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Published: October 6th 2008
Okay, this is going to be a fairly long entry, because I have many things to say and haven't had a chance to say them for a while.
On a couple of general notes, first all the photos so far can be found on
Stephanie's Blog, generally in huge information dumps all at once. At some point I'll stick some of the best up here. Steph's blog has more of a 'what we actually did' rather than my ramblings. It's also better spelt.
Also, if you look at my blog, please comment, even just to say that you have. I'm wondering if anyone's even coming to it except by mistake...
On Camels
I have come to an important realisation - not all the dinosaurs died out or evolved into birds. And I'm not talking about crocodiles, or anything like that. I'm talking about camels. Have you ever looked at a camel really closely? They aren't shaped quite like any other mammal. People tend to think they're essentially just lumpy horses, but that's because they haven't seen them up close. The legs are all wrong. And the neck is all wrong, and the way the neck is attached to the skull, it's wrong. And the teeth - the teeth aren't like horse teeth. They aren't like the teeth of anything else I've ever seen. They are, in fact, like dinosaur teeth - jagged and pointed and generally far too offensive for something that osstenably lives in a desert and eats plants. I think, in fact, that the camels are lying to us. The clue is in the one biggest difference between camels and other mammals, that I haven't yet mentioned - their skin. Their skin, with its weird fur, which moves all wrong over their bodies.
My theory is this. At some point in the distant past, the last surviving dinosaurs, realising that the game was up and the mammals were in charge for a while, hid themselves in the desert. This was a good place for them because the heat suits their bodies, and the mammals initially didn't go there. However, when the mammals started to adapt to the desert, penitrating nearer and nearer the proto-camels domain, they realised that more drastic measures were needed. They would have to hide among the enemy - they would have to pretend to be mammals.
But how could they do that. They relied on mammals arogance in believing themselves to be unshakeably on top of the pile - as the proto-camels were large, the mammals would assume that they were also mammals if they could cover their most obviously reptilian feature - their scaled skin.
Have you ever really looked at camel fur? It isn't a lot like ordiary animal fur. It's very short, and tends to rub off quite easily in patches, around the knees especially, without apparently hurting the camel. It looks very much like the kind of felting that's created by gluing short hairs end-on to things, the kind of thing used to make the hard, fuzzy kind of plastic toy. I think this is the technique that the camels have used to effect their disguise. I think that camel-fur is infact some sort of desert plant, carefully cultivated and havested by the secret camel conspiracy to create their disguises, and then applied to every camel at birth, and reapplied at regular intervals.
We can't know what the ultimate aims of the Secret Camel Brotherhood are, but we can be fairly certain that they aren't friendly towards humans. They have already taken over large areas of in-land Australia. We can't be certain where they will strike next, so we must beware.
Cairo
"To cross the street in Cairo, close your eyes, step into the road, and pray to God"
- random perfum tout, Cairo.
Cairo is a fantastic city - a sprawling, chaotic, over-crowded, mixed-up, decaying, beautiful, polluted metropolis of ancient monuments, fantastic mosques and crumbling colonial architecture all thrown in together and topped off with a feindish one-way traffic system and drivers who don't slow down of stop unless they really, really have to (because there's a solid object, like a bigger car, in the way). The kind of road-crossing that would involve screaching breaks, horn honking and possibly leaning out of the window asking you what on earth you thought you were doing in England is par for the course in Egypt (not to say that there won't be horn honking and shouting out of windows, but that's just what Cairo streets are like).
I've realised as I wander around the streets in Egypt just how used to hassle I've become. I remember the first time I was in Rhodes and encountered hassle - resturantures who would come out, and ask you to come into their returant. At the time it came as a horrible shock, and it was very hard to say, no, I don't want to eat in your particular resturant.
If I still had that level of greenness now, I would have no money, and would be toating around so much tourist tat that I wouldn't be able to move. Compared to Tunisia, the touts here are more sophisticated. In Tunis, they tell you to buy their stuff, and get upset when you tell them 'No, I don't want your stuff'.
I Egypt, they say, 'That's okay. Are you sure? It's a good price.' Or they don't even mention the stuff they're selling. They ask 'Where are you from.' And then they tell you about the cousin they have in that country, and say 'Lovely Juvely'. I don't think they realise that the phrase was populated by an inverterate conman.
