The Apinautica, Chapter 8 - Egypt
It's been awhile since I posted another segment of this, so here's the next one! Where we left off Our Protagonist had just left Nigeria for Egypt
Chapter 8 - Egypt
October 27th, 2009, Egypt - I walked to Egypt, with three friends, the first time. It was only a few dozen meters from Israel through the Eilat/Taba border control point. On the Israeli side, personnel in forest green military uniforms scanned our passports and ran them through computers before letting us pass. On the Egyptian side a man in a white uniform sitting in a chair shuffled our paperwork officiously, then walked with it to some other room, and then somewhere else, before coming back and waving us to another room where more white uniformed Egyptian border guards, one with an actual sword at his hip, had us walk through a metal detector that was clearly not even plugged in.
Outside camels idled among palm trees, gritty sand scudded across the worn asphalt road, and the rugged mountains of the Sinai loomed as a backdrop. Taxi drivers descended on us. Knowing the bus stop was only 400 meters away we did our best to wave them away but we were experiencing an immediate lesson in the tenacity of Egyptian hawkers. One taxi driver slowly drove along just behind us, continually offering to drive us to the bus stop even when it was clearly only 50 meters ahead of us, much to our exasperation.
He began insisting the bus wasn’t coming. We found a bus station attendant and inquired about the bus.
“The bus should come here soon yes?”
“Maybe”
We waited. The taxi driver continued to hang around and badger us. After twenty minutes he went and had a close chat with the bus station attendant, then returned declaring he’d been told the bus isn’t coming.
This seemed like an obvious ruse but after ten minutes, with the bus we expected half an hour earlier nowhere in sight, we asked the attendant again, and this time he told us the bus isn’t coming.
So we relent, fine, we’ll let the taxi take us to Sharm El-Sheikh 130 miles away. He wants 100 Egyptian pounds ($18) a person and will not be budged by haggling. We load our things into his trunk and get into the car. Just as we’re pulling out of the bus station the bus comes in behind us. Welcome to Egypt.
[The above in a different color or font than the below to clearly distinguish it as a different time period]
Thursday, April 18th, 2013 - Arriving in Egypt I almost immediately cause an international incident. “We need to talk” the organization’s program assistant Husam says to me in a coldly serious tone when I finally meet him four days later. This is not the usual Organization but another one, OCAV-ODCA (which had organized my project in Ethiopia) [I've cleverly changed the name from ACDI-VOCA, I'm sure no one will figure it out].
Having been severely constrained for time in Nigeria, jamming the project into 7 days which wasn’t nearly enough, I had arrived in Egypt on Thursday to, as I posted on facebook:
Arrived in Cairo to be met by a driver with a big envelope for me, which included a cell phone, keys to a guest house, and a note basically saying "see you at 7am on Sunday" .. it's presently Thursday evening. Not thrilled with OCAV-ODCA's warm welcome, also it felt a bit like a secret agent drop. Also not thrilled with cooling my heels for two days. If I'd known they weren't going to do shitall until Sunday I could have gotten more work done in Nigeria ):<
I had posted it “public,” which I just thought meant friends of friends might see it. Turns out that makes it publicly searchable, and like the all-seeing-eye of Sauron, the organization’s head office in Washington DC had seen it. There followed “several angry calls” to the Egypt office, which, naturally, motivated the local staff to chastise me four days later when they finished enjoying their very long weekend; which further motivated me to henceforth only complain in friends-only posts or books with barely disguised organizational names.
I never meet the organization’s country director, which is unusual, but in their defense they are juggling seven volunteers at once.
The Guesthouse is nice at least. Instead of putting us up at a hotel they have a three bedroom suite on the seventh floor of a residential building in the upscale Al-Maadi district of Cairo. When I arrive there’s an American handicraft expert whose been living in Indonesia for the past 30 years, and a professor of crop science from Eugene, Oregon, there. The handicraft expert’s project was just ending and she is soon replaced by an Alaskan potato expert with a white bushy Santa Claus beard. He doesn’t own a computer.
