Dan H: the world traveling saxophone holder: 10 Month African Trails Epic Adventure: Weeks 37-39

Sudan, Egypt

Week 37 - Jul. 21st - 27th

day 253 - bush-camp to bush-camp near Wad Medani
day 254 - bush-camp to Khartoum
day 255 - day in Khartoum
day 256 - Khartoum to Meroe Pyramids
day 257 - Meroe Pyramids to Karima to Dongola to bush-camp
day 258 - bush-camp to Wadi Halfa
day 259 - day in Wadi Halfa

Week 38 - Jul. 28th - Aug. 3rd

day 260 - boarded ferry in Wadi Halfa, Sudan
day 261 - disembarked ferry in Aswan, Egypt
day 262 - day in Aswan
day 263 - day in Aswan - trip to Abu Simbel
day 264 - day in Aswan - Philae temple
day 265 - felucca trip on the Nile
day 266 - felucca trip on the Nile

Week 39 - Aug. 4th - 10th

day 267 - end of felucca trip, bus to Kom-Ombo temple, Edfu temple then Luxor
day 268 - day in Luxor
day 269 - day in Luxor - Valley of the Kings, Hatshepsut's temple
day 270 - day in Luxor - Karnak temple
day 271 - day in Luxor
day 272 - Luxor to Hurghada to Suez to Cairo
day 273 - day in Cairo

'I give you good price!'

I met the nicest man in the market today! He called me his friend and promised to give me a good price on his wares because he liked my face! What a thoroughly lovely guy. He was polite and charming and at one point made the incredibly benevolent offer of allowing me to look at his wares without even charging me! 'Lookings free!' he said. He even offered to reduce the price offered on a papyrus painting I was interested in from $300 to $200 because he was feeling generous today. OK so the painting was worth about $25 but let's not be too harsh on him, he's got to cover costs right?

So Egypt is the only African country I've been to before and I did not have a good time at all. We docked in Alexandria for a couple of days while I was working on the QE2 and I took a crew tour to the pyramids at Giza. But alas I was not mentally prepared for the galling experience of dealing with Egyptian street vendors and touts. And the above example isn't even close to the behaviour of the treacherous mountebanks that swarmed around the pyramids on the day of my arrival. They were rude, obnoxious, loud and they pushed and shoved and physically restrained me from walking away when I refused to buy anything. In short: they were arseholes. And as for my time on African Trails, the whole of Africa, from Morocco to Namibia to Tanzania to Kenya, was basic training for how to deal with the Egyptian street vendors, the most reprehensible salesmen on planet earth (keep in mind that I'm not knocking Egyptians as a race, just their street vendors).

But at any rate, when I left for my African-Trails adventure I had sworn to myself that I would be ready for round two when I reached Egypt and that this time I was going to have the time of my life and fall in love with the country as I tend to do with so many of the other nations I visit. The aforementioned 'nice' gentleman who made me so many generous offers proved to be highly entertaining to me, in fact almost every street tout I encountered during my time in the Aswan markets was a constant source of amusement. I made it a game to see if I could come up with fundamentally bizarre responses such as: Them: 'where you from?' Me: 'everywhere and nowhere!' Them: 'what's your name?' Me: 'Grignak the Mighty! DESTROYER OF WORLDS!' Them: 'what you looking for?' Me: 'I'm looking for the truth with a pin!'

On several occasions I didn't even have to do any haggling. At one point I spent a few moments browsing a stall before walking off and the vendor followed me for several minutes, haggling himself down to a price I would have been more than happy to pay: '50 pounds! Oh OK then 40! No? 30? 20? 10 pounds!' And here was me thinking that Arab salesmen drove a hard bargain! A technique used by one salesman was to offer his hand for me to shake it. After the handshake he refused to relent his grip, dooming me to an eternity of standing in front of his stall, hands locked in an infinite grip, or it would have been if I hadn't wrenched my arm away and walked off. Last time I had encountered people this persistent it had left me flustered and perturbed, this time I was having the time of my life! It really can be hugely entertaining to deliberately mess with these people and play their own game.

What was interesting was the fact that the Sudanese had been the exact opposite in temperament to their Egyptian neighbours. The Sudanese were friendly, warm, outgoing people who seemed to be genuinely interested in saying hello to us without any ulterior motive. On several occasions when walking around Khartoum I was approached by friendly locals who wanted to greet us enthusiastically. Previous experience in 9 months of Africa had taught me to prepare myself for a con or a request for money but in Sudan all they wanted to do was say hello. At other times I also found myself wandering around the markets, browsing wares at random. I expected the stall owners to immediately spot me and start their bellowing with lines such as 'You buy! You buy!' or 'Yes you like?' yet there was only silence and courteous smiles!

And so these brief encounters in Khartoum set the scene for the rest of our time in Sudan, a relaxed albeit extremely hot journey through the largest country on the African continent.

