doctor, heal thyself

hello lovelies!

i have a feeling that this is going to be a mammoth entry - tusks and all - so if you don't have time for a long read, maybe come back to this later. get a cup of coffee and take the phone off the hook etc. fasten your seatbelt. i feel like i've done quite a bit, so i'll break it up into smaller, more palatable portions.

1) THE LEAVING (and leaves) OF LUXOR

it wasn't any secret that i was feeling a bit bitter and twisted after my weeks in the bilharzia valley region. having given up on learning arabic, i figured that i didn't need my brain any more, so i bought myself a big package of grass and kept myself in a state of semi-permanent stoned-dom for about a week. it made the 18 hour bus ride from luxor to dahab a little bit more tolerable, but when i got the munchies half way through the journey, i cracked open my 2kg bag of date biscuits and almost ate my way into a diabetic coma.

i decided that i cherished my capacity for thought, expression of emotion and rapid response to situations at hand far too much for a boring high, and after being attacked in a restaurant by a death squad of wild cats and having two slices of my marguerita pizza dragged away, i felt that enough was enough and gave up the silly weed (i.e. smoked the rest in one mega session).

2) DAHAB DESERT DANCE

dahab is a bit of a tourist town on the sinai peninsula, right on the red sea coast (gulf of aqaba). it's full of gorgeous russian girls (prostitutes) and hippies with dred-locks in their head hair, beard hair, and presumably everywhere else hair too. i went there for a bit of relaxation before a proposed jaunt into the deserts of sinai. as is often the case, after i got there one thing led to another, and before i knew it i was sitting on a bus with 40 other dahabians heading into the desert to be filmed taking part in a rave for an advertisement commissioned by the egyptian tourist board. i even got paid US $30. sounds great doesn't it? getting paid to dance in the desert? the reality was a bit different...

as soon as i got on the bus i felt decidedly right wing. everyone seemed to be reading books called 'inner peace' or 'the mind inside', wearing tye-dye clothing and talking absolute crap about whatever subject you'd care to mention. it was really different. the bus seemed to be broken into two groups - the russian prostitutes (and their pimps), and everyone else. for some reason i ended up sitting with the russian prostitutes. my contact was a gorgeous girl called julia who spoke russian, arabic, english and italian on her mobile that never stopped ringing, and for some reason kept thanking me (and no-one else) for coming to the rave. it was all very confusing.

the site for the rave was perfect - a sandy area in a gorge between two craggy hills surrounded by palm trees (you'd almost believe it was real). we posted ourselves in a little seating area for 4 hours whilst the more gorgeous people got made up. we were the first bus-load to arrive, but every subsequent bus-load seemed to bring more and more beautiful people: it was a cattle-call of perfect abs, pecs, legs and hair worn by semi-clad boys and girls from all over the world. here again there were two main groups - the gorgeous people, and rent-a-crowd. i was rent-a-crowd. my rent-a-crowd friend for the day, a guy called tepe from japan, turned to me at one stage and said "have you noticed how many gorgeous russian girls there are here...i think they're all prostitutes..."

eventually we were allowed onto the 'dance floor' where they blasted the music and forced us to put our hands in the air and smile and laugh and dance wildly while 60 second sequences were filmed. just when we were getting into the groove they'd call CUT!, we'd stop, someone's tits would be readjusted, and we'd do it all again. after around 40 or 50 takes, i was drained of all energy and good will. after the final take we all just piled onto the buses and went home.

as an aside - this ad will be shown in britain and maybe other european countries. there are a few of you in europe, so if you happen to see an ad for egypt involving a rave, look for me right at the back just in front of the dj wearing a light green shirt and jeans and dancing like an absolute nut...

3) SINAI SUNSET, SINAI SUNRISE

the following day i caught a bus to st katherine - the little town at the base of mt sinai (or mt moses as it's known in egypt - gebel musa). this is the place where moses allegedly received the 10 commandments from god. i met an austrian hippy girl on the bus, and we decided to head to the summit right there and then. when we got to the top, we threw some old blankets down on a little ledge just below the summit and lay our sleeping bags down on that. we put on every single piece of clothing we had with us, and watched the sunset eating flat bread with feta, tomato and cucumber, and then slept below the stars. it was freezing, but it was perfect. during the night i awaited a visit from god with a new set of commandments (i even brought paper and pen in case he forgot the stone tablets) but he failed to deliver. it was all very disappointing. when the estimated 300 people rocked up at 4am to watch the sunrise (this is what happens there) i realised that we had the best position on the whole peak - all we had to do was open our eyes and watch the sun rise at our feet over the mountains of saudi arabia :)

i came back down the mountain via the 'steps of repentance'. someone told me they are also called 'the six thousand steps'. i decided to rename them 'the six thousand easy steps to total knee reconstruction'. enough said.

