Going to Egypt pt XI

Just one of many particularly nice carvings in the temple complex on Philae.

Only in Egypt, land of monumental architecture, would this building be called a kiosk. That's the lake, just visible behind Trajan's Kiosk, and under the trees to the right was a little souk and refreshment area.

That, my friends, is a felucca, sitting just offshore where our motorboat will leave us to our camelling. The bluff behind the felucca is riddled with tombs. By landing at the Noble's Tombs, we took the long way 'round to the monastery, about half an hour or so of blissful desert riding.

Oh, yeah! That's Don, still in his hat, and our two police escorts, toting guns and pretty bored by the whole thing. But good-natured and chatty. You get on a camel while it's kneeling; when they stand up it's like being on a bucking horse.

Me and my camel shadow.

Greg's got the camera now: that's Don, me, and one of the guys who owns the camels we're riding. I didn't realize it at the time, but I had the rattiest-looking camel ever. I also noticed that the camels ridden by the owners were stylin', with geometric designs cut into the camel's hair. But tourists? We got the hoopdies.

And this is what we missed by taking the long way 'round: a freeway of camels ambling to the monastery and back. And this shot is after we'd started to string out a bit so the press wasn't as thick as it was leaving the monastery.

Babe's Back!

Trees of Mystery General Manager John Thompson, whose father and grandfather built Babe in 1950, said he was “very excited” to have the head put back into place on Monday.

”The pressure's been intense,” he said.

Full article by Kimberly Wear posted on the Times-Standard website.

Box of Love

You know you want you some of this.

Maybe Aristotle Was Right

"Nuke it from orbit; it's the only way to be sure."

I've spent my Daylight Savings Time hours well, and have a lot to show for it in my bad garden. (When I find the cable that magically gets pictures from my camera into my laptop I will show you what I mean.)

Except for a couple of small patches, I have the blackberry and ivy out all the way to the eastern fence. I have seven raised beds in, with more coming this week. (Thank you, FreeCycle!) Along with the two green-manure boxes, I planted a box of strawberries, a box of lettuce, tomatoes, squash, and beans 'n' peas. I got the large stump from the large, ugly bush dug out (thank you, Jason!). I leveled out and put down pavers in the back, northwest corner—the sunniest spot in the yard. I planted the borders and between the pavers with (mostly) plants rescued from other parts of the yard.

That's the good news. The bad news is, while digging out some turf to make a level spot for one of the FreeCycle raised beds, I noticed that while some of the blackberry is reemerging from buried roots (pretty easy to dig out in the still-soft soil), other buried blackberry roots are not sending up new growth and are instead concentrating on below-the-ground growth. So I don't know they're there.

Fuckers. That pretty much means that whenever I put something in, I must first dig out the top eight inches of soil in order to locate and remove all blackberry traces. That makes for some slow going. After I'd cleared, smoothed over, and leveled a 7-by-7-foot area for the last of the beds, I took a breather and sat down by my new little patio and hand-weeded for a bit. Orange Gina and Vivani sat with me, or chased sticks or bugs that caught their fancy. And I noticed, while I was weeding, something mixed in with the crab-grass and onions and pimpernel and assorted invaders. Huh; it looks a lot like tiny blackberry plants. But it pulls right up and isn't attached to any buried stems or roots...I finally examined one closely. Yep: baby blackberry plants. Hundreds of them! How? Why?

So discouraging.

Going to Egypt pt X

Aswan!

Our floating hotel, the Hamees, is coming up fast on Aswan, the biggest city since we left Luxor and the heart of Egyptian Nubia. You can tell which crewmen aboard the Hamees are from Aswan—they're the ones singing and dancing in place behind the bar or buffet table. They're also darker skinned, though not always. Skintones range from a little coffee in the milk to no milk at all. So while the Nubians tend to be darker, among the crew at least it's best to tell by the dancing.

Our schedule is densely packed. There's a lot to see and do in Aswan, and we only have a day and a half before we fly back to Cairo. We furiously make plans so that we can tell David, our guide, what we want to do. So he can tell The Authorities and keep everybody happy. Happy is important.

Our travel company itinerary calls for a visit to the Aswan High Dam. Ditch that! Unfinished obelisk? Eh. Temple of Isis at Philae? Oh, that's in! Felucca ride? Why not?

That's the travel company's plan of what we should do in Aswan. David gives us several other options. We can visit Aswan's souk, which is supposed to be a good one. We can fly to Abu Simbel on the other end of Lake Nasser. Take a hot-air balloon ride.

We can also take a camel ride on the west bank. (I have studied my guidebook.) And while the destinations aren't that interesting (Coptic monastary, very minor ruins), the camelling part is very interesting. We can also visit the relocated Nubian villages on Elephantine Island (indigenous culture! music! henna tattoos!).

