Salam Egypt

I have been fascinated by ancient Egypt since I was very young. I always knew I'd go there sometime in my life but now, at age 60, most of my life had passed and the Muzzies had just blown tourism out of Algeria and after our 9/11 trauma and the unrest in the Arab/Muslim world it looked to me that it was now or never. A friend of a friend had a son teaching at the American University of Cairo and I wrote to him to ask for a suggestion about how to start. Pete Dohrenwend responded that his roommate was away and his room was available in their apartment in the El Maadi district. Thus encouraged, I flew to Cairo.

Pete was teaching in Cairo both as an adventure and as a way of helping our two cultures be happier together. In a just world, guys like Pete — unassuming, idealistic, mid-western good guys are heroes. He told me early in the morning "Here are the keys. Be sure to lock up". And he was gone to work.

I went down to my First Egyptian Street. El Maadi is a pleasant international-feeling neighborhood of restaurants, cell phone salesrooms, clothing stores and the like, which could be anywhere. An excellent and very cheap bakery made my morning. There was a taxi rank on the corner so I started conversations with the cabbies to learn who could best speak "comprehensible-to-me-English". And got very lucky. Ali told me that tomorrow he would take me to the Pyramids, show me the Cairo area for the day and bring me back to this corner. His price was reasonable so I agreed to be at the cab stand at dawn. I was there. And so was he. He asked if I had eaten and I said not yet. He went to a place where lots of other taxi drivers were eating and I got my delicious first Egyptian breakfast of fu'ul (slow cooked fava beans) hard-boiled egg and flatbread. He then drove to the western edge of Cairo where the city ends and the Pyramids are visible in the distance. Already the tour buses were heading that way. Ali (who I have come to believe understood me at some psychic level — we never talked about me or my preferences and yet see what follows…) said to me "Mr. Mike, would you like to visit the Pyramids another way? You could ride a horse there." I said that I had ridden horses and didn't enjoy horseback riding. Ali said, "have you ever ridden a camel, Mr. Mike?"

One mounts a kneeling camel easily and is lofted up much higher than a horse when the beast rises. The ride is wonderfully smooth-the horse bounces you up and down. The camel's walk makes for a pleasant back-and-forth movement. I am accompanied by a youth riding a small donkey and a boy walking, leading the camel at first until I am comfortable with it. The Pyramids are miles away. The day is Sahara Desert hot and dry. There is no wind. The dome of the sky shimmers above us. It is utterly silent. It could be 2,000 years ago — my favorite kind of travel: Time Travel. Heaven.

We circle far out into the desert so as to approach the Pyramids from the back. The only person in sight is an armed camel rider coming out to intercept us as we get close. My guide pays the baksheesh to the guard and we are allowed to ride on to the base of the Great Pyramid. I am in a dreamy high from the dust, the heat, the long camel ride, the endless silent desert, the vast mass of the Great Pyramid towering over us blocking out the world — Michael! This really happened. You got to collect a few chips off the Pyramid without seeing a single tourist. And I have the picture to record it.

Ali suggested that we go south along the Nile to see the Step Pyramid. I was eager since I've followed the development of the pyramid-grave idea as it was being worked out over the centuries and this was an earlier version. Well, I wasn't ready for the incredibly beautiful entrance to the Pyramid or that I would be the only visitor and able to go deep underground by myself into painted chambers endlessly opening around gloomy corners or the terrible fear I experienced down there. I was seized by a horrifying, claustrophobic, far-from-my-world, alone-in-the-wrong-place feeling and I ran for the surface and the bright, hot, life-giving Amon Ra in the sky. Oh, I got Egyptian religion at that moment!

After I calmed down and started to wander around, the uniformed armed guard of the place came along and in sign language offered to show me something interesting. And it was. A maybe 50-foot-deep shaft into a grave near the base of the pyramid, completely unprotected from someone falling to their death in it. We — big smiles — posed for a picture near the edge of the hole. Egypt was even better than I had imagined. The people were the reason.

I told Ali that I wanted to continue south up the Nile to the temples at Luxor and we agreed to meet when I got back to Cairo.

I purchased a ticket for the night sleeper train to Luxor. I like trains and this creaky old train was lovely — a private bedroom with a big window, swaying clackity clack through sleeping villages lit an eerie green by the neon crescent on the top of the minaret, dozing off clunkity clunk over the switches. At Luxor, I was the sole foreigner getting off the train in the pre-dawn grey silence. I see a hotel across the square. In the hotel — sleazy and dim, I woke up the dangerous-looking attendant, paid up, got a key, barricaded myself in the room and slept for 10 hours.

