Back to the Future

After the flat tire (hopefully the last for this expedition) it took me about two and a half hours to reach the Egyptian border with Israel at Taba. Security here is pretty tight and this was the slowest border crossing of the trip… by far!

It took me about an hour and a half to get through the Egyptian side of things (Immigration and Customs and police security check and number plate return etc), and that was done by mid-day. Then I rode about five hundred metres to the Israel border building and then commenced a very polite but very drawn-out entry process that didn’t end till 6pm!... I had never been to Israel before so apart from the physical security checks for myself and the bike, there was a security interview where particulars were taken and then a very lengthy wait while I assume those particulars were all validated… or something like that.

Anyway, as I said, it was all very polite but did take a very long time. Then I rode out into the “promised land” and I have to say it was probably the starkest difference from one side of the border to the other for all the borders Ive crossed on this trip (14 countries now)…

It suddenly clean and modern and efficient…. It seems like in a hundred metres of roadway you cross a time-span of about 50 years J… Israel is definitely a “developed world” country and nowhere in Africa is even close (not even South Africa)… though Israel is in Eurasia not in Africa (Egypt being the only country in the word to straddle two continents!).

And so now my priority objective is to ship the motorbike… Hmmm!

Mo's Mountain

I rode a couple of hundred Km into the middle of Sinai… To a place called St Catherine’s, which is a many centuries old monastery out in the middle of the mountains in the middle of the Sinai desert… And it is the alleged location of the famous Mt Sinai… Yeh where Moses went to have a chat with God and got the “Ten Commandments”… Though it has to be said that there seems to be quite a lot of dissension as to where Mt Sinai was “actually” located!

So I rode on out there, through some quite beautiful desert I might add, and found a camp ground for the night… I was just gonna see the monastery but it turned out the mountain was not that big so I decided to hike to the top. It is of course quite a Religious tourist destination and pilgrims have been climbing it for centuries.

It was no pilgrimage for me though and I just hiked it for the exercise and the view and contemplation value. I decided to hike it on the afternoon of the day I arrived and stay at the top for sunset and then return to my camp. I set out at about 3:30pm and it took me 2 hours to scale it on a broad well defined path (not a trail at all) though it was a bit rugged in a few places. The top section is some 750 steps to a small Greek Orthodox chapel and a small Mosque built on the summit (elevation gain is about 700m). So I toddled off along the trail with my trusty little point and shoot camera (just in case I should be accosted by a chatty burning bush – which apparently has happened here before?) and a litre of water. I got to the top with about 30min spare before sunset. I looked about a bit and thought about it all for a bit and then toddled off back down the track in the rather darker than hoped evening (almost no moon to light my way). The down section was a lot more uncomfortable for my poor knees and feet than the up but after another couple of hours (the dark slowed me down) I was back at camp.

 

I then slept a rather restless night… not due to any religious dreams or visitations but rather due to the lack of a breeze and the “visitations” of quite a few mosquitoes… I had decided not to use my tent since the weather seemed nice and clear… bad choice it turned out!

In the morning I found my motorbike had a flat tire so I took a couple of hours to fix that (I need to get a “bead-breaker”  for my tool-kit to speed that up!) and then I headed for “the promised land”…. A couple hundred kilometers to the border with Israel

 

Put Another Dollar In

I ve just spent a few days at a coastal resort here at the bottom of the Sinai peninsula.

And its definitely a major “resort” town… It’s a city sized resort with all the expected facilities… Youd be hard pressed to spot any significant differences from any of the major resort cities in Mexico like Puerto Vallarta or Cancun… But I was expecting that so no worries J

I came here because it’s the only way around the peninsula to Israel at the moment (the road across the top of the peninsula from Cairo is about one sixth the distance but its not useable by civilians/tourists at the moment because of some home-grown terrorism issues there in Egypt at the moment… so I had to come the long way.

But Im also here to take a bit of a break from riding again and I planned to do two or three days of Scuba diving and a day or so of just laying around on the beach in the sun.

