Fuzzy Memories

Our goal for Aswan was primarily to get our visas for Sudan.  We expected this to take 2 or 3 days, given the limited opening hours of the Sudanese Consulate here.  Spoiler: that was 10 days ago, and we are still here.

We went to the consulate on the first morning, but despite it being well within the hours posted on the front doors, we were surprised to find them barred shut.  Some officers nearby were clearly uncomfortable with our loitering, and told us that the consulate was closed for Eid.  But we’d timed our arrival to get here after Eid!  Well, the Eid holiday was over in Cairo, but we learned from locals that in Aswan it lasts 5 days instead of 2 or 3.   Sure enough, it was closed the next day too.  I even tried on the 3rd day, Wednesday, even though the visa section is normally closed that day.  No problem, we’d come back on Thursday.

On Thursday, they took Dave’s and my papers to start the visa process, but after a few hours returned mine with apologies.  Apparently, for American passport holders, special permission is now required from the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.  This never came up in our research, and we were devastated.

Our sponsor in Sudan, George from the Acropole hotel in Khartoum, gave us some hope that they could send someone to the Foreign Ministry to facilitate and expedite this authorization process.  Our hands were tied — all we could do was research, but other than a reference to some local “fixers” in Wadi Halfa, we didn’t find anything helpful.  George said they could maybe get it done by Sunday.

So, with nothing more productive to do, we started exploring Aswan.

First problem: finding things.  It seems like half the landmarks in Aswan had an incorrect location in Google Maps, most pointing at a giant mosque on a hill.

We’ve become very familiar with getting around Aswan, its dusty streets and noisy touts.  We’re even on friendly terms with some of them, like the sweet Papyrus guy (“Why does no one care for my papyrus?”).  Almost nothing is open during the day, but the city comes to life around sunset.

Sometimes there are sidewalks, but often you have to walk in the street to get anywhere.  Cars usually honk before they pass close, especially the tourist cabs that want to fleece you into paying 10 times the fair rate for a short drive.  It’s actually easy to walk everywhere, if you don’t mind the 46°C (115°F) heat.

If you walk along the Nile, you WILL be accosted by touts trying to get you into a felucca.  These are almost definitely going to be rip-off prices.  But the helpful gentleman who runs our guesthouse arranged for us a few hours in a felucca at a much more reasonable rate.  We were joined by a nice Belgian guy and made our way to the pier.  Oops, no pier — you just jump a railing, inch along a ledge, and climb across another boat.

Our guide solo-skippered the boat entirely under sail (ie, no engine) up and down this short stretch of the Nile.

Ancient history is everywhere.  Civilization in this region isn’t just hundreds of years old, but thousands.  Sometimes you’d see hieroglyphic “graffiti” in the craziest places.

We stopped at a botanical gardens on a small island in the middle of the river. The gardens themselves boasted trees and bushes from all over the world.  I’m not much of a botanist, but even I could appreciate the diversity of plant and tree life crammed into such a small place.

I wasn’t the only one blown away by the island.  Dave even made a special friend.

Back on the river, we sailed around up and down around Aswan for another hour.  There wasn’t much wind but the feluccas made good work of it.

All the feluccas we saw had red, white and green stripes on their booms.  Except some were red, yellow and green.  Any similarity to marijuana flag colors is strictly coincidental.

So it’s scorching hot out and you’re on a boat on the Nile.  Obviously, you jump in.  But there’s a bit of current and the water is very cold (more a problem for me than Dave and our fellow traveler, since I freeze up fast in cold water and fresh water makes it harder to float).  There’s no life preserver or buoyancy aids, what to do?

Fortunately, my camera battery died so you don’t have to see how this worked out.

Next time: back alleys of Aswan!

P.S. Dave has no comment at this time.

It was the first day of the post-Ramadan holiday, Eid al-Fitr, at least in Cairo.  There’s some disagreement about whether Ramadan’s end can be predicted or must be declared by the relevant religious authority, but for official purposes, Eid began on the evening of 14 June and the holiday lasted 2 or maybe 3 days.  Dave and I woke up early to catch our train north to Alexandria.

North?  I thought we were heading south across Africa!  Well, we are, but it seemed like a shame not to dip our feet in the Mediterranean while we were so close.

