Nine days on the Nile

I got away to Egypt for a week in early Jan. As any readers of Tony’s blog will know (from back when he had a blog), he loved the place, and spent best part of the last year telling me so. So I went, and it was very good. Look!

Beside the Nile.

(no comment necessary)

Sunset felucca ride.

View of some Saharan mountains from a hot-air balloon ride at dawn. The valley of the kings is hidden somewhere in there.

There are more photos on facebook.

As I’ve been telling everyone, it seems like much longer ago; it is impossible for me to reconcile what I live and see I see here with Egypt life. It’s the kind of place when you’re walking down the street and you have to stop because two donkeys crashed in front of you; you have to step over a man selling two carrots, a bucket, and a machete; everyone talks to you and it takes a while to learn who is genuinely being friendly and who wants you to buy their brother’s camel; on the tube they won’t tell you to “mind the gap” every 30 seconds, but if you want to get off at the right stop, you’d better be prepared for a fight; Cairo especially is a wonderful sprawl of anarchy with occasional pockets of organisation. Its history is obvious, with the pyramids and sphinx of course, but also the Coptic Christain area, in which I strolled through the graveyard and saw headstone engravings in French, Greek and English side by side, and Hebrew in the nearby old Jewish area. The Islamic area is newer, but no less impressive. I especially like the Islamic architecture, and I like the peaceful and communal feel inside the great mosques. They’re not like churches in that they really seem like places where anyone and everyone can go and do whatever: socialise with friends, pray, sleep, drink tea, and so on. (And for the less faithful, try and fleece tourists.)

I timed the trip for my friend Fiona’s birthday party, which amidst the foreign whirl of Cairo was an oasis of kiwi-ness. Alchohol, Supergroove on the stereo, talking about rugby, and all that good stuff. I later found out that that fancy western suburb, Maleme, was where the Allied troops in WW2 were based, which meant I’d accidently continued tracing my grandfather’s wartime path. (See also Cassino, various places in Crete).

As well as Cairo I visited Luxor and Aswan, in Upper Egypt. In Luxor I saw my first hieroglyphs, visited various tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and visited some very old temples. But the highlight was an early morning hot air balloon ride over the Sahara. Dry mountains and sand were visible in all directions, and the size of the Nile was put into perspective in this grandiosity. The thin blue strip was barely visible, and the green that encloses it was cut off very sharply into yellow. Like in the Tunisian Sahara, the desert was really very diverse. To paraphrase myself, it is nothingness in diversity. From Aswan I decided to really experience it so walked straight our for an hour or so. Despite it being mid-winter, it was plenty hot and tiring for me. I never really got much out of sight of the Nile and the camel touts, but for brief moments could feel something of the desert’s awesomeness. One moment was when a camel gallopped (if that’s what they do) loudly over the crest of a dune, an abandoned monastary stood stoically on the horizon, and in every other direction was yellow rolling nothing. It lasted less than a second, but filled all my romantique notions of what exploring the Sahara is. I didn’t do much too touristy for my stop in Aswan, but hung out drinking tea with the vendors in the market and generally wandered aimlessly.

In summary, the nine days were just enough to make me want to go back for much longer one day. And I will, inshallah.