It takes several discussions, but we come up with a plan: felucca to Philae and visit the Temple of Isis. On our return, drop Glenn and Anna off at the Botanical Gardens while Greg, Don and I go to the west bank and take camels out to the monastery. Ride back, take the felucca and pick up Glenn and Anna. Souk in the afternoon, then crash. Hard.

We present our plans to David, who must notify the authorities as to where we'll be. But the next morning, we climb in our tourmobile and head off...to the Aswan High Dam. Why? The answer is unspoken yet clear: because the dam is the symbol of modern Egypt, the government is proud of it, so dammit we're going to see it.

It was a very nice dam.

But then on to Philae. David had another change of plans: the day was pretty calm, and feluccas need wind, so we were instead going to take a motorboat. No hay peto, as they say south of the border. And indeed we end up towing a becalmed, tourist-laden felucca to the island.

When a 2GB memory card costs $30, the sheer volume of trip photos is staggering. I am still labeling photos, and desperately trying to catch myself up to this point in the travelog.
About halfway through the trip I finally had the idea to photograph the entrance ticket as a way to remind myself, a month later, what sites I'm looking at. D'oh!

Sitting in the shade at the Unfinished Obelisk. Two people in this photo think it's unbearably hot, but we're all having fun. Really!

Why was Egypt at times evocative of Disneyland? In a country of 80 million people we run into Dr. Hawass, the most famous living Egyptian—for Americans, anyway. He's the guy in the Indiana Jones hat.

Cruising in our motorboat. And Don's wearing a hat!

Going to Egypt pt IX

After a long day at the Valley of the Kings, the Temple of Hatshepsut, Deir el-Bahari, and the Colossi of Memnon, we are lounging on the sun deck of the Hamees, our floating hotel for the next three days. It felt good to unpack, although while we're tied up we keep our curtains drawn, as the busy street running along the Nile is about even with our stateroom window.

On the top deck, the sun deck, we have a wading pool, a bar, a ping-pong table under a shade awning, and dozens of lounge chairs and little round tables. Most of the chairs are in direct sun—fine, I suppose, for the Europeans sprawled in their swimsuits. And they don't seem to be able to get enough of it. The Taiwanese group stakes out the ping-pong table. We resort to dragging chairs around to follow the shade and sipping karkadet and playing senet.

The reception area, some shops, a sometimes smoky bar, and most of the staterooms are in the middle two decks. The lowest deck is the restaurant. The meals are almost all buffet-style (and the one that wasn't was a set course). Come to think of it, all the meals we've had in Egypt have either been buffet or set-course. (When we return to Cairo and try to order off a menu in the hotel's restaurant we realize why this is: the language barrier was too great, and picture menus are apparently unknown in Egypt. It was not our best meal.)

Continental cuisine is the chef's strong suit, and everybody's happy with what's being offered, though we all avoid the fresh salad. And enough Egyptian foods are included in the spread so that I feel like I'm at least getting the tiniest taste of local food. So it's yougurt and cucumbers and tomatoes and falafel and foul for breakfast (for me; everyone else ate muesli or pancakes and eggs).

The cucumbers and tomatoes reappear at lunch and dinner, along with pasta, a couple of meat dishes like chicken thighs or carved turkey, a fish dish, overcooked (German-style?) vegetables, and a large and elaborate table of desserts. Good fucking Christ. Stuck on a boat that serves three buffet meals a day with all the dessert you can eat. I desperately stick to using small salad plates to slow my blimpage.

More language-barrier fun. A couple of times Chef served up a fish dish that was the whole fish, from which he would carve you out a chunk. The Taiwanese were very enthusiastic about this, but could not get Chef to understand that they really wanted the cheeks. I saw one battle of the wills where the woman kept pointing at the head of the fish, the Chef shake his head NO, offer her some side meat, and the woman in turn shaking her head NO and stomping off.

But I spent most of my onboard time on the sun deck, all covered up, playing games and sipping Saqqara beer, or standing at the rail and watching the countryside slide by, sometimes green and inviting, sometimes with the cliffs right down to the Nile with sand blowing into the water. Farmers, fisherman, birds, donkeys, cattle, camels, everyone going about their day while we chugged past in the heat of the day.

One afternoon the Hamees paused in her motoring, waiting our turn to go through the locks at Edfu, when we began to be bombarded with plastic bag-wrapped goods hurled up and over the railing and onto the sun deck. I got up from our senet game to peer down below: masses of rickety rowboats crowded among the floating hotels, and the men and women and children in the rowboats were heaving cheap tourist goods, rugs and shawls and shirts, up onto the boats to the tourists in hopes that they would in turn hurl money down into the rowboats. Nothing doing, pal! I picked up a few of the bags closest to our table and threw them into the drifting rowboats below. Direct hit! Score!