It’s just a 3 or 4 hour ride north, so we got to Alexandria in the hottest part of the day.  From our hostel cell room we could see a kid splashing water in the street in front of his shop.  You see this everywhere in Egypt, it helps with the dust and keeps the area cooler.

How do you keep cool in 42 C (108 F)?  You don’t.  Or you jump in the sea!  We tried that, actually, but there were a bunch of idling kids acting suspicious around us so we just got our feet wet instead.  But technically we were in the Med, just two oceans to go!

We put our shoes back on and hiked down the waterfront to a cafe that was getting ready to show the first Egypt World Cup game.  The sun was punishing but we found a slice of shade at an outdoor table, ordered some coffee, and played some cards.

Eventually the sun caught up to our table and we got tired of the street brats harassing us.  Some of them started fighting in the street, whipping another kid with their belts, until the cops showed up to break up the melee.  So far, it seemed like Alexandria was full of teenage thugs.

We walked back across town and found everyone in Alexandria out in the streets, getting ready for a feast and for some reason crowding the movie theaters.

The next morning we took a train back down to Cairo for a day to catch the next train south to Aswan.  The cafe in the Alexandria station is a nice place for coffee and cards…

We spent the night in another mosquito-filled hostel in Cairo, getting up early yet again to catch the train to Aswan.  The “first class” car on this train was very comfortable, almost spacious.  We passed the 14 hours south, through Luxor to Aswan, reading and playing cards (Shithead, again).

The first thing we noticed when we arrived in Aswan around 10:30p was how bloody hot it was.  I don’t remember the exact temperature at the time, but we would soon learn how hot it got here, day after day after day.  We caught one of the orange-striped “tourist” cabs to our hostel.  This was a mistake, they are driven by greedy crooks who try to trick travelers into massively overpaying for short trips.  We soon switched to blue-striped “normal” cabs, until we eventually wised up and started traveling like locals in hop-on/hop-off minivans and converted pickups.

Have I mentioned cats seem to secretly run Egypt?  They aren’t pets, they’re wild animals living in harmony with humans.

Sure, it was midnight and we had to be up early to go to the Sudanese Consulate, but we were starving.  It seemed like everything was closed still, even though Eid had passed.  Confused, we wandered around and eventually found a corner store offering crisps and soda.

Next time, the Sudanese visa ordeal begins.

Dave asked me to write the following: “Dave strove off into the desert with a pack of Camels, found an oasis, and saved a pack of orphans.  He was bathed by the eligible young ladies of the local village.  He was then feted with an extravagant dinner celebration, given the title ‘something Arabic’, and Chris was there too.”

When you travel on a budget and stay in inexpensive hotels and hostels, little problems and discomforts are part of the experience.

So when Dave realized in the middle of the night that the dripping sound we heard was the dilapidated air conditioner dripping buckets on his bed, he just switched it off and rolled over.   I’m trying out this “optimism” thing, so I choose to believe that a few of those drips killed some of the mosquitoes that were feasting upon us in our sleep.

So it was no surprise when we woke up late, in a hot room, dripping with sweat (and maybe AC juice).

After showers and “breakfast”, we decided to figure out the metro and head to Coptic Cairo.

Roughly 95% of Egypt is Muslim, and somewhere around 5% is Coptic Christian.  After the last Pharaoh was defeated by the Persians, the Ptolemaic Kingdom reigned until Alexander the Great conquered it.  Eventually the Romans came in and took over.  Then Christianity came in with the Byzantine empire, in the form of a distinct Egyptian Coptic Church.  About 150 years later the Islamic Arabs came in and took over, but a small Coptic minority remains to this day.

The Coptic churches and fort were huge and gorgeous.  Instead of minarets to broadcast the call to prayer, they have the standard Christian church bells.  Some are electro-mechanical too.

The churches were all gorgeous inside, full of symbolism and biblical patterns like 12 pillars for the apostles, and triangles for the trinity.

Coptic Cairo’s alleys, unlike Islamic Cairo’s, were generally very clean, spartan affairs.

Once we’d had our sweaty fill, there was one major sight left to see before we left Cairo.  Cats have a special status in Cairo and you see them all over.  But there was one in particular we’d missed so far.

The Sphinx of Giza is more or less a part of the Giza Pyramid complex, though there is also a separate entrance.  They have excavated a whole bunch of ruins in front, through which you need to walk to get up close with the cat-man himself.

