Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

Picture the scene: sitting on the banks of the Nile, puffing on the sheesha pipe after another delicious meal on board our dahabeah, and slowly winding down after a hard day of eating delicious food, lounging on cushions, napping in hammocks, sipping lime juice and swimming in the Nile.

This description, free of embellishment, accurately describes just one evening of our five day sail boat cruise along the Nile. Even Sarah was relaxed enough by the end of the day to give the sheesha pipe a try.

Typically, we’d visit a temple in the morning and go for a walk in the afternoon. One day, we did a particularly fun desert walk, working up a rare sweat on an otherwise totally undemanding cruise.

The dahabiyah isn’t the only (or the cheapest) way to cruise the Nile from Luxor to Aswan, but it is the best. The pace recreates the lifestyle of a bygone era and I’ve rarely been as relaxed as I was on that boat. Other options are the felucca and the large cruise ship, but the former has no amenities and the latter goes much faster, missing much of what is of interest along the Nile, because the ship is too large to moor along the riverbank.

We were lucky to be travelling on the same boat as a very nice Australian family. After five days and nights of eating and chatting with Alex and Amy, we had become pretty good friends. Their boisterous son, Lachlan, was a godsend for Eloïse. The two of them kept each other entertained for the entirety of the trip, which made things much easier for us, as we only had to keep an eye on Lucas.

The only other passengers on the boat were four Italians, also very nice people. We got to know them less well, because of the language barrier, but it was still good to get to know them. The entire party ate their meals together, which says a lot about how well we all got on.

The crew were fantastic, paying close attention to the children to make sure they weren’t in any danger. The deck had low railings, so Lucas in particular was in danger of falling over the side. Thankfully, he never really came close to doing so.

On the final evening of the cruise, the chef baked a birthday cake for Lucas (eighteen days early, but who’s counting?) and this was presented to him by the entire crew, singing, dancing and playing musical instruments. I was dumbstruck. It was truly an unforgettable moment and one I’ll cherish for many years to come. Our little boy didn’t really know what to make of all the fuss, but he did seem to like the cake.

All good things come to an end and so, too, did the cruise. It was a bittersweet moment. We said goodbye to the crew, tipped them generously for their hard work and fantastic service, and then bade a fond farewell to our new found friends, the Australians.

This was truly an unforgettable trip and I must give a plug for Nour El Nil, the company that organised it. If you want to cruise the Nile in style, I can wholeheartedly recommend this company.

Luxor is an interesting place, according to our guide book one of the few places in the world truly deserving of the predicate ‘unforgettable’.

I wouldn’t go that far. Yes, its place in antiquity is beyond reproach, but the hordes of geriatric cruise liner tourists at the Valley of the Kings, the pedlars, the nagging caleche drivers (“You know how much?”) and felucca touts, and the searing heat cumulatively amount to a pile of hassle that towers as high as the Colossi of Memnon, themselves.

The tombs in the وادي الملو (Valley of the Kings) open at 06:00. If you’re planning to get up early to beat the crowds, plan on getting there very, very early. We arrived at 09:00 and the area was already a mob scene, with literally dozens of coaches already having emptied thousands of passengers onto the site.

There’s a relatively new system in operation at the site, which means that a ticket now buys you entrance to only three tombs out of all those currently open. Which tombs are open varies constantly, so you have to check at the ticket office. Once you know which ones are open, you can choose which three to visit.

Except, that is, for the tombs of Tutankhamun (KV62) and Ramesses V/VI (KV9), for each of which a separate ticket is required. Trading on the fame of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the ticket for that tomb alone costs more than the standard three tomb ticket.

No photos are allowed anywhere, either inside or outside the tombs, and you’ll be required to leave your equipment with an attendant, who will, of course, demand baksheesh upon returning it to you, even though you neither wanted nor requested his services in the first place.

The most popular tombs take quite a while to visit, not because they’re huge, but because there is limited viewing space inside. The line of queuing tourists thus descends all the way through the entrance tunnel to the inner chambers, where one can ultimately enjoy a few brief moments taking in the innermost chamber, before the queue U-turns and snakes back outside. The experience is akin to standing on a very slow conveyor belt.

A test of one’s mettle it may be, but the tombs themselves are more than worthy of the effort involved in seeing them. Nevertheless, and perhaps I’m a philistine, but I wasn’t awed as I had expected to be. Perhaps the Valley of the Kings, much like the pyramids at Giza, is simply too famous, such that seeing it with one’s own eyes feels merely an enhancement, a reinforcement of an image already so familiar from decades of media exposure. One feels that one has been before, such is the familiarity.

Other sites we visited while in Luxor include Luxor Temple, الدير البحر (Deir el-Bahri) (site of the notorious Luxor Massacre of tourists in 1997, the Karnak Temple Complex and the Tombs of the Nobles. All in all, we crammed in quite a lot during our time there.

