Thursday, September 30, 2010

Jordan

I probably should've done more research before taking a bus from the Central Bus Station in Jerusalem to the Allenby Bridge border crossing to Jordan. It turns out that they won't let you through the Israeli security checkpoint there unless you have a Jordanian passport or a Jordanian visa already in your passport. I had neither. They laughed at me and told me I should've done more research. So much for relying on the advice of the information booth at the bus station. I waited for an hour at the bus station in the middle of the desert with large lizards for the next bus to arrive and carry me north to a different border crossing where they issue the visas on the Jordanian side. From there, it was 39 Jordanian Dinar to get me to Amman, a ride which took about an hour and a half. Incidentally, 1 JD is about $1.40 USD. Jordan is not a cheap place to be.

We rode through the Jordan Valley, villages and farms en route to the big city where many people live who can't afford to live in Amman. The cab driver spoke English well and was amused by my Arabic as I tried to discern what differences exist between the Jordanian and Egyptian versions. Most of the things I learned in Egypt still applied with a few changes in pronunciation and a few changes in vocabulary. I was impressed at how friendly the driver was, especially when he stopped and treated me to tea even though I warned him I had no money left after the border crossing and cab ride, which was true. I had converted all of my remaining Israeli shekels into JD leaving me only a few Israeli coins. Throughout my stay in Jordan, I maintained a mental state of lack of trust and disbelief that anyone would actually do anything just to be nice, something which I acquired in Egypt. Overall people in Jordan were nice and didn't try to rip me off the way they did in Egypt, though when the cab driver dropped me off and I went upstairs to check into the hotel I'd pre-booked, the receptionist told me she was on the phone with the cab driver who was trying to arrange a commission for himself for taking me to the hotel. I guess he didn't quite understand that I'd booked the hotel in advance and that he couldn't claim credit for depositing me there. This is a common modus operandi in both Egypt and Jordan. If you don't have a hotel and a cab driver takes you to a hotel, he tries to get a commission from the hotel for bringing you. Conversely, if you arrange a tour with a cab driver outside the hotel, often the hotel will somehow try to get a commission on the tour. They basically work hard to take money out of each other's pockets.

I enjoyed my hotel in Amman immensely. Upon arriving I met a slew of travelers, the way it is supposed to be and yet was not in Egypt. Five of us went out to dinner together within an hour of my arrival. A woman from France and a man from Portugal who were in town for a conference on human rights, an American who'd lived in Syria for two years studying Arabic and had been turned away at the border on this return trip to visit friends, thus dumping him in Jordan (with all of his luggage lost to boot), his Palestinian friend who told stories of climbing the wall between the West Bank and Jerusalem to visit his brother who lived there, and Anne from Germany who had been spending 2 months working on a farm in Israel and then traveling through both Israel and Jordan. Anne and I would make friends and spend the next few days together. Later on in my stay in Amman, I also met an Iraqi fellow who lived in Fallujah who had quite a few stories of his own, involving missiles flying past where he sleeps. He was upset because he was paying double the price for the same hotel room as other guests, because as it turns out, Jordanians do not like Iraqi people and also believe them to be very wealthy, so because of his accent and passport he was having a rough time of his stay in Amman where he was hoping to arrange papers so that he could travel to Canada and work there as an engineer, his trade in Iraq.

I traveled the first day from Amman to Jerash with Anne, joining with an American guy we'd met at the bus station who was also heading that way. He'd been studying Arabic in Cairo for about a year which was helpful to us as we attempted to find the right bus. Jerash is a Roman city north of Amman, which is quite well-preserved. On the bus, things were very quiet though the three non-locals talked amongst ourselves freely until the very Muslim gentleman next to me wrote on his notebook that he'd just come from the night duty and would like to sleep. The American thought the guy was being difficult, since in Egypt people are very loud on buses, but I thought the guy next to me was probably correct since nobody else on the bus was talking really. Ultimately it worked out, and I chatted for a few minutes with the Muslim guy who told me I should read the Quran because it has all the answers. I was polite. My companions and I subsequently wandered the ancient ruins of Jerash and found our way to a Lebanese restaurant in the actual city of Jerash where we had a nice meal, refraining from ordering the delicacy of the house which was bull testicles. They claimed it best to wash them down with a glass of white wine. Though I have never heard of this particular pairing before, I am hardly a connoisseur of testicles on the order of my friend Ben for instance.