The Scuba-diving in the Red Sea is world class and Ive never been here before so I figured I should take advantage of the opportunity and see it while Im here. And after three days of diving I have to say it is indeed high quality diving… The visibility is excellent. The quality and variety of hard and soft corals is also excellent (and the colours are very rich and impressive too). The fish life is a bit less than Ive seen in other places but not by much and all “the usual suspects” are here in large numbers (for those who recognize the different tropical marine fish). The only down side (and its slight) is that there is some damage to the coral from all the diving traffic that it sees, but corals mostly recover quickly from mechanical damage and it didn’t detract much from the diving.

The big down-side is that diving is about the only “activity” for tourists to do here (apart from the usual para-sailing, and banana-boat rides ec) and so there are HUGE numbers of divers at every dive site every day… Seriously it’s a bit of a zoo… There must be several hundred dive boats and they each take about 20 clients and at any given site on any given day there are about a dozen boats… you get the picture.! But despite the crowded diving I have to say it was a very worth-while experience and I don’t hesitate to recommend it to others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also decided to “up” my dive rating to include “Enriched Air” which involves reading a small booklet, answering a multiple choice exam, and of course “putting another dollar in” as the euphemism goes for the PADI diving accreditation acronym (actually about US$120). So with the new rating I then went and did a wreck dive of a WWII British cargo ship that was sunk in 1941 by a couple of German patrol aircraft. The ship was called HMS Thistelgorm and it was fully loaded with locomotives and trucks and motorbikes and rifles and aircraft etc… the wreck is in extremely good condition and sits in only 30m of water. The Enriched air rating is not mandatory but it reduces the nitrogen content and allows longer dive-times in about the 20-30m depth range. But Oxygen becomes toxic at higher pressures so if you want to go deeper for longer then you need to get another PADI rating for Tri-Mix which adds Helium to the tank… and yep you have to pay to get that rating too but Im in no rush to do that… But back to the wreck dive. I have to say it was a really good dive location and the two dives I did there were the highlight of my stay here… Really well worth doing. I didn’t take any pictures (no UW camera) but there are plenty on the web if you care to look for them…again the visibility was excellent and the access to the ships interior was also easy and swimming around inside was very interesting!

But now that that’s done, Im headed North again…

 

 

 

 

 

Where Did All The Money Go?

Well yes, that statement could well be mine in regard to my current financial situation J

But Im actually asking what happened to Egypt’s money??

I just rode from Cairo in the North, over to the East, took the tunnel under the Suez Canal and then rode for a few hundred Km back South along the coast of the Sinai peninsula to a major resort city/region called Sharm El Sheikh. And so in the space of a week or so Ive seen quite a bit of Egypt and Ive noted three very large national sources of income –
The Aswan High Dam which produces lots of hydro-electricity along with a massive increase in the size and productivity of arable land all along the Nile river..

The Suez Canal that is a major shipping short-cut and brings in lots of money from every ship that goes through. ... no pictures because security in the area is understandably very tight at present...

And all the Oil-fields of northern Egypt from Sinai, in the Red Sea, and out into the Western Desert which again generate gobs of income for the nation. And all of these “wealth generators” have been in place and running for many decades… Should have been plenty of time to pay off construction debts etc,

 

 

 

 

So it seems to me that Egypt should have plenty of domestic power and food wealth as well as foreign income without having to put much effort into creating it at all!  But that “wealth” definitely seems to be lacking visibly from the places Ive visited… In the North here around Cairo things are not terrible and though there is lots of poverty, there is also lots of wealth to be seen in the form of private vehicles and businesses and new construction, and beach resorts etc. But you only have to go an hour or so away from the capital and things get really quite rough… and down South there is a surprising amount of “abject poverty”.  And all those “wealth generating” sources should in my opinion have made Egypt a very wealthy place … I of course recognise that they are all big projects that were built and financed and run largely by foreign corporate interests but still they Must generate lots of ongoing income for the nation…

Now I don’t know what has happened to all the money that should be somewhere in Egypt but Im pretty sure I know some people who do know… Mr Mubarak and his cronies!!  The recently evicted dictator and his upper echelon lieutenants... I bet they know!