It’s big, but not HUGE.  But the detail you can still see in the headdress up close makes you wonder what it would have looked like in its time.

Did you know the Sphinx has a tail?

You can get all the way around it, but nobody seems to photograph the back.

Next up: Alexander the Great’s home in Africa!

 

Not knowing how long we’d stay in Cairo, Dave and I knocked out the must-do straight off regardless of the heat and Ramadan (we generally refrained from eating during the day as well).  First were the pyramids at Giza, and of course the next thing would be the Cairo Museum.  This part is perhaps less adventurous, but the sheer amount of intact artifacts from civilization thousands of years old (not to mention mummies) made it worth the trip.

Of course, first we had to get there.

The police presence was ubiquitous, and the museum was no exception.  Like the Pyramids complex, there were traffic control barriers up and a police checkpoint out front.  We walked through the crazy heat, past the AK-toting cops, to the museum entrance.  To go inside anywhere official in Cairo you have to go through metal detectors, complete with x-ray machines for the bags.  The Egyptian culture seems not to include any concept of queuing or going in order — you just press through and take your chances or you will literally never get anywhere.  But once inside, it was like a beautiful warehouse chock full of thousands of years of Egyptian history.

The two-story museum is split into two levels, organized like a ring going clockwise through the centuries and millennia.  We started with the oldest of what people recognize as the Pharaonic  kingdoms.  The history is generally split into Old Kingdom, First Intermediate, Middle Kingdom, Second Intermediate, and New Kingdom, clockwise around the first floor.

There were so many statues and stelae, everywhere you turn a stony king or queen was glaring at you.  Sarcophagi were ubiquitous, too.

As you’d expect over thousands of years, the art style changed over time, and some pharaohs made bolder moves than others.  Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten to tie himself to the sun deity, which he elevated above all the other “mere” gods.  He introduced what was essentially monotheism towards this sun deity and a new art style to celebrate it.  They got rid of it in the decades after he died, destroying most of his statues and referring to him as an “enemy” or “criminal”.

They have so many artifacts here that many are still in wooden shipping crates, and most are unlabeled.

Did you know the Egyptians carved hieroglyphics into wood as well as stone?  Seems obvious in retrospect but I’ve never seen any before.

Of course, the national museum of Egypt wouldn’t be complete without mummified human remains.

This was one of the only mummies we were allowed to photograph.  There is a royal mummy display with 9 or so kings and queens on display, but photographs are forbidden in that room.  They were in special display cases, and partially unwrapped.  Some looked very peaceful, some were very desiccated, and one showed gruesome battle wounds — his face misshapen and features distorted with big holes in his skull.

The famous boy king, Tutankhamen, was not among them.  His mummy is buried in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings.  However, items from his tomb feature prominently in the museum, near to the statues of his famous father, the aforementioned “criminal” Amenhotep IV/Ahkenaten.  Arguably the most interesting of these items is this massive golden chest found containing King Tut’s organs.

Promptly at 3pm, we were shooed out of the museum (because it closed, not due to our misbehavior).  Dave and I decided to walk across downtown to the area known as Islamic Cairo.

Islamic Cairo feels like one giant market.  My photos don’t do it justice — some parts were so crowded and tight that I couldn’t get my camera out.  We passed through the textile district, the toy district, the sweets district, and the woodworking district, at a minimum (they blend together a bit).  Finally it opened up a bit.

It’s a giant maze of covered alleys.  We walked for an hour at least through them.

I’m glad I had my compass.  We did take a few wrong turns on our way out, though.

Next time: Coptic Cairo and a stone cat-man!

In case you haven’t heard, Dave and I are going to Africa!

Where exactly are we going in Africa?

How will it work out for us?

What could go wrong?  Well, if we actually do get eaten by lions, apart from not living, we’ll never live it down.  There’s also some areas of armed conflict to avoid, various diseases not to get, and that time-honored Brit/Yank antipathy.

But we planned ahead, you see!  As we slowly figure out and travel our overland route from Cairo in the boiling hot north to Cape Town in the frigid south, we’ll be taking trains and buses and ferries, staying in hostels and camps and on the occasional ferry bench.  We have anti-malarials, mosquito nets, sun hats and tiger balm.  We’re pretty sure we’ve got everything covered and nothing can go wrong.  Time to get this show on the road!

