Travel Log 4 - Marsa Mutrah to Cairo

21/01/08

Alexandria’s ancient layout was not well equipped for the hordes of ancient, garishly painted Lada taxis. We arrived in Alexandria en route to Cairo on the bus we took that morning.

The aged trams crept beneath the monstrous high rise housing and the sad, faded glory of the Colonial architecture. It was a sensory overload with most spivs, goldbricks and wheeler dealers having a strong enough command of the English to play their angle.

It was only when out on the sea front and with a bit of objectivity that we could really appreciate what a startling place it was – it looked as if it had and would be there for ever.

We only had a few hours to spend in Alexandria though before heading off to Cairo. Another four hours on the bus, this time sat next to a man relishing his own obesity with a melodramatic snore that kept me on edge for most of the journey.

The Arabic chant which was invariably put on over the bus speakers at top whack was at first irritating began to take on a new light when in the context of the more desert like landscape. The two are well suited.

Upon arrival in Cairo we decided to shirk the taxi drivers and make our way to a hostel on foot. Crossing eight lanes of traffic while feeling like poorly balanced tortoises with our cumbersome backpacks on, was a good way of waking up after the drowsiness of the bus.

22/01/08

We had a grand old room at the hostel with lofty ceilings and a balcony with palatial views of the up-market shopping district. That is not say that the streets were not a moral / social / physical slalom of cars, carts, amputees, guides, papyrus salesmen, mud and cats.

We paid an extortionate amount of money at the British Embassy for a letter of recommendation to take to the Sudanese in order to apply for a visa. We were on edge as we headed over to the Sudanese Embassy because of the tales about one month waits for a visa – apparently it all being down to the whim of the bureaucrat who processes your application.

We arrived in our smart shirts and grinned inanely at everyone we met. The bureaucrat responsible for the application form did not raise his gaze from his newspaper at any point in our conversation, just barked at others who told us what to do. On completion of the forms we were sent from bureaucrat to bureaucrat all over the embassy, upstairs and down stairs. When we finally reached the bureaucrat with his own office and it was decreed that our visas would be ready on Sunday, just five days. It would be nice to think our Arabic 'hellos' swayed him.

The evening was spent in the city's Islamic District which was clearly delineated between those areas within a few metre radius of where the coach tours stopped and everywhere else. Within the radius it was a manic and headache inducing melee of whining pleas to look at tat but as the sun began to set we lost ourselves in the crooked, medieval streets away from it all. Although it was a hive of activity it seemed far more honest and it therefore seemed more of a privilege to see this way of life in action. Just as the quantum mechanic alters the results of their experiment through observation, we changed what occurred around us by our presence in something more 'real' than what those on the coach tours saw. This is a pretentious fear as it is condescending to imagine that the individuals observed are not able to cope with change.

What we saw was steam and dust lit from the open fires of soot machines. Pigeons and canaries darting around in wicker cages. Brightly lit rooms displaying sacks bursting with cotton and giant cakes of soap. A smoking cooper hammering away exuberantly. During dusk we climbed the pitch black steps of the city's oldest mosque's tallest minaret and watched the city teem amongst the rubbish below the skyline of optimistic sky scrapers, half demolished buildings and grand colonial architecture, all shrouded in smog. The city's 'song' as a Cairoan later described the incessant yet strangely expressive hooting of car horns, was interrupted by the piercing call to prayer that jolted through the rickety speakers by our heads.

23/01/08 - 24/01/08

We got the standard pyramids and Sphinx over and done with. There seemed to be a wave of touristic hostility towards these sites with in the 'real' traveling fraternity who now consider them passé sites. However, the pyramids are the only remaining member of the Seven Wonders of the World club. Of course the coach parties were a distraction to the awesome and imposing nature of the structures but we were not pretentious enough to consider ourselves detached from them.

Almost more interesting than the pyramids was our guide Wasim and beside his knowledge of Ancient Egypt, the frank and honest picture he painted of modern life in Egypt was fascinating. Ranging from politics, religion and relationships it was a true insight.

