khyungbird (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} khyungbird) wrote,@ 2008-03-15 11:44:00 |
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We awoke and joined the others in the lobby for the first day of our tour proper. (Actually, Day One counted as a tour day on the official dossier, although all we did was meet up for dinner.) Our morning destination was the Egyptian Museum, and our afternoon destination was the Pyramids of Giza, the great symbol of Egypt.
We talked and got to know our fellow travelers. Actually, it would take many days for us to get to know them even in the most superficial way, but let me say a few words to describe them, not naming names (although if any of them stumble on this site I’m sure they’ll be offended by my rank generalizations -- sorry everybody!). There were the two Portuguese women, both really friendly, one a licensed nurse who gave me shots when I was horribly sick later in the trip. There were the Canadians, chief among them the cheerful and vaguely New-Agey woman with tattoos of bare-breasted goddess-type figures on her bare sleeves, who I kept thinking was probably freaking out the Egyptians (although who was I to care, for one thing, and secondarily, who was I to throw stones, with my horrible haircut and my “Captain Spaulding the African Explorer” mentality?). There was the conservative Christian couple, who (if asked) talked casually about how they’d been to Europe but “Europe is spiritually dead” and about how the mosque we visited was “dirty,” although again, my own attitude towards Islam was just as dismissive in its own way, as I’ll eventually reveal. There was the old weatherbeaten happy-go-lucky blue-collar guy on his umpteenth trip to some exotic location. There was the thirtysomething Jewish woman on a side trip from Israel, a smart, outgoing traveler who nevertheless for obvious reasons wasn’t eager to advertise the fact that she was Jewish among random Egyptians. There was the wiry, athletic Asian-American woman who had made a lot of money working in finance and who was now in the middle of a three-or-four-tour traveling spree, going alone all around the world -- she had just returned from Nepal and was after Egypt she was headed deeper into Africa. There were some other people who, although cool, didn’t make a strong enough impression on me to be reduced to cheap stereotypes. And of course there was Jake and myself, who briefly gave off the impression of “possible gay lovers” to at least one member of our party. (I personally took it as a compliment.) They were a fun group of people to be with. Khaled, our guide, was also great -- although quite not the young hipster I somehow had imagined would be leading us, he was an incredibly experienced guide who sheltered us and took care of us like a mother duck guarding her flock. On more than one occasion he faced down angry cab-drivers, or smoothed over complicated situations, or negotiated reasonable prices for us, in a way that we as tourists could never have done.
THE EGYPTIAN MUSEUM (a few photos)
Leaving our luggage at the hotel, we proceeded to the Egyptian Museum. Cameras weren’t allowed inside, so my photos show only the exterior -- the pool of papyrus and lotus flower, the statues, the French fin de siecle architecture. Inside, the museum was cavernous and chaotic. Guides led tour groups from place to place, giving the same speeches over and over beside massive statues and blocks of stone. Most of the tour groups, including ours on that day, only saw the tiniest fraction of the enormous museum. I used to date a Museum Studies major, and it was pretty clear that the Egyptian Museum would not have lived up to her standards: the signage was sparse and inconsistent, and everywhere, in corners and display cases, thousands of unlabeled items were stacked. The sheer wealth of the collection awed me despite the poor arrangement, and I wandered around scribbling visual impressions of undreamed Egyptian bric-a-brac. In addition to the great statues and sarcophagi, there was a room full of wall paintings and fragments, showing still-colorful nature drawings -- plants, birds, animals of all kind. There were chariots, weapons, furniture. There was a room of animal mummies, from bulls to alligators to ibises. Perhaps most fascinating to me, there was a room full of Greco-Roman sarcophagi and funeral portraits -- artifacts of that weird end time when traditional Egyptian funerary rites were being adopted by Greek immigrants, and mutating under the cultural pressures. Portraits of curly-haired men and women were worked into the bandages above the mummies’ faces, in some cases photorealistic and beautiful, in other cases crude cartoons drawn in garish reds and yellows-- sometimes you had to wonder if these people just didn’t have any taste, or if they knew they had to settle for the “cheap portrait painter.” Walter S. Crane’s comic Sheba, set partially in the Ptolemaic period, got in a few good digs at the decline of traditional Egyptian embalming methods, but the results were fascinating to look at.
THE PYRAMIDS OF GIZA (Photos)
I didn’t have nearly enough time that day to look at the Egyptian Museum, but soon we had to leave and take a bus to our next stop, the Pyramids of Giza. One of my friends who visited Egypt was shocked that the Pyramids were so close to the city proper, and from his description I feared the worst -- pyramids on an empty lot surrounded by chain-link fences, perhaps. But in fact, it wasn’t that bad. The pyramids are on the edge of a working-class neighborhood west of the Nile, but they lie above the city on a great bluff of sand, and a huge area all the Pyramids around is clear, containing nothing but sand. (And if you walked west from the Pyramids through the borderlands of the city, it’s only a few blocks to the true desert.) The super-pricey Mena House hotel, with its golf course, lies along the road directly beneath the Pyramids. We stopped and ate at an Egyptian fast food stand, where I had falafel, and then we proceeded up the road to the bluff.
