Off the Couch and On the Road

The traffic in Asia is insane. Mad. Nobody stops, instead swerving around all obstacles (read: people, cars, chickens, pigs) like a choreographed performance. So the best way to tackle a road crossing is to stare down each bycicle, car or tuk tuk as you put your faith in the universe and slowly cross. Europeans don’t seem to have this skill, they only stop if the law says they must (and often not), otherwise if you are in their way then you will get hit.

I wasn’t so sure about Egypt though – there weren’t many lights or crossings and 8 lanes of traffic bumper to bumper – would they swerve I wondered? Stop if I walked in front of them? I watched the locals and soon learned. Though the driver was often yelling, driving, reading and occassionally spitting out the window simutaneously, he would come to an abrupt halt if you held your hand up in a ‘stop’ signal as you walked in front of the car. Mind, the moment you let your hand fall, he would pump the accelorator and you would be inches from a Cairo emergency room. The hand would swiftly come flying up, the brakes screeching to a stop.

It was a bizzare form of power, and ironic form of entertainment – hand up, down, up, down as the cars started and stopped respectively.

I will, I thought, have great difficulty crossing roads once I finally get back home. I imagined myself stepping out on the highway, arms waving madly, expecting everyone to stop while others look on in amazement as though I’m mad.

Then again, maybe I will be – I can’t even remember what side of the road Australians drive on.

-Sarah

I think once you know how crazy Cairo is, you’re even more hesitant to brave it alone. And yet a tour leader once told me, if you don’t get lost, how are you ever supposed to find anything? So I got myself lost in Cairo.

I started with Abdin Palace, and the frowns and shaking heads of the hotel staff and taxi drivers should have warned me that it wasn’t too popular with tourists, but I forged ahead regardless, spending an hour wandering around the museums inside – filled with weaponery and wartime artifacts, silverware and glassware, and gifts from visiting dignitaries. It was incredibly boring, and in fact I was the only one there the entire time, the guards in each room turning the lights on as I entered, and off as I left, watching me closely so much so I forced myself to have a keenly interested look on my face the enture time. Exhausting.

I left and just walked, and walked, not really knowing where I was going but always having a vague idea about where the Nile was. The streets were crumbling, hot crowded and noisy, filled with the sounds of horns and Arabic shouts, and the smells of spices and street fried bread. There was not one tourist in sight – this was the real Cairo – and when I finally came across a white guy with a backpack I smiled and asked ‘Do you have any idea where you are?’

‘Nope!,’ he grinned and we kept walking our separate ways.

I definitely found something special, getting lost in Cairo, I’m just not sure what it was. But it was great.

-Sarah

Cairo is one of those cities I can imagine new tourists cowering in – Lonely Planet describes it as ‘chaotic, noisy, polluted, completely unpredictable and seething with people, the intencity will either seduce or appall,’ which sums it up perfectly (but I’ll just elaborate for another week or so if you don’t mind. No? Brilliant).

I slept for a full day to recover from my hellish layover and flights, deciding to venture out the following day by visiting the Egyptian Antiquities Museum. Just leaving the hotel was exhausting -ignoring lurid comments from hotel staff and taxi drivers, braving the intense wall of heat from the moment you step outside, and being pushed and shoved aside by hundreds of tourists all aiming for a brief glance at the treasures within the museum before pushing their way to the next artifact.

The museum reminded me of an enormous warehouse, more than 120 000 artifacts, some of the oldest in existance, strewn about in a vaguely organised fashion, some with labels typed out circa 1970, others leaning against pine boards at an ideal height for the two-year olds to hang off. It was cringe-worthy and yet magical – the fact most of the limestone and granite remnants weren’t hidden behind glass doors, as well as the lack of air-conditioning gave an impression of being in an airless tomb itself, and I was not surprised to learn 100 crates of mummies, carvings and jewelled treasures were ‘forgotten’ for 80 years simply because someone neglected to stocktake a section of the lower floor. The Louve it was not, but full of ‘wonderful things’, certainly.