The Giza Pyramids are spectacular but you are on the outside. Those pyramids are simply geometric — their impact is their immense size and their location in an otherwise featureless desert. Here, in southern Egypt, the Temples of Karnak are roofless and open to walk around in and though the scale is also gigantic the experience is entirely different. These temples are on the banks of the Nile in a humid tropical-like atmosphere. They are immense — overwhelming, impossible. And really artful. That's what impressed me so much-that these statues, pylons, lintels and huge walls covered in perfectly carved hieroglyphs could be so artistically executed at this size. How do you carve a statue 60 feet tall with legs the size of tree trunks and have it be just perfect? You look up and see that the undersides of the lintels which span the pylons and have been concealed from the sun are painted with colorful designs still beautiful 3,000 years later.

I was very much in a tripping-trance in this place. The scale is so enormous compared to you that you are actually in an altered state of reality whether you wish to be or not. My Islamic-looking beard, dark tan and local clothing kept me uninteresting to the swarms of tourist predators which inhabit these famous places. I saw no independent travelers. Large groups of tourists — mostly from Spain, Italy or Russia — arriving by bus, were herded through the temples and told the stories and were hustled by guards, guides, guys. I got a ride across the Nile in a small boat to escape the action. I sat under a tree at the edge of a village and marveled at the view of the temples from there. As the day ended and the tourist traffic stopped, I went back across the river and wandered through the huge temples alone and undisturbed in the dusk. Nobody was there to stop me from walking way back beyond the tour route to an area of the temple complex which was closed because it was still under excavation.

This part of the temple complex was never finished — so it reveals how they built it — the stone blocks and the earthen ramps are still in place. I was thrilled. It felt like the construction crew was away for the weekend. Time Travel.

I could have gone over to the Valley of the Kings and seen the tomb of Ramses, Hatshepsut and Tutankhamen just an easy distance west, but I was unwilling to experience any more ancient Egypt. I wanted to snorkel in the Red Sea and to get lost in today Egypt.

I asked a taxi driver who had a bit of English how much he would charge to take me over to the Red Sea — quite a long distance. He gave me a price that I could afford but explained that it was impossible for us to go alone. We were required to make arrangements with the military for an escort across the desert. There had been attacks on tourists and the Egyptian government was anxious to avoid any more. After a couple of hours we were allowed to join a convoy going north to the city of Qena which, a soldier explained, was a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism and therefore dangerous for me. From Qena I then had to traverse the desert east to the Sea. I was the only person — and my taxi was proceeded by a personnel carrier with six armed soldiers and followed by a jeep with a machine gun and four soldiers. It felt like I was in an action/adventure movie. At a checkpoint about halfway across we dropped the personnel carrier but retained the jeep crew all the way to Safaga, on the shore of the Red Sea, my destination.

I had no idea of what I was doing — I just went into the first hotel that I came to. It was full of Russians. I had forgotten that Russia has always been on good terms with Egypt so that Egypt was a cheap and easy vacation for Russian people. The price was right and there were no English sounds to break the far-away feeling.

In the morning I asked a dive shop where the best snorkeling was. He pointed to a spit of land sticking out into the Sea which formed the northern edge of the bay — Ras Abu Soma, several miles north of Safaga. I hired a taxi, for what I thought was too much money, to take me out there but it was much farther than it looked and his price was fair. (I was never cheated or bothered by any Egyptian.) The Ras was an empty treeless desert except for the streets of a development which hadn't happened but at the very tip was what looked like a mirage — the Sheraton Soma Bay Resort. I couldn't imagine being able to afford staying in such a place but after a bit of gentle haggling with the front desk I was granted a reasonable rate at this preposterous, incongruous hotel. Right on a lovely beach with a grand stairway flanked by large kitsch sphinxes on each side which led down to a giant swimming pool with many reclining persons attended by every indulgence of food and drink. The beach was completely empty.

I walked out past the deserted dive shop — where I borrowed fins — to an easy-entry reef, put on my mask and snorkel and got wet. It was a very fishy reef with several of the usual suspects and some animals that I had never seen before — like giant blue-lipped clams. I was completely alone — pure pleasure. It just amazed me that with the exotic Red Sea right there and a fine beach and terrific snorkeling that hundreds of people would be clustered on concrete paving around a chlorinated swimming pool. The buffets were cruise-ship lavish, I heard French, German, Italian and Spanish but no English.

The beach was littered with lovely shells for me to discover and bring home. But after a day of Disney-does-Egypt I needed some reality. I got a ride back to town from a hotel van going in to pick up a tour group. Found a minibus going down the coast to El Quseir.

The minibus is a shared taxi — a low-cost way to travel between cities. I watch what the other riders pay and do the same. There is no English spoken, no tourism here in this lonely and undeveloped coast far from the Nile.

