khyungbird (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} khyungbird) wrote,@ 2008-03-20 22:39:00 |
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Egypt: May 13, 2007
At this point I’ve talked about race and religion, and I’m running out of fiery subjects, so the next few posts will be a bit shorter. When I woke up on the boat I found that our pilots were discouraged by the fact that there was no wind, and so we would not be able to sail downstream for part of the morning like we had originally planned. Instead, our pilots grabbed oars and rowed us across the river to the opposite side (on which the road ran), where our group rendezvoused with a bus Khaled had called on his cell phone. Driving in a few minutes what would have taken hours on the felucca, we made our way to Kom Ombo, a relatively small town and the site of an impressive temple (it’s the place where Polnareff fights Chaka, aka the Anubis stand, in Jojo). :/ A group of Japanese tourists was visiting the site at the same time we were, and my ears perked up as I heard the language. A professional tour guide, I realized, has to know a LOT of languages. I believe Khaled knew three or four. We also ran into plenty of European tourists -- Europe is so much closer to Egypt, after all -- and I heard Italian, French and German being spoken.
A final note on Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: if you’ve been to Egypt, it’s totally clear that Hirohiko Araki based his heroes’ travels on a tour he took. They start out around Kom Ombo, go to Luxor, and then take the train all the way to Cairo, bypassing the areas inbetween... exactly the same way that all the major tourist itineraries bypass the middle of the Nile Valley. (There are tombs and sites there, of course, but apparently it’s not well-developed for tourism and there’s a fair amount of Islamic fundamentalists in the region.)
KOM OMBO AND EDFU (Photos)
Back on the bus, we stopped again at Edfu, the site of a huge temple of Horus and the Horus statue I put online in one of my earlier posts. Like most of the major temples of Egypt, it was built on the site of earlier ruins, as the priests would petition the government for money to rebuild an older temple on he same site. I think the idea was to mimic the ancient floor plan and keep continuity with the past, but I’m not sure how closely they followed it, as the Edfu temple -- with its blocky design like twin bunkers of stone -- seems to follow a relatively distinct late Egyptian architectural style, inasmuch as I know about these things. Edfu was rebuilt in the Ptolemaic era, around 300-30 BC, so it’s one of the most “modern” temples. While we were hanging around in the tourist area outside the temple, one of the members of our group cheerfully accepted the not uncommon offer of a “free” tchotchke -- some necklace or scarf -- from one of the guys trying to sell stuff in the parking lot. As soon as she accepted it, the guy either asked for money, or tried to get her to buy something else (I don’t remember which, it’s a standard ploy). Instead of giving the scarf back like I would have done, she kept demurring “Uh, no, You said it was a gift,” and finally ended up retreating onto the bus with the cheap scarf. The angry merchant hung around the bus for awhile, not yelling or anything, but looking pretty annoyed. I felt embarrassed for all of us.
We continued onward to the place where we would stay for the next few days: Luxor, once known as Thebes. The site of the Valley of the Kings, Luxor is one of the major -- perhaps THE major -- tourist capitals of Egypt. The main drag runs along the east side of the Nile, a line of tourist-oriented blocks and tree-lined streets, surrounded by a thicket of yellow Egyptian housing to the east. We were traveling in the off season, the summer, and the streets seemed mostly empty, the sunlight gleaming off sandstone and dust. Everywhere there were tourist-oriented restaurants, hibernating hotels, and most of all gift shops, in a number which seemed totally disproportionate to our small group and the small amount of tourists on the streets. One night in Luxor, some of the party went to a nightclub, where they were the only people there. Taxis drove and horse-drawn carriages continually clip-clopped up and down the main street of Luxor offering us rides, although as proud cheap backpackers, we usually declined. Once we got off the immediate tourist track, though, the people came out and things got considerably more lively, and Jake and I spent some time wandering through the back alleys, looking at fruit and vegetable stands, buying fresh-squeezed juice from vendors, and eating bread and pastries sold to us by an attractive bakery girl in a headscarf who spoke good English and cheerfully quoted us a totally high price which she knew Jake and I wouldn’t say no to (though we did exchange an “oh well” glance).
