Dispatches from Occupied Quds

Whoops! I didn't actually go to Jerusalem. But I came up with the title for this post back when I thought that I would be going there, and it seemed like a shame to change it to fit reality. Really this post is about Petra (in Jordan) and my epic travels there and back.

We took a night bus across Sinai to the Israeli border. Crossing into Israel was a 4-hour ordeal that involved a whole lot of sitting and a little bit of chatting with various border security people. Probably the best part was when we were being questioned about our studies in Egypt.

Israeli: So you're studying in Egypt... What do you think of Egyptian culture? Arab culture?
Bob: It's great, we're really enjoying it.
*Deafening silence reigns. Every Israeli security guy, both the uniformed ones doing something and the guys hanging around in civvies but obviously carrying guns, look at Bob.*
Bob: ...kind of. It's ok. I mean, it could definitely be better. I like America more.
*Everyone relaxes and returns to what they were doing.*

Most of the delay was due to the fact that one of the people in our group was a Muslim from Taiwan. Given the historic ethnic conflicts between the Taiwanese and Jewish races going back generations, this came as no surprise to any of us.





Two views from where we sat in customs. The view of the Red Sea was nice, but the general consensus was that we would give Israeli customs a higher rating if they actually had a 'stuck in customs' beach where Muslims and their traveling companions could go for a swim (albeit in some sort of barbed wire-enclosed area) while waiting to be cleared.

We eventually made it into Israel, crossed six miles of it around the tip of the Red Sea, and entered Jordan. A few hours later we were in Wadi Musa, the modern town that has arisen next to the ruins of Petra. For the next day and a half we poked around Petra, climbing all over various cliffs, exploring ruins, and generally having a good time. Pictures of all this follow.



You'll recognize this building, I'm sure, from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The Holy Grail is unfortunately not currently on display.



Buildings in Petra. Not much to say about these in particular, but by now you're no doubt wondering how people carved an entire city out of the mountains. It's actually not as hard as one might think - most of the rock here is sandstone, meaning that it both carves easily and erodes rapidly, which contributes to Petra's gradual disappearance. Blowing wind and climbing tourists are taking a fairly heavy toll.

This brings up the point of the double-edged sword of Western tourism. Petra was a relatively forgotten and unknown backwater until Western tourists began flocking to it in the last century. Western attention has brought attention and funding to the region and has allowed for restoration efforts and archaeological studies, but ever increasing numbers of tourists simultaneously cause the rate of erosion to skyrocket. It's something to think about.



The sandstone around Petra is found in vibrant shades of red, yellow, green, blue... basically every color you can think of you can find a chunk of sandstone for. This has contributed to the growth of a thriving sand art trade. Having people intentionally grinding up chunks of Petra every day doesn't help its preservation either.

In a delicious bit of irony, I got hit by a car my second night in Petra. After surviving the insane Cairo traffic for two months, I'd gotten used to one-way streets (there are too many parked cars on most streets to have more than a lane and a half open for traffic, and letting this go in two directions would make the system even more anarchic than it is now). In Jordan, however, traffic laws and populations levels are ideal enough that traffic can flow in a well-regulated fashion in two directions. I'm sure you see where this is going. I stepped into the street, watching the car moving towards me from one direction, only to be hit squarely from behind by a car moving in the opposite direction. The irony of surviving Cairo only to be hit in Jordan was not lost on anyone in our group, and we all had a good laugh about it.

The next morning we crossed the Sinai again, this time during the day. The sun was both a curse and a blessing, in that it made what was a 85-degree trip by night a 110-degree trip by day, but also provided the light for me to see a bit of Sinai as we crossed. Remnants of Israel's and Egypt's various fortifications and defenses of Sinai were everywhere - rolls of barbed wire, remains of pillboxes, craters, Sinai has it all. Particularly sand. It has a lot of that.

Anyway, after 7 hours of Sinai-crossing fun, we arrived back in Cairo. I now have three more days for some final thoughts before I go back to the States.