In the evening we met Adam a secondary school Arabic Teacher on the street. We shared karkaday (hibiscus tea) with him – sweet and pungent, fitting preconceptions of a dark, mysterious and opulent Arabia. Before wandering the streets with him shaking hands with everyone we met followed by a gaggle of children. He took us to an empty mosque and we sat below its grand chandelier on garden furniture and marveled at its design. We followed him round a small leather jacket workshop still working strong late into the evening. We did end up paying quite a large amount for some sweets it was suggested we give to Sudanese people by way of thanking them for things. This may well have been his pay off - something, according to a man from the British Council we met later, indicative of the Egyptian mentality. We took it in good humor and we left with his phone number and address should we ever need anything in Cairo, having had a memorable night.


25/01/08 – 26/01/08
The Coptic Christian region of the city was not treated with a great deal of reverence. The churches and mausoleums were clearly of great religious significance and there were worshippers who could read the Arabic language written with the Greek alphabet, kissing the icons and rocking back and forth but cackling cameramen and women took centre stage. We got there by hopping on the city's metro system and it had to be a fast hop because the doors remained open for an unreasonable length of time so everyone scrambled like mad. It is a very British trait to demand order in these kinds of situations as it is to get uppity when people invariably push in front in queues, but watching the back of the head of an individual who has deemed themselves more important than you is infuriating.

We spent time wandering the streets of Cairo, observing the chasm of inequality that plagues the city. Just a few kilometers separated the grand houses and the 5 star hotels from people living inside a cemetery.

For some sorely needed escapism we headed for the music of After Eight where a DJ played Stevie Wonder and James Brown. It was a night put on by a man from the British Council, chatting with him at the beautiful old mirror and wood bar, waited on hand and foot by men wearing bow ties, it was good to play the Colonial part for a night.

27/01/08
It was time to head back to the Sudanese Embassy to see if we had got our promised visas. It turned out not to have been a problem and from the date on the visa it looked like it had actually been completed the same day we first applied. We gave our condolences to the Russian cyclists who were still waiting after a week and headed off to get a train to Luxor in the south. This proved a lot harder than anticipated as it seemed there were not going to be tickets for a week. This was not for a lack of service, but due to the sheer volume of tourists plying the route. We admitted defeat and retreated to the hostel and let the hostel manager and his 'commission' take over, getting tickets through contacts and under the table. We expected delays in our trip but in post-colonial Cairo it was a bit of a surprise.

Travel Log 3 - Libya

16/01/08
Our only option was to take a taxi to the border and take the long, dramatic walk to the Libyan side. The first of seven passport checks was made by a Tunisian official with a faintly ridiculous uniform. Getting out of Tunisia was easy enough though it was getting into Libya that was going to be hard. The second to last check was made by the non-uniformed (therefore assumedly, more senior) Libyan with the best coiffured moustache. We were left on tenterhooks for nearly an hour in no man's land as he drove off with our passports, assumedly because our required tour guide had our visas and seemed not to have turned up. We spent our time watching the expensive cars slip through and ancient Peugeot pick ups with filigreed rear ends and an ancient man who looked as if he had walked straight from the desert with only the stick in his hand and the blanket around his shoulders, all gesticulate wildly with the officials. Our guide, Mohammed, arrived and promptly asked us 'where is your car?'…oh dear. It was another half an hour and a final passport check by the 'Police Tourist' before we set off in Mohammed's neighbor's flash Mitsubishi.

Mohammed was a delicate looking man with an ill-fitting suit and his neighbor, was a bit of a player with a leather jacket and hood permanently raised. We stopped for lunch in an empty restaurant for apparently traditional Libyan food of spicy couscous and bean tomatoey soup followed by minced spiced meats and rice with fizzy drinks a pattern that was to be repeated. The was a strange awkward dynamic at the table in the echoey restaurant as the neighbor spoke no English and Mohammed very little.

Libya seemed to be a building site of a country. The green of the Libyan flag was visible everywhere. Nearly all woodwork is painted in it. The living standard here seemed generally high, on an economy fuelled by oil visible widely throughout the country.

