A far-off evening

No more than a quick photo essay today. In truth my memories of Luxor and Cairo become harder and harder to summon up, now that a widening gulf of everyday challenges separates me from them. This will be a lesson to me: get the blog posts up quickly after the next holiday, before the central bank can get in edgeways with their unreasonable reporting requests.

The view from my dining table in Midan Hussein, Old Cairo. "Midan" means "square"; the Hussein referred to is the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, whose relics are preserved in the mosque on the right of this picture.

The view in the other direction, with the minarets of Al-Azhar mosque cunningly disguising themselves as chair finials. Al-Azhar is a centre of Sunni orthodoxy which keeps getting mentioned in Albert Hourani's A History of the Arab Peoples (a very dense read, which I'm still working through). Hourani is so parsimonious with his human interest that it's good to be able to put a facade to a name.

I hope this shot doesn't give anyone headaches, but it does epitomise the endless round of vendors who throng the Midan Hussein restaurants. That over-laden boy is hawking bread to the restaurants, without much success that I could see. The vendors who did best were those selling luxuries, like music - lute-players (some commenter will correct my musical terminology) will join your table and play your request for a fee. (Those elegant missiles in the background, by the way, are metal parasols which open to shelter the crowds who gather before the mosque on Fridays.)

I ate chicken kebab on a bed of some parsley-like salad, and drank lemon juice (lots of it: throughout my trip I must have drunk about three times as much as usual in the arid heat). That meal was the most expensive I had in Egypt outside the five-star conference hotel. It would have been more so if I hadn't insisted on an itemised bill, which brought the price down by a quarter, and then corrected an arithmetical error, which saved me another twenty Egyptian pounds or so. Throughout the negotiations I cast frequent glances over the cashier's shoulder to the tourist policeman on the corner of the square; I didn't need to call him over, but he may have had something to do with the restaurant's flexibility.

Another bleedin' temple

Those balloons again, on their early-morning flights over the lunar landscape of the Theban Escarpment.


Apologies to those growing bored with the endless round of temples and tombs, but I'm not stopping now, not when I'm about to introduce my personal favourite among the temples of Luxor.


The Memorial Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir al-Bahri. The other great temple complexes grew and rambled over the centuries as different pharoahs added to them. Hatshepsut built this temple and it seems none of her successors felt they could improve upon it. The original purity of design remains, borrowing spectacle from those magnificent cliffs.


Hatshepsut's temple is also notable for its delicate carvings, many of which show a naturalism not usually associated with ancient Egyptian art.


But as ever, I have to show the human relationship with these old monuments. First the photo that shows I was there:


Photo by Shaik, if I spell his name correctly, a caretaker at the temple. He refused to accept the baksheesh I offered him for doing me this small service - by all accounts the caretakers earn miserable salaries and rely on baksheesh to supplement their incomes - until I used the unfailing formula "for your children".

Now the photo that shows everyone else was there too.


There's an astonishing view through that gateway, and I spent a long time waiting for the crowd to clear so I could photograph it, but this time the tour groups defeated my patience.


(This seems an appropriate moment to mention that even after the Pyramids, my personal prize for the largest and most intrusive crowds at any tourist site I've visited on my travels remains safely with Borobudur, Indonesia.)

Silver service chez Ramses III

After the Valley of the Queens, Ahmed and I had time to swing by the temple complex at Medinat Habu. The site comprises a number of buildings, but they are well and truly dominated by the massive Memorial Temple of Ramses III.


Some people might be disappointed or annoyed to visit an ancient Egyptian monument and discover a small army of waiters setting up tables for formal cocktails and dinner.


Once the initial astonishment wore off, I was fascinated, and not merely by the aesthetic juxtaposition of sacred carvings and white tablecloths - nor by the puzzle of how high-heeled ladies or waiters laden with soup-tureens could remain upright on that undulating floor. It was yet another addition to the wide-ranging list of modern responses to ancient marvels. I keep talking about how awed and humbled I feel in the face of the age and scale and eternal scope of these temples. Here's a perfect counter-example - how to use the same temples to make oneself feel big. Who am I, dining in the company of the old pharoahs?