at the bottom i visited st katherine's monastery where they have a big bush growing on a platform. this is apparently the direct descendant of 'the burning bush'. despite sounding like a b-grade porn flick from lithuania, the burning bush was apparently a shrub from the bible that was seen to be 'burning but not being consumed' (whatever that means), and then god's head appeared in it and started talking. (or something like that - no-one i asked seemed to know the real story). the monastery also had a wonderful collection of ancient manuscripts in ancient greek, arabic and many other languages which i loved, and the world's largest collection of holy icons, including one picture (my favourite) of 'the ladder to heaven' in which grey-haired men race up a ladder to heaven whilst devils lasoo them and ride them down to a hole in the ground representing hell. it included a bunch of rent-boy cherubs on a cloud in one corner and a group of older men that looked decidedly paedophilic being engulfed in flames in another corner.

4) BONDY AND THE BEDOUIN CAMP

one thing led to another, and before i knew it i was sitting around a fire in a bedouin camp in the middle of the sinai desert surrounded by non-english speaking bedouin, camels and goats. i didn't really know what my role was there, so i propped myself against a post and let the evening unfold. i found myself drifting between states of intense concentration and complete abstraction. suddenly the tent was empty except for me and a guy who was coughing and spluttering, and had wheeze that i could hear from the foot of the bed (i mean tent...). he had a cold exacerbating his asthma, but what was i supposed to do about it? it made me realise how very little practical use a medical education is without resources. i used sign language to tell him he needed some ventolin, and he pulled a puffer out of his pocket and managed to tell me that he only used it if he was really bad. i wanted to take a full history, write up an asthma management plan, consider introducing some maintenance therapy and check his inhaler technique, but i've never been that good at charades. i ended up giving him some panadol, which he refused to take until i proved that it was safe by grabbing the nearest glass of water and banging back a couple of pills with a loud arabic 'delicious!'.

as the sun set i wandered around the camp thinking to myself "what the fuck am i doing? i have no idea where i am...i have no idea who these people are...they have no idea who i am..." but i got over that pretty quickly because the camp was so fascinating. it was made up of three largish tents - wooden poles with fabric strung over them - and a little enclosure for goats in the middle. all around were the bedouin's camels with their legs tied so they wouldn't run away. nearby was a road, and all around were the huge rocky mountains of sinai. it was in the middle of no-where.

after sunset i returned to the tent with the fire in it and sat down in the circle of bedouin men. no-one addressed me. i didn't speak. hours passed. i felt like i was in 'a christmas carol' by charles dickens, in which the ghost of christmas present takes scrooge to his worker's house where they attend dinner, but no-one can see them or knows that they are there. (at least i think that's what happens - i've only ever seen 'a muppets christmas carol starring kermit the frog as scrooge's supposedly poverty-stricken employee, despite supporting the enormous weight of his wife miss piggy. i can already hear you crying 'philistine!'). anyway, dinner came - we ate soup with bread cooked in the fire (it tasted like dirt), and then i threw a blanket on the sand and went to sleep.

5) THE TREK

now the main reason i was there was so that i could go on a three-day trek though the sinai desert with a camel and a bedouin guide. i was hoping for either a gorgeous young bedouin man with homosexual tendancies, or an older man who spoke no english, so that we wouldn't have to speak and i could travel within myself too. i got the latter - a lovely man called raashed who looked about 15 years older than his 45, and with whom i communicated in a cocktail of arabic, english and german phrases, with heaps of sign-language to boot. our camel had an unpronouncable arabic name, so i renamed her 'the hungry slut'. the esurient beast ate everything she came across - including cardboard boxes and thorn bushes so sharp they pricked your eyes just to look at them. she had a very meaty, prominent vulva that protruded when she sat down. i couldn't help wondering what would happen if i flicked it with a rubber band, and was prompted to recall with some clarity my ability as a child to shoot a small lip balm from a table from 5 metres with a standard post-office issue red rubber band. such talent has gone to waste in my consolation prize of a medical career.