DOWNTOWN LUXOR (Photos)
I spent some time in Luxor looking for suntan lotion and batteries and the local internet cafe (where I had an excellent orangeade). At one point, I wandered into a small shop lined with the usual bric-a-brac. The store owner said he didn’t have the right kind of batteries, but just wait there! He’ll go get them! And soon he came back, no doubt with batteries from another shop, at a markup. (Things like this happened a few times when I was in Egypt -- there’s some very resourceful businessmen there.) After I bought the batteries, I noticed some photos of one of the Coptic popes on the wall, and asked the store owner about them. He said he was a Copt and invited me to sit down and have some tea. How about it? Oh, and how about some shisha?
No to the shisha, but sure, tea, why not. Egypt was totally validating my love of caffeine. As I sat there in the shade of the shop while he brewed a pot of tea in a tiny beat-up kettle heated over what looked like a lump of peat, I realized that I was being caught in one of the oldest merchant’s tricks in the book (the "be really nice and make them feel obligated to buy something" trick) but decided to go along with it for the experience. As the store owner puffed on a pipe and kept his eyes trained on me, and as I drank the sweet, sediment-filled tea, my own eyes scoured the shop looking for something to buy out of politeness’ sake, just like at the Alternative Press Expo. I eventually settled on a crude, partially broken statue of Jesus or some Christian saint.
“How much for that statue?” I asked.
“25 pounds,” he replied. That’s about five dollars U.S.
“How about 20?” I said.
“25, it’s handmade,” he said, or something like that.
I paid him. I suck at haggling. I only successfully haggled at one point during the tour, and it wasn’t then. Leaving the shop, I vaguely regretted ending up with this wretched clay statue, and when I got back to the hotel I took some photos of it, partly to commemorate and partly because I was considering just leaving it there rather than carrying it back to the U.S. I ended up keeping it and giving it to my friend Adam Burns. On the way back to the hotel an ancient Egyptian man asked me if I wanted to buy some pot. That was the only time I was offered drugs while I was in Egypt, and I was amused but kind of offended that I looked like a pot-smoker, although admittedly my sideburns were pretty crazy.
KARNAK TEMPLE DISTRICT (Photos)
On our first day in Luxor we visited Karnak temple, the great temple complex on the east side of the Nile. It’s in the heart of the city, a park-like area overgrown with weeds and surrounded by walls you can hop over; its vast acreage contains numerous buildings, as well as thousands of piles of broken pillars and stones. The head of the Theban pantheon was Amun, and the ram-headed god was represented in a great row of ram-headed sphinxes that greeted us at the entrance. It was late afternoon, close to sunset, and dogs lay sleeping on the street in the lingering warmth. The park was closing in just an hour, in fact, and we didn’t have nearly enough time to see the entire structure, so I split off from the group and went to the southern part of Karnak, where there were some Greco-Roman-era additions. We stayed together long enough for all of us to see the mosque which, hundreds of years ago, had been built on the site. In the centuries since the death of the Egyptian temples, so much sand and debris had covered the site that by the time the mosque was built, its floor was at least ten feet above the original floor of the temple. It hung as if suspended in the air, still apparently in use to some extent, protected by antiquity laws and the respect of religion. The original floor plan of Karnak had not been rediscovered until the modern era when people finally started to excavate the ruins. It was a powerful display of the passage of time. Of course, now that those stones are exposed, they are again vulnerable to wind and human damage, instead of being safely buried under the sand.
As I headed south alone over the heaps of toppled stone and palm trees, figures in djellabas started to flit among the ruins, and uniformed guards -- the “tourist police” -- glanced at me as I came near their posts. Some of the guards would leave you alone, but as at the Great Pyramids, others were working the same beat as the guys in the djellabas, looking for ways to supplement their income by being impromptu “tour guides.” Unfortunately, in addition to the language barrier, the majority of people doing this, as far as I can tell, hardly know anything about pharaonic history (or, more likely, they realize that most tourists hardly know anything about pharaonic history either, so they’re not about to go up and say “Good day, sir! Did you know that Isis of Koptos was viewed in the Ptolemaic era as a goddess of hair growth?”). Dressed in “traditional” garb as if they might be some mystic tomb-keeper (or, in the case of the tourist police, dressed in a light blue shirt and wielding huge machine guns), they walk up to you and point at a stela of Ramses and say “Ramses!” and then offer to take a photo of you in front of Ramses. Or perhaps they’re just pointing out a good picture, like “Pokemon Snap: Egyptian Edition.” In any case, they then expect a tip for their troubles, and if you’re really just tipping them to get them to go away, well, that’s part of the tipping experience. Whenever these people would approach I would either subtly adjust my route (living in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, I am pretty used to cold-heartedly steering myself around panhandlers) or I’d mentally check my supply of small change. As the Lonely Planet guidebook had warned, my precious supply of 1- and 2-pound bills was growing ever lower. Many of the “amateur tour guides” were people who just sneaked onto the site, I think. On the other hand, Khaled pointed out that even the tourist police made very little money, and our tips were much-appreciated. Far more sympathetic were the usually aged men who genuinely worked as tomb-keepers, sitting around guarding the ancient temples and sites, rather than wandering around Karnak looking for wallets. I tried to save most of my money for the actual, hard-working tomb-keepers.