But of course, Dictators are want to do as they will with their ill-gotten gains (that’s the whole point of being a dictator as far as I can tell).

… As seems to have happened here in Egypt for the last few decades… and come to think of it, the same situation seems to more or less apply to Panama too as I recall… Surprisingly high poverty in the country, Huge wealth generating Canal operating for many decades, and a super-rich elite class of citizens and recently deposed dictator….hmmm

Poor Old Egypt, but maybe the future will be brighter… I certainly hope so.

 

 

Gizza Pyramids

Of course I visited the pyramids while I was in Cairo... They are not quite as big as I had pictured them in my imagination... But they are still incredibly impressive and at 4-5000 years old, certainly a wonder of the world :)

 

 

Personal Deportment Issues

As I mentioned, I am daily interacting with quite a range of people here in Egypt as I make my way through the country. And I have a hard time balancing my emotional responses to the behaviors I see in people… Sometimes I am humbled by their generosity only to be disgusted moments later by their rapacious greed for money the next. Or Im impressed by their personal appearance in a dusty/dirty world only to be amazed by their lack of care over how their street looks as they throw their litter in the street. Frequently they want to help me so much that they are incapable of listening to what it is they can help me with… Its incredibly frustrating at times J And I don’t speak Arabic so the language barrier is an added “amplifier” of misunderstanding too…

And so, every day Im having difficult interactions with the Egyptians I meet along my way as I get petrol for the bike and find food to eat and places to sleep and directions to this place or that… And while I keep trying to take the “high road” I have to admit that at least a couple of times each day I find Ive “taken a wrong turn” and am on the “low road”… angry and using a raised voice and thinking bad thoughts, much as the other party in the situation is feeling at the same time Im sure. Its definitely the most challenging country of the trip, but the reality is that the challenges are actually reflections of aspects of my own personality.

And so Im getting plenty of opportunities to “grow”… but as usual Im failing to make the most of lots of those opportunities… Im only human (and old and stuck in my ways at that!) and I think we all learn pretty slowly with this sort of thing… All I can do is my best, and when I get it wrong, well I can reflect on it afterward and then try to do better next time J

Egypt – a land of challenges J

 

Egypt - Mixed Emotions

Ive been here in Egypt for nearly two weeks now and Ive ridden all the way up to Cairo (arrived today). And Ive seen some of the monuments of the earlier Egyptian empires that spanned at least three thousand years… certainly longer than any of the Western empires and on par I think with the Eastern empires of dynastic China. It’s a long and illustrious history but Egypt’s eminence seems to have pretty much come to an end as of about two thousand years ago…Yep, I think Egypt is “taking a break” from empire and eminence! And as Ive been riding North and visiting the monuments of Egypt’s past and seeing the country and interacting with the people of today, Ive been thinking also about Egypt’s present… and for the most part Ive been very unimpressed!

I have to say Im very impressed with the monuments but very disappointed with most aspects of the present day country and people… My initial impression is that Egypt bears a very strong resemblance to Argentina… The country seems to be particularly disorganized with people much preferring to sit around and talk and smoke rather than do anything productive or useful… And worse than that, when they do do something it seems that they only ever do it for them-selves… If they buy a drink or food or cigarettes then they just throw the waste in the street. You cant find a wall anywhere that is not facing the street front and doesn’t reek of urine. People double park their cars anywhere any time regardless of the traffic they block from flowing or the cars they block in. In pretty much every place I stay the floors are dirty and the rooms un-cleaned since the previous occupant left, and the maintenance of the buildings is pretty much zero! Its as if no one gives a “rats ass” about anyone but themselves and they blithely go about their lives actively making life harder for their fellow Egyptians…

But of course there are significant mitigating factors here too (just as in the case of Argentina).

The first point Id make is that (like Argentina), the people here are incredibly sociable and their culture is thus quite different in its priorities compared to my own culture… They really like to engage each other and it takes time and that seems unnecessary or frustrating to someone from my culture when in fact it builds social accord, and strengthens the country in social aspects. So there is a strong case for arguing that it is a strength rather than a weakness.