Horses

I went horseback riding at the pyramids yesterday. Unfortunately, my camera was broken at the time, so I don't have any hilarious pictures of me sneezing wildly at my horse (I'm allergic to them, apparently). I've done my best, though, to find pictures that will give you an accurate picture of the experience and my thoughts about it.



The pyramids hadn't changed that much since the last time I was here. Except now there was a horse. The horse was very large and I was given absolutely no advice as to how to keep from dying in some ghastly fashion.



Theoden killed a bunch of Orcs and whatnot and then got killed when his horse fell on him.



Knights wore a bunch of armor, presumably to keep this from happening to them, but they still got killed by their horses falling on them. Refer back to that first picture. I'm wearing a t-shirt. This is running through my head a lot.

Note that I'm not afraid of horses. That would be silly. Horses are relatively unintelligent, and I'm relatively sure they don't eat people habitually. But falling from horses... that's a different story.

But in no time at all I rode out into the desert on the horse, dismounted to take memorable photos, found out my camera didn't work, gotten back on the horse, and ridden back into the city. And I'm still in one (slightly sore) piece.

Propaganda

I've been avoiding cabs for my last week in Cairo. Instead I've been walking everywhere I want to go, which turns a 1-hour trip into a 4-hour trip but gets me into areas of Cairo I wouldn't have seen otherwise. The buildings in the older parts of the city are almost universally in some state of collapse, but still impressive.

Anyway, I decided it was time for me to go see the Citadel and the mosques it contains. The Citadel was originally built by Saladin in 1176, but every successive ruling group has added to or modified the fortress and its contents. The Mamluks expanded the walls of the fortress and built a set of mosques inside. Muhammad Ali got rid of most of the Mamluk's mosques and built his own massive mosque, which is still standing, on top of the rubble.



The most recent modifications have been to convert the entire fort into a tourist attraction. The highlight of this, at least for me, was the National Military Museum. Formerly the residence of the royal family until the Abdeen Palace was built, it now houses historic weapons, dioramas depicting Egypt's military since Pharaonic times, and absolutely hilarious propaganda.

Walking through a timeline of modern Egyptian military history, I was surprised to learn that Egypt has actually been at peace with its neighbors for most of the 20th century. Following the glorious revolution in 1952, in fact, there have only been two engagements worth mentioning - Egypt bringing peace and stability to Yemen and Egypt's victory over Israel in 1973. Those of you who thought there was another war with Israel in 1967 were mistaken. Nothing happened in 1967. Don't look at the Sinai behind the curtain.



Part of the massive recounting of the October War. It was interesting that coverage of the war ended with the ceasefire - the Egyptian Third Army that was surrounded by Israeli forces apparently didn't exist.



Easily my favorite sign in the entire museum. "Some of the Egyptian forces ____ as martyrs in defense of their country." What are you talking about? No one died. Seriously. While I'm assuming this was actually some bizarre typo, Egypt does have a history of very blatant censorship.

Bahariyya Oasis

This weekend I went out to Bahariyya oasis, which is one of several oases lying near the border between the Black and White Deserts. The Black Desert gets its name from the ubiquitous layer of small black rocks that sit on top of the sand, making the desert as a whole appear dark brown. The White Desert gets its name both from the lack of these small black rocks, which allows the natural very light color of the sand to show through, and from the presence of large limestone and alabaster formations, both of which are very white.

Maps will tell you that there are five oases in Egypt. This is a LIE. We passed through about 15 on the way from Cairo to Bahariyya. At each one, we would all say to one another "Surely this is Bahariyya - there are only five oases in Egypt and Bahariyya is the closest to Cairo." Then we would drive out the other side of that oasis and reenter the desert. This 'five oasis' concept quickly grew outmoded. At any rate, we eventually reached Bahariyya and embarked in a pair of Land Rovers (driven by a pair of very friendly Bedouin) into the desert.