My old friend Aimee arrived in Amman later that day to spend the next 10 days with me traveling. Our first day was spent wandering the city of Amman, described by most travelers as unremarkable. I understand why people would say that, but to wander for a day was enjoyable. The most obvious landmark is a giant Roman Amphitheater which was quite well preserved, though the grayish and overcast weather (the first not sunny day on my trip) made the city seem excessively drab for most of our day. We wandered through the rest of the city, the downtown of which shares some character with Cairo but is overall cleaner and less chaotic. We also found our way to more modern parts of the city where expatriates and the wealthier folks dwell where we spotted a Gap, a Starbucks, and even a Carvel. There was no harassment from random folks, people were not overtly surprised to see us, the prices on the menus were fixed and I never had to bargain for a bottle of water or anything besides a cab ride. The city also has a feel of being under construction and of new clashing with old. We walked through one modern outdoor mall but walk down one side street and there was a crumbling apartment building with an unpaved parking lot. Oh yes, I also saw a Carvel of all things in that shopping center.

As the sunset approached, we took a cab to the Citadel, a high point overlooking the downtown area. Things got interesting as one side of the sky turned an unearthly orange as we stood looking out at the valleys and hills making up the city. In Amman the homes are built up the sides of steep hills and are tightly packed together, which creates a dramatic appearance even when there isn't a giant orange cloud of indeterminate composition hovering over the city. As it turns out, we got to experience either a dust or sand storm, depending on who is explaining it. The cloud settled onto the city as we walked down the mountain from the Citadel and people walked through the streets covering their mouths with their hands, with masks (way to be prepared) or with the cloth that many men use to cover their heads. It was an eerie way to see the city as dust was illuminated by every headlight and street lamp. Had it lasted longer I probably would've minded, but for a few hours it was a pretty interesting cap to my 3 nights in Amman. A few hours later it had dissipated and a group of us found our way to Hashim, the same restaurant I ate in all 3 nights of my stay in Amman, an outdoor cafe where you can essentially get all the falafel and hummus one could possibly eat for a few JD. The waiters come around with large bowls filled with falafel and deposit them on pieces of paper on your table and you eat with your hands. It's in an alcove off a main street and every time I was there, it was full, and apparently runs 24 hours as well.

The last night in the hostel, I ran into a Taiwanese guy also looking to head down to Petra and we decided to share the cost of a slow drive with a few stops on the Kings Highway, the older and more scenic of Jordan's two major roads running between Amman and Aqaba. Though the trip amounted to a lot of drive-by scenery with photo opportunities, I was glad we got to see a cross-section of the country if only briefly, and it gave me some clues as to what other things I might do differently when I one day return to Jordan. We visited Madaba, a city of beautiful mosaics, two large nature reserves, Dana and Wadi Mujib, and one large desert castle called Kerak, finally arriving in Wadi Musa in the early afternoon, where we'd be handed off to a second driver who would aggressively try to convince us to enlist his services for our stay at Petra, as would just about every other person we'd meet for the next 2 days. It's a touristy place, so one can't be too surprised really. That second driver would reappear at our hotel periodically to see if we'd decided to take him up on his offer. He assured us it was the high season, which it is, and therefore it was necessary to confirm immediately, which it was not. Many people were clearly available to take us wherever the hell we wanted to go, and the prices only went down the more often they asked if we were interested and the more often we declined.