The next thing is of course the recent political upheavals… And I have to give the people of Egypt my honest congratulations on managing to oust a dictator of several decades… That is an incredible achievement and something all Egyptians can feel very proud of… But the down side is that when there is a power-vacuum in a countries politics it leads to quite a bit of turmoil and political instability for a few years (and possibly many). And that’s where Egypt is at the moment. And one of the major side-effects of that instability for Egypt is that tourists stop visiting because of their understandable fears… And Egypt has had a very big tourist industry for many hundreds of years, and so when all of a sudden, many tens of thousands of Western tourists stop visiting, and stop spending many millions of dollars….well, it really hits the economy very hard and tens of thousands of Egyptians suddenly find themselves without jobs!! And guess where Ive been spending most of my very brief time here… yep at tourist destinations where the local economy has been hit hardest. So it is quite understandable that the people Ive been interacting with have been showing signs of “low motivation”!

And so Ive been struggling to find a balance with Egypt much as I think Egypt is in fact struggling to find a balance with its self… As Ive said Ive seen lots of behaviors that suggest people “just don’t care” about anything, but in many ways that’s a response to an entire field of business that has just evaporated and left them without income and without hope… And then there are other people from the same sector who are desperate and see me and the very few other tourists as the only source of available income. These people become incredibly intense in their efforts to “help” me in any way at all in order to get money out of me… But when you are subject to the constant badgering by every second person on the street, and they just refuse to hear the words “no thank you”, Well Im sure you can see how this very quickly gets pretty much every remaining tourist regretting their choice of holiday destination this year. J And then there are the ones who are angry and hate the rich foreign tourists who begrudge spending every dollar even when they have so much and we have so little etc. And then there are also a whole group of people who, even though they are desperately short of money, have no jobs and are seeing their whole way of life swept away, but they are still incredibly hospitable and generous and refuse to take money from you for a cup of tea they insist you drink with them… All in all, it’s a very challenging situation for everyone involved!

And so, as I say there are significant mitigating circumstances and I really do have sympathy for their situation… But even given these significant factors Im pretty sure that a lot of the “unpleasant and unproductive” behaviors I first mentioned were well and truly entrenched long before the current political situation arose… I really think that most Egyptians don’t care a jot about their environment, and don’t care how much trouble they make for someone else if they get what they want themselves… and I don’t have much sympathy for these attitudes.

And so Im left with both strong dislikes and strong sympathies. I find I really like some aspects of their social psyche and really dislike others… Its an interesting place all right!

 

Ta Dah!

Well, here I am in Cairo and that completes the continental traverse from South to North…

 

Not that it’s any sort of big deal though… In fact I think for the most part I took pretty much the easiest route possible. I meandered around in the South a bit, and I did a couple of side trips here and there, and there was that rather challenging Turkana section, but all in all, the Southern/Eastern rout through Africa is the easy option. And I chose it because I was going alone and had no real knowledge of what was involved and knew no one I could get the relevant information from… And with those considerations, the trip has I think all worked out pretty well (well so far at least) and Im pretty happy with all the things Ive seen and done.

But, Ive met some people while here who’ve come largely down the Western route from Europe and I have to say I think if I k new then what I know now, that would have been my preferred option… And who knows, one day I may get up sufficient energy and funds to have another crack at it from that direction… But not for quite a while I think. Im pretty tuckered out and am looking forward to a relatively low-key life in Vancouver for a while.

But first I have to get back there, and its not all plain sailing. After a couple of days here in Cairo to visit the museum and such Ill head East into Saini… hopefully to check out some Red Sea Scuba diving J Then its up into Israel and figure out how to ship the motorbike back to Canada… that should be a bit of a challenge J

Luxor - Valley of the Kings

After Aswan I went North along the Nile to Luxor. And Luxor is located right on the Nile and has a couple of large old temples (Luxor and Karnak temples) from the “Middle Kingdom” period of Egyptian history (3000-4000 years ago I think) The temples are pretty well “destroyed” of course after that many years of abuse but they used such large chunks of stone that there is still a lot that is intact and its very impressive.