The amount of money which must be spent on keeping the innumerate guards, soldiers and police in work and the huge posters must be huge. Also Libya's rejection of liberalising tourism which could bring a lot of money in a county with several World Heritage Sites and vast desert wilderness is intriguing. The hassle we had to go though and hit to our budget was huge and left us needing to cross the country almost as quickly as possible. It makes you realize how much oil Libya has.

The surge in construction all over Libya is due to the recent lifting of the trade embargos and the influx of foreign investment but my god, are the buildings ugly and it is hard to imagine any of them lasting any length of time.

On the way to Tripoli we stopped at the Roman city of Sabratha where we walked down its original streets past bath houses with mosaiced floors. Mohammed insisted on clambering over everything, throwing bits of what I handed him the intention of finding out if they were Roman pottery into the bushes, scooting about on the mosaiced floors and sitting on the Roman toilets (the mime of him defecating being the closest we have experienced to real communication with Mohammed) . Its second century amphitheatre, established by the Phoenicians then re-settled by the Greeks then Romans, was a three story construction dubiously reconstructed by the Italians when they were the ones running the show.

It seemed ironic that the reconstruction was discernable by its worse craftsmanship. It did not entirely make sense that the reason given for us requiring a guide with us at all times while traveling through Libya was that Western tourist had been found to be stealing artifacts yet no one seemed in the least bit interested in the World Heritage Sites maintenance.

The road to Tripoli, which loomed from the arid ground like a sun bleached skeleton, was regularly punctuated with Gaddafi’s image, either cheery with arms outstretched like an advert for a hotel or sternly looking skyward, wearing a pair of aviator sunglasses like a Top Gun pilot. In both cases it was all rather disarmed by the government issue clip art backdrops.

From the ground level Tripoli could be Whitechapel. It had a similar level of uncleanliness and similarly dressed people selling similar things but with the addition of white gloved traffic police and far more bloodthirsty driving.

We met Mohammed’s boss, Mahmood in our flash hotel. It had the same air of grandeur about it as the Roman City with none of the class. The crumbling teeth in Mahmood’s fixed grin did not detract from his snake eyes.. We spent quite some time faffing around with him and his boss Sami, trying to get what we paid for (all accommodation food and travel) as they attempted to give us less with more an more preposterous excuses.

There was a strong sense of the ‘gilded cage’ very reminiscent of that described in Hergé’s Land of Black Gold in which an almost identical situation is described, Tripoli is our San Theodore and Gaddafi our Colonel Sponsz. We are similarly unable to leave the hotel or eat what we want or drink what we want or talk to who we want. We are getting the full socialist dictatorship experience as described in a text written over half a century ago, at the height of the Cold War.


17/01/08
We visited a city with the same empty sense as the one the humans return to in Planet of the Apes, named Leptis Magna, a 7th century city and the crown of Rome's African empire, under the leadership of Septimus Severus. Its central point a senate / market and a walled area as big as a football pitch and strewn with headless and castrated statues and broken columns. The whole place was almost empty. It is perhaps a trite point to make but a decadent society consumed by its own greed did ring certain pertinent bells.

We spent the night in the eerie town of Sirt which was under siege from a motorcade of excitable wedding revelers hooting their horns and setting off fireworks we at first assumed to be firearms. People were evidently having fun in this country and we were not getting any of it. Our meal times with Mohammed and his neighbor were becoming filled with more and more awkward silences partly due to the language barrier and partly due to failed attempts to ask probing questions about the country’s regime and possible dissent. The closest we heard to acknowledgment of dissent was rather convoluted. We noticed the neighbor's car has displaying a Brazilian football air freshener from its rear view mirror and yes, it turned out that the neighbor enjoyed watching football on the TV. But, in Gaddafi’s Green Book- The Answer to the Problem of Democracy (his answer to Mao’s little red book, and our answer to long car journeys) it states that, ‘sporting clubs… are rapacious social instruments, not unlike the dictatorial political instruments which monopolize power’, to which Mohammed conceded that these days Libya is more modern than it once was.

