The whole truth about travel....

When is the bus? Is there a bus?

I have just finished reading Paul Theroux’s book “The Pillars of Hercules” and he says that he doesn't trust travel writers who always say they are having a great time, because everyone knows most of the time travel is tedious and uncomfortable! I tend not to mention the times of tension, boredom, discomfort and even fear because I don‘t want to dwell on them, not because they don‘t happen. Nelson and I have been observed standing on street corners snarling things like “Well OK then, we’ll go your way. But I think it’s over here…” The 14 hour train ride from Cairo to Aswan was hot and boring, the 18 hour bus ride from Luxor to Dahab was worse. At least on the train we did not have to listen to verses from the Koran and Egyptian pop music played a full volume all night long! We did not have a room in all of Egypt with a comfortable place to sit and the pillows were always flat. The toilets in most places, including some of our hotels, were enough to make anyone fearful!
Typical street scene, no garbage pick-up here.

One of my memories of Egypt is the garbage. It’s everywhere. On the banks of the Nile river the garbage was ankle deep, and the only thing I could do was NOT think about what I might be walking in. Of course, there are no toilets on a felucca, so I had to go ashore to pee, and that made me very vulnerable to the garbage….but at least I did not drop my tissues on the spot (doing my own small thing for purity in nature!). All through Egypt we saw trees that looked like they were covered with macabre Christmas decorations: shreds of plastic and other garbage that had blown into the branches. As I sat on the side of the Red Pyramid waiting for John and Nelson to finish their exploration of the interior plastic bags kept blowing up the side of the steps into my face. Even the path to the top of Mt. Sinai was littered with used tissues and empty plastic water bottles. It’s not what I want to remember about the sites of antiquity, but it’s hard to put it completely out of mind.

There are crowds of visitors and vendors in the “best places” and these stops are hard for me to describe because, honestly, you already know all about the pyramids and the tombs and the temples from reading National Geographic or watching the Travel Channel! When we went to see the Valley of Tombs outside of Luxor we were in the company of approximately 10 thousand other tourists (roughly the population of the entire Creston Valley, all in one small ravine in the dessert at the same time). Walking through the famous tombs was a one way parade. I don’t really mind the crowds, most places are well organized and people file through the sites like a one way parade. It’s almost as much fun watching them as it is seeing the tomb, or painting, or church, or temple…..At the same time, it is necessary to ignore the cries of: “Ten postcards, only 1 pound….Genuine alabaster carving….T shirt….spices….100% Egyptian cotton….” A tomb guard stopped me, held on to my arm and wrapped my scarf around my head so I looked like a comic version of a Bedouin man: “You will be Cleopatra…now give me two pounds.” Another typical guard move is to say, “Shhh, lady, follow me. Best carving, best picture, best view….you take picture? Now, give me two pounds, five pounds” Even more persistent than the vendors, who cannot chase us far, are the carriage drivers, who can. They trot their tired hoses up and down the streets of Luxor and Aswan hoping to pick up the weary or unwary for a ride. It’s difficult for those of us who are used to fixed prices to accept bargaining for every product and service as a natural way of life. Nelson is always certain, in the back of his mind, that we have been ripped off somewhere along the way!

Our guide and the guard at Ay's tomb - no one else around!
Some of the best times we had in Egypt were when we went off the beaten track with strangers. In Luxor we braved the market place and I bought a traditional style robe embroidered with Nubian designs. The salesman was a young man named Amhed, and after we had settled on a price that pleased us all he said, “Now that we have done with the money, sit down, talk, drink tea!”. He said that too many people come to Luxor on one or two day group tours and they don’t see the real people or the real history. Well, we are not with a group, we said, what are we missing? Let me show you! The next day he took us to the Tomb of Ay, who is suspected of having murdered King Tut. Our next stop was his home, where the women were making bread and baking it in their new gas fired stove. They invited me to help them. Needless to say, my attempt had to be re-rolled by the Mother-in-charge. Then it was tea with the father, brother and children. Six year old Aya helped me practice counting to ten in Arabic. We had a tour of the farm and admired the onions, the sugar cane, egg plants, tomatoes and forage crops. The afternoon ended with a visit to the house the brothers have built as rental apartments for tourists. It was not the biggest tomb, or the most luxurious tea stop, but the hospitality seemed genuine. It was like visiting a friend instead of touring a site.

Oh, this is not as easy as it looks!

It was easy to take a break from travel and spend a week in Dahab as tourists. All our basic needs were catered to and our need for fun was fully satisfied with snorkeling, quad trips into the desert, windsurfing and swimming. We could even find real coffee (Italian style espresso) for the first time since we left Spain. The wind finally blew us off the Red Sea coast and onto the road to Jordan.