SANDStorm

We’ve been putting off a new blog entry for a while because there aren’t a lot of pictures of Cairo yet. And because internet cafes are hard to come by. We’ve had to take our laptop to regular cafes with WiFi and the battery poops out before we get our necessary stuff done.

Okay, now with the excuses behind us…

Cairo is a big-ass city. Our plan was to spend some time getting to know neighborhoods before we commited to an apartment, and everthing is going according to plan. We haven’t commited to an apartment yet. In fact, we have seen only one. It was big, with two bedrooms, a giant living room and a dining room. It was within easy walking distance of a McDonald’s, a KFC, a Radio Shack, a Little Ceasar’s, a Hardee’s, and best of all, a Chili’s. It was on a quiet leafy street. All in all it was as far from feeling like Cairo as we could imagine. But we didn’t ditch all our crap, get dysentary medication and move thousands of miles to live in Takoma Park.

Well, that isn’t exactly true. The hotel we are staying at while we search for an apartment is in Zamalek, a leafy high-end neighborhood on an island in the middle of the city. Imagine a really dusty and loud Upper West Side where you can get falafel for 50 cents. But it feels like the city. You can walk down the street and get a paper, buy vegetables from a guy on the sidewalk, or pick through mountains of pita bread so fresh they are puffed up like a pillow. The bread is laid out on wooden slats on top of milk cartons and customers just dig through until they find pieces to their liking. I really want to do that at Whole Foods in Tenleytown.

The neighborhood we have decided on, Doqqi, is a little more rough and tumble, but only from our white-picket fence perspective. There are a few trees and some embassies and foreigners, but also a great, stinky market street where you can haggle for fruit or half a skinned goat. There are also lots of traditional coffee shops filled with houka smoking men and a main street with honking taxis and muffler-free diesel buses. Something for everyone.

-Thrashin Badger

[The title includes the “ish” because we were never sure our tour actually took us to the famous Wadi Rum. Environmental regulations demand that all guides be certified through a government ministry, and some hoteliers had warned us that certain travel agencies use uncertified guides who take tourists to an area outside of Wadi Rum. Our hotel assured us, with a big map and everything, that we were going to Wadi Rum, but the guides went off road and we were never sure exactly where we were. I even brought along a GPS, but unfortunately it was only set up for the satellites over North America. While I was able to map the route from Mark Rovner’s house to the R St. Starbucks (Satellite photos actually show the grooves worn in the asphalt by his BMW), there was nothing to help me trace the footsteps of Lawrence of Arabia, who actually travelled through the Wadi Rum area to defeat the Ottomans at Aqaba during World War I.]

This post is a bit dated, sorry. Our little side trip to Wadi Rum in Jordan got neglected because we both had a day of stomach distress, rode a ferry and the next thing you know we were on the beach in Egypt and other things seemed more pressing to write about. But the pictures are worth looking at. That said, look forward to the next post. Our driver from the east coast of the Sinai Peninsula (a trip that should have taken 6 hours, but took 12) had a heart attack in the middle of the drive. For those of you unfamiliar with the Sinai, it is a rocky desert about 200 kilometers wide with not much along the highway except army checkpoints, and luckily for our driver, an ambulance station.

But that is another story. Below is the driver of our wonderfully Mad Max Toyota pickup, specially designed to throw tourists into the air, where they may fall down to the sand dunes as if onto a pillow. Or onto the varied and assorted sharp pieces of metal in the truck bed. He was about 15 years old and had a tendency to send and check text messages on his cell phone as we shot up and down 45 degree inclines at 30 miles per hour. It was reassuring that he felt so comfortable. Quite unlike most bus drivers around the world who festoon their cabs with mountains of religious paraphenalia. Anyone who believes that strongly in the blissful afterlife is not someone I want cheerfully passing on blind mountain curves in rural India.

Our little group of S and myself and some Swiss tourists taking a photo break as our driver lowered the tire pressure. Better traction in the sand, you see.

