases or ideas that come to mind get filed away for later. sometimes i'll have entire paragraphs, or themes, or ways that i'm going to proceed with explaining something sitting in my head for weeks before i actually commit them to print. while on tour it's a lot easier - my framework is what i do with my day, and everything else flows or segues out from there. once the ideas are together i sit down to bash it out. almost every blog entry comes out fully-formed and ready to run with. no half-finished artifacts lying around on my Eee's hard drive, no fragments or drafts that need completing, no planning or writing-plans. i've always been like this. back in high school when they said you had to show yoour planning i'd fake it - write what i wanted in my essay and throw the "plan" together afterwards. that's just how i work: start with an idea and run with it until the spool runs out of string. the the only exception to this is when i'm writing something long and i get interrupted, which has happened a few times in the last couple of weeks, whereupon i have to pick up the flow again from where i left off which i always hate. each entry is the child of the mood i was in when i was writing, and that's going to be different 6 hours later. it's a pain in the fucking arse, which is why i wind up re-reading through what i've done already and often re-write the last paragraph so that the next flows the way i want it to. sometimes i go in with something resembling a plan or framework, sometimes i go open up my text editor with nothing more than a topic and my randon-simile-combinatron running in my headmeats.
music's important. i'm not sure if words can express just how important, but you could consider trying to drive a car without any bearings. i've tried, it doesn't work. crank the speakers, plug in earphones, doesn't matter, but give me noise. what it is doesn't seem to effect the flavour of the product, either. i've written angry while listening to Death Cab for Cutie, mellow and melancholy to In Flames and depressed to Blink-182. right now i've skipped through to Parkway Drive because after the last 3 weeks i desperately need metal. i've been listening to a LOT of Parkway Drive and Inhale Exhale of late, especially "Romance is Dead" and "I'll with no friends (and a grin on my face)".
when i'm sitting in the kitchen in Kennington with a reliable connection i'll usually write straight into the text entry field on the blogger site. out in the world i use a text editor and save it locally until i can get online. raw-text files from the last couple of months still litters the home folder on my Eee because i can't quite bring myself to delete them despite their having been uploaded weeks ago. once the file's saved it tends to sit for a while, hours or days, before i go through for an edit. read, correct, fix typos, add detail, rearrange sometimes. usually it's just a case of adding a few lines of information i missed out the first time around, embellishments or extra words to make the picture clear, sometimes a whole paragraph needs rewriting. these things you do for the sake of art...
whenever i have to work offline i'll note down the time and date i started so that i can fill in the timedate stamp when i finally get it up online. if i'm writing a retro i'll usually project the time i WOULD have been working if i hadn't been drunk, tired, distracted or generally not in the fucking mood to stare at a screen for hours on end. sometimes i try to string a sentence together and it just doesn't happen and if i try to force it all i get is drivel, a foul mood and a dead battery. i had that problem after getting back from Amsterdam - for a week and a half i couldn't write to save me and then spent the following 2 weeks catching up, retro's all the way.
once all that's done it's down to getting onto the net for 10 minutes, pasting all the appropriate words in the appropriate text fields, making sure it's tagged correctly (so you can click on the "UK" tag and only get my UK-related posts, for example) and hitting "Publish". sometimes i'll load up the page to see how it looks online, but since i don't use images or funky layout i don't usually bother. generally i'll spend an hour writing a thousand-word entry, do a quick read-through and post. i've improved my output in recent weeks and the other night in the hotel room in Cairo i was able to bash out 4700 words in around 3 hours, including a couple of breaks. i wound up adding a bit of content and splitting the entry into two for reasons of pace, so the editing-session took around 45 minutes. bearing in mind that i've posted near 24k words so far, you can guess how much time i've been spending in the cracks and quiet moments, on buses, trains, plains and boats. i'd have blogged in the fucking donkey if i'd had somewhere the rest the Eee - don't think i wasn't tempted, or that Louise didn't jokingly suggest it. 24k words and i'm nowhere near done.. i still have to worry about that fucking day in Alexandria, then try to capture the atmosphere of the last couple of days in Cairo... then somewhere in there i need to put together the exposition piece i've been planning since yesterday evening, but have no idea yet just how i'm going to make work.
sometimes when i sit here looking at my Eee i just can't bring myself even to start. sometimes i attack the keys with a focused fervour that would make an OCD-sufferer on cocaine blush. sometimes i sit down to say something i thought would be interesting, like... say... what i did in Alexandria, and wind up talking about something completely different. whatever it is i upload, i try to keep it fresh and interesting and people keep reading it so i guess i can't be doing too poorly. i often get perplexed when people i've only met recently tell me that they enjoy the blog, but i won't try to pretent it's not gratifying. meanwhile, i'm planning to continue with this until i get sick of the idea... or when people stop yelling when i don't post for a while. getting things out of my head and onto the screen tends to help reduce my desire to kill people, and the feeling of getting an entry that i've written, edited and feel good about posted is, while less than post-orgasmic, still a real buzz.
meanwhile, i need to eat more of the monster Toblerone i bought at Cairo International Airport (i was feeling shite and wanted chocolate. no preaching about my diabetes, i'm SO not in the fucking mood) and get Alexandria out of the way. i need something to get me in the mood...
Friday, April 10, 2009
Egypt Day 17: the house that Alexander built...
i've always had a quiet admiration for Alexander of Macedon... and not just because because his grandfather and my grandfather came from the same part of the world. where Louise will be coming back from Egypt with pile of Ramses II swag big enough you could bury her in it, Alex always gets a not of respect from me. he was followed by men twice his age, fought his away across the known world and won and died before he turned 30. he's history's embodiment of "life fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse".
somewhere earlyish in his career he wandered into Egypt and kicked the Persians out with (from what Soobie was saying) about as much effort as it takes to slap a mosquito that makes it into your 6th floor hotel room late at night and keeps you awake with its buzzing. i can imagine the conversation now... or at least how it would have played out if Egypt was Brunswick St in Fitzroy:
"So wheresa capitala dis place? LUXOR?? Wassamadda you? I'm not gunna rule from fucking Luxor! Youse all can get fuck mayte. All get fuck! I'm not gunna going up anna downa Nile all de time. Call my cousin Christos anna his mayte John an Stef. I wanna new capital closera to home. Youse can call it Alexandria... yeah, i lika that. Get going! I gotta polish ma Monaro mayte!"
or... well, proably nothing like that, really. still, you get the point. from the capital in Athens Luxor is a long, painful way away. shifting the capital to the coast of the Mediterranean made sense, even if just in travel time. Luxor was the capital of Upper and Lower Egypt, so its location vaguely central made a good compromise between Memphis in the north and Aswan in the south... kinda like Canberra in Australia. Everything in the Middle Kingdon of Egypt was about that balance between north and south. the crown of the kings was "the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt". the temples are covered in a synergy of papyrus and lotus - papyrus being the symbol of the north and lotus of the south. north and south, east and west, life and death, the ancient egyptians liked to play things in pairs.
meanwhile, Louise and i are running late for our meetup with Mohammed... or he's early. i'm not sure, but we get a call from the concierge while i'm throwing my showes on to tell us he's here already. when we get down we find a kindly man with a beard who looks like he may be in his early 40's... which around here means he's at least 50. he leads us out to his car - a late-model Hyunday Verna (Accent in Australia) and we're off up the Alex Desert Road. cars in Egypt are... intersting - Cairo especially. the standard taxi you see in Cairo is a 20+yo Fiat, Peugeot or Lada (the Egyptians did well out of their treaty with Russia... or maybe Russia did well outof Egypt. everywhere you go there are Ladas, the Air Force use MiGs and the police use AK's), painted black and white and looking like they've had every side patched and straightened at least once or twice. most of the cars i see don't have a straight panel on them and if it's clean it means it was washed this morning.
the Alex Desert Rd runs almost straight out of Giza north and west through the Nile Delta. it has 4 marked lanes, which makes it 5-6 lanes wide and surface i'd go so far as to say is "decent". you'll pass a mosque every couple of kilometres in case you're travelling at prayer-time... in fact, they seemed more frequent than service stations (got to love a country where religion's more important than petrol). over the course of 200km you gradually make your way from desert beige to farm green as you go deeper and deeper into the rich soil and and abundant farmlands in the north, then swamp and marsh-lands and then suddenly the blue-green of the Mediterranean. the city was originally built along a natural bay with a couple of small islands across it, which was altered over time to become a calm, enclosed harbor. the Lighthouse (one of the 7 Ancient Wonders) on Pharos Island is long gone and Pharos Island is now an indistinguishable part of the mainland, near enough to where the Citadel of is now.
we haven't spoken to Mohammed much. i'm in the front passenger seat with Louise sitting behind me in the back. it's a habit we got into on taxis if only because i can fend them off if things get nasty, and it means i'm a buffer against potential leering. it's important to note that this hasn't been an issue. at all. even in the slightest. Louise gets a lot of looks from both blokes and ladies. i get more than a few myself we're a novelty and there's no taboo in this culture about staring. regardless, sitting in the front it's mainnly my responsbility to keep the driver entertained, but when Mr Sayed mentioned that Mohammed's english wasn't the greatest he wasn't kidding. he gets by amazingly well though, it's just some of the concepts he doesn't follow our words for. this means that while Louise sits in the back sleeping with her headphones on, or playing with her DS i'm stuck up front not wanting to be rude by pulling my book out. Mohammed's our driver, but he's not a taxi. we're paying him, but he's not our servant. we need to be a little more respectful, so my book doesn't come out until WAY late on the way back to Cairo. it's not too bad though - he's having a fun time trying to explain things to me and teaching me new words in Arabic, little of which sticks. by the time we crest the last rise and are looking over the sea i'm getting well and truly ready to go for a walk around and not have to think too hard about how to say what i mean in simplified english.
one of the first things i notice about Alexandria is how much cleaner it is than Cairo. in fact, that statement is way too much of an understatement. it's Cairo's supermodel younger half-sister. same mother, different fathers, smaller and without the soft middle and saggy boobs, sporting a perfect smile and a better tan. in the 30's it was a slice of Europe-in-Africa - more French and Greek than Arabic. over the last 70-odd years the Arabs have reclaimed it, but kept most of the good habits. the streets are startlingly clear of litter, and because it's insulated by 100km of farmland and marsh it's nowhere near as dusty. i don't see a single tour bus in the entire time i'm there, so i'd guess that it's pretty far from the usual tourist routes. in the rest of Cairo when someone says "Welcome to Egypt," or "Can I take your photo?" i've learned to ignore them. i have to stop ignoring them here because Alexandria is the only place i've been in Egypt where no one. NO ONE has asked me for money or tried to sell me anything i didn't tell them i wanted to buy first.
Mohammed drops us off at the Citadel first up after skirting the bay. it looks like a fucking sand-castle - limestone walls which have been repaired and rebuilt recently from the looks of things, a squat boxy little fort with crenellations and arrow-slits, murder-holes and stout walls that i'd not want to lay siege to with weapons less recent than the last century or a ridiculous number of expendible mampower. we do our standard wander around, but here we're two of the few non-Egyptians in the place. it's full of school groups and Arabs on holiday. it's refreshing like a cool breeze, as subtly different from everywhere else we've been as a feather on the end of a sledgehammer.
exploring the passages and hideyholes in the Citadel i find out that in Alexandria i'm a superstar. i keep getting besieged with high school lads who want to take photos with me, they all want to be my friend, practice their english... i'm not sure if i look like someone famous or what the story is, and Louise is copping a bit of it too: catching shy glances and furtive smiles from the girls. i see one of them whip a phone up out of nowhere to get a photo of her before blushing and making a run for it. i'm a little wierded out by it all, but i'm learning to cope. it's kinda fun, especially when a group of lads blocks traffic on both sides so that i can get a nice photo of Louise while they wait for their own photo op. Louise isn't particularly impressed and doesn't think it's particularly appropriate - i shouldn't be encouraging them, she says. me, i'm just happy they're not trying to hit me up for cash or buy their shit and what the hell? if there's one thing in this world that puts a smile on my face it's making people happy without trying and the number of times i hear "Thankyou thankyou! You're a good man!" makes me think that if this is all they want of me then i'll give it twice.
we finish taking photos and looking around after an hour or so and eventually find Mohammed in the carpark so that we can get on to his next recommendation - the Library or Alexandria. there used to be a Great Library of Alexandria and at the time it was the greatest collection of written works the world had seen, but that mysteriously burned down somewhere back in Roman times. rumour has it that the most important, rare and interesting pieces were squirelled out in the hours preceeding, but i wasn't there so i couldn't tell you. it's only down the road, but it takes a while to get here because we have to wait for the diplomatic convoy to go past. "A Big Man is coming," Mohammed tells us as the armoured cars and trucks full of guns roll by. i spot the flag of Cyprus on the bonnet of a car, but that's all i know.
the Library is a massive, stadium-sloping building with rack after rack of books extending up 12 levels, each with a reading area. there are a couple of exhibitions on the middle floors, and a massive datacentre hosting the Internet Archives. it's a grand building, awe inspiring. its a temple dedication to the worship of accumulated knowledge and the written word. after looking around for a bit we head for the door, dodging the official party who've arrived at the Library since we're come in, so i walk up to part of the diplomatic entourage and ask who's come to visit. "Mr, El Presidente of the Republic of Cypress!" is the grinning response of a woman who's absolutely excited to be asked. sweet fuckery... we just walked within 10 metres of the guy.
