Egypt

We again arrived in a new country at the godless break of dawn, exhausted and disoriented. Egyptian customs was easy enough once we paid our 15USD for a 'visa', i.e. a vaguely holographic piece of paper to stick in our passport. I'm not sure but I always had the feeling the visa system was somehow associated with keeping out undesirables not just collecting government taxes a the border.

Anyways we found a cab and headed into the centre of Cairo. It was while driving out of the airport that we discovered just how ludicrously thick with things historic Egypt is. The roundabout at the exit of the airport is decorated with a 4000 year old obelisk. A little while later we made a second discovery, our cabbie had absolutely no idea where along one of the biggest roads in Cairo our hostel was. Luckily Egyptians are more than happy to offer directional advice, and we had bargained for a fixed price at the airport. Several sets of differing instructions later our cabbie spotted a Fed Ex guy and made a bee line for him, turns out wherever you are in the world no one knows what's on the 7th floor of decrepit apartment/office blocks like your local courier driver.

Cairo is the base for seeing the pyramids, and in fact the Giza pyramids (the big ones with the Sphinx) are smack dab in the middle of Giza (think Glenfield but a whole lot drier (and with pyramids)). They seem to have kept the area behind the pyramids free of construction giving it a nice photographic backdrop, but if you stand behind the Sphinx and look at it, you can see as much of suburban Cairo as the smog will allow.

The pyramids themselves are as impressive as you would expect for 5000 year old man made geography, but unfortunately you're not allowed in them or on them these days. Luckily that's where the Dahshur and Saqqara sites come in. Dahshur has three pyramids but only one of them is accessible as the land is now controlled by the military. The interesting inaccessible one is the Bent Pyramid which changes slope about halfway up, when the engineers realised they were building at too steep an angle and the whole thing would collapse if they kept going the same way. The Red Pyramid is the accessible one, and notable because we were allowed to descend 200 feet into the very centre of the pyramid. The length of the tombs are strung with fluorescent lighting but on the day we visited they weren't working and Jacquie and I and about 8 other tourists descended all following the light of our wonderful little LED torch (thanks Tiff).

Not only is the entry corridor quite long but it is very low and at a reasonably steep angle. But after squat walking down we were rewarded with three vary dark, quite imposing corbel vaulted burial chambers, the second of which is apparently at the dead centre of the pyramid. Interestingly enough traversing the entry corridor uses muscles that neither me or Jacq have used much of late and we were unable to climb stairs without groaning for a good two or three days afterwards.

Saqqara's main pyramid is Djoser's Stepped Pyramid which was built earlier than any of the others we'd seen and was under some fairly heavy restoration when we visited. But the stand out here was the tomb of a minor official with a lot of very nicely preserved hieroglyphics often with a lot of the original colour showing. The thing that Egyptolgists never mention is that the ancient Egyptians were not the classy minimalist decorators that the ruins may lead you to believe, but instead the original temples were so heavily painted in bright colours that dark sunglasses would have issued at the door had all the original colouring survived.

The other big draw in Cairo is the Egyptian Museum which is at once astounding and hilarious. It is the back alley junk shop of the museum world, except the junk happens to be priceless, and irreplaceable cultural treasures. The building is two large floors with about 50 areas laid out on each floor. Each area is stacked with enormous amounts of carved stonework, statuary, funerary offerings, sarcophagi, and even a couple of rooms of mummies. Nothing is labelled, but everything is worth looking at, in fact if it became a text heavy museum it would take infinitely longer than the 4 hours we spent to peruse its halls. The really fantastic stuff is Tutankhamen's. At the back of the top floor there is a room dedicated to the objects found with him, the centrepiece of which is the fairly famous funerary mask, made of 11kgs of solid gold. Apparently as impressive as all of Tutankhamen's things were they probably weren't that great compared to other Pharaohs, it was just a fluke of another Pharaoh building his tomb almost directly on top of Tut's that meant it was discovered completely untouched by the ubiquitous grave robbers that put an end to the whole pyramid building thing in the first place.