18/01/08
The days became a saga –the food was repetitive and plain and eaten in specially designated, empty tourist restaurants. We do not speak to anyone other the Mohammed who’s English is worse than our French and we are having to endure the driver’s same six CDs, although one of them is a by the Berber musicians, N’Tayaden, which is a ray of light. We are forever being stopped at checkpoints where Mohammed handed over one of his stack of copies of our details in Arabic. What on earth was being done with all this information? Was it going into some vast filing cabinet in one of the mysterious buildings we have passed?

The drive from Sirt to Bengazi was over by early afternoon. The landscape had been quite monotonous; flat arid land and a covering of rubbish that lay for fifteen metres either side of the road. After a great deal of cajoling Mohammed let us leave the hotel we were stationed in by ourselves. We walked down what was to all intents and purposes an Eastern Block sea front replete with mandatory crumbling concrete, but it lacked the grand communal areas. We made our way to the naval base in order to take pictures of the boats to spite the Orwellian ‘administration’.

On the drive we had tried to find out more information about The Great Man Made River. A giant pipe running from the interior of the country to provide water to vast dry arid reasons. Quite how big the environmental impact of this quick fix solution will be is unclear but if it's to be believed, Gadaffi's son has a big job to make this country green.


19/01/08
We visited Cyrene on the way to the border and as uncultured as it sounds, unlabelled Roman remains described by a man clearly making it up as he went and saying it in a made-up language, started to loose some of its original charm. Apollo’s fountain was striking as it trickled out of the mountain into a jet black, man made pool and through the city in irrigation channels. Also the vista out across the miles of flat land out to the sea was spectacular. Mohammed told us ‘UNESCO will make him nice’ some time in the future.

The drive did provide one surprising aspect a sudden change to a Mediterranean climate with all around being green and dramatic and cavernous gorges which provide a welcome break from the flat arid landscape of the past few days.

During the evening in the hotel with a red interiors the Egyptian proprietor overheard our conversation and said to us privately, ‘you will like Egypt, there are plenty of women and you can have beer. It is not Guantanamo’.


20/01/08
We were driven to the border and eventually allowed to leave Libya. On the Egyptian side we very easily bought visas and passed through into a whole new country and mindset. As we walked through no man’s land the people behind the fence were very keen to practice their English on us and smiles on peoples face was quite different to the reserved nature of the Libyans, it was good to have some interaction. We took the relatively plush bus four hours to Marsa Mutrah and over-nighted in a pound a night hostel run by lonely looking man and his knot-backed father. It was an all time low on the cleanliness front but it had a certain Parisian struggling artist's charm to it. Egypt immediately seemed to have a greater deal of poverty than Libya but a good infrastructure, and certainly a more welcoming people.

Travel Log 2 - Djerba to Ben Guerdane, Tunisia

13/01/08 – 15/01/08
We spent the first morning in Djerba pacing the tourist beach which in the gloom, swarmed with agéd German tourists with ruddy faces in tracksuits walking as silent couples being smarmed by two greased-back-hair Tunisians on horseback. When unsuccessful in luring a punter into paying for a ride along the beach, they were placated by their in-on-the-scam horses that bit playfully at the shoulders of their handlers. We left the beach passing through the huge construction sites of holiday complexes comprising of bizarre concrete monstrosities patrolled by men in army boots. It was easy to see why this huge development has put such a strain on the islands water resources, the trouble is all there was to the island was the tourist industry.

One of the island's lesser advertised and more interesting ports of call was the mysterious El Ghriba synagogue, apparently home to the world's oldest Torah. The Jewish population was shaken in 2002 during a terrorist attack causing many people to leave the island and it therefore required strict security checks to gain entry. Inside in a corner of the building men with small very similar features on their large faces were absorbed in prayer led by the man with a long wispy beard and wizened features. The building's interior was a visual overload of intricate silver and colored glass. Upon leaving in the taxi we were struck by a moment the likes of which are only indelibly etched upon the memory when there is a serendipitous hand at play – the sound of children laughing in the school, melodramatic 70's French pop on the taxi's radio, the sea blue of the Jewish quarters, the stark white of the synagogue and the yellow of the flowers in the meadow surrounding it.