at the end of the second day raashed told me that the hungry slut was actually a boy-camel. i re-inspected her genitalia and my mind boggled. the hungry slut carried everything - raashed and i were left to wander about freely.

our first day was spent trekking through large open deserts surrounded by distant rocky mountains. it was punctuated by frequent bouts of diarrhoea on a background of crampy abdominal pain and nausea. i suspect the glass of water i used to prove the safety of the panadol was the culprit, and the irony did not escape me.

after so many weeks pampering my hole with the nozzle, i was in a state. luckily, i brought some soft antibacterial wet-wipes, which proved to be my 'nozzle in a packet'.

that night we camped in a dry river bed. i remembered an interesting fact: more people die of drowning each year in the sahara than dehydration. everyone knows to bring water - it's the sahara for god's sake - but no-one expects the freak storm and the flash flood. we cooked some rice and potatoes on a camp fire and drank very sweet tea - the egyptian way.

as i lay in my sleeping bag, i felt that i could see every single star in the whole universe. suddenly i had a million questions in my head and i needed JH there to answer them. because the sky was so clear, i got the feeling that there was no atmosphere, and that i could topple off the earth and float out into space at the slightest provokation. i felt like i was in space. i watched orion - my favourite constellation - as he danced across the sky, and was delighted to see the big dipper in the north, which we can't see in australia.

in the morning, raashed mixed flour and water in a pot and then spread the damper under some hot embers. we cracked open the steaming bread when it was ready and ate it with cheese and jam, washed down again with sweet tea.

the second day we passed through the rocky mountains themselves - sand dunes gave way to eruptions of light red rock - twisted and folding and crumbling cliffs that sprang 300 metres directly up out of the earth. the scale was too large to comprehend. i took millions of photos, but they will come to nothing - could one tour the hermitage museum by way of a keyhole? we had lunch, and later camped, in the shadows of such cliffs.

the third day was completely different. we made our way back through a dried river bed surrounded by very boring black mountains that looked like piles of rubble. when i looked down, however, the combinations of colours were exciting. not only were there swirls of colour in the bedrock, but the entire river-bed was covered in rocks of every shade imagineable. rocks that were black as night were sitting right next to white rocks, and red rocks were scattered with purple boulders that evoked the eye-shadow of an 80's rock star. it suprised me that all the colours were together, not separated into groups - as if a giant bag of jelly-beans had been emptied into the riverbed.

at this point i was becoming really comfortable with raashed and the hungry slut - so comfortable that i almost forgot they were there. at one stage, whilst inspecting some bed-rock, i let off the grandmother of all farts. suddenly i remembered that i was not alone, and looked up to find raashed staring at me with a mixed expression of suprise and respect on his face.

i lost all concept of time and distance during the trek - as i wandered through the desert my mind wandered about and turned things over, looking at, dwelling upon and leaving things at its leisure. the trek, the camping, the views - it was magical.

at the end of the third day i returned to st katherine township in a jeep. i had a sore throat and my diarrhoea was still going strong. my head was spinning and i was physically exhausted. what i needed to do was rest. the stupidest thing i coud think of doing was trying to climb mt katherine - egypt's highest mountain.

6) THE CONQUERING OF MT KATHERINE

the following morning, i set off early to climb mt katherine. rising to 2642, it was apparently the site at which a group of monks found st katherine's body 300 years after she was martyred in alexandria. her remains were carted off to the aforementioned st katherine's monastery, of burning bush fame.

there were the usual protests: "you need a guide!", "people have died!", "you'll get lost!". we've heard that all before haven't we? it's illegal to climb the mountain without a permit and a guide, but the owner of my camp told me to ignore that and just head up the valley, turn left at the garden and i'll be right.

sure enough, when i got to the garden i turned left and got well and truly lost. i used photos that i had taken from the top of mt sinai, stored on my mp3 player, and compared them to the skyline to find that i was heading in the opposite direction to what i should have been. i wasted about an hour, but that was the only mishap - when i got to the base of the mountain proper, the track was as clear as my will, and i powered up to the peak.

even though it's not the hardest climb in the world, i found it quite demanding. i squirted my way to the top, my head was spinning, and there were times when i thought i might have to turn back (if i broke both legs and had a pneumothorax). but reaching a peak is secondary to the climb itself, and i felt free and amazing and alive whilst i was doing it. and that feeling is worth everything.

when i got to the top, i found two austrian boys with their two egyptian guides. they were all smoking pot. i said:

"my goodness! you'll fall down the mountain"
"no man, we'll fly down"

i had a quick nap, and after the boys flew away, i had the mountain to myself. i could see the gulf of suez and the rest of egypt on one side, and the gulf of aqaba and saudi arabia on the other. mt sinai was behind me and the red sea before me. i put on bjork's 'all is full of love' (which is like the theme song to my life) and i danced and sang and laughed. again - it was magical. here is a picture of me as i stand on the highest piece of land in egypt. ondrej on the peak of gebel katarina. on the left in the background is mt sinai. amazing

i descended the mountain, and the following morning i took a horrendous amount of imodium before taking 11 hours worth of bus to alexandria.