After having had a big rant about Moroccans in my previous post its probably important to say that by Egypt was pretty much what we were used to, people would call out to us a lot, and follow us trying to sell whatever they had, but they got to the point and told us what they were selling and even how much it would cost a lot more readily than their Moroccan counterparts. Cairo in particular had a lot of cheap places to eat, including a specialist pigeon restaurant (don't bother they're all stuffing). The hotels were a bit more expensive than the food but of quite a good consistent standard. In fact we were never even offered an unairconditioned room which was a good thing as most of our afternoons were spent close up to the air-con trying to cool off from a morning in the sun.


We also got to visit old Coptic Cairo, their church of Saint George and a couple of small shrines. It was really interesting to see how much of a tradition the local church has about the two lines in the bible where it says Joseph, Mary and child packed off to Egypt for a few years. They have a purported itinerary and lots of holy sites along its length. We did discover that we quite like Coptic art (especially Jacq). They're churches tend to be pretty much covered in gold haloed icons and dark wood which make them pretty attractive.

After Cairo we were convinced to get a tour loosely organised for us, as independent travel is made quite difficult by the Egyptian authorities. We weren't going to be travelling on a tour bus or anything but we had our transport and day tours arranged for us which worked out pretty well. We started by catching the foreigner only sleeper train up the Nile to Aswan. The train itself was pretty nice but I made the mistake of brushing my teeth in the drinking water provided on the train and was very very sorry shortly thereafter. But to make up for it all for the first time in my life someone was waiting for us at the siding to take us to our hotel. Shame it was just a dude in a t-shirt and there wasn't even a car, just a short walk to our hotel, but I felt special anyway.

That afternoon we headed out the High Damn and to Philae Temple in a wee van. The damn is remarkably unimpressive for something that pretty much revolutionised farming in Egypt, breaking the annual cycle of Nile flooding, and creating an enormous amount of hydroelectricity. It also managed to displace a huge amount of the Nubian population of Egypt while creating the largest man made lake in the world, and for all that it was kind of lame, not perilously vertical reinforced concrete just a whole lot of dirt with a road across the top.

Philae Temple was more interesting as it was one of several temples in the area to be moved following the construction of the damn. Now adays you jump on a little boat and motor around to the island before wandering through the many columned courts and the hieroglyph laden inner temple. Unfortunately for the carvings, 1500 years before the site was dismantled and moved by the Italians, the burgeoning Coptic Christian population defaced most of the carvings while they were using the building as somewhere out of the way to have church. Always a shame when people taking their religion seriously gets in they way of a good photo opportunity.

Our second day we got up at 3 in the morning to catch a police convoy down to Abu Simbel. Egyptian Police Convoys along with the tourist only trains are the Egyptian version of security theatre, they stick a couple of cops with guns and funny helmets at both ends of the convoy/train, wave a wand and declare you safe from the sporadic but quite real terrorist attacks that have been carried out in Egypt. I don't know about everyone else but I think I'd feel a lot safer unguarded with half a dozen other tourists in a van, than packed into a 100 foreigner jihadi piñata guarded by the exact same guys who guarded the convoy the day before.

However Abu Simbel was worth the trip, another moved temple they managed to fake the new one quite nicely into the side of an existing hill, and the carvings were the biggest and most colourful I think we say in Egypt, and we saw a crocodile hanging around the edge of the lake waiting for an unsuspecting tourist to get hot and go for a dip. Apparently the damn also keeps the crocodiles out of the lower Nile.


The next day we took to the Nile on a Felucca, along with a couple of Aussies, an Argentinian, and two skinny Egyptian wannabe rastafarians that were purportedly the crew. We criss-crossed the Nile quite merrily and were treated to some very good home cooking by our hosts. And anytime we parked somewhere we were treated to a bit of Bob Marley as well on an old beaten tape player. The hardest part of the whole trip was having to rotate on the mattresses lining the deck every time the boat tacked and watching the expert boom lowering as we made our way under a badly planned bridge.