We began in the Black Desert, seen above. We were all pretty tired of sitting after the bus ride, so we ended up running (at first) and later walking up one of the multitude of mountains that springs from the desert floor without warning. Those of you who have been to visit me at Philmont will notice that the terrain looks pretty similar, just without any trees. I was struck by this similarity throughout the trip to Bahariyya, but particularly while hiking up this hill. It brought back a lot of memories, and I began to think that it wasn't really all that different from the mountains in New Mexico.



Then I got to the top, and there was an ABSOLUTELY GINOURMOUS NEON GREEN SPIDER sitting out on a rock. Seriously - massive and bright green. Picture a tarantula, then make it twice as big, then give it massive fangs, then make it neon green. Also make it extremely fast and capable of jumping. This was nothing like New Mexico. It was, however, pretty awesome. I never saw a scorpion while in the desert, unfortunately, but that spider pretty much made up for it. This was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of spider viewing (this assertion is supported by the fact that I haven't been able to find any pictures of it. You're going to have to trust me on this one). This is the kind of spider that gives you superpowers when it bites you and you go on to get your own comic book series and blockbuster movies.

Anyway.

After coming back down the mountain we drove a little further into the Black Desert (but approaching the White Desert) and stopped at a Bedouin village camp for lunch.



The roof was held up by a thicket of palm trees that had been delimbed, created several very sturdy vertical posts to build around. Water from an underwater aquifer was being pumped to the surface and ran through on a trough. The noise from the generator for the pump kind of spoiled the idyllic desert atmosphere, but having a very handy source of running water to put one's feet in was fantastic. Of course, this was before we saw them washing dishes and food downstream of all of our feet.

After this we went to see the pillars of limestone and alabaster that marked the boundary between the Black Desert and the White Desert. This was not quite as dramatic as I had been expecting.



I intended to see good white lands and bad black lands, but the scene is grey.



Further into the White Desert we entered into an expanse of limestone pillars shaped into mushrooms by the wind. These pretty much defy description, and I'm not going to try. This is one of the better pictures I got of them. More are available if you want them. Look! Here's one now!



The sun was setting at this point, so we drove deeper into the miles of limestone mushrooms and made camp. Rain was a definite nonissue, so making camp consisted of parking the Land Rovers at a right angle, setting up a curtain against them (presumably to protect us from blowing sand) and putting out cushions everywhere to sit and sleep on. Desert foxes appeared about three minutes after we sat down to see if we had food (which we did. They got some of it) We ate, looked at stars for a while, ran around in the desert a lot (one of the advantages of the White Desert is that the sand is completely clean - there are no rocks of any size mixed in, and you can walk barefoot without any problem), and eventually went to sleep.



The next morning I woke up. The curtain that protected us from blowing sand unfortunately was facing the wrong direction to protect us from the sun, so actually I woke up pretty early. So did this other guy (named Jon), so I amused myself taking various pictures of him and rock formations while the sun finished coming up. People give pictures that lived-in feeling.



And look! There's me! I got a haircut.

El Ahly 5, Zamalek 4

Last night I watched El Ahly play Zamalek in soccer. At least, that's what I was told. Honestly it felt more like I was watching the entire city of Cairo go temporarily insane. They're pretty big on soccer here.

We took a taxi to the stadium, which is about 30 minutes away. This was an experience in itself. A basic tenet of driving in Cairo is that if you're stopping, turning, slowing down, speeding up, feeling any kind of emotion, or feeling emotionless, you should use your horn to let other drivers know. The only exception to this is the evening of soccer matches, when using the car horn means you support El Ahly, which nearly everyone in Cairo does. Consequently the entire drive to the stadium every single driver in Cairo was honking his horn in concert to various pep songs for the team. It was awe-inspiring and deafening.



We arrived at the stadium about two hours before the game began. At this point the stadium was pretty much full and everyone had started screaming. Thinking about what was going to happen when the game actually started was intimidating. God forbid El Ahly ever score a point.



About half an hour before the game started people started getting excited and massive banners started being unfurled in every direction. There was more screaming, some chanting, and a lot of tenseness wherever red-clad El Ahly fans and white-clad Zamalek fans saw each other.