Warm out today, warm out yesterday, probably be warm tomorrow

Like I said: it was quite hot in Sudan. That's an understatement. Although cloud cover in the south blocked out much of the sun and kept the heat down a little, the average temperature hovered around the 45-47 degree mark (around 120 F), for the rest of our time in the country. Our first setback in Sudan occurred before we had even reached Khartoum. We stopped by the side of the road to bush-camp but heavy rain caused the muddy ground to turn into a thick swamp which the truck was unable to get itself out of. We spent much of the rest of that day trying to dig the truck out and even attempt to create a road for the truck by piling up small rocks to make a kind of makeshift gravel path. Nothing worked and it looked like we were well and truly screwed.

We eventually had to flag down a passing tractor and it helped to pull the truck out. It was far too late in the day to make it all the way to Khartoum as we had originally planned so we set up camp behind a small petrol station by the road. The next day we reached Khartoum. The Sudanese capital was quite pleasant, mainly due the aforementioned complete lack of a tendency for the locals to bother and pester you to buy their wares and for them to say hello without then following on to ask for money. Or a pen. We spent a couple of nights at a camp-site on the river Nile and chilled out, not doing to much because of the absurdly hot weather, quite a sudden change from cold and rainy Ethiopia.

Myself and Phil almost managed to get ourselves arrested for taking illegal photographs despite the fact that neither Phil or myself actually took any photos at the time. But we were near an apparently sensitive government building and the fact that I was even holding a camera seemed to get us into trouble. He insisted that he would confiscate my camera even after I showed him the photographs on it and proved that there wasn't any photos of any 'forbidden sites'. Once we realised that the guy trying to hold us up couldn't actually show us any I.D. to prove he was a cop we buggered off. We didn't want to find out whether or not the phone call he was making was to the police or not. The idiot followed us for a while and actually found where we were camped even after we thought we had lost him. Nothing came of it although I frankly didn't think anything would anyway.

The rest of our time in Khartoum was quite uneventful. I was content to either wander around the city which was extremely quiet due to it being Friday, the Muslim holy day, or to simply lounge around the camp-site drinking plenty of cold water. After a couple of nights we were ready to head out into the northern deserts of Sudan and make our way towards Egypt.

Bush-camping in the desert (it's been a while!)

We left Khartoum early and headed out towards what would pretty much be the only tourist attraction in all of Sudan: the Meroe Pyramids. Though not on a scale nearly as grand as the pyramids at Giza they were still a highly intriguing sight. Some of these pyramids were left as they were found, some of them were partially restored and some were even rebuilt to look exactly as they would have been when they were brand spanking new. These Nubian pyramids were constructed much more recently than their Egyptian equivalents, sometime between 800 to 280 BC. All in all there were dozens and dozens of these little pyramids in the area. The highlight of the day, quite possibly the highlight of Sudan for myself, was not the pyramids themselves but actually being able to set up our camp right next to them. Sudan is a country that finds itself with very few tourists and we had the Meroe pyramids all to ourselves while we were looking around the area. So later on in the day, once it had cooled down a little, we parked near the ancient archaeological site and set up our camp for the night. Having the entire area to ourselves, the quiet and tranquil desert in the middle of nowhere, was just wonderful. I had missed the peace and solitude that we had gained during some our more remote bush-camps in West Africa so this was exactly what I wanted.

It was too hot to sleep in a tent that night so I just rolled out a mat and slept on the soft sand. We continued driving on the next day and after a brief look around some more pyramids farther up the road we bush-camped out in the desert once again. It was exceptionally hot that night due to an overcast sky trapping the heat in after sunset and I noticed that nobody else put their tent up. The day afterwards we arrived at Wadi Halfa where we spent the night just outside town where we found a nice shady spot behind a large hill in the late afternoon. The next day involved finding ways to kill time in Wadi Halfa as we still had another day and a half before the ferry to Egypt left. Killing time in Wadi Halfa pretty much consisted of sitting around in the shade and sweating for hours at a time and moving around only to attempt to find cold water from some of the local vendors.

The next day we were ready to board the ferry to Egypt as scheduled but that was pretty much the only thing that day that went as planned. Since the ferry was for foot passengers only we would have to have the truck delivered to us via a private barge that was supposed to be sent down to Sudan by its Egyptian owners. Gav had warned us that this part of the trip almost never goes as planned for African Trails trucks. He was right to caution us. We had been told that the barge was already on its way and would arrive before we left Sudan. Further probing revealed that it hadn't left Egypt at all. We left the truck, boarded the ferry and it would be almost two weeks before we would see the truck again. Gav had described the upcoming ferry journey to us as a genuine trip from hell, like I said he's always pessimistic so we end up being pleasantly surprised, but I didn't mind it. The lower deck was air conditioned and later that night we simply bunked down on the upped deck. Others had brought roll mats from the truck but I was travelling light so I simply was content with the hard metal floor. It was a pleasantly warm night that was interrupted only by the nighttime call to prayer.