7) ALEXANDRIA

from suez all the way through cairo and now in alex, there is something like a sand/pollution storm, so that it's been difficult to see anything. the sun looks like a dim light bulb in a dark, steamy bathroom. here is a photo i took yesterday afternoon on the alexandria seafront. bear in mind that it's 4 in the afternoon!

there was a tv in the bus which showed 3 movies. the first two movies were both about cross-dressers - the first was a man dressed as a woman who got arrested and was sent to a women's jail (and later became a talk show host) and the second was about two guys who dressed as chicks so that they could stay at a women's boarding house. the third movie wasn't about cross-dressers, but it featured a transvestite in a minor role. the statement about sexuality in egypt was loud and clear.

i'm staying in a soviet-style hotel full of stuffed birds and men wearing suits and smiles. the rooms have decent beds and the bathroom has a real shower. the toilet has this big fuck-off nozzle so you have to hold onto the sides of the bowl so you aren't launched into orbit. it almost makes having diarrhoea a pleasure (apart from the satisfaction of knowing that i've lost all the weight i gained on account of my indescretion with the date biscuits). in any case, it's letting up.

i've got a balcony right over the sea - i decided to spoil myself - and though i'm paying only $15 a night here, it's by far the most expensive place i've stayed so far. but it's worth it, and obviously: i'm worth it.

i've been in egypt 31 days now - one whole month. i think this means that i've spent at least one month on every continent except for antarctica so far (a situation i'll have to remedy after my sister does for fear of her head exploding with jealousy - antarctica has always been a touchy subject) ;)

i'm going to relax a bit, put my feet up, stare out my window and do nothing. gather my strength and get ready for the next challenge: china!

the belgian queens

the egyptians: as many of you may know, i've been having a few issues with the egyptians. i was feeling quite burdened with guilt about it (the fact that i hated them) until i discussed my views with quite a few other tourists, and found that i wasn't the only one.

for more than a hundred years, rich western tourists have been floating up and down the bilharzia, handing out ludicrous sums of money to the poor on its banks. because this country is so poor, and because the people who visit tend to be so rich (and part of tour groups), everyone here has perfected the art of milking money out of the unsuspecting tourist.

this has impacted on me in a number of ways. the first is that it's difficult to take photos of anything involving people: everyone demands money. i was on elephantine island in aswan a few days ago, and after taking a photo of a colourful window, i was chased by an old woman demanding cash for the picture of her neighbour's house. another old lady stopped me on the street and begged me: "please! please take a photo of my cat! it's so cute!" i had my camera out and took a photo of her stupid cat, at which point she demanded baksheesh (a tip). i as indignant. it's SO unpleasant! many of the people i've spoken to have been subject to very elaborate tricks to get their money which are impressive in their scope.

the second is that you can't have a conversation with anyone about anything, because everyone's trying to sell you something. as benign as the conversations seem, you invariably end up in someone's shop or even house with them either demanding money for something or trying to sell you fake papyrus "50% off, only for you my friend and only today". when walking through a market, it's open season.

the worst part for me is that i've been absolutely unable to improve my arabic because i can't have any conversations.

of course there are exceptions, but they are incredibly few, and when you encounter them, you feel so suspicious that you're unable to relax into the pleasure of interaction. of the other tourists i've met, i haven't met a single one who has thought the egyptians were pleasant, genuine people, and many are making a beeline to the various airports to cut their trips short. every single person i've met who is trying to learn arabic (and i say this without exception) has all but given up for lack of people to practice with.