Finally, the game actually started, and was largely the standard professional soccer match - everyone ran around a lot and no one scored for most of the game. Eventually, of course, El Ahly scored, and there was about as much mayhem as expected. Several hundred riot police deployed around the field. Very exciting.

In the end El Ahly ended up winning 5-4 in overtime and the spectators flowed en masse to the streets to celebrate/riot. Already lax traffic safety was completely forgotten - buses, which typically are filled literally to capacity and have an additional 5 or 6 people hanging on to the outside of the door, now had an extra 20 people dancing on the roof of the vehicle. Taxis were rarely seen with less than 8 people in/on them. Traffic was being directed by an 8-year-old kid with a flamethrower made out of a lighter and an aerosol can. Honestly it wasn't vastly different from Cairo traffic at any other time except for all the red flags being waved around.

Alexandria

I went to Alexandria this weekend with a horde of people from AUC. After an interminable bus ride we arrived in the city, dropped all of our stuff at a hotel, and went to the beach, because that's pretty much what everyone does when they go to Alexandria.



Hey look! The Mediterranean! The shoreline of the city curves a fair amount, so you can see it in the distance there. Neato.

I meant it when I said that everyone goes to the beach when they to go Alexandria. The city, or at least the seaward half of it, is essentially a massive resort with an Egyptian flavor. The Egyptian flavor means that everything is extremely overcrowded.



As I said, it's overcrowded. It actually wasn't that bad here - we were at a private beach. The public beaches have significantly denser thickets of umbrellas. A small sidenote on that topic - I learned the Arabic word for umbrella today, and it's derived from the word for the sun. If you wanted more emphasis on the Middle East not getting a lot of rain, there it is.

Though I suppose the English word umbrella implies shade, not protection from the rain. Whatever. It's still interesting. Back to Alexandria.



Look! Another skyline.

I'd heard from various sources before coming that Alexandria was much more of an 'international' city than Cairo - more European influence, more Europeans, etc. That international flavor certainly exists in Alexandria, but it comes across as something that has been forcibly injected into the city by outside forces rather than a voluntary comingling of cultures. The body of Alexandria, much like the body of Cairo, consists of 4 million poor* people crammed into a city that really can't contain, much less provide for, all of them. International elements have been deposited in Alexandria in an attempt to connect the city to the Mediterranean and European cultures, but I don't know that the attempt has succeeded.



The new library, replacing the more famous Libraries of Alexandria that have repeatedly burned down in the past. While the building is very beautiful, very post-modern, and very large, it doesn't connect with anything else in the city. Native Egyptian architecture is very cohesive - buildings are various shades of brown depending on how long they've been standing, most are unfinished, and their focus is always on maximizing efficiency. I'm not sure that the new Library, however beautiful, will ever really feel like an Egyptian library.

*Poor doesn't accurately convey the average Egyptian lifestyle, because (at least for me) the word assumes a comparison to a large middle class. Egyptians aren't poor when compared to one another - the vast majority of the population has much the same standard of living. Those that don't, though... man.

My roommate went to a birthday party for the son of the Egyptian Minister of Transportation (or some such). The Minister owns a 22-story building in downtown Cairo, of which he rents out the bottom ten floors. The rest is essentially a personal palace.

For the people at the top of the pyramid, the system works great. For the people at the bottom, well... at least they've got company.

Luxor

I went to Luxor this weekend to finish my brief foray into Egyptology and ancient Egyptian history. Luxor is certainly the place to do this, as it sits on top of the ancient capital city of Thebes (literally on top in some places). As a result the area's rife with temples and tombs and statues and people trying to sell you things (these aren't original from Thebes, but I can't imagine they've changed much since then).



A chunk of Luxor, viewed from the roof of a hotel. The biggest difference between US and Egyptian skylines is all the minarets. That and the palm trees, I guess.