One of the most common questions I encountered from merchants and tourist-hustlers was “Where are you from?” I admit that I sometimes wimpily lied, saying I was British or Australian or Canadian rather than American, in case of possible anti-American feeling. If you said you were Canadian, the standard answer was “Canada Dry.” BA-DA-BING! Apparently “Canada Dry” used to be a popular drink in Egypt. Once or twice I said I was British, until I read Jake Forbes’ copy of Palace Walk (he had already finished it) and realized that Britain has a historically HORRIBLE relationship with Egypt! In full imperialist fashion, Britain ruled Egypt through a series of protectorates and puppet governments from 1882 to 1956, a period during which massive nationalist protests were held down by occupying British soldiers. Palace Walk has several historically-based scenes in which British troops fire on unarmed protesters. When Egypt finally became independent, there were massive anti-European reprisal riots -- particularly in Alexandria, a city which has been famous for its riots for more than 2000 years -- and most of the foreigners left the country. Until they were invited back to come look at the pyramids. So, Canadian or Australian was definitely the best option. The Jewish woman on our tour, as I’ve mentioned, regularly lied about her ethnic background (except to Khaled and the rest of us, of course). I would have done the same. As far as anti-Americanism, I can’t say I actually encountered any firsthand except for overpriced batteries and possibly this one teenage or college-age girl that Jake and I saw while we were walking around Cairo the first day. She was sitting on a bench with some guy while Jake and I walked past. “American! Bang bang!” she said in a mocking tone of voice, making gun gestures, unless my memory is embellishing it. We were just amused and kept walking.
We only had time to see a small fraction of Karnak, and the “Mummification Museum,” and soon we were back in the hotel. Next stop: the Valley of the Kings.
At this point I’ve talked about race and religion, and I’m running out of fiery subjects, so the next few posts will be a bit shorter. When I woke up on the boat I found that our pilots were discouraged by the fact that there was no wind, and so we would not be able to sail downstream for part of the morning like we had originally planned. Instead, our pilots grabbed oars and rowed us across the river to the opposite side (on which the road ran), where our group rendezvoused with a bus Khaled had called on his cell phone. Driving in a few minutes what would have taken hours on the felucca, we made our way to Kom Ombo, a relatively small town and the site of an impressive temple (it’s the place where Polnareff fights Chaka, aka the Anubis stand, in Jojo). :/ A group of Japanese tourists was visiting the site at the same time we were, and my ears perked up as I heard the language. A professional tour guide, I realized, has to know a LOT of languages. I believe Khaled knew three or four. We also ran into plenty of European tourists -- Europe is so much closer to Egypt, after all -- and I heard Italian, French and German being spoken.
A final note on Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: if you’ve been to Egypt, it’s totally clear that Hirohiko Araki based his heroes’ travels on a tour he took. They start out around Kom Ombo, go to Luxor, and then take the train all the way to Cairo, bypassing the areas inbetween... exactly the same way that all the major tourist itineraries bypass the middle of the Nile Valley. (There are tombs and sites there, of course, but apparently it’s not well-developed for tourism and there’s a fair amount of Islamic fundamentalists in the region.)
KOM OMBO AND EDFU (Photos)
Back on the bus, we stopped again at Edfu, the site of a huge temple of Horus and the Horus statue I put online in one of my earlier posts. Like most of the major temples of Egypt, it was built on the site of earlier ruins, as the priests would petition the government for money to rebuild an older temple on he same site. I think the idea was to mimic the ancient floor plan and keep continuity with the past, but I’m not sure how closely they followed it, as the Edfu temple -- with its blocky design like twin bunkers of stone -- seems to follow a relatively distinct late Egyptian architectural style, inasmuch as I know about these things. Edfu was rebuilt in the Ptolemaic era, around 300-30 BC, so it’s one of the most “modern” temples. While we were hanging around in the tourist area outside the temple, one of the members of our group cheerfully accepted the not uncommon offer of a “free” tchotchke -- some necklace or scarf -- from one of the guys trying to sell stuff in the parking lot. As soon as she accepted it, the guy either asked for money, or tried to get her to buy something else (I don’t remember which, it’s a standard ploy). Instead of giving the scarf back like I would have done, she kept demurring “Uh, no, You said it was a gift,” and finally ended up retreating onto the bus with the cheap scarf. The angry merchant hung around the bus for awhile, not yelling or anything, but looking pretty annoyed. I felt embarrassed for all of us.