Mohammed's looking for somewhere for lunch. he's got somewhere in mind but he can't remember where it is and it's obvious he's got his heart set on something specific because he's asking the same question over and over of every taxi driver we drive past. i don't understand the Arabic, but i CAN pattern match when i hear variants of the same phrase repeated. eventually we pull up in a vaguely-legal parking spot and sit down to some of the best, sweetest charcoal chicken i've ever had. it's been lightly marinaded, and roasted with a covering of onions and tomato. there's so much food that we can't get near to finishing it all and Mohammed gets some of the leftovers to go. it's a cool, dim little place we've fetched up that seems fairly clean, considering the woodchips strewn across the floor. there's even a basin with soap so we can wash out hands before and after tearing half a chicken to pieces and devouring it.
we stock up on water from a cheap-arse little supermarket. the other thing that Alexandria seems to lack is "tourist pricing". we've been here for something like 4 hours now and no one's tried to sell us anything, begged us for money or coax us onto a camel or horse. i'm loving the vibe more and more as time goes by and i'm starting to realise that if i had to live anywhere in Egypt it'd probably be here. back in the car and we find out that the greek ampitheatre is closed, which is a bit of a shame. we make up for it by getting Mohammed to park near the harbor and wandering along it for half an hour or so. i try to explain the concept of "beach" in a mixture of simple english and pantomime but it's not going anywhere so we call on Mr Sayed to help. at a little piece of beach at the eastern end of the main bay i get to dip my toe in the Mediterranean for the first time and celebrate by pulling out my poi and going off on the sand. when i stop 5 minutes later there's applause - everyone's come to watch the crazy white guy with his tennis-balls and streamers at the end of some string and for the first time in something like 6 years i get to bow to an audience of more than a couple of people and while we climb back up onto the footpath i'm grinning so hard i could break walnuts on my cheeks.
we're out of ideas and it's 3:30PM. with a 3-hour drive ahead of us we skip out on finding coffees and shisha and opt to head back to Cairo, getting back on the highway and into the insanity of Egyptian traffic. driving in this country is something of an experience. overwhere you go in the city there are cars squeezing through gaps i wouldn't have rated as such. the ends of wing-mirrors everywhere are scratched and cracked from where they brush regularly. even the open roads are ridiculous - on the coach on the way back from Abu Simbel our driver's going at least 30km/h over the limit, passing 2 or 3 of the other coaches at a time like they're standing still. our driver on the way to Dahab is regularly on the wrong side of the road playing chicken with trucks, and despite pulling over seconds before impact neither driver seems to blink. it's Situation fucking Normal. Mohammed's pretty relaxed. our taxi driver from Tuesday was one of the most skilled collision-avoidance drivers i've ever seen. i'm not sure i could have predicted traffic as well as he could, and i'm not shy about rating my own skills. Louise passes out in the back seat again and as we roll back from the delta to the desert i finally relent and pull my book out for a while.
i'm a little pissed off by this point - if i'd known how nice Alexandria would be i'd have tried to get a night there and see more of it. of everything on this trip it's been the biggest surprise. i love the genuinely friendly atmosphere of the place. i've been hearing "Where you from? Welcome to Egypt!" before a hundred times, but this is the first time i've felt like they're really pleased to see me as someone different rather than as a walking wallet that bleeds cash if they hit me with the right-sized stick.
nearly 12 hours after we left and we're back at the hotel finally, still stuffed from our excessive lunches. my appetite's slowly fading into a shadow of its normal self, so tea's skipped. Louise parks herself in bed and plays with her DS while i crank some tunes and i get to work blogging again - a little over 3 hours wearing the keys of my Eee smooth and i'm still nowhere near finished, so i keep going until my brain melts and i need to sleep. there's not long to go now before we head back to London... the days trickling away and i'm edging towards looking forward to it. there's only so much of this i can take, i think, before it starts to seriously do my head in but i'm in my stride and i think another 2 days are easily surviveable.
somewhere earlyish in his career he wandered into Egypt and kicked the Persians out with (from what Soobie was saying) about as much effort as it takes to slap a mosquito that makes it into your 6th floor hotel room late at night and keeps you awake with its buzzing. i can imagine the conversation now... or at least how it would have played out if Egypt was Brunswick St in Fitzroy:
"So wheresa capitala dis place? LUXOR?? Wassamadda you? I'm not gunna rule from fucking Luxor! Youse all can get fuck mayte. All get fuck! I'm not gunna going up anna downa Nile all de time. Call my cousin Christos anna his mayte John an Stef. I wanna new capital closera to home. Youse can call it Alexandria... yeah, i lika that. Get going! I gotta polish ma Monaro mayte!"
or... well, proably nothing like that, really. still, you get the point. from the capital in Athens Luxor is a long, painful way away. shifting the capital to the coast of the Mediterranean made sense, even if just in travel time. Luxor was the capital of Upper and Lower Egypt, so its location vaguely central made a good compromise between Memphis in the north and Aswan in the south... kinda like Canberra in Australia. Everything in the Middle Kingdon of Egypt was about that balance between north and south. the crown of the kings was "the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt". the temples are covered in a synergy of papyrus and lotus - papyrus being the symbol of the north and lotus of the south. north and south, east and west, life and death, the ancient egyptians liked to play things in pairs.
meanwhile, Louise and i are running late for our meetup with Mohammed... or he's early. i'm not sure, but we get a call from the concierge while i'm throwing my showes on to tell us he's here already. when we get down we find a kindly man with a beard who looks like he may be in his early 40's... which around here means he's at least 50. he leads us out to his car - a late-model Hyunday Verna (Accent in Australia) and we're off up the Alex Desert Road. cars in Egypt are... intersting - Cairo especially. the standard taxi you see in Cairo is a 20+yo Fiat, Peugeot or Lada (the Egyptians did well out of their treaty with Russia... or maybe Russia did well outof Egypt. everywhere you go there are Ladas, the Air Force use MiGs and the police use AK's), painted black and white and looking like they've had every side patched and straightened at least once or twice. most of the cars i see don't have a straight panel on them and if it's clean it means it was washed this morning.
the Alex Desert Rd runs almost straight out of Giza north and west through the Nile Delta. it has 4 marked lanes, which makes it 5-6 lanes wide and surface i'd go so far as to say is "decent". you'll pass a mosque every couple of kilometres in case you're travelling at prayer-time... in fact, they seemed more frequent than service stations (got to love a country where religion's more important than petrol). over the course of 200km you gradually make your way from desert beige to farm green as you go deeper and deeper into the rich soil and and abundant farmlands in the north, then swamp and marsh-lands and then suddenly the blue-green of the Mediterranean. the city was originally built along a natural bay with a couple of small islands across it, which was altered over time to become a calm, enclosed harbor. the Lighthouse (one of the 7 Ancient Wonders) on Pharos Island is long gone and Pharos Island is now an indistinguishable part of the mainland, near enough to where the Citadel of
we haven't spoken to Mohammed much. i'm in the front passenger seat with Louise sitting behind me in the back. it's a habit we got into on taxis if only because i can fend them off if things get nasty, and it means i'm a buffer against potential leering. it's important to note that this hasn't been an issue. at all. even in the slightest. Louise gets a lot of looks from both blokes and ladies. i get more than a few myself we're a novelty and there's no taboo in this culture about staring. regardless, sitting in the front it's mainnly my responsbility to keep the driver entertained, but when Mr Sayed mentioned that Mohammed's english wasn't the greatest he wasn't kidding. he gets by amazingly well though, it's just some of the concepts he doesn't follow our words for. this means that while Louise sits in the back sleeping with her headphones on, or playing with her DS i'm stuck up front not wanting to be rude by pulling my book out. Mohammed's our driver, but he's not a taxi. we're paying him, but he's not our servant. we need to be a little more respectful, so my book doesn't come out until WAY late on the way back to Cairo. it's not too bad though - he's having a fun time trying to explain things to me and teaching me new words in Arabic, little of which sticks. by the time we crest the last rise and are looking over the sea i'm getting well and truly ready to go for a walk around and not have to think too hard about how to say what i mean in simplified english.
one of the first things i notice about Alexandria is how much cleaner it is than Cairo. in fact, that statement is way too much of an understatement. it's Cairo's supermodel younger half-sister. same mother, different fathers, smaller and without the soft middle and saggy boobs, sporting a perfect smile and a better tan. in the 30's it was a slice of Europe-in-Africa - more French and Greek than Arabic. over the last 70-odd years the Arabs have reclaimed it, but kept most of the good habits. the streets are startlingly clear of litter, and because it's insulated by 100km of farmland and marsh it's nowhere near as dusty. i don't see a single tour bus in the entire time i'm there, so i'd guess that it's pretty far from the usual tourist routes. in the rest of Cairo when someone says "Welcome to Egypt," or "Can I take your photo?" i've learned to ignore them. i have to stop ignoring them here because Alexandria is the only place i've been in Egypt where no one. NO ONE has asked me for money or tried to sell me anything i didn't tell them i wanted to buy first.
Mohammed drops us off at the Citadel first up after skirting the bay. it looks like a fucking sand-castle - limestone walls which have been repaired and rebuilt recently from the looks of things, a squat boxy little fort with crenellations and arrow-slits, murder-holes and stout walls that i'd not want to lay siege to with weapons less recent than the last century or a ridiculous number of expendible mampower. we do our standard wander around, but here we're two of the few non-Egyptians in the place. it's full of school groups and Arabs on holiday. it's refreshing like a cool breeze, as subtly different from everywhere else we've been as a feather on the end of a sledgehammer.
exploring the passages and hideyholes in the Citadel i find out that in Alexandria i'm a superstar. i keep getting besieged with high school lads who want to take photos with me, they all want to be my friend, practice their english... i'm not sure if i look like someone famous or what the story is, and Louise is copping a bit of it too: catching shy glances and furtive smiles from the girls. i see one of them whip a phone up out of nowhere to get a photo of her before blushing and making a run for it. i'm a little wierded out by it all, but i'm learning to cope. it's kinda fun, especially when a group of lads blocks traffic on both sides so that i can get a nice photo of Louise while they wait for their own photo op. Louise isn't particularly impressed and doesn't think it's particularly appropriate - i shouldn't be encouraging them, she says. me, i'm just happy they're not trying to hit me up for cash or buy their shit and what the hell? if there's one thing in this world that puts a smile on my face it's making people happy without trying and the number of times i hear "Thankyou thankyou! You're a good man!" makes me think that if this is all they want of me then i'll give it twice.
we finish taking photos and looking around after an hour or so and eventually find Mohammed in the carpark so that we can get on to his next recommendation - the Library or Alexandria. there used to be a Great Library of Alexandria and at the time it was the greatest collection of written works the world had seen, but that mysteriously burned down somewhere back in Roman times. rumour has it that the most important, rare and interesting pieces were squirelled out in the hours preceeding, but i wasn't there so i couldn't tell you. it's only down the road, but it takes a while to get here because we have to wait for the diplomatic convoy to go past. "A Big Man is coming," Mohammed tells us as the armoured cars and trucks full of guns roll by. i spot the flag of Cyprus on the bonnet of a car, but that's all i know.