At night I lie in bed listening to the occasional crackle of gunfire wondering if it’s celebratory gunfire or political instability. Longtime Egyptian dictator Mubarak had been overthrown two years prior, the political party of the “Muslim Brotherhood” had won subsequent elections based it seems on being the most organized and prepared for this sudden democracy, but seeing it as a winner-take-all system, were quickly alienating large segments of the population. Though Egyptians are often devoutly Muslim, they’re accustomed to a more secular government than the Muslim Brotherhood was intent on. “This is not Saudi Arabia!” someone explained to me, “women wearing full niqab, that’s not Egyptian, but the fundamentalists are pushing it on us.” Just three months after my visit the Muslim Brotherhood would be overthrown in a coup, so the situation was well and truly simmering.
Dr Ross (the crop science expert) and I go to the city’s citadel on Saturday. There’s a sweeping view over the city from there - a sea of minarets and brick buildings that look unfinished, with steel girders protruding from them. Apparently, it is the custom to just add another floor to the building when they feel the need to expand. A guard at the citadel gives us a bit of a personal tour, and then as is custom, expects baksheesh (a tip), but as Dr Ross is significantly older than me the guard focuses on him and he is utterly oblivious. I’m relieved not to be the one it is expected of but a bit embarrassed of his obliviousness. Much as I hate demands for baksheesh the cultural sense that it is now due has gotten into me.
At the famous Khan al-Khalili bazaar it’s noticeably less vibrant than it had been four years ago. They say tourism is down 90% due to the political situation. As always, a local guy attaches himself to us like some kind of parasite, despite our unambiguous statements that we don’t want his help. We steadfastly ignore him as he suggests we go in this place or that as we walk around the bazaar, and when we are ready to leave he demands baksheesh for his trouble. We did not oblige, and once again I was happy Dr Ross was the focus of his attention. The most interesting thing for me is at the vegetable market, where Dr Ross could point out exactly what was wrong with all kinds of vegetables, be it a disease, poor pollination, or poor nutrition.
Coincidentally 86 year old Roger Ransom this same day was just walking up to the pyramids, no doubt saying “Goll-y -” and about to make some wry witticism about them, when a local man called his attention from just behind. On turning, he found the young man was saying he had found his wallet on the ground, and hoped for some baksheesh in return. Being as wallets don’t just fly from one’s pocket to the ground in open spaces it is to be supposed that this is merely the more polite form of pickpocketing, and perhaps safer for the pickpocket since they seem to live in absolute dread of the Tourism Police. Now, despite that Roger is my grandfather, we actually failed to communicate the coincidence of our both being here (he on a brief stop on a Mediterranean cruise) until realizing some weeks later. [I don't know if the continuous through-reader would recall but my grandfather Roger had earlier come up in that I use his navy peacoat and sextant]
The mentioned guard, showing how prisoners were whipped here
Sunday, April 21st - Sunday is the beginning of the work week in Egypt. Eager to finally get started I jump in the car that comes to fetch me at 7am, already containing Husam the program assistant and the driver Mohammed. We buy some green falafels for breakfast from a streetcorner vendor and head south on the main highway. The dense high rises of Cairo soon give way to a flat barren sandy moonscape. It’s so monotonous that I soon fall asleep.
I wake to a scene from a dystopian science fiction movie. All around us the land looks dug up, bulldozed, excavated, piled. Large construction vehicles lumber like great beasts in and out of billowing clouds of white dust and around great mounds of snowy white gravel or sand.
“What is this?” I ask
“Lime mines”
They go on for miles and miles. And then suddenly we cross over the rim of the Nile Valley, which we’d been traveling parallel to, and descend into lush green agricultural fields. Up ahead we see another city of brick highrises, and presently we’re within it, Minya, the “Gateway to Upper Egypt,” population 256,732. In several places around the town, in the center of round-abouts, on pedestals in squares, there’s large recreations of the famous bust of Nefertiti. You’ve probably seen the bust, it’s one of the most famous works of art from ancient Egypt, portraying Nefertiti with sharply defined features and a blue hat that rises over her head like a cone expanding from the point of her chin to a broad flat top.