There is a spot where you can climb on a big rock above a pile of ruined bricks that is purported to be Lawrence’s house. He had a great view and good parking, but not many museums and at least two hours from a movie theater.

After a long day of bouncing up and down in the back of a Toyota pickup, we decided to bounce up and down on a camel. Our guides and the Toyota driver pulled up to a guy and asked him if we could ride on his camels. The bedouin let their camels run wild to feed on the limited greenery in the desert, and collect them when they’re needed. This one was collected for our benefit a few moments later. It had a large brand on its neck in the shape of the Arabic letter for L.

Thrashin Badger makes sure the camel knows which way to go. It turned out to be a circle. Riding a camel is really comfortable. You can cross your legs in front of the saddle horn, lean back a little, and fill the desert with your romantic song. I chose Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher.”

After the half hour camel circle, we shared tea with the guy who rented us the camels. He shared his with his camel. He would also spontaneously start singing and then laughing, and our guides would look at each other and laugh really, really hard. They would also video him with their fancy cell phones. We left convinced that everyone thought the camel guy was crazy.

These camels get to enjoy the desert sunset EVERY DAY! If they would only turn around and look at it…

D takes a break from being sick in bed to be sick on the beach.

(Posted 3 days after the events described…)

We intended to leave Nuweiba and the quiet, sun-drenched beach for the chaos of Cairo today, but last night D went to bed with a fever and sinus headache. He’s stuck in bed today, being nursed back to health with the help of the very attentive staff at the hotel who call on him with cups of hot lemon water with honey and toast.

When not checking in on D, I am left to sit on the beach, play pool (ok, maybe “play” is an exaggeration, but I’m trying!), and speed through the latest book I’m reading, “A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey Through the World of Militant Islam.”

This is the high season for tourism in the Sinai, popular with Israeli tourists as Nuweiba is only one hour from the Israeli border crossing of Taba. However we are the only people checked into the hotel at this time.

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After a few text-heavy postings, I thought you might like some pictures for easy digesting. Here are some photos we’ve taken of the hotels and hostels we’ve stayed in during the past month of travel.

We stayed with our friend in Edinburgh who lives in a third floor apartment on this street.

Stairwell to Kirstie’s third floor apartment

View over the Marmara Sea from our hostel’s rooftop terrace in Istanbul

Musty cave hotel in Cappadocia, Turkey

Old colonial-style hotel in Amman, Jordan. We had a small balcony overlooking the busy main street

After two days in a less-than-clean hostel in Petra (sorry, no photos), we splurged on the grand Al-Cazar hotel in Aqaba. We didn’t know what luxury really is until we arrived in Nuweiba…

Our luxury room with windows to the beach in Nuweiba

Hanging on the beach

The mountains of Saudi Arabia on the other side of the Gulf of Aqaba

Four grueling hours after leaving Aqaba we pulled into Nuweiba port – we had arrived in Egypt. Since we knew there was only one stairwell which all of the passengers could exit from the boat, we made our way to the front, as close to the exit as possible until we were told to stop in the restaurant area by the immigration agents. We stood around with everyone else, waiting for the doors to the exit to be opened and the pandemonium to begin.

However after a little while of standing around, an immigration official yelled over to us, “American?” We nodded, and he indicated that we should follow him. He led us through the hallway, stepping over the men sprawled along the hallway walls and behind heavy closed double doors.

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Our travel from Aqaba, Jordan to Nuweiba, Egypt started off well enough. We left the grand Al-Cazar hotel right on time and arrived at the Aqaba ferry terminal at 11 a.m. – the recommended arrival time for purchasing tickets for the 1pm fast ferry boat to Nuweiba.

There is only one fast ferry from Aqaba to Nuweiba every day, and the only other option is the slow ferry. If you mention the slow ferry to an Egyptian who wants to take the fast ferry they swallow and look off in fear. We had heard our own horror stories from other travelers. Eight hour waits for the boat to leave. Twelve hour waits. The ferry not even showing up to port until the next day. From the sounds of it, an overland excursion through Iraq by donkey was the only thing that sounded worse.

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