We also took the opportunity to go out on a felucca, but I ended up losing my rag with its captain at one point when I felt he was trying to scam us to pay a non-existent entrance fee for a brief visit to Banana Island.

Lukie absolutely loves the caleches. We took several during our stay, mostly just to please him. He loves to sit at the front and shake the reins and is clearly beside himself with joy. The downside is that he goes mental when it’s time to get down and continue on our way.

I mustn’t forget to mention the slightly pricey, but wonderfully air-conditioned Oasis Café. The prices are somewhere between the Egyptian norm and Western expectations, but service is attentive and the juices and milkshakes are out of this world. This place impressed us so much the first time that we went back for lunch a second time the next day.

“I like it” is Lukie’s new catchphrase, repeated often, usually while eating. It also aptly describes how our family feel about the desert.

The experience has been too rich to describe, but going to sleep in the moonlight, with no ceiling over one’s head except the canopy of stars, was a very special experience, indeed.

Watching the moon plough a track across the sky, having the sight of the various constellations be the last thing one sees before being claimed by slumber, being woken by a new dawn’s sun bursting out from behind a gigantic sand dune… These are things that it is hard to put a price on.

Lest the poetic prose sweep you away, there’s also the more mundane reality of wearing the same pair of underpants until they start to creak, and squatting in the sand to defecate, trying to lean far enough back that the shit doesn’t land in your trousers, but not so far that you lose balance and end up with sandy sphincter syndrome.

These are minor inconveniences, though; a small price to pay for the absolute solitude and all-consuming silence that we city dwellers can otherwise never experience. An urban domicile affords one a lot of modern convenience, but it comes at a very real, perhaps too exorbitant price.

We spent several days and nights on our expedition in the desert, amidst landscapes of large limestone mushrooms, 20 metre sand dunes, springs and mountains. Scarab beetles left tracks around our sleeping bags at night and desert foxes approached our camp fire at supper time.

You can imagine the fun the children had, climbing the sand dunes and tearing down them again. The food has been delicious in a way that only food prepared fresh in such humbling surroundings can be. Similarly, every mouthful of water one takes out here tastes like nectar. You quickly learn to take little for granted in this environment.

Our final day in the desert was a little odd, requiring a police escort on board our vehicle as we headed into a new desert. We had to move luggage onto the roof to make space for him. He stayed with us all night, supposedly so that he could shoot any wolves that came to where we’d made camp, but I doubt there even were any wolves in that desert. It was probably nothing more than a strange bit of Egyptian bureaucracy (and there are many).

I’m aware that Ian has just blogged, but so as not to be unduly influenced, I haven’t read his entry. I apologize if we say all the same things. However, you can at least count on me for accuracy regarding any facts or figures duplicated in both entries; I am not so prone to exaggeration as my dear husband.

Our book goes on at some length about the influence of tipping, or baksheesh, in Egyptian culture. It leads you to believe that you will be plagued all day every day with not-so-subtle demands for cash for all sorts of mildly helpful things like opening a door or answering a question. Until today we had hardly encountered these requests and I thought maybe the whole baksheesh thing had been overblown. However, until today we hadn’t really entered the main tourist trail. How things changed when we visited the only remaining ancient wonder of the world.

Today we went to Giza, site of the famous pyramids and sphinx, and Saqqara, site of some other pyramids. Today was one big exercise in avoiding getting ripped off and not trusting any information that anyone gave us. It was really quite annoying.

The day started with us hiring a taxi off the street for the day to take us to the various sites and wait for us while we looked. Ian made quick work of that because there was a guy standing right outside our hotel trying to rustle up taxi business. The book gave us a guideline of a fair price and the guy agreed to the top end of that range (200 pounds for the day, which is about 28 Euros). He took us to Giza and the fun started when he pulled up next to a place where we could “look at a map” and something about a horse. We immediately realized that the scams were beginning and asked to just go to the ticket booth, but some guy who spoke much better English than our driver was on at us about how far it was and how we would have to walk with our children, blah blah blah. I must confess that I was almost drawn in by the idea of taking a horse and carriage around all the pyramids and not having to walk at all, but luckily we managed to fight them off and proceeded with caution to the ticket booth. By this point we weren’t at all confident that it was the real ticket booth, but it did provide a ticket with a hologram seal, so we were good to go.

We went in and looked at the sphinx and then headed up the hill to the pyramids. On the way, we had many offers for vastly cheaper horse carts / camels / donkeys / what have you. We would clearly have been insane to have gone with the guy down in the parking lot.