Despite being a big fan of history in general, I’ve always found the sheer amount of known history there is about Egypt to be overwhelming. But I find googling the historic context of specific things I’ve just seen to be very interesting. The famous Bust of Nefertiti, it seems, was found, complete with its colors of skin tone and blue hat, in a sculptor’s workshop in the ruins of the ancient city Ankhetaten, near Minya. The city had only been occupied for one generation, during the reign of Nefertiti’s husband Akhenaten, who had made it his capital. Nefertiti lived approximately 1370 to 1330 BC. Akhenaten’s son and successor was the famous pharaoh Tutankhamen (“King Tut”), though his mother was not Nefertiti but another wife of Akhenaten’s ... who was also his full sister. And Tutankhamen married one of Nefertiti’s six daughters (his own half sister). Perhaps not surprisingly Tutankhamen had physical deformities and both his children died as infants. Okayyy enough of that reading for the day.
The famous Nefertiti bust, not my picture
We proceed directly to Minya University, which looks much like many large universities, with empty roads criscrossing between buildings of classrooms and grassy squares with students walking to class. On several main intersections there’s student protestors holding signs. Ah yes, this is familiar, at UC Davis there were always students protesting for more rights in one area or another.
“What are they protesting?” I ask Husam.
“They want women to cover themselves.”
“Oh.” I note that all the protesting students are bearded young men.
We meet Dr Adel, head of the apiculture department, and look at some of their beehives. They’re surrounded by 15 acres of flowerbeds belonging to the horticulture department, and the staff are well informed about which local plants are good for bees. I am eager to learn this because I’m asked this everywhere I go and usually woefully uninformed about local flora. Amongst the flowerbeds and peaceful shade of frees, under a canopy of palm fronds 30 to 40 chairs are set up - a delightful outdoor classroom. Of the students we meet among the flowerbeds, a majority are young women, serious and intelligent, conservatively dressed but not enough, evidently, to satisfy the protestors.
In the evening at 10pm I meet Husam and Mohammed at one of the many streetside cafes in downtown Minya. All along the sidewalks the wall-side is lined with people sitting on stools at tables, smoking water-pipes and, like us, drinking fenugreek tea. I learn Husam is 28 with two children. Mohammed is older, with kids in their twenties. His daughter is engaged.
“Do you like your future son-in-law?” I ask. They both laugh.
“This is Egypt. They would not be engaged if he didn’t like him.” Husam explains. Mohammed’s English is alright but he doesn’t speak much. I ask him if he has any pets and a broad smile crosses his face as he begins to tell me about his cat.
[To be continued (this is 2053 of 5446 words in the Egypt chapter so it will probably be three parts)]
Originally I had envisioned this featuring more of the 2008 trip but it doesn't really come up again, as that was just tourist stuff. The part I'm currently writing is from later that year when I go to Turkey, I'm currently puzzling out how to best combine the 2008 Turkey trip with the two trips in 2013, and in particular, whether I should keep them separate or for simplicity sake combine them (in actual fact, because I had become involved with this Turkish girl at the end of the Egypt chapter, I go to Turkey, and a month later decide to go back and see her again).
To help sort out what I have to say about Turkey I've started writing some entries on Medium about it. One about my first trip in 2008 went up and was carried by the "Globetrotters" publication without a hickup. When I went to post a second one focusing on Cappadocia one of the Globetrotter editors wrote "Hello Kris, so sorry but will have to pass on this one. We actually have a term for this kind of story at GT: 'And then and then'. They get to be rather tedious to read. Instead, we love captivating, well told first person travel narratives that have a more or less gripping story to tell. Thanks!" which ... like look you could say that about THIS entry and I would certainly understand, but the submitted story is pretty focused on going to Cappadocia and what one experiences there, to such a degree that I feel like the received comment is just unwarrantedly insulting and I'm wondering how I got on her bad side. Especially since another publication then accepted it and the editor raved about its quality, and another Globetrotter editor also left a nice comment. Anyway since I live to be snarky I changed the story's subtitle to "Fairy towers, goblin cities, and white horses, a gripping tale with literal cliffhangers and literal gripping, of a journey into the depths of Turkey!"