The vast Monday night market back in town was an impressive sight. Tables heaved with piles of second hand clothes and dates and pick up trucks displayed their cargoes of oranges. Spice stalls filled the air with reminisces of foods from all over the world. On our way to get a bite to eat we were got talking to a pair of likely lads named Omar and Rauph, who fitted the mold of Del Boy and Rodney snuggly. One had a Polish wife and the other a degree in sociology and they were in the process of setting a business selling camel tooth jewelry. It was hard not to be wary of them with their complex haircuts and fake Ray Bans, but we shared sweet, smoky, grainy black coffee with them, invariably in brightly lit cafes with smartly dressed, smoking waiters and raucous card games all about. We really need not have worried, but it’s a mentality that is the curse of the guide book.

Leaving Djerba we took a cramped louage (minibus) to Ben Guerdane – the last town before Libya, and over-nighted in a clammy little hotel with a mischievous proprietor who pulled faces behind the police while they checked our passports.

It was a cowboy town of unpaved street, stinking sewers and immaculately turned out Libyans strolling about the place posturing widely in fake designer wear and in flashy cars, while many of the townsfolk scooted about on horse drawn carts. While one street was entirely dedicated to small huts containing an oversized calculator, bed, TV and drawer of money for exchanging Tunisian Dinars for Libyan.

Travel Log 1 London to Djerba, Tunisia

09/01/08
With an overbearing sense of bewilderment we began our journey proper from London. Other than the hour lunch in Paris we headed straight for the ultra efficient TGV to Marseille. The Eurostar afforded us enough time not to complete the day’s crossword. As we crossed France looking out as the countryside gradually change from the train’s second deck we were left thinking, the French know how to organise their public transport.

10/01/08

Marseille seemed to be a city of lax planning regulations. Austere colonial architecture was interjected by Fraco-esque high rise modern living. The dark take on modern living continued into the city’s bowels where the metro seemed to be in a state of 1970’s stasis with everything in a shade of orange which assumed the city’s citizens would be taking public transport to Mars by now. This however is not a fair reflection on some of the beautiful buildings and churches we passed by, it just difficult to appreciate them in the January gloom that smacked of Blackpool.

The hour delay for the ferry to Tunis was the first taster of the waiting game we are sure we will have to play again and again with forty or so foot passengers for company, most of who appeared to be shopkeepers with huge loads of goods. It was a good opportunity to pick up some clues on how Tunisians operate because we were unlikely to pick much up with our broken French and a complete lack of Arabic (thus far). There did not seem to be a rule as to the number of kisses they gave each other on the cheeks. The question that arose was, how do they avoid the embarrassment of leaning in for a kiss that the other party is not willing to reciprocate? Their personal space seemed even smaller than that of the French and their gesticulations all the more categorical, with an emphasis upon an out stretched arm with all fingers brought together as if plucking a grape from a vine. As they talked it seemed as if from sentence to sentence the flipped from telling one another their house was going to be repossessed, to them letting them know that they would be marrying into the other party’s family with their own fortune.

It will be intriguing to see these minutiae in cultures change as the landscape does as we travel towards South Africa.

There must have been five hundred berths onboard the ferry, most of which were empty and seemed to be in a state of being cleaned for the entire journey. There was a definite sense of colonial era travel, with the waiter service and entertainment, but the long curving staircase to the bar with a dance floor had a filthy carpet more reminiscent of the Dover to Calais experience. That night we were treated to a set of what were evidently Tunisian classics, by the reactions of the tipsy gentlemen pulling shapes such as the ’measure the arm length at the tailors’ and the ’wafting of a burn on the forehead with outstretched arms’ on the dance floor. The sleep we got that night was un-funnily hysterical. The ship’s syncopated judder felt like the sofa upon which another person is sitting and who is finding something inappropriate hysterical and remains on the brink of guffaw. As this reverberated through us as we slept on the floor of the ’quiet’ lounge a group of shopkeepers entered and conducted some kind of anarchic tea party at top volume. It became clear we were already a long way from home.