When we arrive at El Quseir, a small size fishing port, the minibus goes through residential neighborhoods dropping off passengers at their homes. Finally, it is down to homeless me. I make the universal sign for eating and my own pantomime for fish and the driver smiles and shows me he knows what and where. He takes me to a simple, ramshackle seafood restaurant right on the water. He gets out and takes me inside and explains to the owner/cook that I am from Amrika and that I want his best fish dinner. Happiness all around.

The cook brings out two glistening fresh fishes for me to choose, grills my choice, adds a spicy vegetable stew and bread — no wine in this Muslim nation — I'm savoring that simple perfect meal again as I sit here. This was the Egypt that I was looking for. I walk to the inter-city taxi stand and ask Safaga? Safaga? A middle-class man says, "This is the right line". The first English I have heard — he could tell from my accent that I was an English speaker. The crowd was clearly surprised and pleased that an American was in line waiting for the bus. The most pressing question they asked me was about the threatened invasion of Iraq by Boosh. I assured them that it was only saber-rattling and that America was not stupid enough to actually invade Iraq. No doubt several dozen Egyptians still believe that a CIA misinformation agent was among them that day.

Next morning I headed up the coast to Hurghada, a popular dive destination, to find a way back to Cairo. I got in a shared taxi with five other men and headed off into the desert. Much talking and laughter — all in Arabic, of course — but as we approached a police checkpoint the men got much quieter and were clearly nervous about me being in the car. I hunkered down and looked as local as I could.

Didn't work. The police made me get out of the car and go into the police station. Once again, it was movie time only this wasn't a comedy. It was a nightmare scenario. Hot empty desert. Unpainted cinder-block fort. Barred windows. Very unsmiling police big black mustaches. They take me to a white-washed concrete room, empty except for a desk with a scary-looking official sitting behind it. He says in English, "You are not permitted to be here. You are not permitted to travel in a shared taxi. It is dangerous for you to travel this way. You will wait here until I can send you back to Hurghada."

I say, "I am in a car with five Egyptian men. I feel safe".

He says, "Go with God".

We get the hell out of there, congratulations all around, laughter resumes. Cairo next.

Cairo was not important in ancient Egypt — but it is the central city of the modern Arab world — which is kinda funny — Egyptians aren't really Arabs. They are Muslims and speak Arabic. I wanted to be in the souks, the old quarter, the traditional world that has been there for centuries so I wandered in the Khan-al-Khalili until I was hopelessly lost. I just loved the old mosques, the narrow crookedy streets, the dust, the chaos of sounds, the thousand things clamoring for my attention, the sun streaming down between awnings igniting the brass, the glass — oh, the glass! Thousands of perfume bottles in hundreds of fanciful shapes and colors — perfect gifts for Anne, Kathleen, Laura, Mardi, Teri and Francie. And me.

But what is a splendid perfume bottle without splendid perfume? I'm on a mission now. I see an elegant carved wood and stained glass entry to a perfume shop. It is full of burkas. A good sign. The owner sees my interest from the street and comes out to tell me now isn't a good time but if I come back in the morning he will have plenty of time for me. I arrive at Amber Perfume [still in business, excellent photos online] as he is opening next morning — he asks if I have had breakfast? I say not yet. He orders for us from a vendor who brings breakfast to him and other shop owners in the neighborhood every morning. It is, of course, fu'ul. Fava beans slow-cooked in a deep cylindrical copper pot. Delicious, nutritious, ubiquitous — the basic food. Some flatbread, some fruit, some tea and we're ready to do business. I figure this guy as honest — mainly because his shop was full of local women — so I ask him to show me his best stuff. He says Egyptian Red Musk is the place to start and other elements can be added. He selects several for me. I just pulled the stopper from a bottle and it wafted me right back into that time and place.

Next day is my last day in Egypt so Pete and his girlfriend want to give me a special treat. And was it ever. Late afternoon we went to the Nile River where they knew a man who would take us for a sail.

The boat was a traditional felucca. It was a heavy wooden ship about 10 meters long, beamy, lateen-rigged. An all-purpose cargo carrier in a design thousands of years old. I had a small sailboat long ago and have always found sailboats interesting. So I watched how the captain rigged up very avidly — never having seen lateen rigging except in pictures and curious about this ancient way of sailing. He noticed my interest and once we were underway and out in the middle of the river he gave over the helm to me. Incredibly sensual!

The great cloth sail tugging the heavy ship against the current of the Nile — one of the most memorable experiences of my life.

My flight out was late at night and there weren't going to be any cabs on the corner after 10pm. Ali said he would come and get me if I didn't mind that he brought his wife and son along because he didn't like to leave them alone at night. So they came as promised and we drove through the balmy Egyptian night to the airport. It was 9/11, 2002.