so - does this mean i'm having a shit time? not at all. i've adjusted my expectations to not involve friendly chats with the locals, have forgotten my dreams of speaking arabic in the near future, and i'm having a rather wild time with the other tourists that i meet. egypt itself is an amazing country, and i do know how to enjoy myself :)

so - what have i been up to? after heading up to abu simbel, i stayed in aswan for a few days checking the place out, eating heaps of pastries, dancing on the roof of my hotel, and generally hanging out with people and being lazy. on saturday, i hopped onto a felucca for a three day float down the bilharzia. the trip was wonderful. we had two boats - on mine there was with a 23 year old guy, nick (which means fuck in arabic), from melbourne who was returning from a 3 month tour of the middle east. also a 21 year old guy (guillaume) from montreal who was doing a world tour and trying to pick up as many languages as possible on the way. he already spoke 7 languages (including arabic which he had to give up whilst in egypt), and was even going to china to learn chinese later this year. don't you hate it when there are younger, better versions of yourself running around? terrible! he inspired me to get my language study on track, and also to get over to montreal pour les beaux hommes. the other boat with us had 4 korean cousins, with whom we spent the evenings playing korean circle clapping games involving physical punishment for errors. delightful.

at night we were moored to the banks, and lay in our sleeping bags watching the full moon and listening to the creak of the wooden feluccas as they were rocked by the gentle movements of the bilharzia.

during the day, we read, ate, chatted and snoozed on the deck. nothing of note occured, except that our boat sprung a leak at one stage and soaked our bags, so we had to evacuate the vessel whilst the hole was found and plugged.

we arrived in kom ombo on monday morning, and stopped by a few temples on our way back to luxor.

i've been in luxor now for three days. tonight i leave on an overnight bus to dahab, on the red sea in sinai, for the last two weeks of my stay in egypt. i'm keen to get some trekking and hiking done in the beautiful deserts of sinai.

of course most social interactions go unmentioned, but i wanted to tell you about one in particular: the belgian queens.

i had met a guy from antwerp on gaydar, a gay chat/personals site. i thought it would be good to meet up, as he and two of his friends were staying in luxor for a week, and i'm quite partial to passing an interesting evening.

the belgian queens were staying at the sherraton, which was the first indication to me that all was not right. i rocked up to the hotel during the day so i could leave him a note telling them of my whereabouts. the actual hotel sickened me - it was in a really poor part of luxor, and had huge fences and guards around it to keep reality at bay. there was an egyptian band at the front door which began playing as soon as a tourist was in sight, and a huge foyer with leather couches and carpets and whatnot and whathaveyou. i left the note and departed hastily.

at 9pm, i was to meet the boys in the foyer of the hotel. i was already a bit stoned, because i had been chatting and smoking on the roof of my own hotel with another belgian guy (raymond-andre), and we had spent a rather pleasant afternoon together.

in the foyer of the sherraton, the three of them were sitting in the middle of the room, legs crossed, sitting bolt upright with one hand up in the air, next to their heads, holding cigarettes a la audrey hepburn. it was so camp i wanted to laugh out loud. we made our introductions, and then moved out onto the balcony where i refused a drink a few times (who wants to pay 30 egyptian pounds for a beer when they sell them for 6 in the street?) before i was forced to have a stella. the guy i had made contact with had a face that looked like a snake, and the boy next to me had plucked out most of his eyebrows and drawn them back on about half a centimetre lower than they should have been. i couldn't really tell which gender he was, and because of the weird eyebrows, after looking at him for a while i couldn't tell whether he was facing upways or downways, leftways or rightways. being stoned didn't help.

what followed next was about 20 minutes of hideous interaction. the boys sat there with smug, superior expressions on their faces sighing loudly or sniggering when i made comments, and offering none of their own. when i told them that i was staying in a hotel that "even had water...sometimes!" and cost only 10 pounds a night (~2.5 aussie dollars) it confirmed their superior status and the conversation all but ground to a halt.

i asked one guy what he did, and he said "oh...i work..." implying that i didn't. i didn't really know what to say - it was so silly. finally one of the queens broke the dead-lock and started talking about something, but it was at this moment that i had the misfortune of tipping beer into a part of my face that didn't have a mouth in it. it streamed off my cheek and down the front of my shirt. everyone froze and there was a deafening silence for a few seconds whilst i realised what had happened. i made an accurate and appropriate summary of the situation: "whoops! i missed my mouth!" at which there was a furious exchange of glances and raising of plucked eyebrows before a loud discussion in flemish and much scoffing.

i'd had enough. i skolled the rest of my beer, placed it gently on the table and said that i needed to go to the toilet (to the general rolling of eyes and more exchanged glances). i walked back into the foyer, past the water feature, out through the big front doors and the coin-operated band, and then ran down the street through the warm, noisy, dirty, free air of my egyptian evening.