the Library is a massive, stadium-sloping building with rack after rack of books extending up 12 levels, each with a reading area. there are a couple of exhibitions on the middle floors, and a massive datacentre hosting the Internet Archives. it's a grand building, awe inspiring. its a temple dedication to the worship of accumulated knowledge and the written word. after looking around for a bit we head for the door, dodging the official party who've arrived at the Library since we're come in, so i walk up to part of the diplomatic entourage and ask who's come to visit. "Mr
Mohammed's looking for somewhere for lunch. he's got somewhere in mind but he can't remember where it is and it's obvious he's got his heart set on something specific because he's asking the same question over and over of every taxi driver we drive past. i don't understand the Arabic, but i CAN pattern match when i hear variants of the same phrase repeated. eventually we pull up in a vaguely-legal parking spot and sit down to some of the best, sweetest charcoal chicken i've ever had. it's been lightly marinaded, and roasted with a covering of onions and tomato. there's so much food that we can't get near to finishing it all and Mohammed gets some of the leftovers to go. it's a cool, dim little place we've fetched up that seems fairly clean, considering the woodchips strewn across the floor. there's even a basin with soap so we can wash out hands before and after tearing half a chicken to pieces and devouring it.
we stock up on water from a cheap-arse little supermarket. the other thing that Alexandria seems to lack is "tourist pricing". we've been here for something like 4 hours now and no one's tried to sell us anything, begged us for money or coax us onto a camel or horse. i'm loving the vibe more and more as time goes by and i'm starting to realise that if i had to live anywhere in Egypt it'd probably be here. back in the car and we find out that the greek ampitheatre is closed, which is a bit of a shame. we make up for it by getting Mohammed to park near the harbor and wandering along it for half an hour or so. i try to explain the concept of "beach" in a mixture of simple english and pantomime but it's not going anywhere so we call on Mr Sayed to help. at a little piece of beach at the eastern end of the main bay i get to dip my toe in the Mediterranean for the first time and celebrate by pulling out my poi and going off on the sand. when i stop 5 minutes later there's applause - everyone's come to watch the crazy white guy with his tennis-balls and streamers at the end of some string and for the first time in something like 6 years i get to bow to an audience of more than a couple of people and while we climb back up onto the footpath i'm grinning so hard i could break walnuts on my cheeks.
we're out of ideas and it's 3:30PM. with a 3-hour drive ahead of us we skip out on finding coffees and shisha and opt to head back to Cairo, getting back on the highway and into the insanity of Egyptian traffic. driving in this country is something of an experience. overwhere you go in the city there are cars squeezing through gaps i wouldn't have rated as such. the ends of wing-mirrors everywhere are scratched and cracked from where they brush regularly. even the open roads are ridiculous - on the coach on the way back from Abu Simbel our driver's going at least 30km/h over the limit, passing 2 or 3 of the other coaches at a time like they're standing still. our driver on the way to Dahab is regularly on the wrong side of the road playing chicken with trucks, and despite pulling over seconds before impact neither driver seems to blink. it's Situation fucking Normal. Mohammed's pretty relaxed. our taxi driver from Tuesday was one of the most skilled collision-avoidance drivers i've ever seen. i'm not sure i could have predicted traffic as well as he could, and i'm not shy about rating my own skills. Louise passes out in the back seat again and as we roll back from the delta to the desert i finally relent and pull my book out for a while.
i'm a little pissed off by this point - if i'd known how nice Alexandria would be i'd have tried to get a night there and see more of it. of everything on this trip it's been the biggest surprise. i love the genuinely friendly atmosphere of the place. i've been hearing "Where you from? Welcome to Egypt!" before a hundred times, but this is the first time i've felt like they're really pleased to see me as someone different rather than as a walking wallet that bleeds cash if they hit me with the right-sized stick.
nearly 12 hours after we left and we're back at the hotel finally, still stuffed from our excessive lunches. my appetite's slowly fading into a shadow of its normal self, so tea's skipped. Louise parks herself in bed and plays with her DS while i crank some tunes and i get to work blogging again - a little over 3 hours wearing the keys of my Eee smooth and i'm still nowhere near finished, so i keep going until my brain melts and i need to sleep. there's not long to go now before we head back to London... the days trickling away and i'm edging towards looking forward to it. there's only so much of this i can take, i think, before it starts to seriously do my head in but i'm in my stride and i think another 2 days are easily surviveable.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Egypt Day 16: it's not what you know that matters around here, it's how many men called Mohammed...
sitting on the balcony again tonight it was so murky i couldn't even see the Pyramids. other nights i've been out here i've been able to see at least the outlines. tonight: not so much. air quality's not exactly what you'd call "good" here. a lack of regular rainfall means that stuff hangs in the air for quite a while before settling and between traffic (many to the taxis run on gas rather than petrol, which is good. most of the buses run on diesel or low-octane petrol and belch smoke which cancels out a lot of the benefits), cooking fires, burning rubbish which is heavily plastic and... did i mention dust? regardless of the reason, you can see a noticeable line in the sky from the pollution. looking down from the 6th floor it looks like the aerial scenes from Blade Runner (but without the rain) - the green lights in the nearby mosque's spire and the finished-before-they're-done buildings adding to the cyberpunk tinge.
Mr Sayed's in the hotel foyer this morning as promised, with Louise's chain fixed up as good as new. he's also brought along a pair of ear rings she'd asked to look at - little hollow cartouche's in silver, inscribed with the name Ramses II (Louise's hero). she loves them, and suddenly they're a gift. he REALLY didn't have to do that. just when he can't get any more awesome, he's also come through on another favour we asked on Monday morning: his friend Mohammed will, for LE400, will take us to Alexandria tomorrow and show us around for the day. 200+km and 3 hours drive each way, a 12 hour day. what a bloke. Mohammed's english isn't great, but Mr Sayed has a day off on Thursday so all we have to do is call him and he'll translate for us. i REALLY should have bought more stuff from him. he heads on his way, good deeds done well and truly up until next Ramadan, and we hit up the Taxi-Pimp for a ride into the Egyptian Museum. it was the first thing we were taken to on the official tour, but we really didn't get to do it in enough detail so we're heading back again with Mr Samir - a lovely bloke somewhere in his 40's with specs, a tweed jacket and a 2003 diary filled with notes written by grateful passengers.
we knock the museum over in DETAIL today - catching everything we missed the first time round, and a lot of the stuff we didn't. we spend the extra LE100 to see the mummies, including Ramses II and his father Seti I. Louise manages not to squee, but you can tell she's excited to finally meet her hero, even if he's been dead for 3000 years. we cruise the ancient jewellery, even the exhibit of mummified pets. some of it's world-class in its presentation. some of it's jam-packed in wherever there's space with even less rhyme or reason than the rest of Cairo. we saw the site for the new museum which is going up near the Pyramids and i'm really hoping they sort it out a bit better this time... or at least build it with some space to add anything the find later. there's just too much stuff with too little order to understand half of what you're seeing, but we're loving it anyway. Louise and i have been to so many museums together in the last 6 months that we've got each other's pace almost right so that neither of us is too fast or too slow and i'm more than happy to keep her company through the artifacts until my knee or back gives out, whereupon she's more than happy to sit and let me rest.
we kill the rest of our energy wandering around central-Cairo, meandering along the Nile until we find a street-bazaar and wander around with the locals. we're on their turf now - out of the tourist areas with their touts and walking amongst people who are just living their lives, where a couple of foreigners are an oddity to be stared at, not marks for a quick buck. finally getting sick of the idea we flag down a cab, agree on a price written in my notebook in Arabic (i know the symbols now, but not the words) and take the most convoluted route i've seen so far back to the hotel. this is the 4th time we've been brought this way and we've not used the same route twice.
Louise hits the room for a lie down and i hit the street for a reccie, looking around for potential places to eat tonight. i find a couple of convenience stores, some cafes i want to hit for shisha when i get the chance, and get a recommendation for a good restaurant which later proves to be too expensive. when we head out later we keep rolling past after seeing the prices (take THAT you "thinking i can't read any Arabic motherfuckers"! sometimes i can't be bothered to haggle over the price of my tea and just walk away...) so we roll down the street market a kilometre or so until we get sick of the idea. all the food-places are take-away and with the only english in sight being on the labels of our shoes we're not really sure what the hell we're ordering. it's interesting, and i'm enjoying the local colour, but we're also hungry so we wind up being boring and get room service.
i'm really digging all this at the moment. the abundant availability of sleep, cruising through the days at my own pace... there are worse places to be. i've just about got Cairo sussed. i wouldn't go so far as to say that i'd want live here, but i've accepted it and managed to get my finger more or less in the groove. it's almost a shame it'll all be over in another couple of days, but there are plenty more adventures to have in that time. i think we did well booking 3 weeks - it's been short enough to never feel bored, but long enough that i don't feel like i'm missing much or that i should be rushing. meanwhile, it's time for more sleep, glorious sleep. Mohammed will be here at 7AM so we need to be up at 6 and i've no interest in following the Way of Soobie and only allowing 4 hours to rest...
Mr Sayed's in the hotel foyer this morning as promised, with Louise's chain fixed up as good as new. he's also brought along a pair of ear rings she'd asked to look at - little hollow cartouche's in silver, inscribed with the name Ramses II (Louise's hero). she loves them, and suddenly they're a gift. he REALLY didn't have to do that. just when he can't get any more awesome, he's also come through on another favour we asked on Monday morning: his friend Mohammed will, for LE400, will take us to Alexandria tomorrow and show us around for the day. 200+km and 3 hours drive each way, a 12 hour day. what a bloke. Mohammed's english isn't great, but Mr Sayed has a day off on Thursday so all we have to do is call him and he'll translate for us. i REALLY should have bought more stuff from him. he heads on his way, good deeds done well and truly up until next Ramadan, and we hit up the Taxi-Pimp for a ride into the Egyptian Museum. it was the first thing we were taken to on the official tour, but we really didn't get to do it in enough detail so we're heading back again with Mr Samir - a lovely bloke somewhere in his 40's with specs, a tweed jacket and a 2003 diary filled with notes written by grateful passengers.
we knock the museum over in DETAIL today - catching everything we missed the first time round, and a lot of the stuff we didn't. we spend the extra LE100 to see the mummies, including Ramses II and his father Seti I. Louise manages not to squee, but you can tell she's excited to finally meet her hero, even if he's been dead for 3000 years. we cruise the ancient jewellery, even the exhibit of mummified pets. some of it's world-class in its presentation. some of it's jam-packed in wherever there's space with even less rhyme or reason than the rest of Cairo. we saw the site for the new museum which is going up near the Pyramids and i'm really hoping they sort it out a bit better this time... or at least build it with some space to add anything the find later. there's just too much stuff with too little order to understand half of what you're seeing, but we're loving it anyway. Louise and i have been to so many museums together in the last 6 months that we've got each other's pace almost right so that neither of us is too fast or too slow and i'm more than happy to keep her company through the artifacts until my knee or back gives out, whereupon she's more than happy to sit and let me rest.
we kill the rest of our energy wandering around central-Cairo, meandering along the Nile until we find a street-bazaar and wander around with the locals. we're on their turf now - out of the tourist areas with their touts and walking amongst people who are just living their lives, where a couple of foreigners are an oddity to be stared at, not marks for a quick buck. finally getting sick of the idea we flag down a cab, agree on a price written in my notebook in Arabic (i know the symbols now, but not the words) and take the most convoluted route i've seen so far back to the hotel. this is the 4th time we've been brought this way and we've not used the same route twice.
Louise hits the room for a lie down and i hit the street for a reccie, looking around for potential places to eat tonight. i find a couple of convenience stores, some cafes i want to hit for shisha when i get the chance, and get a recommendation for a good restaurant which later proves to be too expensive. when we head out later we keep rolling past after seeing the prices (take THAT you "thinking i can't read any Arabic motherfuckers"! sometimes i can't be bothered to haggle over the price of my tea and just walk away...) so we roll down the street market a kilometre or so until we get sick of the idea. all the food-places are take-away and with the only english in sight being on the labels of our shoes we're not really sure what the hell we're ordering. it's interesting, and i'm enjoying the local colour, but we're also hungry so we wind up being boring and get room service.
i'm really digging all this at the moment. the abundant availability of sleep, cruising through the days at my own pace... there are worse places to be. i've just about got Cairo sussed. i wouldn't go so far as to say that i'd want live here, but i've accepted it and managed to get my finger more or less in the groove. it's almost a shame it'll all be over in another couple of days, but there are plenty more adventures to have in that time. i think we did well booking 3 weeks - it's been short enough to never feel bored, but long enough that i don't feel like i'm missing much or that i should be rushing. meanwhile, it's time for more sleep, glorious sleep. Mohammed will be here at 7AM so we need to be up at 6 and i've no interest in following the Way of Soobie and only allowing 4 hours to rest...