Aimee and I arrived at the gate of Petra that evening at around 8pm and waited for Petra By Night to begin. The crowd swelled to at least several hundred, and once they started allowing people through the gate, I followed the advice I'd read and we let the anxious masses move forward without us, walking at a snail's place until it was just us and a few individuals and couples walking pretty much alone along the Bab Al Siq, a dirt road that leads to the Siq itself, a steep canyon cut out of red stone leading into the ancient city of Petra itself. For this night tour, they light the entire path with candles and people who work there periodically walk up and down the path shushing people as we cover the 3 or 4 kilometer stone path into the site. Despite the large volume of people ahead of us, we walked for the most part alone and undisturbed admiring the dramatic, moonlit canyon until we finally rounded a corner and I caught my first glimpse of the famous Treasury which many people would recognize from the 3rd Indiana Jones movie, and in the square in front of it we found maybe 200 candles in paper bags surrounded by a ring of tourists all sitting remarkably quietly except for the occasional digital click and whir of a camera or odd cellphone ringing. A few people insisted on sharing their undoubtedly insightful observations with their friends despite the repeated shushes of the crowd wranglers. As we arrived, a brief show began with a few Bedouin musicians taking turns playing pieces first on a Bedouin instrument called the Rababa, a bowed instrument made of wood, covered with goatskin, and with a bow and a string made of horse hair, and then a flute. The crowd listened in reasonably respectful silence. The camera flashes didn't do much to preserve the ambience, though the lead Bedouin had a good sense of humor about it and on the count of 3, suggested everyone point their cameras at the Treasury and take a picture at the same time, which created an amusing and seizure-inducing strobe effect.

The plan was to sleep in a bit the next day before heading to Petra for the day, but that plan was disrupted by a clanging fire alarm at some ungodly hour which didn't show signs of shutting off anytime soon. We slept anyway. Later I found out that the night-watchman had decided he didn't really believe the smoke detectors did anything. The whole thing in his view was an elaborate scam. To be on the safe side, he decided to test it out with his cigarette lighter. I am not making this up. He held his lighter under the smoke alarm and set off the fire alarm system for several hours, at around 7:30am in the morning, in a hotel.

We got up and headed to the site. For the next 12 hours or so, we wandered around the ancient city of Petra. We approached the Treasury through the Siq by day, a completely different experience since the dark red and orange stone and the contours of the canyon and ancient Nabatean irrigation systems were now all clearly visible. The Treasury is even bigger than it looks in pictures. I envied Aimee who in her haste to come on the trip did not research and saw the Treasury for the first time without ever really having seen a picture of it. It must have been a lot like the experience of the Swiss explorer who "discovered" Petra by tricking a bunch of Bedouins into leading him there, having no idea what he was about to see. Within Petra, there is one main road along which you wander, and up on the hills to the left or right you pass a large amphitheater and various tombs carved into the sides of what they always refer to as "the living rock" though I do not know why. It's pretty impressive. At your leisure, you can choose which things you'd like to inspect more closely, often necessitating a hike of varying length, or if you are a wildly overfed tourist, a donkey ride of varying price. Aimee and I wandered the main road but headed for a more distant site first on the advice of some other folks we'd met earlier who suggested a few ways to avoid crowds. We hiked up what I'd guess were between 750-1000 miles of steps, though possibly less, to reach the Monastery, a building similar to the Treasury though a bit less grandiose and dramatic and certainly harder to reach. Way up on that mountain, there were several vantage points though really the scenery from just about anywhere was quite overwhelming. At the "End of the World" viewpoint, we sat overlooking the Arabian desert and drinking Bedouin tea with 3 folks waiting for the tour groups to resume after lunch and come inspect their Bedouin silver stand. There are plenty of stands throughout the site, some with drinks and Pringles, others with jewelry and Bedouin daggers, and still more with whatever tourist knick-knacks you can imagine. Children also wander the site trying to sell postcards, though at no time was any of this more overwhelming that in is in any Egyptian tourist site I visited during the first 3 weeks of my trip.

Later, after our return from the Monastery, we had paused at a drink stand ("Happy hour all day!") and we were drinking the best bottle of water I have ever tasted, when the man running the stand suggested we could check out the "High Point of Sacrifice" only 30 minutes up the hill behind us. In Jordan estimates of time and distance were not very reliable in general. Up we went passing absolutely incredible scenery including the "renaissance tomb" and the "tomb of the roman soldier" and other sites that were not even marked on the primary map they hand out to most tourists. Petra is so filled with amazing stuff that much of it is beyond the reach of those who don't stay for more than a day, or in the case of some tour groups who arrived from Israel, a few hours. The rocks took on an even more surreal appearance as we wound our way through canyons and stone steps eventually arriving at a high vantage point over the entire site. Besides the amazing scenery, we were pretty much alone besides the very occasional traveler or Bedouin local we'd encounter en route to or from the caves in the site in which many of them still live. Anne told me when she visited Petra, she'd made friends with a Bedouin fellow and actually stayed a few nights inside of Petra, sleeping in her sleeping bag just outside the cave where her friend lives.