Mostly, though, we relaxed and ate and watched the world go by. We did stop one day and excurse to Kom Ombo, a fine ruin but notable in my mind as our hottest day in Egypt, about 104 or so. Hot enough that I started to droop by the end of our visit to Kom Ombo. Back to the boat for another Saqqara!

[Speaking of hot, it was so hot in Arcata today that I was down to a t-shirt and shorts while delivering mail. That's right! No hat, no second pair of socks, no capilene or hoodie. So how hot is that? 74 degrees—we were roasting.]

Folks out collecting the day's labor from a marsh alongside their village. At this point I was still playing around with my new camera, and you've already heard me say I'm not the world's greatest photographer, but the haze isn't because of me or a wonky color profile.

We heaved a big sigh of relief when we left ultra-polluted Cairo behind, but we ended up trading industrial exhaust for agricultural pollutants—everyone burns their garbage (when they're not dumping it in the Nile) and field stubble. The combination of hot, dry weather and the smell of fires kept the SoCal part of my brain on a constant state of alert. But we couldn't figure out why the air south of Luxor should be so hazy. Until we tasted grit in our mouths and realized the air was also full of sand blowing in off the desert—which you'd be able to see in this photo if the air weren't so polluted.

Going to Egypt pt VIII

It feels so good to be walking in the desert!

Even if it is a miniscule walk away from the hubbub, one crowded attraction to the next.

I'm chuckling to myself about our group's concern for my safety, about wanting me to take a guide.

Every ten feet or so Ahmad turns around and offers me a piece of his collection of tourist crap. Would I like a book of postcards? (He fans them out.) Cat statue? (Holds it to catch the light.) Scarab? No, no, and no. Do I need to take his hand? (He will treat me like his mother.) No, thank you. I am chugging along right behind him on the crushed limestone trail. I could find my way over this thing without my contacts or glasses. In the dark. There is absolutely nothing to obscure the path. Up, over, down.

We reach the top of the ridge, and I ask Ahmad about some tombs I can see cut into the rock. Ah, that's in the Valley of the Queens; I'll show you. So we make a little detour so I can look down at the tomb entrances and into what's less a valley and more a ravine. We make another little detour to get a good view back down into the Valley of the Kings. Nice. We make another quick detour and Ahmad pauses, bends down and starts flicking through the dusty rocks at this feet, comes up with two little fossil clamshells in his palm, hand them to me. Awesome. I take some more pictures and we start down the other side.

Ah, I see now. I ask Ahmad about the direction we're taking. He explains, we go this way and at the bottom I go to my village for tea. If we go that way—he points down the nose of the ridge, with its warty little guard outpost—if we go that way you have to go by yourself because I don't have a ticket for the Valley, he says. Okay, I say, let's go your way, so we start straight down the cliff face.

Birks aren't really good hiking shoes, so I quickly decide I'll do better without them, and follow Ahmad with them in my hand. He keeps looking back and offering a hand, but I insist I'm fine. Though I am not taking any pictures while scrambling.

Ahmad asks if one of the men in the group is my husband. Yes. Do I have kids? Three, and a grandson. Are you married, I ask Ahmad. He says he wants to get married, but he doesn't have the money. He's been working as a guide leading tourists over this ridge for about ten years. He took a break and worked for a man making alabaster statuettes, but the man was crooked and tried to cheat his workers, so Ahmad quit and went back to this. His entended family all does this. He hopes to save enough money to marry someday. Good luck on that, buddy.

We finish with the cliff portion of our tour and resume the looping ridge trail down toward his village. Ahmad asks if I have time for tea. Man, oh, man, I wish I did! But No, I say, I promised to meet my group and I don't want them to worry. Would the group have time to come by, he asks? I think of our schedule and sadly say, No.

When I stop to put my shoes back on, Ahmad hands me the pack of postcards. A gift, he says. I suspect he's stunned that a grandma just traipsed barefoot down this cliff. I expect he doesn't see too much of that.

I appreciate the Tourism Board's humor in posting these signs. I'm hoping they get the Kodak Picture Spot signs up soon.

Starting up the ridge. The shade pavillion is on the right, some tomb entrances (demarcated by low, buff-colored walls) on the left.

A little higher now, and delightfully empty. The tourists just below us on the trail didn't go any higher and by the time we got to the top of the ridge, Ahmad and I were the only ones in sight. Well, us and the tourist police kiosks dotting the ridgeline.

Ahmad in his galabeyyah and sneaks and blue acrylic scarf. We're just about to start down the cliff below the ridgeline in order to avoid those pesky tourist police and their insistence on tickets. Shoes off!

A flat bit before some more scrambling down.