The temples of Medinat Habu also house the most impressive collection of Victorian-era graffiti of any Egyptian monument I visited. Look at N. Pearce! They just don't put that kind of effort into graffiti any more.


The ocean is not defiled by mere human filth, and the temples remain wondrous.

Valley of the Queens and the Luxor catechism

I struck a bargain with Mr Ahmed, surely the most urbane of Luxor's taxi drivers, to drive me out to the Valley of the Queens for the afternoon. Photography isn't permitted inside the tombs, so my souvenir pictures are limited to the landscape.


Driving away from the Nile, one crosses a line where the irrigation ends - green on one side, sand-coloured on the other. Small villages dot the area, but outside them there is nothing green. It's an astounding barrenness, a clean skeleton of a land - entirely fitting for the great necropolises there.

With limited time, I didn't visit the Valley of the Kings. By all accounts, many tombs in the other necropolises are just as fascinating, but tour groups congregate where the notoriety is. Avoiding large groups when visiting tombs is no mere matter of aesthetics - or perhaps I should say it's a matter of atmosphere, literally. A small room deep underground rapidly fills with the exhalations of visitors. The tomb of Titi - the nearer of the two entrances in the photo above - contained maybe twenty other people when I entered. I couldn't endure the close air very long, and I don't remember a thing about the paintings.

I was lucky enough to catch a break between tour groups when I visited the tomb of Amunherkhepshef, a prince who died young. The beautiful and well-preserved wall paintings show the pharoah presenting his small son to various gods. I studied them at leisure, accompanied only by the caretaker, who spoke no English but who fanned me solicitously.

It must have been on this day that I started taking notes on the Luxor catechism. Wherever you go in Luxor, the taxi drivers, tomb caretakers, tourist guides and market vendors ask the same questions. If people know only a few words of English, they know parts of this catechism. It always starts with an enthusiastic "Welcome!" and should be liberally punctuated with the same.

Welcome!
Alexa: Thank you.
Which country?
Alexa: Mozambique.
Mozambique? Very nice people. (Shop owners add: I have many friends in Mozambique.)
First time here?
Alexa: Yes.
How long you stay?
Alexa: Just a few days.
Not long enough.
Alexa: I know. I'll come back.
Egyptian market?
Alexa: No thanks.

("Egyptian market?" was a specialty of Luxor's caleche (pony cart) drivers. They explain that Luxor's main souk is for tourists and offer to show a real Egyptian market of the kind where the locals shop. I tried to explain that, being from Mozambique, I shopped in (ahem) picturesque markets all the time, and the local version wasn't very high on my list of priorities. But the caleche drivers' determination was remarkable. Close to 11pm on my second day I sleepily climbed into a caleche to get from the Karnak sound-and-light show to the ferry terminal, and in the five-minute ride the driver enquired "Egyptian market?" three times.)

I don't mean to mock anyone's language skills. The average souvenir-seller in Luxor puts most English speakers to shame in that respect - their livelihood depends on it. If I ignored a spiel in English, vendors would try me with Italian, French or German.

As I emerged from the Valley of the Queens, I asked the massed vendors at the gate whether any of them could sell me images of the wall-paintings I'd just admired. Somehow the request for pictures came out in Portuguese - but it was understood, and there was a general flurry as every vendor present rushed to check his stock of postcards. No one had any, but the request flew the length of the row of shops faster than I walked it. As I was about to leave, the one man who had what I wanted hurried over, saying, "Are you the lady who speaks Spanish?"

I bought his book of photos, but the price we agreed on, after a long exchange of offers and counter-offers, plainly wasn't up to his expectations. I did warn him that I came from Mozambique. Surely his other Mozambican friends must have told him we can bargain.