We got off the boat the next morning and proceeded to Kom Ombo on our way down the Nile to Luxor. The Kom Ombo temple was notable for it being (half) dedicated to Offler (umm I mean Sobek), and nothing much else really. But you can't really go far wrong with a guy with a crocodile head now can you.

Further down the road we reached Luxor home of Karnak, and the Valleys of the Kings and the Queens. Karnak is fantastic and was the highlight of all the temples for me, upon entering you are surrounded by a field of enormous columns, impressively carved and well, enormous. It is one of those really very impressive places that its hard to describe.


The Monarchal valleys were also quite interesting as they were the result of the complete failure of the Pyramids as secure resting places for past pharaohs. As most of the pyramids were ransacked by tomb robbers at some point the priests packed up all the remaining sarcophagi and built new tombs in a secret valley out in the hills. Later pharaohs got in on the act too, and this is where Tutankhamen was buried. Our ticket let us into three tombs of our choosing. Two of which were very straight forward hieroglyph lined shafts, while the last was a little twisty fullah designed with a false floor and hidden burial chamber. Of course none of this helped as almost all of these tombs were also eventually robbed.


We caught our train back to Cairo and from there caught a bus out to the Sinai peninsula (the triangular bit) and to laid back Dahab. We spent a whole week there, the highlight of which was a snorkeling trip out to a diving spot called Blue Hole. When I was not sucking in water through my nose I was watching big schools of little bright fish darting around and through the reef. Not many big fish but I did spot a fluorescent parrot fish out grooming the coral. Unfortunately Jacquie got a very sun burnt back from that day out so we spent quite a few days lazing round, reading Lee Child thrillers and eating regularly.


Fully rested we took a bus up the coast to catch the ferry to Jordan. While amateur geographers may realise that one could simply drive from Egypt to Jordan via Israel, the presence of an Israeli stamp or even an Egyptian exit stamp for an Israeli crossing would have prohibited us from entering Syria. So instead we paid 70USD each and waited 3 and a half hours for our much delayed ferry to arrive and whisk us across the glassy waters of the Gulf of Aqaba and into Jordan, land of politeness, civility and helpfulness.

Morocco

Every time I go to write about our time in Morocco I am struck with a certain amount of confusion. I look back on the month there as reasonably well spent but when I try and recall individual experiences, the ones that spring to mind are often negative. This is largely to do with the nature of the people in Morocco that speak English. Morocco was under French control for some time so most people speak both Arabic and French, along with varying amounts of Berber in the south and Spanish in the far north. As such English is some kind of distant fifth place language and is only known to either the well educated or those that make their living from extracting cash from tourists.

This would be OK if the average Moroccan tout had taken a course in effective western selling techniques. The almost universal approach to selling something to whitey is to ask what country they are from, how long they have been in morocco, possibly what hotel they are staying at. All before even announcing what it is they would like to sell you because mostly everyone sells everything. They likely have a shop of their own but are just as happy earning commission by guiding you to a local hotel, or restaurant or even just by demanding baksheesh for directions or a pro bono history lesson when in site of anything vaguely historical. And while we've been to several countries with a haggling culture we've never seen such counterproductive and zealous attempts at overcharging as in Morocco, where as in most countries if you know the 'right' price you get the 'right' price, many Moroccans will not bat at an eyelid at not making a sale if it means lowering the price to something a local would consider. And then once you have hardened to the nonsense that goes on, some of them will even act offended when you ignore (or even just refuse) their unsolicited attempts to sell you things you don't want.

Wow that's an especially long paragraph describing the short comings of Moroccans, but the worst is yet to come. Once you've come to the decision that no Moroccans are to be trusted, or even talked to you get your rental car stuck in the sand (it looks an awful lot like dirt down south) and every single person that drives past in the next few minutes stops their car, leaves their air conditioning, rushes across the road and bodily shoves your car until it is free of the bunker. AND THEN wander off without expecting a handshake and a smile let alone exorbitant baksheesh. You can understand why it was so traumatizing right?