at first i felt a bit guilty about not paying for my beer, but then i realised that it was a victory - a victory for me and a victory for all australians.

as i walked through the streets on my way home, i felt an affinity for the people of egypt that have been forced into their unsavoury behavioural patterns under the weight of history and socio-economics. there was, however, no excuse for the way the belgian queens behaved, and everything from the overstated luxury of their hotel to their manicured nails disgusted me. the contrast made me realise all the more just how much i love to travel - to bargain down a felafel at the corner street stall, to join the throngs of locals in the back of a pick-up, to wander through ancient sites alone in the late afternoon, to play russian roulette with the nozzles at my $2 hotels: to go my own way.

HOORAY FOR INDEPENDENT TRAVEL!

no humour please, we're german

arabic: so i dropped the lessons. i had originally planned to have four classes, but the sessions themselves became such a circus that i was unable to bring myself to continue after lesson number two. the 'teaching' took place in the foyer of the hotel with extended family and friends present watching TV at 500 decibels, and consisted of going through the letters of the arabic alphabet with the 'teacher', saied, trying to think of every word he could think of starting with that letter and writing it down. afterwards there was stilted conversation practice in which i couldn't milk relevant phrases out of him. he sat there smoking a sheesha pipe and adjusting his cock through his gown every 5 seconds which i found unconducive to learning.

i was still in luxor, and headed over to karnak the following morning, which contains the enormous amun temple complex. i hired a bike which turned out to be a girls bike (replete with a little basket infront where i could stow my bonnet) and this was convenient and gave me the independence i needed to get around the mediumly spaced out sites around luxor. the complex was very impressive, and unlike castle and church fatigue with which i suffered terribly in europe, i find that i'm more and more interested in the sites here as time goes on, noticing the differences in the statues and the hieroglyphics (which i love) over different ages, and getting a feel for life in egypt 1000-2000 BCE. there was a note in the amun complex which said that the main hall was bigger than st peter's and st paul's combined. i simply wasn't impressed, and couldn't help thinking that even a small victorian forest is much bigger than st peter's and st paul's combined. do you know what i'm saying?

the next day i got up late and moseyed on over to the valley of the kings. the tombs were impressive - hundred metre chambers dug deep into the rock and decorated beautifully, all in the middle of a desolate nowhere. much of the details in these tombs have been preserved - not just the colour of the hieroglyphics remain, but different shadings of colour within the same hieroglyph could be seen, giving the character depth.

it was on this day that i started feeling lonely. after two days visiting some of the most popular sites in the country, i felt like i was the only person in the whole of egypt who wasn't on a tour. in fact, when i chained up my bike at the entrance to the valley of the kings, it stood alone. i counted, however, over 40 buses.

that evening, as i basked on the roof of my hostel, a lovely 27 year old german boy called stephan appeared from nowhere: we have spent the last three days travelling together :)

the following morning, after watching sunrise from the roof, we crossed the nile (bilharzia) and conquered the mountain above the valley of the kings. it was wonderful. on one side you could see down into the valley of the kings (picture on left), on the other the valley of the queens, behind you was the bilharzia glistening in the morning sun, and in front was the vast expanse of the libyan/sahara desert - nothing but sand and rock stretching for thousands of kilometres. you could fit a million st peters and st pauls into that.

from the mountain we descended to the hatshepsut temple complex - a beautiful temple carved into the cliffside, built by ancient egypt's only female pharoah. this was the site of the 1997 luxor massacre, in which 58 foreign tourists were shot, beheaded and disemboweled by muslim extremists in an attempt to reclaim egypt for islam. i could handle being shot, and even beheaded (haven't you always wanted to know if you can still see and hear as your head is flying through the air?) but even the word 'disemboweled' makes me want to crawl. i saw enough of it during my last rotation at latrobe regional hospital to last me a lifetime. i only read about the massacre on the net after i had visited the temple, which was good because it gave me the heebie jeebies and i felt sad. security has been ramped up since then (don't worry mum!)

i'll mention that i've become addicted to date cookies. they sell them by the kilogram here, and i buy them by the kilogram. it's just the sort of ultra-high GI rush that i've always been looking for. my belly had been disappearing, but it's making a come-back thanks to the date biscuits. at least i'm regular.