11/01/08
We awoke to the sound of Hoovers and the sun rising over the Northern tip Africa. It was upon arrival at passport control that we were definitely not yet in the zone because we had not filled in the appropriate pass cards while onboard. After sorting out the issue we declined the offers of the cawing taxi drivers intent on taking us into Central Tunis and walked off to try and find the train station. This was the first instance of troublesome public transport not being the easy option. The train took us to the centre of Tunis where we walked to the medina to find our accommodation for the night. The Medina was a set of high, narrow streets filled with Chinese plastic from different moulds to those were accustomed to, the intrigue of which was lost, as there was a overriding sense of being perpetually swindled by people bumping into us and just so happening to the location of King Ottoman’s wife’s bed above a rug shop and so on. One Fagin / Oddjob character we allowed to boss us around for a while, telling us to take pictures of seemingly random objects who we managed to placate, unsurprisingly, with money, put it well when he said ‘Tourist love Tunis, Tunis love tourist’. He also said ‘You not catch plane? You not capitalist!’, which was even better.

Being engulfed in Islamic architecture and interiors has left me feeling that I am missing out on something. I am sure that there is something to see in the intricate repetitions of patterns on tiles and in the symmetry of the domes and pillar alignment that I cannot see.

What I can see in this environment is something far more repetitious - a regurgitated aesthetic ideal marketed at individuals such as myself, the model of which I have seen countless images customised to. It is the image with the pretence of being un-sanitised and authentic. It is the perfectly ‘antiqued’ archway framing a poor child in ‘distressed’ clothing playing with a ‘crossbreed’ cat on a ‘traditional’ road I saw today and wished I had my camera with me.

A concerted effort is going to be required to accommodate other culture’s take upon beauty and not have my field of vision narrowed down by search for it improbable places. Stuart does not entirely agree with this, hence it being in the first person.

12/01/08
One of our Australian dorm mates found the throwing of shoes at the snoring Stuart even more amusing than Toby. An early rise and off to see the Grand Mosque which was both peaceful and grand at once, which is quite an achievement.

We planned to reach Djerba today, an island in the South of Tunisia popular with package holidays that while benefiting the island’s economy, are apparently severely affecting the island’s water supply. To get to Djerba we were going to get the train to Sfax, Tunisia's second city. On the way to the station we happened upon an impressive market behind an unassuming entrance way. There were bull heads in buckets, mountains and olives and fruits and a cheeky lady who let us try some different cheeses. After a wander round we were well stocked for the travel ahead.

From Sfax we caught the Louage (minibus) to Djerba. The Louage ‘station’ was fairly chaotic with bus drivers attempting to fill there bus in order for them to travel economically. The bus journey was an interesting experience in its own right. We shot down arrow straight roads cutting through the olive groves, weaving through the traffic. Stopping abruptly for yet more coffee and cigarettes then shooting off again. During the night, we passed eerie restaurants illuminated by fluorescent bulbs of various garish colours hung from the beams of their outdoor seating areas. Men ate below the carcass of an eviscerated sheep with its fleece still upon its back, which dangled from a chain on the ceiling. This scene was repeated in restaurant after restaurant in what seemed like installation art.

The man running the Youth Hostel in the islands capital was an amazing character with full Tunisian garb, shin length hooded fleece top with tassels and Yassar Arafat style head scarf and requisite dusty laminate shoes and no socks. We are pretty sure when he was younger he was a fearsome character. That night we ate like kings on roadside tuna and almost raw egg pizza followed by shish and coffee.

The next few days are to be getting an idea of Djerba before heading for the Libyan border and Allah willing we will have visas given to us on the border by the tour company you are required to have.

Until we work out how to get all the photos on the blog you can see them at;

http://www.flickr.com/photos/africacarbonodyssey/