On the way up the hill to the pyramids, many many men approached us with the camel rides or extremely crappy souvenirs and delivered their usual opening line “where are you from?” To which we replied “Holland” while continuing to walk along. Then comes the standard “Ah! Allemachtig prachtig!” or, perhaps “allemachtig prachtig tachtig!”, which translate to almighty gorgeous and almighty gorgeous eighty, respectively. We responded with a smile that weakened with repetition and continued along. Most people didn’t try much harder than that, probably realizing that the quality of their goods was such that only one in one thousand people would bite and that the ones who will bite will make themselves immediately apparent. Kind of like the Nigerian “I am the widow of a very bad rich man and I need your help getting my money out of my corrupt country” e-mail scam. However there are a couple of incidents that stand out in my memory.

We were contemplating going into one of the pyramids, but were running short on time. So as we stood outside the entrance debating it, a guy approached us, asked us where we were from, gave us an allemachtig prachtig, and began stuffing our arms full of goods. He began with me, shoving a headscarf into the crack of my arm somewhere that it basically would stick without me grabbing it. He asked Ian if he could buy me for one million camels because I was so beautiful (perhaps our most dedicated readers will recall that this same line was used on us many moons ago at a camel market in Al Ain in the UAE, if I recall the city name correctly). I tried to give the headscarf back but he wouldn’t take it, saying “no, it is a gift, no money, because I love the Holland people!” Then he stuck one on my head and told me that I looked like a queen. Hmm. Anyway, we started walking away. I kept trying to thrust the headscarf back to him, only to be greeted with his “because I love the Holland people!” line. As we continued to walk, he kept digging into his bag of goodies for gifts for the children and thrust a little pyramid statue at Ian. We kept saying no thank you and he finally, after what felt like forever, gave up. I handed him the scarf back and he said to Ian “give me the pyramid” and that was finally it. Sheesh.

As we walked along, several of the tourist police gestured to their camels to tell us to take a picture of them, only to then ask us to baksheesh him once we had. We chose to take one guy’s picture seated on his camel and gave him the stately sum of 1 pound, but then continued to see others who would gesture to their camels and say “it’s okay, (and pointing to the badge on his arm) police.” Of course, if we had taken a picture of the camel, we would definitely have been hit up for baksheesh.

Finally, at Saqqara, there was a guy with a donkey who basically abducted Eloïse and stuck her on his donkey. Ian was a bit ahead of us at this time and I told the guy that I didn’t even have a camera. Of course he said the usual “no money!” while putting her on there and telling me to take a picture. If you know Eloïse, you’ll know that she wasn’t at all keen on this plan and was looking extremely suspicious and reaching out to me to take her off the donkey. Ian finally took the picture because we just weren’t going to get away from this one without a fight, and baksheeshed him lightly.

Ironically, lots of people want to take Eloïse’s picture. They all think she’s the bee’s knees. Our day in Saqqara ended with an Egyptian woman approaching me, asking me where I was from (she seemed to nice, but my heart sank at that question) and then very politely asking to take Eloïse’s picture. Of course I said to go right ahead and she and every member of her party posed in turns with Eloïse, who is not sure what to think about all these pictures. In most of them she looks quite suspicious and has her fingers in her mouth (or nose). After she kissed Eloïse, thanked us profusely, and walked away, I commented to Ian that we should have demanded some baksheesh.

After being quoted just under E£600 for a proper, organised tour of الجيز (Giza) and the other pyramid sites, we decided to go it alone. One chat later with a taxi driver outside our hotel and we had arranged to have him be our driver for the day. I offered him E£150, he countered with E£200, and with that being the maximum I was willing to pay, we had a deal and got under way.

Our first stop of the day was the main reason that most tourists come to Egypt in the first place, the Giza Necropolis, home to the last of the seven wonders of the ancient world to remain standing and substantially intact, the Pyramid of Cheops, amongst others.

What can one say about the pyramids at Giza? Television and books do much to prepare you for them. Who hasn’t seen images of the wonders of engineering on a travel programme or a historical documentary?

We’d also been to the Mayan pyramids at Chichen Itza and other sites in the Mexican Yucatan, so their Egyptian counterparts came as no great surprise, awesome though they be.

The Great Sphinx was somewhat smaller than I’d imagined, and a little more crumbly, but still a marvel to behold. When you finally arrive here, after four decades of life on the planet and endless exposure to images of these behemoths, it’s hard, in a sense, to conceive of the notion that you’re actually here for the first time. Everything seems strangely familiar.

Nevertheless, we can now cross a major item off our list of things to see before we die. Although they’ve lasted this long, one wonders how much longer these remnants of an ancient civilisation can withstand the suffocating pollution of the current one. Perhaps all of this will have turned to dust in a few hundred years or less.