on that topic, i have to mention one of the best things about egypt: the nozzle. whilst many of the toilets in this country are hideous (flashback to kharga-luxor train toilet nightmare sequence), all toilets at hotels have that little nozzle where you turn on the tap and it squirts you right in the hole. banished are the vulgar, unhygienic days of using paper to smear faeces all over your perineum - with just a few quick squirts from the nozzle, your hole is so clean that you could eat (off) it. i find that it gives me that special kick-start that i need to face my day with renewed confidence.

stephan and i caught the train to aswan the following day and spent a lazy afternoon floating on the bilharzia in a felucca (a small sail boat with a triangular sail) and riding a camel up to an old mud-brick coptic monastery. delightful :)

this morning we met at 3:30am for a 4am bus to take us to abu simbel. all the buses go in a convoy, so you have about 20 buses leaving from all parts of aswan taking hundreds of tourists the 250km south to abu simbel together. it's supposed to be due to a security threat in the south from the fundamentalists which have a strong-hold there, but the buses race each other to abu-simbel, and at times we were out of sight of any other buses, so i'm not sure what the point of the convoy was at all.

abu simbel was impressive - a large temple built into a cliff with four huge seated statues of ramses II out the front. inside the cliff is a large temple complex, with halls and chambers all covered in exquisitely detailed depictions and hieroglyphic descriptions of ramses II life and exploits. the whole thing is all the more incredible because the entire temple complex was moved to avoid being submerged when the bilharzia was dammed. afterwards we went to the philae temple complex on an island between the old and new dams (also relocated) and then made our way back to aswan.

i want to mention here that egypt is the most sexually frustrated place i've ever been to (for the residents, not for me). i've had three gay run-ins so far, all of which went along the same lines. i am approached by a guy on the street who asks a few opening questions (what's your name, where are you from) and then says "so you like egyptian women?" to which my answer is usually a shrug of the shoulders or a polite 'no'. after a few moments of similar 'sizing up' type talk or offers of massage, there comes the question: "are you gay?" followed quickly by "you wanna fuck?" to which my answer is always 'no'. after this there are invariably several minutes of clarification: you're gay? you don't want to fuck? do you speak english? are you confused? wait a minute - are you gay? do you understand? what do you mean no - do you speak english?!

this rubbish is by no means restricted to the gays in egypt (who must suffer terribly with the extreme homophobia here) - every time a single western woman goes anywhere, almost every single guy she passes starts following her with his tongue dragging along the ground desperate for a fuck (every non-muslim woman is a slut).

it's because there is no outlet for expression of sexuality or sexual desire here, and everyone's going crazy with it - they're all stumbling around, bleary-eyed, in a stuporous state of permanent masturbatory fantasy.

i'm going to spend maybe another day or two here before i head back to luxor. i want to do a three night trip in a felucca down the bilharzia, but it might depend on whether i can find other people to go with. we'll see!

sahara

sahara is actually the arabic word for desert, or so my arabic tutor tells me - he's the owner of the hotel i'm staying in in luxor - only $2 a night, so with my meagre savings i might just be able to stay here for the rest of my life. i have a feeling that he's a lecherous drunkard, but i'm desperate to improve my arabic.

i arrived this afternoon from the western deserts - i'll give a quick account of the past week's events:

i left cairo after having made peace with the city. i suppose 17 million people can't be wrong - or can they? i had a three hour wait for my bus in a suburban bus stop under a freeway where i sat smoking a sheesha pipe and drinking egyptian coffee. i felt cairene. i jumped on a bus and made my way to the bahariya oasis.

when you leave cairo, the buildings become a bit sparser and you can just see vast tracts of sand between them. when they peter out, there's nothing but sand - nothing. no plants, no animals, no sounds except for the wind whistling in your ears. there are two colours - the colour of the sand and the colour of the sky. there is nothing else.

arriving in an oasis is a bit of a slap to the visual sense. it's like a light being turned on in the middle of the night - your eyes are dazzled by the green. and the oases here are exactly like the mirages you see in children's animations - there's a whole expanse of sand stretching for hundreds of kilometres, and then suddenly there's nothing but palm trees everywhere you look. i had my eyes peeled for genies popping out of lamps, but there was nothing. i did meet a young boy called aladdin, but the little bastard didn't grant me anything.

i hooked up with 2 japanese couples and we went on a 2 day tour into the black and white deserts after a quick dip at one of the local hot springs.