Karnak

After waiting out so many tour groups at Luxor Temple the previous day, I was determined to get to Karnak before everyone else. I woke at 5.00am and was at the ferry terminal by half-past, buying a breakfast of sweet bread rolls from a headscarved girl. I'd planned to take the ferry to the east bank and walk to Karnak - it's a couple of kilometres from the heart of town - but a man with a launch (pronounced "lunch") quickly persuaded me to pay a little more for the ride downriver.


So I approached the temple the way the old priests did, by water, walking up the stone stairs on the bank of the Nile and across the wide square before the monumental gate. The sun was just rising. When the temple opened at six, there were a handful of temple caretakers and tourist police, one other independent tourist and her guide, and me.

I wandered alone in the awe-inspiring hypostyle hall, absorbing the place.


Being alone in Karnak is a rare and beautiful experience - but the photos you get don't do much to convey the astonishing scale of the place to people who weren't there. The photo above makes the columns look about ten feet tall. I have to admit that other tourists sometimes have their uses. Here's a photo from later in the morning.


The guidebook reports that at 10.30 a convoy of about 150 tour buses arrives from Hurghada and starts to disgorge its crowds into the temple. The photo below was actually taken before that.


I've sworn off ever joining a tour group, having spent hours exploring masterpieces like Karnak, and in that time watching busloads of exhausted Germans and Japanese moping through their five-minute lectures from guides before trooping off to the next item deemed worthy of interest. Take, for example, a small side chamber of the temple, filled with intriguing carvings which I studied at leisure when I had the place to myself in the early morning.


The obliterated figure is Hatshepsut, the most successful of Egypt's various queens; the chains of ankh symbols represent the water of life with which the gods Horus and Thoth anoint her. Hatshepsut was a great builder who added considerably to the temple (the whole complex is a great rambling maze, with additions by every pharoah who had the resources), but many of her images, here and elsewhere, have been erased like this.

I couldn't take that photo in the early morning; my camera was playing games again. In a way that was a good thing, as I could meet the temple on its own terms, without worrying about camera angles and compositions. I threaded my way through the maze of halls, chapels and courts from the huge entrance forecourt to the modest Temple of the Hearing Ear at the rear of the complex, where I sat for one of the most memorable breakfasts of my life, comprising bread, water and Karnak.


Then I bought overpriced batteries from the souvenir shop and worked my way back through the complex, taking most of my photos. Seeking out that intriguing side chamber, I waited perhaps ten minutes for the crowds at the doorway to clear. They were tour groups, waiting in line for the preceding group to emerge from the chamber. Small chambers like that must have a strict schedule, with each tour company allotted a few minutes only, so that everyone gets a turn. Eventually I slipped in behind one of the smaller groups so I could take my photos.


I may have fancied the dirty look from the guide, but elsewhere tour guides asked me to move along, with unsmiling politeness. Apparently I spoiled the atmosphere.

As for that obliterated figure, the tour guides I heard were united in their explanation that Hatshepsut's successor and stepson set out to destroy all records of her reign. As I wasn't paying for their services, I never asked the obvious question of why he did such a patchy job of it. Since returning home I've done a bit of background investigation and discovered the matter may be a bit more complicated, but I can see how the more dramatic family saga, complete with political intrigue, conniving theocrats and revenge, would be regarded as more suitable for tourists.


A view from towards the back of the complex - the Temple of the Hearing Ear is behind me at this point. That one can't even see the hypostyle hall from here indicates the huge scale of the complex. Tourist police are on the right; at the extreme left I just managed to catch a distant hot-air balloon. One can take an early-morning balloon ride over the west bank.

I returned to Karnak that night for the sound-and-light show. It was worth it for the magical walk through the spotlit temple, but the voiceover was cringe-inducing cliche-ridden overheated C-grade tripe. The best part was when it stopped and the audience returned to the entrance via some of the temple's most impressive monuments. Tour groups hastened through the marvels as though in a shopping mall. I stepped off the main path in the hypostyle hall and lingered in the shadows, gazing up at the stars between those papyrus capitals. It was a short eternal moment before the guards swept up the stragglers like me and shepherded us back into the bustle of Luxor at night.