We continued onward to the place where we would stay for the next few days: Luxor, once known as Thebes. The site of the Valley of the Kings, Luxor is one of the major -- perhaps THE major -- tourist capitals of Egypt. The main drag runs along the east side of the Nile, a line of tourist-oriented blocks and tree-lined streets, surrounded by a thicket of yellow Egyptian housing to the east. We were traveling in the off season, the summer, and the streets seemed mostly empty, the sunlight gleaming off sandstone and dust. Everywhere there were tourist-oriented restaurants, hibernating hotels, and most of all gift shops, in a number which seemed totally disproportionate to our small group and the small amount of tourists on the streets. One night in Luxor, some of the party went to a nightclub, where they were the only people there. Taxis drove and horse-drawn carriages continually clip-clopped up and down the main street of Luxor offering us rides, although as proud cheap backpackers, we usually declined. Once we got off the immediate tourist track, though, the people came out and things got considerably more lively, and Jake and I spent some time wandering through the back alleys, looking at fruit and vegetable stands, buying fresh-squeezed juice from vendors, and eating bread and pastries sold to us by an attractive bakery girl in a headscarf who spoke good English and cheerfully quoted us a totally high price which she knew Jake and I wouldn’t say no to (though we did exchange an “oh well” glance).
DOWNTOWN LUXOR (Photos)
I spent some time in Luxor looking for suntan lotion and batteries and the local internet cafe (where I had an excellent orangeade). At one point, I wandered into a small shop lined with the usual bric-a-brac. The store owner said he didn’t have the right kind of batteries, but just wait there! He’ll go get them! And soon he came back, no doubt with batteries from another shop, at a markup. (Things like this happened a few times when I was in Egypt -- there’s some very resourceful businessmen there.) After I bought the batteries, I noticed some photos of one of the Coptic popes on the wall, and asked the store owner about them. He said he was a Copt and invited me to sit down and have some tea. How about it? Oh, and how about some shisha?
No to the shisha, but sure, tea, why not. Egypt was totally validating my love of caffeine. As I sat there in the shade of the shop while he brewed a pot of tea in a tiny beat-up kettle heated over what looked like a lump of peat, I realized that I was being caught in one of the oldest merchant’s tricks in the book (the "be really nice and make them feel obligated to buy something" trick) but decided to go along with it for the experience. As the store owner puffed on a pipe and kept his eyes trained on me, and as I drank the sweet, sediment-filled tea, my own eyes scoured the shop looking for something to buy out of politeness’ sake, just like at the Alternative Press Expo. I eventually settled on a crude, partially broken statue of Jesus or some Christian saint.
“How much for that statue?” I asked.
“25 pounds,” he replied. That’s about five dollars U.S.
“How about 20?” I said.
“25, it’s handmade,” he said, or something like that.
I paid him. I suck at haggling. I only successfully haggled at one point during the tour, and it wasn’t then. Leaving the shop, I vaguely regretted ending up with this wretched clay statue, and when I got back to the hotel I took some photos of it, partly to commemorate and partly because I was considering just leaving it there rather than carrying it back to the U.S. I ended up keeping it and giving it to my friend Adam Burns. On the way back to the hotel an ancient Egyptian man asked me if I wanted to buy some pot. That was the only time I was offered drugs while I was in Egypt, and I was amused but kind of offended that I looked like a pot-smoker, although admittedly my sideburns were pretty crazy.