The Pyramids are lovely, and huge, and completely worn down. In Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski’s sci-fi novel The Killing Star they are the only human structure which is still vaguely recognizable after the planet is carpet-bombed by genocidal aliens, and I’d believe it. You are no longer permitted to climb the pyramids, the way my dad did when he visited Egypt in the late 1940s, when *his* father, a surgeon, was a guest of an Egyptian noble. However, small groups of people sit in the shade of the great stones -- “tourist police” (who have a massive presence around the pyramids, that tourist magnet), people selling bottles of water, legitimate guides and somewhat unscrupulous, or entrepreneurial, guides trying to get you to give them a few pounds in return for taking a photo of you or pointing at the pyramids and indicating some supposed exciting feature. A few subsidiary ruins, and smaller pyramids, sit around the Great Pyramid, but I didn’t get too close to them. We did drive to a small observation bluff about a half-mile away, where tourists are trucked in the thousands to take photos of the Pyramids from this vantage point, and to be tempted by vendors selling Bast statues, Horus statues, pieces of papyrus, scarves, little stone pyramids -- the landfills full of merchandise and memorabilia which are for sale at every major Egyptian tourist site. Furthermore, clustered around this observation site are the most aggressive tourist-hunters I encountered in all of Egypt, guys dressed up in “traditional” garb who try to get you to take a photo of them for money, or make you put on their clothes and then take a photo of you for money. I took a photo of one of these guys, intending to pay him, and then somehow allowed my camera to actually be GRABBED away by him as he took a photo of me. I got the camera back, of course, but I was so annoyed that I deleted the photo he took. I kept the photo of him, however, and I paid him a few pounds and piastres. I don’t remember if it was him or someone else who discouragingly said “No piastres... piastres are toilet...” when he saw me whip out a 50-piastre note instead of a pound. (Of course I paid him more than 50 piastres, but not a whole lot more... maybe 2 pounds 50?)
We returned from the observation site and I decided to do something I couldn’t pass up: go inside the Great Pyramid. It cost about $30, if I remember correctly, and I gave my ticket to some men sitting in the cool shadow of the cave entrance on the western side. At the time, what most stood out to me was that one of the guards was the only guy I saw in all of Egypt with a long haircut (neck-length, mulletty, but with longish hair in the front as well). I myself had long hair and huge mutton-chops when I went on the trip, but walking the streets of Egypt, I soon saw that every single man had really short, conservative haircuts -- a couple of people even commented on my hair. Not that I would have blended in any better with short hair, of course. I wanted to call this guy “Brother!” and ask him why he was such a hair rebel, but I decided to wait until I got out of the Pyramid, and by the time I emerged he had left. Anyway, the interior of the Pyramid was muggy and dark, the stone was almost slick with perspiration. I smelled urine and sweat and human smells. Cramped, gated passageways led off in strange directions, but the main path led up, over a long staircase leading up the main gallery, its triangular roof high in the dark. The air was so poor and the cave so hot that I was sweating by the time I reached the top, and I crawled through the low passageway, illuminated by electric lights. There, in the top chamber of the pyramid, was the empty sarcophagus. A dim, indirect light filled the black room with shadows, and in the shadows a European New Ager was sitting in the lotus position, meditating in the corner. I said hello to him and we exchanged pleasantries, and then I left him in that sweaty, dark room, and clambered down the rickety wooden stairs into daylight.
Cameras weren’t allowed in the Great Pyramid, so I gave my camera to one of my fellow travelers, and didn’t get it back until after we were leaving the Pyramid and the Sphinx. The sphinx is in an awkward location, at the bottom of a hill beside the Pyramids, surrounded by low walls, in a sort of slough with puddles of water nearby. (Apparently rising groundwater is harming the structure.) About 200 feet away from the sphinx is a touristy cafe by the exit of the pyramid/sphinx complex, which appears to be the model for the cafe where the heroes fight D’Arby in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. Getting close to the sphinx, however, requires running a gauntlet of peddlers and tourist-hunters who are gathered round it like people playing “blob tag.” The pyramids aren’t nearly so bad because they span acres and acres -- it would take an army of salesmen to surround them -- but all traffic to the sphinx must pass through a narrow area, and while I watched, hapless European families would approach the sphinx only to have to constantly shoo away people pushing Nefertiti statues and pyramid keychains in their faces. I stayed clear of it; sadly, the sphinx is so small and ravaged there isn’t much to see anyway.
Our group of tourists soon gathered together, I got my camera back, and we made our way back to the cars. The area around Giza is apparently famous for its papyrus-making, and papyrus is pretty much only sold to tourists, so our guide Khaled -- in one of several very soft-sell attempts to crosspromote our trip with local businesses -- next took us to a “papyrus factory” where people tried to sell us papyrus. The papyrus sheets were basically posters printed with all kinds of designs -- pharaonic, Christian, Islamic, silly -- but I didn’t have the slightest interest in buying one, so when this smiling Egyptian guy descended upon me (and other people descended on everyone else in the group), I TOTALLY wimped out and pretended that I had to make a cell phone call and couldn’t get reception inside the building. So I hung out by the van fiddling with my cell phone until everyone else left, having apparently not bought any papyrus, and I assume Khaled told the papyrus people something like “Sorry, maybe next time,” and we went back to the hotel and from there to the train station. At the station, Khaled helped me buy a phone card.
The next leg of our journey would be by train, along the Nile to Aswan. Jake and I shared a sleeper car. As the train rolled on, our waiter/attendant opened the door and brought us dinner and our evening tea. When he saw that I was drawing in my sketchbook, his eyes widened at the sight of the pencils.
“What nice pencils,” he said (or something like that). “You know, my son is an artist.”
“Here you go,” I said, handing him a pencil.
“I have three sons,” he said.
I gave him two more pencils. After that, he showed his gratitude by leaving us an extra (or at least I think it was extra) pot of hot sweet tea, which Jake and I drank readily. After dinner I read the Koran in bed, until the rocking of the train put me to sleep (notice a pattern to these daily updates?). Outside, in the dark, the Nile flew by.