Getting into Cairo and finally to our hostel was mostly uneventful.  We got to our hostel around midnight.

When the sun came up, we finally got to see the area we’d chosen in which to start our adventure.  Downtown Cairo isn’t the cleanest place in the world, but it’s not as filthy as some places I’ve seen.  And there are a lot of apparently feral cats.

Of course, what do you do first in Cairo?

The pyramids!  The Giza pyramid complex is not exactly in the middle of the desert.  In fact, at the end of the driveway there’s an entire golf course.  There are roads paved through the complex so that tour buses can cart in tourists to take their selfies and get talked into camel or carriage rides or guided tours.

Of course we shook them off and just bought entrance tickets.  The pricing scheme is not well-explained, but they essentially make it a-la carte: one ticket to get into the area, another for each pyramid and the tomb.  We opted for what seemed to be a big package option including everything.

First up: the Great/Khufu/Cheops pyramid!

It’s really big, in person.  (Thanks auto-complete!)  They used to let you climb it up a ways on the outside, but that day has sadly passed and the gate is shut.

Alas, no climbing adventure for us.  We’d have to settle for going inside.

It took a second to sink in but no time at all to rush forward, ticket in hand.  “No cameras!” the stoic official-looking old man in a white uniform said.  We had to give up our cameras in order to enter.  I told Dave to go ahead, I’d hold his bag and camera.  Then he’d hold mine and I’d go.  Dave was gone a while.  I wondered how long it took to walk down a hallway and maybe down a few stairs.

It turns out he took a couple shots on his camera anyway, which explain why he took so long.  When my turn came, I was very glad my Tilley hat is slightly padded on the top, as I bonked my head a bunch trying to climb this in a constant crouch.  Once you get to the top of this narrow shaft, it opens up into the “Grand Gallery” which is just as steep, more like an 8 story climb, but has a TON more space.  At the top, you enter the king’s burial room which now has only his empty sarcophagus.  I looked around for a bit, then headed back down the ramp to meet up with Dave.

Now, as I had been waiting for Dave, I noticed a woman carrying a nice DSLR walk up to entrance.  She didn’t show her ticket to the dour gentleman in white or turn over her camera, but instead pushed a one or two euro coin into his hand, then carried her camera up into the pyramid.  This was a good lesson for Egypt: many simple rules are negotiable for baksheesh (very small tips or bribes).

Dave and I then walked around the Great pyramid for the next one in line.  It was neat to walk across the desert between the ancient wonders.

The second pyramid, Khafre or Chephren, looks just as amazing and imposing up close.  The limestone cap still in place on the top is a bit shiny and has such detail that it’s easy to imagine it in its heyday.

This pyramid also had an indentation like you could go inside it, and they were selling individual tickets for this pyramid as well.  But where is the entrance?  There weren’t any people about.

An underground entrance!  The little kiosk is where the ticket-checkers take shelter from the sun and confiscate un-paid-for cameras.  We know the place shuts at 4p, and most everything else shuts at 3p, but it was only 2:20.  Surely they hadn’t just packed up and gone home?  Alas, that seemed to be the case.

So we did what any self-respecting travelers would do when the area seems to have shut down around you: wander into the desert.

We broke down and let a friendly busker take our photo for a couple of bucks.  Dave pointed out that I mis-remembered this.  I actually gave a busker a couple bucks when he took my photo at the ship exhibit (below), not in the desert.  In fact, we found a friendly rock to do the job for free.  After all, when would we be here again?

The last bit included in our ticket was not yet closed, but they made it clear we didn’t have long.  When they buried Khufu they buried some of his ships too, largely intact, in deep rectangular tombs next to the pyramid.  One of them was exhumed and restored, then reassembled and put on display in a hall just behind the Great Pyramid.

Dave and I were in awe of the details of construction like notched planks forming the sides, letting it work and flex without breaking apart.  It’s neat to see such a tangible testament to ancient ingenuity and craftsmanship.

Dave has a friend from back home who lives in Cairo and works for the UN.  She invited us to an iftar (breaking of the fast) get-together at her office that evening.  We had arrived in Cairo with 4 days left of Ramadan, and many Muslims break their day-long 15 hour fast at 6:45p every evening.  We ate with her team and their families, met her boss, then left the work party and went up to her lovely apartment next door.  What a commute!

Next up, more Cairo!