Our route around Morocco was pretty much clockwise starting in Tangiers and heading southwards through Tetouan, Chefchaouen, Fez, Meknes, Azrou, Errachidia, then west through the desert and Tinerhir, Boulmaine de Dades to Ouarzazate, South to Zagora, and N'Kob before heading to the west coast Agadir, and Essaouira, and then finally our outward leg through Marrakech to Casablanca.

Our second stop after Tangiers was Chefchaouen, a pleasant small town, with windy alleys painted pale blue, where everyone wanted to sell us drugs. Not in that furtive shady guy walking the other direction whispering '¿Dak Bro?' kind of way, but in the well dressed young men reclining in the public square openly offering high quality, low price marijuana and derivatives to all and sundry. I'm pretty sure we received five separate offers the first day, and to be honest the 'pushers' were a lot more relaxed and polite than the guy trying to sell you brass lamps, or carpets.

We stayed in another really nice budget hotel, and spent some time wandering the alleyways before heading off to climb a near by hill to a ruined mosque (the only kind of mosque non-muslims are allowed into in Morocco, bar two). The climb was green and goat strewn but on arrival there wasn't much of the mosque left but there was a nice man who sold me fanta and espoused considerably on the quality of Morocco's (and therefore his) hashish and its deserved dominance in the european market.

Chefchaouen was also a firm believer in the standardized Moroccan breakfast, with all restaurants in town offering almost identical renditions of toasted fresh bread, apricot jam, fresh cream cheese with mint tea. I should note at this point that mint tea does not ever on pain of death involve a tea bag in Morocco, nope you take your glass or your tea pot and stuff it with as much mint as you can manage, add as much sugar as will dissolve and then add your boiling water and stir thoroughly.

The big cities in Morocco all blur together somewhat, large old quarters threaded with impossibly confusing, historic and/or smelly alleyways. Market stalls piled with fresh foods, public cats begging at butchers just big enough for one cow to be delivered and dismembered. Many closed ornately carved mosque doors, and small boys lurking in the windy bits waiting for us to get lost enough to require paid guidance out.

And then the burgeoning Ville Nouvelle's, full of faded colonial buildings, mad traffic and male-only coffee shops where all the chairs point outwards so the men can look at all the passers by. Perhaps my favourite image I have is of the McDonalds in Meknes with a huge mural in the drive-thru of head-clothed Arabs riding horses, while brandishing rifles above their heads. Very Middle-East meets West I thought.

When we were in Fez we joined a random crowd lining the cordoned off main road only to see three black audis blast past us at way over 100kph bound for who knows where. Turns out that it was either the king or a royal decoy, and the real king caught up with us a couple of days later when we arrived in Meknes. The hotel we had chosen from the guidebook turned out to be completely inaccessible due to crowds lining the streets, and we were completely stuck in the throng with our backpacks for a good five minutes before King Mohammed VI cruised past in one of the afore mentioned Audis.

Our time in the south around the Dades and Todra Gorges was pretty good. First we took a taxi up the Todra Gorge, which was steep sided, had a small river flowing through it and was absolute party central for all the local young moroccans. Big groups of people sat on the pebble islands in the river and banged drums and tambourines and shouted and sang like you wouldn't believe. The swarms continued all the way up the narrow section of the gorge, but seemed to disappear immediately as we rounded the corner and headed up on a day hike over the saddle above the gorge. The land is really barren with little scraggly shrubs holding doing their best to hold the rocks together. On the way over we graciously allowed a British bloke to catch up with us, and proceeded up the hill and down the other side together. Turns out he was a producer of a mini-series being filmed in Ourzazate, and was out for his day off hike cum location scouting. The geology didn't disappoint as the hills provided text book views of distorted and upended sedimentary rocks that left us all terribly impressed, and in the end we even got a free ride to the next town in a clean, safe car.

The next day we headed out of Boulmaine de Dades by taxi again, and headed up the Dades gorge, and the valley of roses which was more an architectural trip than the previous day. The gorge carries a river and is lined with both palm trees and aging mud brick kasbahs (aka forts). We stopped several times and wandered down around the river, while admiring the bizarre rock formations on the other side. The river in the Dades gorge was much swifter and deeper than the day before at Todra, but this didn't stop some locals trying to convince us that we should cross the river and join them (probably so they could sell us a carpet).