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Egypt Days 13-15: i could have sworn i had more stamina than this. did i leave it all in Dahab?
i'm sitting on the 6th-floor balcony of my (questionably) 4-Star hotel room sipping a beer while i gaze out on the Pyramids of Giza in the late-afternoon and i can hear the call to prayer echoing from the minaret a couple of hundred metres away. the dust and smog create a glow in the air which softens the sunset and gives the buildings a sepia tinge. the Hotel SIAG Pyramids advertises its rating behind the concierge desk, but i'm starting to realise that the stars in Egypt... they do not mean what i think they mean. much of the foyer is painted gold, with marble floors, a spiral staircase and red-upholstered chairs that look rather grand when you walk in the door, but you don't have to go far before the cracks appear in the facade. for starters, marble's cheap here. it's fucking everywhere, so i'm not impressed. the gold paint on the chairs started rubbing off years ago and it's well on its way now. the pool is an empty blue crater with brown sludge in the deep end (so much for our idea of sitting by the pool, chilling out). of the 3 lifts, i've only seen 2 work and even then they don't like coming up to the 6th floor (they're ok with the 5th though. maybe they got in a fight with the 6th and now they're not talking? who knows...) and the wireless internet in the foyer seems to actually be for the hotel across the road or something, so you need to sit just inside the doors to get a connection... and even then it drops out every few minutes which is hugely frustrating when you're trying to send a 3 meg attachment by email. it's not all bad here though. Louise and i have a queen-size bed each and true to the advertising the balcony does in fact have a great view of the Pyramids that we've spent a lot of time sitting and and looking at. the air con works which is good, not because it's particularly hot but because otherwise we'd have no fresh air. open the sliding door in the evening and you'd better have your mozzie repellant on otherwise prepare to be eaten. i've had my jabs, but typhoid is a nasty little disease which turns your blood to poison and is therefore not your friend.
a couple of days ago i was on the public coach from Dahab to Cairo. heading there we were crammed into a smaller tour bus which went direct. thanks to the extra night in Dahab, GoBus booked us onto the public coach which was surprisingly comfortable - better than the Mccaffrey's buses i used to take from Canberra to Sydney. it takes a more circuitous route, however, cutting across the Sinai peninsula to the west-coast and going through Sharm al Shiek and a couple of other places with immemorable names on its way to the capital. we had a 8:30AM start, but somehow were more shattered by the time we arrived at 5:15PM than we had been leaving at 7AM nearly a week previous. Louise slept most of the way, her head falling and snapping back every couple of minutes, while i drained most of my Eee's battery trying to make some amount of sense out of the days just passed.
Wally was at the bus stop to meet us and say goodbye - he was meeting his new group in a couple of hours, but still took the time out to see us off to our last tour-arranged hotel personally. i can't rate the service of the tour company highly enough - they've looked after us, kept everything tight, made sure we were always sorted and the moment we wanted to change the plan they accomodated us in a heartbeat. i was sad to see Wally go, just as i was sad to say goodbye to Soobie a week before. Soobie was our guide and our shepherd. Wally was our fixer and our friend. at the same time i was glad to be off the tour and off the map. now i do this thing My Way... Louise agreeing of course. i like to set my own pace and choose my own path. being on the tour grated a bit, but the reality of the situation is that i could never have completed as much as they did anywhere near as efficiently or cheaply, even given twice the time to do it, and even if i'd tried 80% of the detail would have been lost because they have the local-knowledge and know-how.
we get an early night in the Holiday Inn after finding the supermarket Soobie had shown us on the second day of the trip (conveniently, located just down the road from the hotel) and grabbing some fast food for tea, eating in our room and chilling out. we're met in the lobby by our jeweller Mr Sayed at around check-out time. he'd met us in our hotel in Luxor where he has a regular hookup through GoBus as their "trusted source" for jewellery which meant that when we ordered customised pieces he was guaranteed to deliver. we'd picked up our shipments on our second stint in Cairo, on our way to Dahab but my silver bling-bracelet had been too small and needed adjustment, and Louise'd necklace had broken in Dahab and needed repair. he came out to our hotel to pick her necklace up and promised to have it back to her at our next hotel in 2 days time. no mess, no fuss, no arguement, just an apology for the inconvenience. he didn't have to do that.
the business of the morning sorted we haggled with the concierge and arranged a taxi out to Giza and the hotel we'd booked ourselves for the last week in town. an hour later we were sitting on our balcony enjoying the view.
feeling appropriately chilled out, we hit the street in search of adventure, exploration and food. we've landed a bit of a ways off the beaten track here in Giza - the hotel is a kilometre or so off Pyramids Rd, opposite a new freeway overpass which is under construction. we've got no idea where the fuck anything is around here and no direction looks particularly obvious so we decide "fuck it" and head right, spending the next 2 hours doing a bog-lap around and through a mixture of suburbia and strip-malls, eyes of the locals tracking us (mostly Louise) as we pass through back-streets where english is something that generally happens to other people. it's hot and dusty but our limited Arabic successfully buys us cheap-but-delicious felafels and no one gives us any lip. i'm liking this - away from the tourist traps and the bazaars, seeing how these people live in the real world. a bit of a rest back at the hotel and we're out the door again. the hotel's Taxi-Pimp introduces us to Omar who will take us to the Pyramids Sound & Light Show, wait around for us then show us somewhere to get a bite to eat. the show's just as cheesy, lame and overly dramatic as advertised... but it's fun. i don't even mind when it loses the plot half-way through and goes off on a wierd tangent because at least it's interesting and tells stories i've not heard before. it IS actually worth going and paying to see, even if just to see the pyramids light up in pretty colours with lasers tracing out patterns on the flat wall of the Embalming Temple. true to his word, Omar takes us not only to an Egyptian fast-food place (FelFela - a greasy snack-joint selling felafel sandwiches and Shwerma Kebabs for LE1 and LE12 in that order. at that price i get Omar a felafel sandwich for being such a good sport. tipping is a big part of the culture here and i want to try something different) but a hole-in-the-wall grog shop where we stock up for the coming week.
Cairo's a dusty, dirty, smelly hellhole of a town. don't let anyone tell you otherwise, but don't take this as criticism either. areas like the one i'm at here in Giza are only a couple of kilometres from the Western Desert and therefore dustier than an octogenarian's lingere collection. rubbish arrangements are both serendipitous and democratic - anywhere that isn't currently being used has a pile blown in by the wind, then people just use that. they seem to get cleaned out every once in a while, but not until every man and his donkey has a pick through for anything of interest. the only clean cars you'll see were washed this morning, and spent most of their time since covered up. i've seen cars under bridges with a coating of dust so thick i couldn't tell what colour they started out, but now they're brown. the rubbish in this place makes me despair sometimes. i swear Bangkok was cleaner, although with the lack of humidity Cairo wins on smell. dry shit don't stink so much (although with the impressive donkey population even in the centre of Cairo there's plenty of donkey-shit around). seriously though? fuck it. that's just the way it is. YOU try keeping shit clean when the desert dust whips up and and a new load settles in the stillness of the night. it rains here so rarely it barely even counts and it'd take at least a week of downpour to give this place anywhere near the cleaning it needs.
this is what the PC-crowd like to call a "developing country". for every rich person is Cairo or Alexandria there are hundreds of peasants living a rural life up and down the Nile. the average Egyptian earns less than LE1000 a month. that's ~AUD$250, or ~GBP£100. and that's the average. i've been blowing something like that each week i've been here. for every dole-bludger sitting on their corpulent arse in Lakemba whining about how hard it is in the current economic climate, all i can say is come meet Mohammed. he works a field of garlic and carrots on the edge of the desert. he sleeps in a mud-brick hut with his wife and 3 kids. his 10 year old son just started working in a carpet factory and he's glad for it because the money Amir earns means he can take english-classes in a couple of years and maybe get a job in tourism as a tout selling dodgy-papyrus, driving a taxi or maybe even as a guide if he's lucky. the daily live of these people is dust, dirt, prayer and hard fucking work and if you still think your life is hard after seeing the gratitude in his eyes after you hand him the equivalent of a quid when you need to pull your head out of your fucking arse because it's completely full of shit.
there's not the money for garbage trucks in the burbs - they're focused on keeping the tourist sites clean (and they don't even manage that very well half the time) because that's what important here. Australia rode the sheep's back to prosperity before climbing on the Haulpak and hitching a ride with the resources boom. Egypt's riding the international tourist and the money we spend visiting the monuments and museums, shopping in the bazaars and the restaurants, taking tours and paying guides means freeways, water you can drink from the tap without catching dysentry, power with only the occasional brownout, hospitals and medicines, education and trades. i'd love it if they could keep the place tidier so that they didn't have to live in filth, but i understand why they can't. each day i come back to the hotel dusty and dirty and i don't want to know the colour the water'll turn when i wash my clothes back in London, but it comes with the territory. at least i know in a few days my clothes will be clean, and stay that way for a while.
Tuesday rolls in and we've both had something like 9 or 10 hours of sleep but we just manage to get down to the buffet in time to snaffle some chocolate-covered croissants and a sweet danish, along with a couple of mugs of the muddy water that passes for coffee in this town. it's either Turkish Coffee (WIN!) or Nescafe (FAIL!) around here, and the hotel doesn't do Turkish. shit together, we find the Taxi-Pimp and our new friend Mohammed agrees to take us around for the day. first stop is the Citadel of Salah Al-Din, perched over the city on a hilltop with a stunning view - a medieval fortress from back in the days before gunpowder when thick walls, a few thousand men and a decent stockpile of arrows could hold off an army. when the Turks and the Arabs finally took Egypt back from Napoleon and crowned Mohammed Ali (where do you think Cassius Clay got the name?) as the new king he had a grand mosque build at its peak: a majestic, but subdued place of worship. Ali and his dynasty ruled for the next 147 years, but the Mosque of Mohammed Ali remains.
i've been in churches galore - growing up with a quietly Roman Catholic mother and a father who dabbled in a few different christian sects before coming back to Orthodoxy with a religious fervour that would bring a tear to an Inquisitor's eye, i've seen the inside of more places of worship than i have Macdonalds restaurants. Catholic, Uniting, Baptist, Angligan, CoE, Orthodox (Greek or Russian), Buddhist (a couple of flavours), Hindu, Ancient Egyptian... throw in a Synagogue or two, Latter Day Saints and Scientology and i'll just about have the full set unless you want to get nutty and go Davidian (oh yeah - that burned down. shame). i've seen them big and small, grand like St Pauls in London, small and humble like St Margaret's (i need to check this) in Edinburgh Castle, sombre Orthodox churches full of gold-leaf ikons, colourful Hindus ringed with statues, halls with folding seats, converted warehouses and even an ancient brick temple overgrown by a Budda-Tree, tended by modest, peaceful buddhist monks. my first mosque was something new. light coloured stone walls a storey high giving way to dark coloured domes above, lights hung low on chains from a ceiling done in dark-olive green, deep brown and black, silver inscriptions and filigree and carpets on the floor for the believers to sit, pray and contemplate. a whispered story i overheard was that some local Jewish artisans were roped into the construction and decoration and when no one was looking they painted a Star of David at the top of the central dome around the mount for the main chandelier in gold, thumbing their noses at their Muslem task-masters. if you look up you can see it there to this day - apparently Ali could take a joke and let it stay.
it's peaceful and restful... none of the grotesquerie of the crucifiction, fire and brimstone, "do this or else", bleeding eyes or hearts. of course, i can't read Arabic so for all i know they inscriptions could be screaming "Death to the infidel" but somehow... i don't think so. we wind up sitting there for at least 10 minutes enjoying the serenity. even the american and Italian tourists near us take their shoes off and pay respect. back outside in the blinding sunlight we're back to our normal "get a photo of me in front of the" habits, but i'm starting to develop an inkling of why Islam spreads faster than an 18yo's legs at a toga party. later in the day we visit the Mosque of Sayyidna Al-Hussein near the Kahn Al-Kalili and i see people sitting, talking, praying, sleeping. fall asleep in a Catholic church and you'll be shoo'd out. sit on the floor and you'll be rudely prodded. here sitting on the floor is what you do. it's dark, cool, and thick stone walls provide a sanctuatry from the midday sun. seats? you sit on the carpet, fool! that's what it's for!
