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.
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 ove
r 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.
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 ove
r 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 :)
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