The hawkers of trinkets and other tourist tat are at their worst here. Nowhere on Earth have I had to endure the high-pressure sales techniques employed at this location, which include running after you and stuffing items into the crease of your elbow or the folds of your clothes, even as you hurry away. These items are ostensibly a gift: “Because I love the Dutch people! You are so good at football!”

After trying to hand back these so-called gifts with no success, I soon adopted to the practice of sincerely thanking my benefactor and then just walking away. I found that these thinly veiled salespeople would then invariably catch up with me and ask me for a small donation towards the gift. Aha! The cat starts to emerge from the bag!

I would then refuse, at which point all pretence slipped away and I was asked to return the very lovely head garment and miniature pyramid. Huh? But you said they were a gift! I thought you loved me! How could you? What an Indian-giver!

Even one’s children become unwilling human crowbars in the unrelenting effort to prise money from their tight-fisted parents. Before you know it, a cunning donkey or camel runner has swooped like a vulture, grabbed one of your children from your side and perched them on the back of a rather disgruntled-looking ship of the desert. You are then encouraged to snap away with your camera and, of course, the moment that you do, the game’s over and the not so subtle gesturing for baksheesh begins.

I make it sound worse than it actually is, as long as you are firm but friendly with these people. God help anyone not up to dealing with this kind of badgering and intimidation, because they’ll be stripped of their last cent by the time they get to the top of the hill and behold Cheops in all its glory. I even saw people pestering tourists for baksheesh without so much as the pretence of something being offered in return. A man was literally approaching tourists, gesturing for cash and — to my great surprise — receiving it from some battle-weary sightseers, who presumably just wanted to be left alone at any cost.

Even the police here will demand baksheesh for helping you. They’ll encourage you, for example, to take a picture of them mounted on their camel and then demand a price for it. The price for all of these services is never very much, up to about E£5, but it does get tiresome.

Nevertheless, the whole Egyptian economy seems to run on this basis and you quickly get used to it, developing a sense of when baksheesh will and won’t be expected. In a public toilet, for example, someone will spring from the shadows and turn on the tap for you to wash your hands. When you’ve finished rinsing them, he’s there with some paper towels. When your hands are dry, he’ll spray some scent on them. And as you leave, he’ll point to the pot of baksheesh for you to do your duty. Operating the tap oneself, finding one’s own paper towel and going without scent seemingly isn’t an option. Just be glad he doesn’t want to hold your cock while you piss.

But I digress. This entry isn’t, or shouldn’t be, about baksheesh. It’s about the glory of the pyramids.

We soaked up as much as we could of the Giza site and were getting hungry as we headed back to meet our taxi driver.

Our next stop was سقار (Saqqara), the necropolis of the ancient Egyptian capital, منف‎ (Memphis). On the way there, our taxi driver took us to a dodgy craft village to get a bite to eat, in spite of my insistence earlier in the day that we were not to be taken to any tourist traps along the way. We were starving by this point, however, so succumbed to his blatant attempt to earn a kickback and ate a filling, if overpriced and not terribly inspired meal there. It was better than the alternative of insisting on being taken somewhere else, with no guarantee that anywhere else would be cheaper or better.

At Saqqara, the actual site was less impressive than Giza, but it was also less busy and there were fewer touts to contend with. An hour was ample to get around the site.

When you’re planning your day, it always seems as if there will be time for more, but these two sites were enough to fill our day. We returned to the taxi and headed back to central Cairo. I paid our driver, baksheeshed him (naturally) for his services, and we crossed the road to our hotel for a short rest before dinner.

Said dinner was a fantastic bowl of كشر (kushari) at the venerable Cairene institution of Abou Tarek. It was completely vegetarian and absolutely delicious. For me, it came as a pleasant change from the conveyor belt of kofta and other meat-based dishes that I’ve been eating over the last few days.

As always, our pale-faced, red-headed children proved a big hit with the dining locals. Local ladies picked them up, kissed them and plied them with sweets while laughing and smiling at us. Lukie loves all of the attention, whereas Eloïse doesn’t really know what to make of all the fuss, but goes along with it, anyway, for the most part.

We’d promised Eloïse an ice-cream, so we stopped off at the perpetually mobbed Koueider bakery on the way back to the hotel. I forewent the ice-cream and instead had cake and coffee at a coffee shop just across the road from our hotel.

We have to be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow for an early departure to the White Desert, where we’ll spend the next five days sequestrated from the chaos of urban Egypt.

That’s marks the end of our Internet access for a while, too, as we’ll be sleeping in a tent with no electricity or other distractions of the modern world.

With just us, our children and the sand dunes around us, this is going to be quite an adventure. Shitting in a hole in the sand may not be for everyone, but given the extent to which technology permeates our daily lives, I can think of no better way to cleanse our minds and bodies than to retreat from the madness for a few days in the solitude of the Egyptian desert.