I've taken to saying that I'm from Wales. That tends to throw them off stride some what - they either say 'good people, the Welsh' and leave it at that or try to work out where Wales is. I've had people firmly continuing on the basis that I'm Irish or Belgiun.
They don't, however, have a stock phrase for the Welsh, or know any places in Wales to claim to have a brother or cousin living there. As often as not, they just leave me alone. Some Australians I met were doing the same thing with Tazmania.
There was a moment while we were waiting for a bus-driver to get back so we could set off with a convoy from Kom-Ombo to Edfu, and of course the the bus was beset with touts selling the usual portable tat - jewlery in this case. And because we had no-where to go, they were being more than usually persistant.
Of course they could only go for the people closest to the open door (open to keep the heat down). And they were really going for them, with all the usual tricks, seeming to work on the basis 'if it's cheap enough, eventually they'll buy it, no matter what it is.' This generally leads to the inevitable, and quite depressing 'is gift' or 'is free', handing it over, and then demanding money. We all knew how it went by now. But this time, we were all quite fed-up. So when the hawker said 'is gift', the woman he was bothering said 'okay', and took it. And then shut the bus door in his face. I wasn't at the angle to see him, but apparently he threw a fit. And even when the door was re-opened, he didn't come back to bother us, and neither did anyone else.
Pyramids
The inside of a pyramid is a strange place. They aren't heavily decorated like the tombs - if they were, the decoration is all long gone. The best few have a few carvings, usually 'glyphs and stars on the ceiling. But the experince that makes it worth it is the actual climb down into the pyramid. As far as I've seen, the later a tomb was built, the more likely it is to be essenially flat and linier. The earliest tomb in the valley of the kings, for example, is a long shaft down to the burial chamber, and has things like a long dead-fall. Most of the later tombs are basically a series of level passages, with a few steps down at the front, or are level all the way through.
The pyramids, which are far older, have very few level sections - they are mostly shafts, usually at about fourty-five degrees. You climb the side of a pyramid, to about a third of the way up. Then you take a long, narrow, low tunnel, under the base of the pyramid, and then another back up into the body of the pyramid. There is seldom a single place where you can stand up straight on the whole passage - the experance of climbing down a shaft into a place of burial, with shafts above and other passages gated off is fantastically evocoltive - this is a journey through the underworld, a journey to a re-birth which the soul of the deceased will make. And the feeling of being in a vast, ancient, powerful,
heavy structure is incredible. Plus, it's got a fantastic Tomb Raider vibe.
Felucca Trip
I have learned on important thing about wind-driven transport. As much fun as it is while you're moving, it is entrily dependant on a quality that can disappear for days at time - the wind. The felucca trip we took was supposed to take us in four days from Aswan (about as far up the nile as a boat can get before you get to the dams) and Edfu (a town close to Luxor). The trip is generally stated as two nights, three days, but we were determined to be leasurly about it, and know that we have a propensity to spend hours and hours at historical sights. And so we set off, a brisk head-wind allowing us to tack firmly down river. We spent the evening in a nubian village (with 'flight of the pheonix' on the inconguous TV in the background, a film featuring a scene in which the 'darstadly arabs' kill one of the protagonists for no particular reason, playing in the background), and we spent the night under the stars. In the morning, having confronted the problems of there being no toilets on the banks of the nile, we found ourselves in a more serious situation - overnight, the wind had died. Not a big issue, we decided, it'll probably pick up tommorow, and in the mean-time we can meander down-river with the currant and chill out. We spent the night playing cards with another group of people on a different felucca, on what I've called the 'Isle of Dogs' for the semi-feral dogs that stared at the boats and growled after dark (they backed off if actually threatened or whacked). Day three dawned, still no wind. We took the oportunty to visit a random Nubian village, which wasn't generally used to tourists. On arrival we were absolutly mobbed by small children, who fell into roughly three catagories; ones who were genuinly exited or interested in seeing forigners, ones who were exclusivly interested in what they could get from us, and ones who fell some-where in the middle. We had a bag of sweets, which we had to literally toss away from the boat in order to have enough room to land. We wandered around the village with them in tow, showing us things and talking to us in broken English and gestures. After we went back to the boat, the in between group mostly filtered off, leaving the hard-core at either end. The one group were using the few words of English they knew 'Give me Money' and 'Give me Pen' (or just 'Money' and 'Pen, pen'). I don't know why a pen in particular would be a highly prized item - possibley they just think that's what we have that we might give them.