i'm not really sure what the Citadel's all about. we spent an hour or so wandering around it, following the circut of the somewhat-interesting (but poorly organised and a little pointless) Military Museum which had considerably more replicas and models than it had actual artifacts, skipping the Police Museum completely and generally enjoying the view of Cairo. like so much of Egypt, it's got a "thrown together" feel to it and i almost wish i'd had a guide to point at the interesting stuff i know i missed.
back on the street i give Mohammed a call to come grab us from the pickup point and we're off, but only after climbing into the wrong taxi and having to jump out 10 metres down the road. we're dropped off at Sayyidna Al-Hussein and after having a look around we cruise the markets for a while. Louise wants to look at jewellery. Louise wants to haggle for a shisha water-pipe. Mr Raven wants to gut-punch the next person who yells at him "Sir, Sir! How can I take your money?" walk softly, carry a big stick and pray i only break half your fingers. the first time i thought it was refreshingly honest, after which it got old really fast. Kahn Al-Kalili is Cairo's BIG tourist market. think of anything stereotypically Egyptian and/or Pharaonic, you name it: you'll find it here. two main streets linked by cross-roads and alleyways. keep your wits about you or you're getting lost. the unwary should carry a compass in their hand and their money in an internal body cavity... or maybe another set of trousers. which they left in another country. we don't get anywhere near into it on account of being tired, thirsty and in desperate need of a sit down. it's tourist-ville, so we even bargain down the price of our drinks and cocktail-shisha and enjoy a nice half-hour sipping sweet cold hibiscus while we watch the world go by, walking away with that contented feeling that too many things are right with the universe and anything that isn't is welcome to wait until i care again.
meanwhile we've lost Mohammed. i've burned through most of my remaining phone credit trying to work out where he is. he's in the carpark of the nearer mosque (there are 2 in close vicinity). no, he's on the street. wait, we'll meet him out the front of the farther mosque. we're going back to the car park? no, there you are! it's getting late and we've managed to hit rush hour on the freeway. oh. sweet. fuckery. somewhere in the middle of i-have-no-fucking-idea a 5-lane freeway hasn't just slowed to a crawl, it's stopped. people are getting out of their cars to see what's going on. after 5 minutes i'm sitting in the window of the taxi waving at the kids in the back of the truck ahead wishing i had my poi with me, otherwise i'd have given this Cairo Freeway an impromptu performance before running around the cars with my hat out asking for tips. turnabout is fair-play, after all. i'm SO pissed off - i'm never taking them out of my bag again. Louise is happy i left them in the hotel - she hates it when i make a spectacle. in the end we wait until the traffic mysteriously starts moving again and amuse ourselves by learning to read Arabic numbers (which came in useful today when we walked into a restaurant with an english menu but prices in Arabic. WIN!) by reading off licence-plates (they have both Arabic and Western on them, so they're like mini-Rosetta Stones). Mohammed gets in on the game and seems to be having a ball schooling the white kids. i get to the point where i can read all 10 numerals and say to him i can read numbers in Arabic! now i'm as good as an Egyptian 5-year old! and he loses it laughing. eventually we're dropped back outside the hotel. the bill? LE200 - the equivalent of AUD$50 for 6 hours and fuck-knows how many kilometres.
we celebrate in the restaurant next to the hotel which has an english/arabic menu and no other customers but us. the food's good, the staff hover around as if their heads are on the chopping block if we aren't completely satisfied and we while away our evening watching the Egyptian Top-40 and smoking apple-shisha while mosquitos mistake my legs for a free buffet.
a couple of days ago i was on the public coach from Dahab to Cairo. heading there we were crammed into a smaller tour bus which went direct. thanks to the extra night in Dahab, GoBus booked us onto the public coach which was surprisingly comfortable - better than the Mccaffrey's buses i used to take from Canberra to Sydney. it takes a more circuitous route, however, cutting across the Sinai peninsula to the west-coast and going through Sharm al Shiek and a couple of other places with immemorable names on its way to the capital. we had a 8:30AM start, but somehow were more shattered by the time we arrived at 5:15PM than we had been leaving at 7AM nearly a week previous. Louise slept most of the way, her head falling and snapping back every couple of minutes, while i drained most of my Eee's battery trying to make some amount of sense out of the days just passed.
Wally was at the bus stop to meet us and say goodbye - he was meeting his new group in a couple of hours, but still took the time out to see us off to our last tour-arranged hotel personally. i can't rate the service of the tour company highly enough - they've looked after us, kept everything tight, made sure we were always sorted and the moment we wanted to change the plan they accomodated us in a heartbeat. i was sad to see Wally go, just as i was sad to say goodbye to Soobie a week before. Soobie was our guide and our shepherd. Wally was our fixer and our friend. at the same time i was glad to be off the tour and off the map. now i do this thing My Way... Louise agreeing of course. i like to set my own pace and choose my own path. being on the tour grated a bit, but the reality of the situation is that i could never have completed as much as they did anywhere near as efficiently or cheaply, even given twice the time to do it, and even if i'd tried 80% of the detail would have been lost because they have the local-knowledge and know-how.
we get an early night in the Holiday Inn after finding the supermarket Soobie had shown us on the second day of the trip (conveniently, located just down the road from the hotel) and grabbing some fast food for tea, eating in our room and chilling out. we're met in the lobby by our jeweller Mr Sayed at around check-out time. he'd met us in our hotel in Luxor where he has a regular hookup through GoBus as their "trusted source" for jewellery which meant that when we ordered customised pieces he was guaranteed to deliver. we'd picked up our shipments on our second stint in Cairo, on our way to Dahab but my silver bling-bracelet had been too small and needed adjustment, and Louise'd necklace had broken in Dahab and needed repair. he came out to our hotel to pick her necklace up and promised to have it back to her at our next hotel in 2 days time. no mess, no fuss, no arguement, just an apology for the inconvenience. he didn't have to do that.
the business of the morning sorted we haggled with the concierge and arranged a taxi out to Giza and the hotel we'd booked ourselves for the last week in town. an hour later we were sitting on our balcony enjoying the view.
feeling appropriately chilled out, we hit the street in search of adventure, exploration and food. we've landed a bit of a ways off the beaten track here in Giza - the hotel is a kilometre or so off Pyramids Rd, opposite a new freeway overpass which is under construction. we've got no idea where the fuck anything is around here and no direction looks particularly obvious so we decide "fuck it" and head right, spending the next 2 hours doing a bog-lap around and through a mixture of suburbia and strip-malls, eyes of the locals tracking us (mostly Louise) as we pass through back-streets where english is something that generally happens to other people. it's hot and dusty but our limited Arabic successfully buys us cheap-but-delicious felafels and no one gives us any lip. i'm liking this - away from the tourist traps and the bazaars, seeing how these people live in the real world. a bit of a rest back at the hotel and we're out the door again. the hotel's Taxi-Pimp introduces us to Omar who will take us to the Pyramids Sound & Light Show, wait around for us then show us somewhere to get a bite to eat. the show's just as cheesy, lame and overly dramatic as advertised... but it's fun. i don't even mind when it loses the plot half-way through and goes off on a wierd tangent because at least it's interesting and tells stories i've not heard before. it IS actually worth going and paying to see, even if just to see the pyramids light up in pretty colours with lasers tracing out patterns on the flat wall of the Embalming Temple. true to his word, Omar takes us not only to an Egyptian fast-food place (FelFela - a greasy snack-joint selling felafel sandwiches and Shwerma Kebabs for LE1 and LE12 in that order. at that price i get Omar a felafel sandwich for being such a good sport. tipping is a big part of the culture here and i want to try something different) but a hole-in-the-wall grog shop where we stock up for the coming week.
Cairo's a dusty, dirty, smelly hellhole of a town. don't let anyone tell you otherwise, but don't take this as criticism either. areas like the one i'm at here in Giza are only a couple of kilometres from the Western Desert and therefore dustier than an octogenarian's lingere collection. rubbish arrangements are both serendipitous and democratic - anywhere that isn't currently being used has a pile blown in by the wind, then people just use that. they seem to get cleaned out every once in a while, but not until every man and his donkey has a pick through for anything of interest. the only clean cars you'll see were washed this morning, and spent most of their time since covered up. i've seen cars under bridges with a coating of dust so thick i couldn't tell what colour they started out, but now they're brown. the rubbish in this place makes me despair sometimes. i swear Bangkok was cleaner, although with the lack of humidity Cairo wins on smell. dry shit don't stink so much (although with the impressive donkey population even in the centre of Cairo there's plenty of donkey-shit around). seriously though? fuck it. that's just the way it is. YOU try keeping shit clean when the desert dust whips up and and a new load settles in the stillness of the night. it rains here so rarely it barely even counts and it'd take at least a week of downpour to give this place anywhere near the cleaning it needs.
this is what the PC-crowd like to call a "developing country". for every rich person is Cairo or Alexandria there are hundreds of peasants living a rural life up and down the Nile. the average Egyptian earns less than LE1000 a month. that's ~AUD$250, or ~GBP£100. and that's the average. i've been blowing something like that each week i've been here. for every dole-bludger sitting on their corpulent arse in Lakemba whining about how hard it is in the current economic climate, all i can say is come meet Mohammed. he works a field of garlic and carrots on the edge of the desert. he sleeps in a mud-brick hut with his wife and 3 kids. his 10 year old son just started working in a carpet factory and he's glad for it because the money Amir earns means he can take english-classes in a couple of years and maybe get a job in tourism as a tout selling dodgy-papyrus, driving a taxi or maybe even as a guide if he's lucky. the daily live of these people is dust, dirt, prayer and hard fucking work and if you still think your life is hard after seeing the gratitude in his eyes after you hand him the equivalent of a quid when you need to pull your head out of your fucking arse because it's completely full of shit.
there's not the money for garbage trucks in the burbs - they're focused on keeping the tourist sites clean (and they don't even manage that very well half the time) because that's what important here. Australia rode the sheep's back to prosperity before climbing on the Haulpak and hitching a ride with the resources boom. Egypt's riding the international tourist and the money we spend visiting the monuments and museums, shopping in the bazaars and the restaurants, taking tours and paying guides means freeways, water you can drink from the tap without catching dysentry, power with only the occasional brownout, hospitals and medicines, education and trades. i'd love it if they could keep the place tidier so that they didn't have to live in filth, but i understand why they can't. each day i come back to the hotel dusty and dirty and i don't want to know the colour the water'll turn when i wash my clothes back in London, but it comes with the territory. at least i know in a few days my clothes will be clean, and stay that way for a while.
Tuesday rolls in and we've both had something like 9 or 10 hours of sleep but we just manage to get down to the buffet in time to snaffle some chocolate-covered croissants and a sweet danish, along with a couple of mugs of the muddy water that passes for coffee in this town. it's either Turkish Coffee (WIN!) or Nescafe (FAIL!) around here, and the hotel doesn't do Turkish. shit together, we find the Taxi-Pimp and our new friend Mohammed agrees to take us around for the day. first stop is the Citadel of Salah Al-Din, perched over the city on a hilltop with a stunning view - a medieval fortress from back in the days before gunpowder when thick walls, a few thousand men and a decent stockpile of arrows could hold off an army. when the Turks and the Arabs finally took Egypt back from Napoleon and crowned Mohammed Ali (where do you think Cassius Clay got the name?) as the new king he had a grand mosque build at its peak: a majestic, but subdued place of worship. Ali and his dynasty ruled for the next 147 years, but the Mosque of Mohammed Ali remains.
i've been in churches galore - growing up with a quietly Roman Catholic mother and a father who dabbled in a few different christian sects before coming back to Orthodoxy with a religious fervour that would bring a tear to an Inquisitor's eye, i've seen the inside of more places of worship than i have Macdonalds restaurants. Catholic, Uniting, Baptist, Angligan, CoE, Orthodox (Greek or Russian), Buddhist (a couple of flavours), Hindu, Ancient Egyptian... throw in a Synagogue or two, Latter Day Saints and Scientology and i'll just about have the full set unless you want to get nutty and go Davidian (oh yeah - that burned down. shame). i've seen them big and small, grand like St Pauls in London, small and humble like St Margaret's (i need to check this) in Edinburgh Castle, sombre Orthodox churches full of gold-leaf ikons, colourful Hindus ringed with statues, halls with folding seats, converted warehouses and even an ancient brick temple overgrown by a Budda-Tree, tended by modest, peaceful buddhist monks. my first mosque was something new. light coloured stone walls a storey high giving way to dark coloured domes above, lights hung low on chains from a ceiling done in dark-olive green, deep brown and black, silver inscriptions and filigree and carpets on the floor for the believers to sit, pray and contemplate. a whispered story i overheard was that some local Jewish artisans were roped into the construction and decoration and when no one was looking they painted a Star of David at the top of the central dome around the mount for the main chandelier in gold, thumbing their noses at their Muslem task-masters. if you look up you can see it there to this day - apparently Ali could take a joke and let it stay.