Land of the Pharaohs

After a night sleeping on the the deck we milled about for a few hours before we found ourselves in Egypt around midday. Not everybody had slept so well, especially Shaun who was woken up several times including when a very strange man woke him up in order to ask him what he thought about the political situation in Britain for some reason. Trying to get through customs was for most people a futile exercise in pushing, shoving and shouting as loud as possible. This was quite pointless really since security was getting incredibly pissed off and after screaming what were no doubt Arabic obscenities at the most brazen of the queue-jumpers one of the guards ushered me and some of the other Af-Trailers through since we were waiting around and smiling politely.

Gav's contact in Aswan proved to be very reliable and had an air conditioned minibus waiting to take us to our hotel, beautiful! The hotel was also quite fancy (relatively) and had comfy beds, decent showers and extremely cold air conditioning. During our time in Aswan we took a nighttime trip to Philae temple to see the sound and light show which might well qualify as the most corny, trite, pure bathos ever conceived by the Egyptian tourist boards but it was spectacular to see the beautiful temple lit up at night. Commentary included such wonderful lines along the lines of: 'Oh Nile! Caress the crevices of my beautiful temple with your warm flowing waters! Let your warm juices fill my every hallway and alley!'. Well that's how I remember it anyway but I have a dirty mind and I'm only exaggerating a little. I do certainly remember some comment about the 'beautiful priestesses of Hathor and their jutting pert breasts' or something like that. After all Hathor was the original party god: Goddess of beauty, happiness, dance, love and best of all: music. My kinda deity in other words.

The other trip was a rather long coach journey to Abu Simbel, a stunning and awe inspiring pair of temples built by the Pharaoh Ramses II when his ego started to get the better of him and he decided that he would upgrade his position from Pharaoh, god's appointed representative on earth, to an actual, literal god. Was there ever a more vainglorious narcissist in all of history? There probably were actually. But most people like that likely spent most of their time standing on street corners babbling incoherently to passers by about their right to divine rule whereas Ramses II seemed to manage to convince an entire nation to go along with his deification and his apparent ascension into immortality and was able to convince thousands of workers to erect preposterously enormous temples to honour his mighty, indefatigable omnipotence. Abu Simbel was the site of one of those many monuments. Overwhelmingly magnificent and quite colossal, the temple of Ramses II features for vast statues of Ramses outside sitting on his throne

At least Ramses II was nice enough to allow his wife Nefertari to ascend to godhood with him. Though Ramses, the old dog, had many wives, partners, flings, old flames and friends with benefits, he favoured Nefertari most of all. The nearby temple of Hathor was dedicated to Ramses' special lady and although not quite as sizable or magnificent as his own it was still a fantastic sight. Two very large statues of Nefertari stood outside, though they were admittedly flanked by FOUR statues of Ramses who just had to get one up on his wife. But I shouldn't be too hard on ol' Ramses for this, he had actually made some very generous and previously unheard of concessions for his wife. Firstly, although his own statues outnumbered Nefertari's, they were of equal size which was completely unheard of and was never repeated in Egyptian history. Secondly it was also extremely generous of Ramses to even build his wife a temple at all, and such a magnificent one too. This was not something that most Pharaohs bothered with. So Ramses II, despite his somewhat conceited nature, was actually incredibly liberal for the time. Right on!

Back on cruise ships, though it ain't the QE2!

Upon leaving Aswan we did so not by bus or train but by boat. Included in the price of our Af-Trails trip was a two night journey down the Nile on board the small sailing vessels of the Nile known as feluccas. These little boats were surprisingly spacious despite their size and the deck was covered in a huge mattress that allowed up to 10 people to lie down with plenty of room and to stretch out without getting in anyone else's way. Since we were 18 people at the time we took two boats. We also took several ice boxes filled with cold water and, more importantly, plenty of beer!

The next few days involved cruising slowly down the Nile, stopping frequently for a dip in the Nile or to allow the crew to prepare our food for us which was also included in the trip price. Swimming in the Nile was wonderful, the water was very mild and the perfect way to cool off after sweating in the midday heat. At night we simply docked at the riverside and slept on board. We didn't actually cover a huge distance past Aswan but it was still a wonderfully pleasant and tranquil journey nonetheless. Gav was also happy to come along since if the truck had made it to Aswan he would have had to leave the feluccas early and go back to Aswan to get it. But the truck wasn't there and so instead Abuda, Gav's previously mentioned contact for Aswan, organised transport for us.