The other group, however, made the trip worth it - they were more girls than boys, and one girl in particular (the girl in the blue t-shirt) was waving with such pure, cheerful glee to see us whenever she could find a gap in the press of mostly older boys, that I was strongly tempted to give
her money and a pen. Of course, they would have been taken away from her by the press of bigger, older boys. So I didn't. But we did wave back as often as she was at the front.
Luxor
Our stay in Luxor has been something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the temples and tombs are beautiful. As always, it's generally the lesser-known tombs that are really special. Tut Ankh Amun's Tomb, for example, is small and poorly decorated, but has it's own, expensive ticket and is always full. Comparativly, the Tomb of Tuthmosis III, right at the far end of the valley, is usually empty, exquisitly decorated, and far more worth-while. Technically, the ticket to the valley of the kings is good for three tombs, but if it's clear you aren't with a tour, a little backsheesh will let you see one or two more than that. Unfortunatly on the way out of the valley Steph started to feel the first signs of the virus that would dog the next week and a half or so of our stay. It was one of those wonderfully non-specific bugs, where you feel generally achey all over your skin, and in every muscle, and in your head, and you have a fever, but it doesn't localise in any one place (no vomiting, no sneezing or sniffling, no swellings or rashes). We did go to the hospital, but language difficulties meant we couldn't explain exactly what the problem was.
On top of that, we managed to break the camera at Karnack (I got hold of it too late, Steph let go of it too early), so we don't have any photos of the West Bank Monuments.
Collossal pink granite statues of Ramesses II
The title may seem oddly specific, but these things are absolutly
everywhere. It was general practice for every pharaoh to make some contribution to the big temples. So Seti II would add a shrine for the sacrad Baques, and Tuthmossis IV would add a collanade, and so on. But you can always tell what Ramesses II's contribution is - because it's always the same. Ramesses II's contrubution will be one or more colossal pink granite statues of himself, possibly standing in front of a picture of him winning a battle or smiting his enemies. But it's the statues you remember. He even built whole temples to himself based on the concept. Abu Simble? It's an enormous ego-trip for the most powerful man in the world at the time. You can tell because it's fronted with six colossal statues of Ramesses II. Although those ones are sands-stone, rather than pink granate like the rest. His greatest work was of course, the Ramessesium, the temple dedicated to himself and his own divine greatness. This is where Shelly was inspired to write 'Ozymandias' about the biggest and most impressive statue of him, which is snapped off at the waist and lying forlorn on the ground. We didn't have the camera by that point, but I started a scetch and intend to go back and finish it before I leave (I had to break off halfway because my virus came back to have another go).
Being a tourist attraction
Not having my camera has had a lot of downsides (obviously, we can't take any photos of anything) but it's had a couple of odd upsides as well. One is that we have a good excuse for saying no to requests to 'take photo together?' (either me and Steph or one of us with a Random Egyptian Tout). In any case, cameras are forbiden in most of the tombs. But the big upside for me has been the motivation to sketch a little more - I've already mentioned one of the Colossus of Ramesses, and I've finished one of one of the Colossi of Memnon, which are smaller but still standing, and very evocative. But in the process of creating the sketch I had the odd experiance of becoming a tourist attraction myself.
The Colossi are sighted on the only road up to the monuments, which means every tour pads out it's itinery by stopping here. The place is usually swarming with tourists getting off coaches, taking a half-dozen photos from the edge of the car-park, and piling back onto the coach. So what I did was turn up, find the only patch of shade with a veiw of the colossi, and sit down in it. This patch of shade was the shade of a lone palm tree, and it left me in the middle of the dust-patch that most of the viewing of the colossi was done from. So there I was, sitting in the dust on the middle of the floor, sketching in my sketch book. I was mostly concentrating too much on what I was doing, with my hat blocking out my peripheral vision, to notice what was going on around me. Apparently I attracted quite a bit of intrest from the tourists - Stephanie says someone even photographed me!
What I was aware of was that every time the buses left, children whose normal occupation is selling random things to the tourists came over to see what I was doing. They could see that I was far to busy to actually buy anything (a first among hawkers) but they were facinated by what I was doing, and by the sketching set (especially the putty rubber and when I sharpened a pencil). A couple of times one of the older touts had to yell at them all to get them back to work on the next bus load, which they had ignored the arrival of while watching me.
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Carol
non-member comment
Really enjoyed reading your blog as I have never been to any of the places you have written about! Especially liked the bit about the camels!!