KARNAK TEMPLE DISTRICT (Photos)
On our first day in Luxor we visited Karnak temple, the great temple complex on the east side of the Nile. It’s in the heart of the city, a park-like area overgrown with weeds and surrounded by walls you can hop over; its vast acreage contains numerous buildings, as well as thousands of piles of broken pillars and stones. The head of the Theban pantheon was Amun, and the ram-headed god was represented in a great row of ram-headed sphinxes that greeted us at the entrance. It was late afternoon, close to sunset, and dogs lay sleeping on the street in the lingering warmth. The park was closing in just an hour, in fact, and we didn’t have nearly enough time to see the entire structure, so I split off from the group and went to the southern part of Karnak, where there were some Greco-Roman-era additions. We stayed together long enough for all of us to see the mosque which, hundreds of years ago, had been built on the site. In the centuries since the death of the Egyptian temples, so much sand and debris had covered the site that by the time the mosque was built, its floor was at least ten feet above the original floor of the temple. It hung as if suspended in the air, still apparently in use to some extent, protected by antiquity laws and the respect of religion. The original floor plan of Karnak had not been rediscovered until the modern era when people finally started to excavate the ruins. It was a powerful display of the passage of time. Of course, now that those stones are exposed, they are again vulnerable to wind and human damage, instead of being safely buried under the sand.
As I headed south alone over the heaps of toppled stone and palm trees, figures in djellabas started to flit among the ruins, and uniformed guards -- the “tourist police” -- glanced at me as I came near their posts. Some of the guards would leave you alone, but as at the Great Pyramids, others were working the same beat as the guys in the djellabas, looking for ways to supplement their income by being impromptu “tour guides.” Unfortunately, in addition to the language barrier, the majority of people doing this, as far as I can tell, hardly know anything about pharaonic history (or, more likely, they realize that most tourists hardly know anything about pharaonic history either, so they’re not about to go up and say “Good day, sir! Did you know that Isis of Koptos was viewed in the Ptolemaic era as a goddess of hair growth?”). Dressed in “traditional” garb as if they might be some mystic tomb-keeper (or, in the case of the tourist police, dressed in a light blue shirt and wielding huge machine guns), they walk up to you and point at a stela of Ramses and say “Ramses!” and then offer to take a photo of you in front of Ramses. Or perhaps they’re just pointing out a good picture, like “Pokemon Snap: Egyptian Edition.” In any case, they then expect a tip for their troubles, and if you’re really just tipping them to get them to go away, well, that’s part of the tipping experience. Whenever these people would approach I would either subtly adjust my route (living in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, I am pretty used to cold-heartedly steering myself around panhandlers) or I’d mentally check my supply of small change. As the Lonely Planet guidebook had warned, my precious supply of 1- and 2-pound bills was growing ever lower. Many of the “amateur tour guides” were people who just sneaked onto the site, I think. On the other hand, Khaled pointed out that even the tourist police made very little money, and our tips were much-appreciated. Far more sympathetic were the usually aged men who genuinely worked as tomb-keepers, sitting around guarding the ancient temples and sites, rather than wandering around Karnak looking for wallets. I tried to save most of my money for the actual, hard-working tomb-keepers.
One of the most common questions I encountered from merchants and tourist-hustlers was “Where are you from?” I admit that I sometimes wimpily lied, saying I was British or Australian or Canadian rather than American, in case of possible anti-American feeling. If you said you were Canadian, the standard answer was “Canada Dry.” BA-DA-BING! Apparently “Canada Dry” used to be a popular drink in Egypt. Once or twice I said I was British, until I read Jake Forbes’ copy of Palace Walk (he had already finished it) and realized that Britain has a historically HORRIBLE relationship with Egypt! In full imperialist fashion, Britain ruled Egypt through a series of protectorates and puppet governments from 1882 to 1956, a period during which massive nationalist protests were held down by occupying British soldiers. Palace Walk has several historically-based scenes in which British troops fire on unarmed protesters. When Egypt finally became independent, there were massive anti-European reprisal riots -- particularly in Alexandria, a city which has been famous for its riots for more than 2000 years -- and most of the foreigners left the country. Until they were invited back to come look at the pyramids. So, Canadian or Australian was definitely the best option. The Jewish woman on our tour, as I’ve mentioned, regularly lied about her ethnic background (except to Khaled and the rest of us, of course). I would have done the same. As far as anti-Americanism, I can’t say I actually encountered any firsthand except for overpriced batteries and possibly this one teenage or college-age girl that Jake and I saw while we were walking around Cairo the first day. She was sitting on a bench with some guy while Jake and I walked past. “American! Bang bang!” she said in a mocking tone of voice, making gun gestures, unless my memory is embellishing it. We were just amused and kept walking.
We only had time to see a small fraction of Karnak, and the “Mummification Museum,” and soon we were back in the hotel. Next stop: the Valley of the Kings.