The El Feyrouz Hotel

Last year I posted this photo of one of the Nile's many sources, this one in Rwanda. Here's how the same river looks downstream, at Luxor.


That's looking back at the east bank, where the city of Luxor - about half a million people - stands. The east bank is where you get money, tangle with bureaucrats, eat pizza and find lots of scrubby hotels with big painted signs promising cold beer.

I'd rung ahead to a hotel on the west bank, which the guidebook assured me was much quieter. The locals who pointed me towards the ferry terminal all emphasised that the fare was one pound - which I knew from the guidebook, and I wondered about their insistence until it came to boarding and the men selling tickets wanted me to pay two pounds for a return trip. There are no tickets, so I would have had to pay again when I returned.

Luxor seems to be known as the scam and hassle capital of Egypt. Perhaps because I'm accustomed to Mozambique, or just respectful of the sad fact that everyone has to earn a living somehow, I never felt much bothered. For every local with a scam there's another willing to step in with a warning; taxi drivers and felucca (sailboat) captains are quick to step forward with offers, but responded well enough to being politely declined. I should clarify that in my book, shyness about bargaining on a tourist's part does not constitute a scam on a local's part.

Harassment wasn't a problem either. There was a lot of joking around from the men who deal with tourists, along the lines of the shopkeeper who bounded wide-eyed to his door with the line "I must be dreaming!" as I walked past. Either I wasn't in the country long enough to lose patience with it, or I've now travelled enough to know there are worse things to hear from men in foreign countries. Only in one case (a camel-driver at the Pyramids) did I feel the need to tell someone he was behaving badly, and he desisted at once.

Nor was security an issue. The locals with whom I got chatting were always highly amused, and quick to reassure me, when they noticed my Mozambican habit of constantly glancing around to check who was getting close - though I found it interesting that they recognised the mannerism for a security precaution. Many remarked on my travelling alone, but said things like "most tourists are frightened to travel alone" rather than "it's risky to travel alone". (I'm sure they're right, but if the average tourist is opting for group travel for security reasons, it's surely counter-productive - big groups give terrorists more news value.)

Security at tourist sites was generally perfunctory, at least for this obvious foreigner (with interesting exceptions, such as the synagogue in Coptic Cairo). I had to step through metal detectors to enter temples and museums, but no one wanted to search my bag. Tourist police in their handsome white uniforms quietly kept their stations at all the major sites. It was reassuring to have them around, though I never needed them for anything other than directions.

That digression was an appropriately roundabout way of getting to my hotel. The walk from the west bank ferry terminal involved a lengthy discussion with a couple of taxi drivers about the causes of terrorism in Egypt (they both blamed economic conditions created largely by their own government, not anything foreigners did) and a pause for mint tea in a garden cafe (it was a blazing blue-skied day of around 40 degrees), then a short stroll through the side streets.


The El Feyrouz Hotel was certainly easy to find, a big pink cake of a building.


It was a perfect hotel for me - simple, clean and comfortable. The pre-dawn muezzin's call woke me on my first morning there ("prayer is better than sleep") but I slept through it on the second day. There was a lush garden and restaurant.


I enjoyed Egyptian food, which is long on spices and vegetables. A typical meal involves waiters placing a dozen different dishes on your table - aromatic stews, spiced rice, hommus, babaganoush, salads, stacks of flatbread - from which you take your choice. It's great for groups, or those made ravenous by scrambling around temples and tombs in the heat; light eaters like myself spend plenty of time explaining that the food really was delicious but there's just no room for another bite.

I didn't sample Egyptian wines at this stage (more on this later). I was enjoying the experience too much to want to blunt my senses. I didn't even open a book (other than the guidebook) for six days, which must be a personal record. I felt no need to slip into another world when the one around me was so constantly entrancing.