On our second day in Ourzazate we succumbed to peer pressure and hired a car and spent the next three days alternately being excited about driving a car on the wrong side of the road, remembering how to drive a manual, getting stuck in the sand, and occaisionally exploring the palm lined river that led south to Zagora, and the desert east of there out to N'Kob. Before we booked the car I was very careful to note which roads we were allowed to drive on, as paved roads are at a premium in the south of morocco, and I was quite surprised that we were allowed to drive to N'Kob as it is a chicken road, one paved lane with broad gravel shoulders where anytime you meet someone coming in the other direction you must half leave the paved strip to make way. The main point of all the driving was the scenery on the way, and several times we just stopped and wandered off into the palmeries, amongst both the date palms and the fields of wheat which were being busily harvested while we were there.

We used our last day with the car to drive up to Aït Benhaddou which is probably the most famous of Moroccos kasbahs and has been in the background of a lot of movies. It was quite an interesting climb thorugh the still inhabited houses inside to get up above the valley and the river and see the town by sunset.

The other thing to do around Ourzazate is visit the film studio sets, Atlas studios was the big one and we got a cheap guided tour around several parts of the fake ancient world. The neighbouring studio had a huge double sided castle used for Kingdom of Heaven (and several movies since) which is at once the city of Jerusalem and Crac de Chevaliers in Syria.

After we returned the car we headed out west to the coast and the towns of Agadir and Essaouira. Agadir was a big modern town with a beach quite unlike anywhere else we'd been in Morocco. We had a bit of trouble finding a hotel with room, but when we found one, they immediately offered us a discount for us to take the biggest room we'd ever seen. If I had been feeling more athletic I could not have just swung a cat but my entire wife around the empty space available.

We visited the beach which was weird as Moroccans try hard to be modest but aren't experienced enough to realize that cotton is just not a modest seaside fabric. The other big news was trusting our lives in the hands of a strange hair dresser. Between a bad smattering of shared English and French we somehow both ended up with good haircuts, and the hairdressers floor ended up with at least half Jacquies hair after an extended thinning session.

Essaouira was different again with an old town perched on the coast, decorated with Portugese battlements and a lively port cum fish market. We didn't stay long but actually felt less stressed when we left, which had to be a small miracle.

Marrakech would have been just another big Moroccan city if it wasn't for our new found devotion to juice bars. The nearest one to our hotel would happily murder a punnet of strawberries to order and server them in a pint mug. No ice, no water, no milk. Just blended strawberry goodness for all of 2NZD. Needless to say we ended up heading over there just about every time our stomachs felt recovered from the last dose. Its other draw card was its main square which plays host to numerous BBQ stands, tassel headed drummers, and under appreciated snake charmers (never pick up a tambourine in Morocco you never know whats underneath it). The only act that actually drew a smile though was the kids corner were a much picked upon old man displayed a hedge hog trained to run around inside a mans hat, several tame pigeons and the most inert lizard you have ever seen. I was entertained even before a young girl made a break for it with the hedgehog and the poor old fullah had to chase off after her. He still seemed quite surprised when we passed him a few coins.

We didn't have high hopes for our day in Casablanca as it is the financial center of Morocco and not much else (apparently all the exoticness from the movie was based on Tangier). However we knew we were able to visit the enormous King Hassan II Mosque and so like obedient tourists we lined up and bought our 20 something NZD tickets stood by the English speaking tour sign and were issued with a plastic bag for the storage of our shoes while inside. And what a lot of inside there was, the main hall was rugby pitch big and cathedral tall but built as one large columned rectanguloid with marble everything, and a retractable roof. The roof is essential as mosques are never air conditioned and once you load the place with 25,000 worshipers the heat could get dangerous if there wasn't some serious airflow allowed in.

And then we left. Another month down and not a souvenir to show for it, but the flight to Egypt was quick and relatively painless and we did our best to charge straight into the Egyptian experience.