it's peaceful and restful... none of the grotesquerie of the crucifiction, fire and brimstone, "do this or else", bleeding eyes or hearts. of course, i can't read Arabic so for all i know they inscriptions could be screaming "Death to the infidel" but somehow... i don't think so. we wind up sitting there for at least 10 minutes enjoying the serenity. even the american and Italian tourists near us take their shoes off and pay respect. back outside in the blinding sunlight we're back to our normal "get a photo of me in front of the
i'm not really sure what the Citadel's all about. we spent an hour or so wandering around it, following the circut of the somewhat-interesting (but poorly organised and a little pointless) Military Museum which had considerably more replicas and models than it had actual artifacts, skipping the Police Museum completely and generally enjoying the view of Cairo. like so much of Egypt, it's got a "thrown together" feel to it and i almost wish i'd had a guide to point at the interesting stuff i know i missed.
back on the street i give Mohammed a call to come grab us from the pickup point and we're off, but only after climbing into the wrong taxi and having to jump out 10 metres down the road. we're dropped off at Sayyidna Al-Hussein and after having a look around we cruise the markets for a while. Louise wants to look at jewellery. Louise wants to haggle for a shisha water-pipe. Mr Raven wants to gut-punch the next person who yells at him "Sir, Sir! How can I take your money?" walk softly, carry a big stick and pray i only break half your fingers. the first time i thought it was refreshingly honest, after which it got old really fast. Kahn Al-Kalili is Cairo's BIG tourist market. think of anything stereotypically Egyptian and/or Pharaonic, you name it: you'll find it here. two main streets linked by cross-roads and alleyways. keep your wits about you or you're getting lost. the unwary should carry a compass in their hand and their money in an internal body cavity... or maybe another set of trousers. which they left in another country. we don't get anywhere near into it on account of being tired, thirsty and in desperate need of a sit down. it's tourist-ville, so we even bargain down the price of our drinks and cocktail-shisha and enjoy a nice half-hour sipping sweet cold hibiscus while we watch the world go by, walking away with that contented feeling that too many things are right with the universe and anything that isn't is welcome to wait until i care again.
meanwhile we've lost Mohammed. i've burned through most of my remaining phone credit trying to work out where he is. he's in the carpark of the nearer mosque (there are 2 in close vicinity). no, he's on the street. wait, we'll meet him out the front of the farther mosque. we're going back to the car park? no, there you are! it's getting late and we've managed to hit rush hour on the freeway. oh. sweet. fuckery. somewhere in the middle of i-have-no-fucking-idea a 5-lane freeway hasn't just slowed to a crawl, it's stopped. people are getting out of their cars to see what's going on. after 5 minutes i'm sitting in the window of the taxi waving at the kids in the back of the truck ahead wishing i had my poi with me, otherwise i'd have given this Cairo Freeway an impromptu performance before running around the cars with my hat out asking for tips. turnabout is fair-play, after all. i'm SO pissed off - i'm never taking them out of my bag again. Louise is happy i left them in the hotel - she hates it when i make a spectacle. in the end we wait until the traffic mysteriously starts moving again and amuse ourselves by learning to read Arabic numbers (which came in useful today when we walked into a restaurant with an english menu but prices in Arabic. WIN!) by reading off licence-plates (they have both Arabic and Western on them, so they're like mini-Rosetta Stones). Mohammed gets in on the game and seems to be having a ball schooling the white kids. i get to the point where i can read all 10 numerals and say to him i can read numbers in Arabic! now i'm as good as an Egyptian 5-year old! and he loses it laughing. eventually we're dropped back outside the hotel. the bill? LE200 - the equivalent of AUD$50 for 6 hours and fuck-knows how many kilometres.
we celebrate in the restaurant next to the hotel which has an english/arabic menu and no other customers but us. the food's good, the staff hover around as if their heads are on the chopping block if we aren't completely satisfied and we while away our evening watching the Egyptian Top-40 and smoking apple-shisha while mosquitos mistake my legs for a free buffet.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Egypt Days 10-12: now i just need to learn to fly...
walking down the market street in Dahab i can hear the call to prayer, and i'm now officially a PADI-Certified Open Water Diver. three days, 7 dives, 4 quizzes, 2 videos and an exam. with the shiny card that should come through the mailbox at basecamp in London in a month or so i can now hire kit, grab a buddy and plan my own dives down to a depth of 18 metres without requiring a Dive Master. i wasn't going to do the Open Water Course. i wasn't going to dive at all due to the expense, but on the first day in Dahab Wahil from Orca Dive Dahab came to talk to us and as he went on Louise and i met eyes across the table and nodded. after the first day in the water what started as a SCUBA course (2/3 of the full course load, max-depth 12 metres, Dive Master required) turned into the full Open Water Diver.
3 days spent, US$350 gone, it was worth every cent. the first time i got out there in full kit to swim around was just incredible - breathing easy, the mask correcting my vision nicely (i'm -1.25 in each eye and the perspex mask naturally corrects between -1 and -2 under the water so i'm sweet), fish having a contemplative look at my fingertips. rolling onto my back and looking up at the surface while a school of Scissortails passed overhead, flipping into a St Peter's Cross and watching the Clown Fish dart around Mohammed (our instructor, veteran of over 7000 dives), it's one of the few things i've found in the last couple of years that compares to motorcycling as a sport, although on reflection it's probably no less expensive when you get into it.
everything went smashingly through to the end of the first day. there's a required video to watch which we covered off the night before (after returning from Mt Sinai) and by the end of the day Louise and i had decided to extend an extra day in Dahab so that we could finish off in full. Mohammed grabbed me and Louise while everyone else was distracted washing their kit and told us that we were by far and away the best divers in the group. we headed off down the street grinning like hyenas, laughing like drains, loving life and having the time of ours. day two, for me did not go so well. i wasn't feeling particularly great to start with after waking every half-hour or so through the night when an exercise half-way through the second session left me gasping for breath under 3 metres of water, then after a bit of a fun-dive we had to practice taking our masks off underwater, then putting them back on again. welcome to a book i like to call "Things That Freak Mr Raven Out For Fun & Excitement". the list is short and simple, although i shan't be explaining it all to you today. 2 things that bear mentioning at this point are thus, however: i cannot fucking stand getting water in my eyes, including opening them underwater, and i have massive problems with getting water up my nose. you might think that this would get in the way of swimming and watersports, but i've developed techniques so that i can surf or swim or whatever, even in a big swell. for starters, i always look where i'm going and what's going on around me so that i don't accidentally catch a wave in the back of the head. i swim with my head up for the most part. it's not great, but it's adequate, and if i have to go under or through a wave i'll take a deep breath, scrunch my eyes up before diving under and exhale through my nose to keep it clear before rubbing the water out of my eyes on the surface. now you want me to fill my mask with water, open my eyes, try to keep breathing without water shooting up my nose then put my mask back on and clear it? you've got to be fucking joking.
i tried. i gave it my best shot. then i breathed water, choked and jumped straight to the surface (it's ok - we were in about a metre and a half of water) coughing, spluttering and gasping. that was the end of the dive and i staggered away gutted. i didn't feel better until much much later after Louise and i snapped at each other, rode camels off into the sunset and subsequently apologised. we'd had to rush from the dive centre back to the hotel because we were late for the evening's camel ride down the beach to see the sunset over the mountains. i'm loving camels; from their oft-joked-about toes to their teddybear-ears. i've seen enough people riding them in the last couple of weeks that i've picked up a few skills, one being that if you cross one leg over the front of the saddle then cradle you opposite knee with your ankle it's FAR more stable and comfortable. we didn't hang out particularly long - out on the beach the group sat taking photos and drinking bedouin-tea (a lovely, sweet herbal concoction brewed on an open fire) until the sun was nicely down then headed off again, loping off back to the hotel and i finally started to feel a bit relaxed.
another night of sleep and day 3 brings us from a group of 5 to a group of 3. Deano and Kim have finished at SCUBA and they're now out. it's down to Mike, Louise and me. the rest of the skills are demonstrated without issues, but i'm nervous as an arachnophobic with a Huntsman on his face when it's time to get my mask off again. the methodology preferred by PADI is to let enough water into your mask to cover your nose, then breathe a little, then repeat at just below the eyes and then with a mask full. i'm having none of this. the only way i'm passing this is if i can get a solid hold on my nose so it can't try to breathe through it and when it's time i take a deep breath, close my eyes tight like i'm about to die, rip my mask off my head in one quick motion and grab my nose tight. i'm kneeling on the ocean floor under 2 metres of water blind and desperately staving off gasping panic, my inhalations coming in ragged and fast while i struggle for calm. i get the pat on the head and i repeat the procedure in reverse, alternating between grabbing my nose tight and using it to exhale and clear the mask.
5 minutes later i have to do it again. half an hour later i have to do it again under 6 metres of water. i got through and i passed, somehow managing the highest score in the group for the exam. i copped flack from Mike for the rest of the day and i think Mohammed might have been going easy on me but i didn't care. the last of the practical skills over, a practice dive through the reef near the Lighthouse and the rest was a foregone conclusion. i ate my lunch while i flew through the exam and you couldn't have wiped the grin off my face with metho. walking out at the end of the day with out last practical dive done, kit washed and stowed, temporary certificates laminated and stowed in our wallets, we walked off down the market street with a massive feeling of achievement. it's such a simple thing that anyone can do it, but we weren't caring. we're both already thinking about where we can go diving now that we've unlocked access to most of the world's recreational dives. Greece or Spain in the summer is tempting, but in the back on my mind is the little island in Fiji i sat on for 3 days a year or so ago where the water was warm, the beers were cold and Rhianna sung "Umbrella" every hour on the hour. there was a little PADI dive shop i never got to try at the time and i feel like i missed out on something there. Louise keeps using the word "we" when discussing future dives. we made good buddies down under the water (PADI uses a buddy-system for safety. i'll watch your back and you keep the sharks off mine) and i'll happily partner up with her again... i'm just not assuming anything about the future at the moment.
still, it's something i'm remarkably glad i've done. after 3 days of suiting up and getting out there the movements and procedures have second-nature. a few more dives and i reckon i might start getting as comfortable as i am on a bike. now i just need to see if i can learn to fly a plane...
3 days spent, US$350 gone, it was worth every cent. the first time i got out there in full kit to swim around was just incredible - breathing easy, the mask correcting my vision nicely (i'm -1.25 in each eye and the perspex mask naturally corrects between -1 and -2 under the water so i'm sweet), fish having a contemplative look at my fingertips. rolling onto my back and looking up at the surface while a school of Scissortails passed overhead, flipping into a St Peter's Cross and watching the Clown Fish dart around Mohammed (our instructor, veteran of over 7000 dives), it's one of the few things i've found in the last couple of years that compares to motorcycling as a sport, although on reflection it's probably no less expensive when you get into it.
everything went smashingly through to the end of the first day. there's a required video to watch which we covered off the night before (after returning from Mt Sinai) and by the end of the day Louise and i had decided to extend an extra day in Dahab so that we could finish off in full. Mohammed grabbed me and Louise while everyone else was distracted washing their kit and told us that we were by far and away the best divers in the group. we headed off down the street grinning like hyenas, laughing like drains, loving life and having the time of ours. day two, for me did not go so well. i wasn't feeling particularly great to start with after waking every half-hour or so through the night when an exercise half-way through the second session left me gasping for breath under 3 metres of water, then after a bit of a fun-dive we had to practice taking our masks off underwater, then putting them back on again. welcome to a book i like to call "Things That Freak Mr Raven Out For Fun & Excitement". the list is short and simple, although i shan't be explaining it all to you today. 2 things that bear mentioning at this point are thus, however: i cannot fucking stand getting water in my eyes, including opening them underwater, and i have massive problems with getting water up my nose. you might think that this would get in the way of swimming and watersports, but i've developed techniques so that i can surf or swim or whatever, even in a big swell. for starters, i always look where i'm going and what's going on around me so that i don't accidentally catch a wave in the back of the head. i swim with my head up for the most part. it's not great, but it's adequate, and if i have to go under or through a wave i'll take a deep breath, scrunch my eyes up before diving under and exhale through my nose to keep it clear before rubbing the water out of my eyes on the surface. now you want me to fill my mask with water, open my eyes, try to keep breathing without water shooting up my nose then put my mask back on and clear it? you've got to be fucking joking.