But the good thing about them is that Im allowed to take pictures whereas in the museums and inside any tombs I am not. And the amazing thing is that after thousands of years, the painting of the figures in on the temple walls are still surprisingly clear and colourful. The artisans used natural oxides and ground semi-precious stones for the pigments and they just don’t change over time… Lapiz for blue, malachite for green, manganese oxide for black and iron oxide for red; not sure what they used for yellow. But the figures on the walls are not really “art” as we think of it and there is nowhere near the creativity and variation in forms that would be expected from artists… Its more like “craftsman” work where the forms of the figures were always strictly controlled to adhere to “ideal standards”, and the “stories” and records that the figures depict are consistently the same stories in each temple etc… It was all very controlled… And so was the painting… There are no graded or blended colours its all distinct sections of black white red green yellow and blue… But still, that I can see the figures largely as they were when freshly painted thousands of years ago is truly amazing!

Some pics, but hopefully not too many J

 

But the big thing to see in Luxor is the “Valley of the Kings”.

The valley is actually quite a small gully and its located on the outskirts of what was the ancient city of Thebes, which in turn is located about 10KmWest of Luxor (not sure if it was always off to one side of the Nile or if the river may have changed course a bit over the millennia?). Anyway, the “valley” was the burial place for at least 60 kings of the middle Kingdom period, and they are all located within a few hundred meters of each other… But its not much to look at from the outside, just a dry dusty/rocky gulch with no plants whatsoever and a bunch of tunnels burrowed down into the ground.

During the height of the old Kingdom the pharaohs in the Nile delta got very grandiose and managed to build the great pyramids of Giza, but then the old kingdom declined and after some centuries of internal turmoil, the middle kingdom blossomed. But the kings of this period had changed their burial rituals and instead of creating massive pyramid tombs that took many decades and vast amounts of resources to construct, they decided to be buried under-ground in the shadow of a naturally pyramid shaped mountain here at Thebes… or so Im told anyway. But they didn’t just opt for a simple hole in the ground, no, the tombs are delved deep down into the roots of the mountains with tunnels up to a 1km long. And the tunnels have multiple chambers along their length and all of the walls of the tunnels and chambers are covered in elaborate hieroglyphic “stories” and figures etc  The tunnels and chambers were delved quite precisely into the mountain rock (which is mixed sedimentary type material). The tunnels all have neatly rectangular cross-sections and are cut in very precise straight lines, but the rock was quite friable and after digging the tunnels and chambers the walls were quite rough. So, they plastered all the interiors with a white clay and smoothed it all very well… Then the artisans went toi work and carved into the soft clay “skin” all the images and verses that were wanted (in fact most of the stories are in the form of instructions for the dead kings spirit to reference and thus successfully navigate the perilous path of the underworld and make it to heaven (or something like that!). Then after the figures were all carved by hand (and there are many many thousands of individual glyphs as well as the large images of offerings to all the Egyptian gods), they were then individually painted… And again, the colours here are still vividly bright and just as they were thousands of years ago… amazing!

There is far less damage to the images down in the tombs compared to up in the temples on the surface, but there is still quite a lot of damage. You see, almost all of the tombs have been “open” since antiquity and grave robber had done their work well for centuries if not millennia. And the upper sections of the tombs were used as chapels by later Christians etc too… But there is still a fantastic amount to see and I was very glad I went and had a look. But again the down-side is that the current Egyptian antiquities administration does not allow any photography in the tombs so I have no pictures to share… I was told the justification (outside the obvious “don’t use a flash” restriction) was that if they don’t allow pictures than more people will come to see the temples/tombs in person!... If that is the reason behind the “no pictures” rule then I think its terribly misguided…Just because there are pictures available of the Mona Lisa painting on the internet doesn’t mean I don’t want to see it in person myself one day… But that may just be a rumor… Id like to have a few pictures but I respected the rules and so I only have words to share with you.

I was very impressed and I was glad I went to see the tombs J