The Westernized name Luxor is actually a transliteration of the Arabic name for the city, الاقصور, which translates to 'the palaces'. Supposedly the new city was named this after the ancient temples throughout the area, though really at the time it would have been more accurate to name the city 'the half-submerged pillars sticking out of the garbage and sand'. Perhaps they were being optimistic. Today all of the temples have been dug up from their half-submerged state and some have been restored to something resembling their original grandeur. The extent of the ruins really brings home the extent of surplus resources and manpower possessed by the pharaohs that got swallowed up in massive bureaucracies and make-work projects. Or maybe it just shows how badly they mismanaged their budget, devoting colossal amounts of money and manpower to unnecessary public works. Fortunately neither of these problems is one faced by Egypt today.

I did not make these observations to our tour guide. He presented a very interesting version of ancient Egypt that can be summed up as follows: The ancient Egyptians were all fabulously wealthy and lived a life of luxury. Everyone was happy. However, this lifestyle consumed all of the resources of Egypt, making the Egyptian populace today universally poor. This version of history conveniently omits the slave system that made the luxurious lifestyle of a tiny percentage of Egyptians possible, and avoids talking about the (ironically enough) pyramid-shaped social structure Egypt had then and continues to have today.



Here's an example of unnecessary public works. You see the sphinxes lining the path behind me? This is outside the temple at Karnak. There's a similar set outside the temple at Luxor, some 5 miles away. Originally there would have been an avenue connecting the two with intricately hand-carved sphinxes lining the entire distance.



This is also from Karnak. Nothing particular to say about it, but man! Look at those columns! Those are big.



From somewhere in the grounds of Karnak Temple, looking at the main mass of ruins. The entire temple covers a square mile.



The Luxor Temple. You'll notice that one of the obelisks outside is very conspicuously missing. This is, of course, the one that got taken to France and is now in the Place de la Concorde. Our tour guide was very vocal about this sort of thing as well. Any Egyptian artifact that left the country was referred to as "stolen" by the Europeans, though most were eventually "recovered and returned to their rightful owner." The obelisk in France was a bit of a sore point for him.



I mentioned earlier that the modern Luxor had been built very literally on top of the original Thebes. The above is a mosque that was built into the Luxor Temple. Pretty cool.



The Romans, having no sense of history or preserving archeological finds, painted over a chunk of the Luxor Temple.



More defacing of ancient monuments by those bloody Romans (1), though in this case more recent generations don't appear to have learned anything about proper archeology. A more recent graffiti artist was Jollois (2), who is presumably Jean-Baptiste Prosper Jollois, one of the scientists accompanying Napoleon's army and one of the writers of the Description de l'Egypte. Still more recent was Becky(3). Becky has yet to get her name into any history books, but she's still hoping.



The Valley of the Kings. The white cliffs surrounding it reflect heat down onto the floor of the valley, raising the temperature to truly ungodly levels. By law no one has to work if the temperature rises above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, which it pretty much always is, so the government does not release temperature information for Luxor during the summer. Word on the street, however, is that it was about 120 degrees the day we were there.

Up to this point in the summer I've been following my father's high-impact tourism practice of taking a rock or other memento from memorable locations I visit: a rock from the necropolis at Giza, a shell from the Mediterranean, coral from the Red Sea, etc. Here, however, I decided that enough was enough - it was time to give something back. So, undoubtedly helped along by some bad kushari that I'd eaten the night before, I threw up in the tomb of Ramses IV. Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by the 120 degree heat.



The temple of Hatshepsut, which is being restored to resemble its original appearance. Hatshepsut's actual body was thought to be lost, but a few days after we got back from Luxor they found it. Figures. Our tour guide was a big fan of Hatshepsut, and went into great detail about how evil her step-son (who was also her nephew and son-in-law) was for deposing her. His greatest praise, however, was for Akhenaten, who tried to convert the Egyptian polytheistic system to a monotheistic system of sun-worship, or, as our guide put it, "was the first Egyptian to believe in God."

And that's all I have to say about Luxor.