i tried. i gave it my best shot. then i breathed water, choked and jumped straight to the surface (it's ok - we were in about a metre and a half of water) coughing, spluttering and gasping. that was the end of the dive and i staggered away gutted. i didn't feel better until much much later after Louise and i snapped at each other, rode camels off into the sunset and subsequently apologised. we'd had to rush from the dive centre back to the hotel because we were late for the evening's camel ride down the beach to see the sunset over the mountains. i'm loving camels; from their oft-joked-about toes to their teddybear-ears. i've seen enough people riding them in the last couple of weeks that i've picked up a few skills, one being that if you cross one leg over the front of the saddle then cradle you opposite knee with your ankle it's FAR more stable and comfortable. we didn't hang out particularly long - out on the beach the group sat taking photos and drinking bedouin-tea (a lovely, sweet herbal concoction brewed on an open fire) until the sun was nicely down then headed off again, loping off back to the hotel and i finally started to feel a bit relaxed.
another night of sleep and day 3 brings us from a group of 5 to a group of 3. Deano and Kim have finished at SCUBA and they're now out. it's down to Mike, Louise and me. the rest of the skills are demonstrated without issues, but i'm nervous as an arachnophobic with a Huntsman on his face when it's time to get my mask off again. the methodology preferred by PADI is to let enough water into your mask to cover your nose, then breathe a little, then repeat at just below the eyes and then with a mask full. i'm having none of this. the only way i'm passing this is if i can get a solid hold on my nose so it can't try to breathe through it and when it's time i take a deep breath, close my eyes tight like i'm about to die, rip my mask off my head in one quick motion and grab my nose tight. i'm kneeling on the ocean floor under 2 metres of water blind and desperately staving off gasping panic, my inhalations coming in ragged and fast while i struggle for calm. i get the pat on the head and i repeat the procedure in reverse, alternating between grabbing my nose tight and using it to exhale and clear the mask.
5 minutes later i have to do it again. half an hour later i have to do it again under 6 metres of water. i got through and i passed, somehow managing the highest score in the group for the exam. i copped flack from Mike for the rest of the day and i think Mohammed might have been going easy on me but i didn't care. the last of the practical skills over, a practice dive through the reef near the Lighthouse and the rest was a foregone conclusion. i ate my lunch while i flew through the exam and you couldn't have wiped the grin off my face with metho. walking out at the end of the day with out last practical dive done, kit washed and stowed, temporary certificates laminated and stowed in our wallets, we walked off down the market street with a massive feeling of achievement. it's such a simple thing that anyone can do it, but we weren't caring. we're both already thinking about where we can go diving now that we've unlocked access to most of the world's recreational dives. Greece or Spain in the summer is tempting, but in the back on my mind is the little island in Fiji i sat on for 3 days a year or so ago where the water was warm, the beers were cold and Rhianna sung "Umbrella" every hour on the hour. there was a little PADI dive shop i never got to try at the time and i feel like i missed out on something there. Louise keeps using the word "we" when discussing future dives. we made good buddies down under the water (PADI uses a buddy-system for safety. i'll watch your back and you keep the sharks off mine) and i'll happily partner up with her again... i'm just not assuming anything about the future at the moment.
still, it's something i'm remarkably glad i've done. after 3 days of suiting up and getting out there the movements and procedures have second-nature. a few more dives and i reckon i might start getting as comfortable as i am on a bike. now i just need to see if i can learn to fly a plane...
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Egypt Days 8-9: from the mountains to the ocean (the Red Sea isn't red. i call "false advertising")...
it's an intriguing aspect of human nature that we seek out the high places of the world. we live generally live low, near water if possible, or something else useful otherwise, but in our cities we build up and when in the wilderness we go high. it's joyous to be able to stand somewhere and see for miles around, but it seems to be more than that somehow... as if the higher people go the closer they feel to something divine. something else i've noticed over the years is that for some reason i'm still yet to fathom; if out see a lonely cluster of rocks somewhere out in the wilderness someone will have come through there and made a stack. i've seen it in the red nothing-ness of Australia, i saw it walking through northern Scotland, out bush in Thailand and in the middle of fucking nowhere south of Aswan in the crisp light of a desert dawn. now i'm seeing it on the way back to Dahab from Mt Sinai. 3, 4, sometimes 5 or 6 flattish rocks piled one atop another for no obvious reason.
Dahab's a sleepy little shithole (compared to other beach resorts i've been to out in the world it's ratty, dirty with uncomfortable rocky beaches, but compared to the rest of Egypt, Louise and i both agree it's a jewel) on the Gulf of Aqaba. the Red Sea forks at the bottom of Sinai - a triangular landmass connecting Egypt to the Middle East with the Gulf of Suez on the west and Aqaba on the east. from a maximum elevation of 2285m, the broken-tooth mountains of sun-baked granite meet the sea and continue to drop down to around a 1000m depth on either side. Dahab sits around half-way down the east coast staring across the deep blue waters at Saudi Arabia. it's a happy little holiday destination, restaurants on the rocky beach, dive and surf shops and peddlers selling trinkets and tshirts. after Aswan and Luxor the touts seem relaxed and easy-going. walking down the main road i hear the occasional call of "My shop is here!" my shop is in Australia, mate. yours is real nice though... and "You want lunch? Fresh seafood!" fresh when? last week? and so on. there's less of them walking in front of you or trying to drag you bodily in to look at plastic statues, and for this i'm incredibly grateful.
we're staying in the Oricana Hotel, comfortable, clean, a pool in the courtyard and a 10 minute walk to the beach down the market street. i've been looking forward to Dahab in part because i know i'll be spending 5 nights in the same place for once and so the first thing i do is empty my backpack and take stock of my washing situation. i've been doing my washing a bit here and a bit there in the shower when i've had the chance. it's not great and my clothes aren't the cleanest but it's keeping me in fresh underwear and making sure my shirts don't get TOO manky. we eat on the beach for most of our meals. the restaurants have their kitchen across the footpath in the real buildings. seating is on the sand and enclosed by semi-permanent walls that block the wind, and windows that let you look out over the surfers and snorkelers. it's nice here. the tourists are relaxed and are smoking shisha while enjoying the security of knowing that we can actually sit here undisturbed for a while without having to worry about when we'll be whisked off to our next exotic location. we've been REALLY getting into the shisha - tobacco flavoured with fruit pulp and smoked out of a large ornate bong. currently my favourite flavour is apple/mint, but strawberry's growing on me and grape was also quite good. whenever we have an hour or so to spare someone will call out "It's shisha time!" in a bad american accent, a reminder of the four yanks who didn't join us in Dahab. they'd have fucking loved it here. there's shisha EVERYWHERE.
i'd love to be chilling out for hours on the beach, but i have to get a couple of hours of sleep in the early evening if i can. this is the last of the Sleep Deprivation part of the tour. tonight is something kinda special. after an hour or so of nap Louise and i are up and loading up into a bus at 11PM for a 2 hour drive. we manage to get a little more sleep on the ride, squeezed into the second-to-last seats on the bus with no leg-room to speak of. Kim's laid out on the back seat, Derek lying on the floor and when were stopped for a passport-check by the Tourism Police and had to wake him up we could all hear and sympathise with his plaintive, shattered "Whyyyyyyy?"
there's excitement running through the tourists as we form up in the monastery of St Catherine, tempered by an air of "what the fuck have we got ourselves in for?" what the fuck we've got ourselves in for is a climb up Egypt's tallest and most famous mountain at 1 in the fucking morning. our bedouin guide Souphi takes us up the Holy Valley, then the switchback paths, then the 772 Steps. 8km of walking, a kilometre or so of it being Up. it takes 3 hours and 6 rest-breaks. nothing i can say can adequately describe what it's like. it's dark, but you can see the rocks in your path by the starlight when the Canadian behind doesn't blind you with his headlamp. it's quiet and still but for your own labored breathing and shuffling footsteps. the mountain looms ahead like a shadow on an inkblot and it's tiring. you're sweating from the exertion, otherwise it's freezing cold with the wind cutting through your clothes like bayonets. it's properly tiring. no-conversation-because-i-need-that-breath-to-live tiring. finally at the top we stop and buy expensive tea from one of the 6 cafes (i call them cafes. what they are is huts built on a flat piece of rock, thin wooden walls covered in rugs and blankets with benches inside, running a roaring trade in selling drinks to exhausted pilgrims) while we wait for the stragglers to show up. 30 Egyptian Pounds rents me a thin mattress and a blanket that smells faintly of donkeys and dust and we find shelter in the lee of the church so that we can sleep under the stars in the still and silence of the top of a mountain in the middle of a weathered, battered range in the middle of a desert and the arse-end of nowhere. when the bedouin boys stop trying to sell blankets to people already sleeping UNDER blankets it's so serene that i pass out watching shooting stars and satellites before i can really start to enjoy it.
that serenity's broken an hour and twenty minutes later when the fucking Colombians put music on and start singing. Mike and i wake bolt upright, thinking i'm being attacked. Louise was awake a little while before us and gave us a nudge, the false-dawn brightening the horizon and i desperately want kill every fucking christian in sight. one minute we have peace and quiet and beauty, the next it's hymns greeting the sun in Spanish and an extremely angry Australian who's about ready to start throwing them off the side. it takes me a couple of minutes to pull myself together and start bouncing around the rocks taking photos of everything in sight. finally the Colombians decide to Shut The Fuck Up and stop ruining it for the rest of us, and it's still and quiet again, the sun rolling its way up the sky and the crew sitting around enjoying the warmth as it slowly seeps through our clothes and sleeping bags. it takes a while, but we eventually get Kim and Derek out of their sleeping bags and make a move for Down.
down is much quicker than up. seeing some of the steps we'd climbed, Louise and i were starting to wonder how we'd gotten up in the dark without falling. Mt Sinai doesn't sit alone - it's in a vast range and view of the valleys in the cool shadow of early morning takes your breath away... which is ok because i don't need so much of it going down. 3 hours up becomes 1 hour down and we reconvene in the cafe at the monastery (recognisable as a cafe this time) while i sip on a coffee that i need like oxygen. St Catherine's is an Orthodox (Coptic or Greek i'm not so sure. it's covered in Cyrillic but i'm not familiar enough with Coptics to be able to tell the difference easily) monastery built around (what they claim to be) the fabled burning bush from the biblical story of Moses (i've seen it and touched it. it wasn't burning and surprisingly neither did i. i kinda worry about spontaneously combusting when i walk into churches. it's paranoid i know, but still). the top of Mt Sinai is where he supposedly went later to retrieve the 10 Commandments. with that sort of religious kudos you expect pilgrims, but luckily most of them don't really want to be getting there at 8AM and the Colombians have burned up their energy singing and fucked off into the distance. while this doesn't quite mean that we have the place to ourselves, it IS less packed than it could be.
we have a bit of a look around the monastery when they open the doors. it was rebuilt as a fort in the 5th century after being sacked by angry Romans, but while the stones still stand it's been modernised inside... to a degree. running water and plumbing aren't so shithot in the middle of buttfuck-nowhere, but you make do. it seems a peaceful way to spend a life you'd waste anyway - nestled away in a deep valley, the rock walls stretching overhead past narrow turrets and thick defences, a chapel that's seen the love of 1600 years of monks, all of who's bones are stored in a small gated alcove - 6-odd cubic metres of skulls plus more of what look like femurs mouldering and gathering dust in the cool of the basement.
i passed out almost the moment i curled up on the bus. there were two tour groups on the bus and when we'd got on the night before they had first-on advantage and spread out, squashing the GoBus mob into the uncomfortable seats in the rear. being used to a quicker pace than them (thankyou Soobie) our crew dived in and made ourselves comfortable early, massively pissing off the stroppy older couple who proceeded to complain about being stuck in the same seats they'd been happy to let us get squeezed into. we couldn't help but laugh with evil satisfaction, our group bonding against a common enemy.