Luxor Temple

The sleeping train from Cairo arrives in Luxor before 7.00 AM. I stowed my bag in the left luggage office, smiled through the ambush of taxi drivers outside the station, and walked down Sharia al-Mahatta towards the Nile. Luxor's governor is cleaning up the town, aiming perhaps more for the comfort of tourists than of average locals: the street is like a sand-coloured shopping mall. Maputo streets would be bustling by that hour, but in Luxor things start more slowly. About five minutes into the walk, sniggering at the steadily declining fares offered by my remaining attendant taxi driver, I glanced up and saw the tallest lotus capitals of Luxor Temple between the shop-fronts.


It's humbling and deflating to meet them so unexpectedly, when a moment ago you were absorbed in your own fleeting concerns. I know the pharoahs built to make people like me feel small, but I'm amazed at how effective it still is, even for those of us who should be well and truly inoculated against the ideology.


Not everyone is so respectful, of course. The obelisk that belongs on the right side of the gate in the above photo is presently in the Place de la Concorde, Paris.

Of course the French were only the more recent of a succession of visitors who for whom the place was just a resource. The Arabs built a mosque atop the old temple walls:


That was long after the Romans had adapted it for use as a fortress, covering the heiroglyphs with their frescos.


Heiroglyphs that somehow never made it into the history books I read as a child: cattle ready for sacrifice at the temple.


More conventionally festive, acrobats doing backflips in the celebrations for the yearly Opet festival.


And that was just the morning in Luxor. I'll come back to the rest of the day, but I'd best post this before solid people get impatient.


(Photo actually taken at sunset the next day, but it seems to belong here.)

First day in Cairo

My camera played up on my first day in Cairo, so the only photo I can show you from that day is this unsteady shot of St Barbara's church in the Coptic quarter.


After a few hours in Cairo, I needed to sit quietly in a peaceful medieval church. Occasional tour groups somewhat dispelled the atmosphere, though it was worth it to hear one tour guide, explaining a frieze of Jesus' miracles to Japanese tourists, refer to the "super powers of Jesus".

Having just spent six of the most wonderful days of my life travelling in Egypt, I feel authorised to pontificate on the key to successful holiday travel, which is to plan to do not too much. For my first day in Cairo, my only other goal, besides the Coptic quarter, was to visit the Egyptian Museum.

Even that was a bit too much for one day. It's a spectacularly cluttered museum, so crammed with treasures that much of it gets pushed into dusty side compartments - I wandered into one of these accidentally, enjoying the sense of antiquities so common as to be put aside and forgotten, until I ran into staff working on computers and realised I wasn't supposed to be where I was.

I should have left after a couple of hours, while my taste was still sharp, but in such an important museum there's always some important piece remembered from art classes waiting in the next gallery, and one more gallery won't hurt. The extravagance of Tutankhamun's burial treasures are a glittering blur. At least I found the Amarna room early. Akhenaton's strange smile, literally so far above the small matters of humans, will stay with me a long time. There are four near-identical colossi of him in the Amarna room, but in one of them the conventional serene smile has a strange grim twist in the corners, and that's the one I remember.

The average photo in art books does these colossi no justice. Certainly, to understand what the Amarna smile is, you need to see it as the average photo shows you, full-face and properly lit. But to understand what the Amarna smile is, you need to see Akhenaton gazing far over your head, his stone mind on eternal matters, smiling at his thoughts.

The other event of note on my first day in Cairo was that I did probably the most dangerous thing I've ever done, which was to cross the Corniche El-Nil on foot at peak hour as I walked into town from the Coptic district. Locals do this at a walking pace, somehow; I did the split-second tourist dash. Most of my travels around Cairo that day were actually done on the metro, which was cheap, trouble-free and no dirtier than the Paris metro. Each subway train has a couple of carriages designated for women only. I thought I'd be respectfully dressed in my ankle-length skirt and modest blouse, but I kept finding myself with the only bare arms on the carriage. Headscarves are near-universal. Trousers are fine, glitter and jewellery is plainly expected, and even figure-hugging tops are acceptable, but the only skin to be shown is face and hands.

More of this tomorrow. By the time I'm finished posting about Egypt, it'll be clear why it has taken so long to get around to it.