On the third day we were picked up by an extremely comfortable, air conditioned coach with reclining seats, quite a step up from the comfort level of our faithful old truck. We were driven to Luxor, though not before visiting a couple of temples en route. The first temple was Kom Ombo, a partially intact monument that, although mostly ruined, contained some spectacularly preserved and highly detailed stone carvings on the walls. The second temple was Edfu, a stunningly enormous and mostly intact building that amazed everyone with its monumentally immense walls that flanked the entrance gate.

After exploring these fascinating ancient sites we were on our way to Luxor.

Luxor

Some scams are just so ridiculously pointless that you just have to laugh at them instead of getting frustrated. On our second night in Luxor some of us went out to get some Chinese food. Me, Sarah, Phil, 'Spots', Katey, Paige and Jess all left in a cab for the centre of town where we attempted to find a place called the Fortune Cookie that we had heard about. We were wandering around asking for directions when a two horse and carriage drivers told us that they knew where the place was and could take us there. We agreed on price and were off. We trotted through the town streets for about 10-15 minutes before coming to our stop. A strange feeling of deja vu overcame us as we disembarked the carriage until is suddenly dawned upon us: we'd been taken in a circle right back to the same spot! Well not quite, we were about 20 feet further down the road from where we started, perhaps they hoped we wouldn't notice! We were outside a Korean restaurant but not the place we wanted. Of course we refused to pay. One of the drivers kicked up a huge stink, swearing, threatening us, pushing us and telling us he would call the police and generally just being a world class arsehole. Was was strange was that he actually seemed to be genuinely upset, like he thought that we were trying to rip HIM off! 'Fuck you man!' was the not so eloquent epitaph delivered by the imbecile as we moved into the Korean restaurant we decided to settle for. Well not quite, he followed us into the restaurant a few times until we made it quite clear that we weren't going to give him and penny and he should bugger off and stop wasting his and our time any further! Still the Korean restaurant proved to be absolutely wonderful and so the incident could have been said to have a happy ending after all!

The rest of our time in Luxor went perfectly smoothly. Luxor contains the largest concentration of ancient Egyptian monuments in the whole country and we spent plenty of time exploring them. A trip to the west bank of the Nile allowed us to take in several sights, starting with the impressive Colossi of Memnon, two huge statues that sit near what used to be a temple but is now rubble. Next was the Valley of the Kings, a fascinating archaeological treasure trove where dozens of pharaohs of the past were buried in incredibly complex and beautifully adorned tombs. After that was a trip to Hatshepsut's Temple, build by Egypt's only female pharaoh and a beautiful sight indeed.

The main attraction in Luxor though is Karnak temple which might well be one of the most extraordinary works of architecture ever built. It's a gargantuan, cavernous temple complex that covers a truly vast area and even today, thousands of years later, it still stands with many areas relatively intact. It was certainly one of the most impressive temples so far but then I could say that about most of the temples I've seen in Egypt.

Eventually Gav managed to wrest control of the truck from the incompetent pond-scum who ran the barge service from Sudan and after some more pointless turmoil with even more imbecilic customs officers he was finally able to get the truck back up to Luxor to meet us. Separated for almost 12 full days this was the most time we had spent away from the truck (not counting those who left the trip altogether and then returned later of course!) It was time to get back on the road again, this time in African Trails style not some fancy comfortable air conditioned coach! We were all starting to get soft!

Cairo

We broke all truck records when we drove from Luxor to Cairo. 835 kilomertres was the farthest distance we had travelled in one day and as for time: well we left at six in the morning and arrived at midnight, a staggering 18 hour driving day. Although I should point out that not quite all of it was spent driving. Although a wrong turn in congested Cairo was responsible for some of the lost time it was Gav's wrongful detention by the police (again!) that put a couple more hours on to the trip time. First things first I should point something out. Drivers in Cairo are some of the worst drivers in all of galactic history. You can't really describe it, you just have to see it for yourself. On a crowded street one car had tried to push in front of Gav from a side street suddenly but Gav didn't see him in time and the barely noticeable impact (for they were going at about 2 miles-per-hour) put a tiny little ding on the body of the car. The owner of the car wanted US$100, Gav didn't pay him a penny and so the police detained us for a while. For some inexplicable reason we were given a police escort to our hotel after everyone eventually realised that Gav wasn't paying and so we got a squad car in front of us, lights flashing and siren howling as it took us to the Sun Hotel in downtown central Cairo. I'm not sure whether the escort was an act of good faith or a guard to prevent us from maliciously dinging any more cars en route but it didn't really make much difference anyway, people don't seem to move out of the way of flashing lights and sirens in Cairo. Even an ambulance tried to speed past later in the night and nobody moved to one side!

But we were finally there at the Sun Hotel just after midnight. Our arrival in Cairo marked another momentous (well maybe not quite momentous) occasion: the end of the latest segment of the trip.

Nairobi to Cairo scratched off the list! With one final leg to go the trip will be over soon! 9 months down and 1 more to go!