I braved the heat again to wander around downtown Cairo for the afternoon and ended up sipping peppermint tea with locals in their perfumery and art gallery, chatting about Australia (Um….nope haven’t been there either. Nice is it? Lovely.) before exhaustion set in and I found a taxi to take me back to the hotel.

Or try, in any case. I forgot the golden rule of travelling in non-english speaking countries – take a hotel business card with the address of the hotel in the local language – and ended up driving around in chaotic traffic for 30 mins before finally arriving at the hotel, sucombing to my cool room and American TV for the rest of the night. Bliss.

-Sarah

I don’t think many have asked why the grass is greener on the other side, or understood that unique human ability to want what we don’t have.

Probably they just crossed a wooden bridge, looked back over to the hillside they walked from, pushed their spectacles higher up the bridge of their nose, nodded and mumbled, ‘Yes, yes. Definitely greener. Must write that down.’

The greener pastures complex is, I think, at it’s most defining moment when you’re overseas and alone, in countries where you can’t wander aimlessly down the street or hang out in a coffee shop, and where you have nothing but time to sit and think about the hillside on the other side of the bridge. It is interesting to note the things one does miss at this time (barring the obvious family and friends) – the once neglected car? Job interviews and suits? Washing and vacuuming? Cash machines and paved roads? Clean feet, like, all the time? Insane.

I have realised  it’s not a long term dilemma, usually the appearance of some newfound friends, being amongst hoards of tourists, an episode of CSI or emails from home eases the ache to fly home and start cleaning the bathroom. And then there are the moments you pinch yourself and find it amazing that you are seeing the very best of the world that is privileged to so few.

I have often replied to the question, ‘so why are you travelling overseas?’ with a wink and a wry, ‘Oh, it’s cheaper than therapy.’ But perhaps I should replace that with, ‘Well, there was a wooden bridge I decided to cross…’

Yes, yes. Definitely greener. Must write that down.

-Sarah

Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe was quite a strange place to visit – like a modern town that had suddenly vanished, leaving the empty shells of shopfronts, tiled pavements and streetside statues as a bleak reminder of what it had once been.

And ‘once’ must not have been that long ago – menus were still full of choices that weren’t available, shopkeepers still trying to stay in business – but their friendly greetings and apologies were full of the knowledge that they couldn’t help us with their empty shelves and bare coathangers, as much as we wanted to help them.

It was quite sad, and real, and there was hope that an upcoming election may change things, but most likely not. We ate at the hotel I was staying in post-tour, and had drinks down at the backpacker hostel, who could both afford to import food and drinks, though when walking at night we had to keep an eye out for wild elephants, apparently. I didn’t quite believe our tour leader when he said this, but considering both my close encounters with elephants on this trip have been terrifying, I thought best to lean toward caution.

The night after our tour officially ended, we made our way down to the river for a restaurant buffet meal and a performance of African music and dancing, which was beautiful, and relaxed with some wine (at $1.50 a bottle. A bottle. I thought it important enough to mention) before someone exclaimed that a hippo had made it’s way onto the lawn of the hotel and was munching away at the grass, minding it’s own business. It was huge, massive, and was apparently a regular visitor to the restaurant. We all mumbled about having had to pay money for the past month on cruises and hippo walks where we barely saw the animals, and here was a full-grown hippo out of the water, at the place we were spending $8 on dinner. Also, after seeing two buffalo in the Masai Mara, worthy of a dozen shots, we ran into a whole herd on the road back to our hotel. Typical.

I had a week in Zimbabwe after the tour ended, luckily with a few others that were staying a day or two longer as well, and spent my time on the internet, swimming, sunbaking and reading, until everyone else had left, and I was on my own bored senseless awaiting my flight to Cairo.

Which meant, of course, that I won Big Brother. Right?

‘Yes! You won, congratulations!’ a ‘housemate’ said to me as he left for the airport. I did always wonder what it felt like to be the last one in the house…

-Sarah