2 hours of sleep doesn't sound like much, but it lasted me through the day and on into the night. how Louise stayed out dancing until 3:30AM i have no idea. i was gone and in bed 2 hours beforehand. somehow we pushed through the day, the hour on the mountain and the 2 on the bus leaving me refreshed and grooving, the hard knife-edge of fatigue in view, but holding off from opening a vein. we met up with the rest of the tour group in back in Dahab and organised to have a group dinner, then head off to The Treehouse - Dahab's hippest night spot - for drinks and frivolity. it was good, it was fun, Louise and i played the Arab boys at pool and she danced around while i ran out of steam. these sorts of places are more her thing than mine anyway and Wally was there to make sure everyone got back to the hotel safely (he gets paid for this shit - i don't).
today's been my first really peaceful, relaxing day in weeks. slept in until 9, met people in the foyer of the hotel, loaded up into a couple of jeeps and headed off-road to one of Dahab's best and most accessible snorkeling spots called the Blue Hole. picture this: the mountain greets the water in a long, sheltered, 300 metre arc wide enough to leave 40-odd metres of flat rocky sand in between. curve it in a semi-circular bay and line the shore with 2-storey restaurants. now look in the water and see the reef stretching 5 or 10 metres out to sea as a strip of light blue-green which ends abruptly in a semi-circular gap of the deepest blue. that's the Blue Hole - nominal mid-tide depth of 1 metre dropping almost straight down to 110 metres, a vertical reef falling into depths that have your brain dribbling out your ear, full of fish and incredible for floating above with some flippers and a mask. we swim until we get too cold (deep water is seriously cold) then laze around drinking cold Hibiscus Tea while we work on our tans on the top deck of the restaurant we're using as a base of operations. it's lovely - off the beaten track enough that we need a jeep to get out there, busy enough to be interesting, quiet enough that you don't notice. Louise and i head back out into the water for a bit just before food, but mostly i'm happy to lie around and work on my tan which i manage to do without getting burned. a few of the guys have started to peel after days without shirts on although they're getting results, i must admit.
i'm really liking Dahab. after a week of bouncing around Egypt like a bunny on meth this is exactly what i needed. gentle walks, no rush, very little hassle from the shopkeepers (some of them have big signs up advertising the fact, then go to great lengths to convince you that they won't hassle you. the irony is not lost of me) and plenty of good food to be had. i'm recharging and i'm loving it, although my reserves are gone - lost along with the last of my beer-gut. i need to get into something fatty and horrible when i get back to London so i can put on a little more padding. i'm running out of steam far too quickly for my taste.
either way, i'll have to enjoy the quiet while it lasts - tomorrow's going to be an awesome, but tiring day.
Dahab's a sleepy little shithole (compared to other beach resorts i've been to out in the world it's ratty, dirty with uncomfortable rocky beaches, but compared to the rest of Egypt, Louise and i both agree it's a jewel) on the Gulf of Aqaba. the Red Sea forks at the bottom of Sinai - a triangular landmass connecting Egypt to the Middle East with the Gulf of Suez on the west and Aqaba on the east. from a maximum elevation of 2285m, the broken-tooth mountains of sun-baked granite meet the sea and continue to drop down to around a 1000m depth on either side. Dahab sits around half-way down the east coast staring across the deep blue waters at Saudi Arabia. it's a happy little holiday destination, restaurants on the rocky beach, dive and surf shops and peddlers selling trinkets and tshirts. after Aswan and Luxor the touts seem relaxed and easy-going. walking down the main road i hear the occasional call of "My shop is here!" my shop is in Australia, mate. yours is real nice though... and "You want lunch? Fresh seafood!" fresh when? last week? and so on. there's less of them walking in front of you or trying to drag you bodily in to look at plastic statues, and for this i'm incredibly grateful.
we're staying in the Oricana Hotel, comfortable, clean, a pool in the courtyard and a 10 minute walk to the beach down the market street. i've been looking forward to Dahab in part because i know i'll be spending 5 nights in the same place for once and so the first thing i do is empty my backpack and take stock of my washing situation. i've been doing my washing a bit here and a bit there in the shower when i've had the chance. it's not great and my clothes aren't the cleanest but it's keeping me in fresh underwear and making sure my shirts don't get TOO manky. we eat on the beach for most of our meals. the restaurants have their kitchen across the footpath in the real buildings. seating is on the sand and enclosed by semi-permanent walls that block the wind, and windows that let you look out over the surfers and snorkelers. it's nice here. the tourists are relaxed and are smoking shisha while enjoying the security of knowing that we can actually sit here undisturbed for a while without having to worry about when we'll be whisked off to our next exotic location. we've been REALLY getting into the shisha - tobacco flavoured with fruit pulp and smoked out of a large ornate bong. currently my favourite flavour is apple/mint, but strawberry's growing on me and grape was also quite good. whenever we have an hour or so to spare someone will call out "It's shisha time!" in a bad american accent, a reminder of the four yanks who didn't join us in Dahab. they'd have fucking loved it here. there's shisha EVERYWHERE.
i'd love to be chilling out for hours on the beach, but i have to get a couple of hours of sleep in the early evening if i can. this is the last of the Sleep Deprivation part of the tour. tonight is something kinda special. after an hour or so of nap Louise and i are up and loading up into a bus at 11PM for a 2 hour drive. we manage to get a little more sleep on the ride, squeezed into the second-to-last seats on the bus with no leg-room to speak of. Kim's laid out on the back seat, Derek lying on the floor and when were stopped for a passport-check by the Tourism Police and had to wake him up we could all hear and sympathise with his plaintive, shattered "Whyyyyyyy?"
there's excitement running through the tourists as we form up in the monastery of St Catherine, tempered by an air of "what the fuck have we got ourselves in for?" what the fuck we've got ourselves in for is a climb up Egypt's tallest and most famous mountain at 1 in the fucking morning. our bedouin guide Souphi takes us up the Holy Valley, then the switchback paths, then the 772 Steps. 8km of walking, a kilometre or so of it being Up. it takes 3 hours and 6 rest-breaks. nothing i can say can adequately describe what it's like. it's dark, but you can see the rocks in your path by the starlight when the Canadian behind doesn't blind you with his headlamp. it's quiet and still but for your own labored breathing and shuffling footsteps. the mountain looms ahead like a shadow on an inkblot and it's tiring. you're sweating from the exertion, otherwise it's freezing cold with the wind cutting through your clothes like bayonets. it's properly tiring. no-conversation-because-i-need-that-breath-to-live tiring. finally at the top we stop and buy expensive tea from one of the 6 cafes (i call them cafes. what they are is huts built on a flat piece of rock, thin wooden walls covered in rugs and blankets with benches inside, running a roaring trade in selling drinks to exhausted pilgrims) while we wait for the stragglers to show up. 30 Egyptian Pounds rents me a thin mattress and a blanket that smells faintly of donkeys and dust and we find shelter in the lee of the church so that we can sleep under the stars in the still and silence of the top of a mountain in the middle of a weathered, battered range in the middle of a desert and the arse-end of nowhere. when the bedouin boys stop trying to sell blankets to people already sleeping UNDER blankets it's so serene that i pass out watching shooting stars and satellites before i can really start to enjoy it.
that serenity's broken an hour and twenty minutes later when the fucking Colombians put music on and start singing. Mike and i wake bolt upright, thinking i'm being attacked. Louise was awake a little while before us and gave us a nudge, the false-dawn brightening the horizon and i desperately want kill every fucking christian in sight. one minute we have peace and quiet and beauty, the next it's hymns greeting the sun in Spanish and an extremely angry Australian who's about ready to start throwing them off the side. it takes me a couple of minutes to pull myself together and start bouncing around the rocks taking photos of everything in sight. finally the Colombians decide to Shut The Fuck Up and stop ruining it for the rest of us, and it's still and quiet again, the sun rolling its way up the sky and the crew sitting around enjoying the warmth as it slowly seeps through our clothes and sleeping bags. it takes a while, but we eventually get Kim and Derek out of their sleeping bags and make a move for Down.
down is much quicker than up. seeing some of the steps we'd climbed, Louise and i were starting to wonder how we'd gotten up in the dark without falling. Mt Sinai doesn't sit alone - it's in a vast range and view of the valleys in the cool shadow of early morning takes your breath away... which is ok because i don't need so much of it going down. 3 hours up becomes 1 hour down and we reconvene in the cafe at the monastery (recognisable as a cafe this time) while i sip on a coffee that i need like oxygen. St Catherine's is an Orthodox (Coptic or Greek i'm not so sure. it's covered in Cyrillic but i'm not familiar enough with Coptics to be able to tell the difference easily) monastery built around (what they claim to be) the fabled burning bush from the biblical story of Moses (i've seen it and touched it. it wasn't burning and surprisingly neither did i. i kinda worry about spontaneously combusting when i walk into churches. it's paranoid i know, but still). the top of Mt Sinai is where he supposedly went later to retrieve the 10 Commandments. with that sort of religious kudos you expect pilgrims, but luckily most of them don't really want to be getting there at 8AM and the Colombians have burned up their energy singing and fucked off into the distance. while this doesn't quite mean that we have the place to ourselves, it IS less packed than it could be.
we have a bit of a look around the monastery when they open the doors. it was rebuilt as a fort in the 5th century after being sacked by angry Romans, but while the stones still stand it's been modernised inside... to a degree. running water and plumbing aren't so shithot in the middle of buttfuck-nowhere, but you make do. it seems a peaceful way to spend a life you'd waste anyway - nestled away in a deep valley, the rock walls stretching overhead past narrow turrets and thick defences, a chapel that's seen the love of 1600 years of monks, all of who's bones are stored in a small gated alcove - 6-odd cubic metres of skulls plus more of what look like femurs mouldering and gathering dust in the cool of the basement.
i passed out almost the moment i curled up on the bus. there were two tour groups on the bus and when we'd got on the night before they had first-on advantage and spread out, squashing the GoBus mob into the uncomfortable seats in the rear. being used to a quicker pace than them (thankyou Soobie) our crew dived in and made ourselves comfortable early, massively pissing off the stroppy older couple who proceeded to complain about being stuck in the same seats they'd been happy to let us get squeezed into. we couldn't help but laugh with evil satisfaction, our group bonding against a common enemy.
2 hours of sleep doesn't sound like much, but it lasted me through the day and on into the night. how Louise stayed out dancing until 3:30AM i have no idea. i was gone and in bed 2 hours beforehand. somehow we pushed through the day, the hour on the mountain and the 2 on the bus leaving me refreshed and grooving, the hard knife-edge of fatigue in view, but holding off from opening a vein. we met up with the rest of the tour group in back in Dahab and organised to have a group dinner, then head off to The Treehouse - Dahab's hippest night spot - for drinks and frivolity. it was good, it was fun, Louise and i played the Arab boys at pool and she danced around while i ran out of steam. these sorts of places are more her thing than mine anyway and Wally was there to make sure everyone got back to the hotel safely (he gets paid for this shit - i don't).
today's been my first really peaceful, relaxing day in weeks. slept in until 9, met people in the foyer of the hotel, loaded up into a couple of jeeps and headed off-road to one of Dahab's best and most accessible snorkeling spots called the Blue Hole. picture this: the mountain greets the water in a long, sheltered, 300 metre arc wide enough to leave 40-odd metres of flat rocky sand in between. curve it in a semi-circular bay and line the shore with 2-storey restaurants. now look in the water and see the reef stretching 5 or 10 metres out to sea as a strip of light blue-green which ends abruptly in a semi-circular gap of the deepest blue. that's the Blue Hole - nominal mid-tide depth of 1 metre dropping almost straight down to 110 metres, a vertical reef falling into depths that have your brain dribbling out your ear, full of fish and incredible for floating above with some flippers and a mask. we swim until we get too cold (deep water is seriously cold) then laze around drinking cold Hibiscus Tea while we work on our tans on the top deck of the restaurant we're using as a base of operations. it's lovely - off the beaten track enough that we need a jeep to get out there, busy enough to be interesting, quiet enough that you don't notice. Louise and i head back out into the water for a bit just before food, but mostly i'm happy to lie around and work on my tan which i manage to do without getting burned. a few of the guys have started to peel after days without shirts on although they're getting results, i must admit.
i'm really liking Dahab. after a week of bouncing around Egypt like a bunny on meth this is exactly what i needed. gentle walks, no rush, very little hassle from the shopkeepers (some of them have big signs up advertising the fact, then go to great lengths to convince you that they won't hassle you. the irony is not lost of me) and plenty of good food to be had. i'm recharging and i'm loving it, although my reserves are gone - lost along with the last of my beer-gut. i need to get into something fatty and horrible when i get back to London so i can put on a little more padding. i'm running out of steam far too quickly for my taste.
either way, i'll have to enjoy the quiet while it lasts - tomorrow's going to be an awesome, but tiring day.
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