the black desert is a vast expanse of nothingness dotted with black-rock encrusted mounds/hills. standing atop a high mound and staring out into the nothing was deeply peaceful. i took the black and white photo of kenji having what i thought might have been an epiphany on the mound below the one the rest of us were standing on. when he came back i asked him what he had been doing, and he said - "i was drawing a dolphin". i had been spot on.

the white desert: thousands of years of sandy wind had carved bizarre shapes out of the white rock of this part of the desert. we threw a few blankets on the sand near a massive white outcropping and made a fire, and then ate and slept under the stars. it was wonderful save the mexican who had joined us whose snoring matched a pneumatic drill in it's sheer power, and didn't respond to slaps to the face or kicks to the legs. in the morning the sun dripped into the sky through a haze of sand on the horizon. the white dust gave everything in the middle distance and further out a white glow, as if everything were lighted from some sort of internal source. beautiful.

i headed over to the dakhla oasis on a bus through a sand-storm, which lasted the next three days outside the oases. the sand came in from everywhere and left no place untouched - i could see it raining down inside the bus and could feel it insinuating itself into all the nooks and crannies of my existence. when i got off the bus i could actually wipe a layer of sand off each ear. from dakhla i visited the ottoman town of el kasr. this is a mud-brick city that has been all but abandoned, but may be one of my highlights to date on the trip. i really love lanes, and rather than a system of lanes built around a city, this whole mud-brick city seemed to have been built around its lanes - a huge system of inter-twining lanes that twisted through the walls and doorways and floors and spaces within one massive single building that was the city itself.

the following day i arrived in kharga, but there was some sort of weird security business going on, and the police were escorting tourists everywhere. i was going to see some sights with some mexican friends, but the police actually tailed us in their car, and this freaked me out so much that i ran away through a palm tree field to shake off the pigs and did other things. i know it was 'for my safety', but i need my freedom.

this morning i came to luxor on a train that looked like it may have been built before the pyramids. we stopped every 50km or so so that the track could be cleared of sand as the desert tried to reclaim the tracks. as we hit the lush strip of green that borders the nile on either side it was more than a dazzle to my eyes - it was a blindness. my eyes hungrily ate up the fields of sugar cane and vegetables that grew in the rich soil beside the river. they say that egypt is the gift of the nile, and after a week in the desert, this couldn't have been more apparent.

luxor is called the 'largest open air museum in the world'. apparently it's a treasure trove of ancient monuments and other antiquity delights. i haven't explored yet - i arrived in the early evening, and immediately negotiated a tutorship deal with the hotel manager, who gave me a 2 hour lesson immediately so that we could be finished before egypt played (ghana?) in the next stage of the african cup. i came here when the game started. my internet cafe is full of screaming egyptians with eyes glued to the screen.

few other things:

good luck dad on your trip to north africa! for those who are interested, click on the link to the right to see what my dad's up to in his own african adventure.

a received quite a few emails asking me whether i wanted people to post things on the blog rather than email. the answer is no. if you want to write on the blog, that is fantastic - and if there are questions that might be of interest to others i'd love to see them there, but if you have something personal to say, then please keep emailing me privately - i know that even when things are not private, one does not always want them to be seen by public eyes.

women. i had a bit of a crisis last week in which i started hating egypt because of the gender inequality here, and that was precipitated mainly by seeing lots of woman wearing full burkas, with nothing but a slit for their eyes to see through. a key moment was when i saw a little girl training for the full burka - running around with friends in the street, and then donning her full head gear as she walked home. i juggled the problem with myself, thinking that the way western women smear make-up on themselves and wear uncomfortable clothes and footwear is as much an inequality and a prison as the headscarves are here, but in the end i was unable to get away from the fact that a full burka is a total loss of identity. i thought - how can anyone tell who is under all those sheets? and then i realised - that's the point. maybe western cultures are too focused on individuality and individualism, but i cannot help being a product of my culture, and i really can't help feeling horrified by the way many women here are treated and treat themselves - like ghosts floating about in the background. this is not the rule, but it hurts me nonetheless. does anyone have any ideas or opinions?

work: good luck to all you HMOs starting work again! i felt only a few days ago a real weight coming off my shoulders. it was as i stood in the white desert watching sunrise. and a tension that i didn't even know had developed released it's grip from me and i started laughing and dancing on the rock. you're all much braver that i am - i don't think i could handle going back to work for at least another few months.

i will leave it there. have fun and keep your emails and messages coming - am loving them :)