Petra was really the reason I came to Jordan in the first place and in no way did it not meet my expectations. I read about the history of the Nabateans, the people who built it and about whom much is still unknown. They had constructed sophisticated systems to save water from the very rare rainstorms which enabled them to build this giant functioning city in the middle of the desert. Having accomplished this goal, and having spent many weeks traveling, I decided it was time to change the pace for the final night in Jordan and we landed at the Radisson hotel in Aqaba. Less than an hour later I was having a drink at a bar in a swimming pool. A well-deserved drink I thought.

I recalled having met a young English couple in Amman at our hotel who were walking like they were 150 years old, but it turns out they had just spent the day in Petra doing exactly what we'd done the day before. We were not quite as worn down as they, but the hectic schedule of the weeks previous did make me appreciate the luxury all the more, as well as the shower door, cause in most of the hotels on this trips and in many budget hotels besides, they're not too big on shower doors or curtains. The owner of our hotel in Wadi Musa was genuinely puzzled that someone had left a negative review of his hotel because there was no curtain separating the shower from the rest of the bathroom. I've come to accept this as normal in most budget hotels, and in fact in many places, the bathroom and shower are the same room. In Wadi Musa there actually was a division of space, but I suppose they figured that so little water is going to come out of the shower head, that not much could possibly end up all over the bathroom. Incidentally, the shower head is also a bonus, since the hotel in Amman didn't have one of those either. It was pretty much like taking a shower in a 6 foot tall kitchen sink. Actually it was more like 5 feet, so I had to duck in order to actually get under the faucet. Point being, when I found myself later back under the gun of a real shower being blown back and pinned against the glass as if being blasted by a fire hose, I was thankful.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

About a week in Israel

In the movies, the people who talk to god or to whom god speaks are usually in the insane asylum scenes. Here, they run the whole show. Alright, maybe not the whole show, but they do a lot better than a padded room.

I was told that in Israel, Haifa is a city of work, Tel Aviv is a city of play, and Jerusalem is a city of prayer. That does seem to be the case. I spent the majority of this first week of Israel in Jerusalem and religion is much more visible here than it was in Tel Aviv. I see the ultra-orthodox Jews everywhere, black hats and all, as well as the less orthodox who stick to yarmulkes and the occasional tzitzit hanging out from their otherwise modern clothing. Also ever-present are the soldiers, most of whom look incredibly young to me to be toting around assault rifles wherever they go. I have seen that before so I am used to it, but I had dinner one night with two Austrian tourists who did a double-take when three soldiers with rifles sat down next to us to eat their falafel sandwiches.

Once in a while you see a soldier with earlocks who looks Haredi. Haredi is a word I hadn't really heard much until the last year or two of my life. For those who don't know, it refers to the most orthodox Jews. The word is a Hebrew translation of "orthodox" and apparently it is understood to mean "one who trembles in fear of god." These are the Jewish people who in New York I would've usually called Hassidic, which turns out to be a subset of Haredi belief depending on who you ask. A real look at the Haredi culture here and around the world is probably beyond the scope of this blog, or at least this blog entry, but I can share at least two anecdotes my cousin Sonia shared with me.

The Haredi apparently don't have to work or go into the army here. Sometimes they do, but most of the time they do not. This upsets some of the non-Haredi, religious or otherwise. So my cousin was in line at the gas station waiting for a pump to be free while the Haredi guy in front of her decided that he didn't like the job the gas station attendant had done cleaning his windshield. He was taking his time arguing with the guy that he should have done a better job while people waited in line to fill up their cars and go to work. So Sonia yells out the window that the guy should move so she can go to work and pay taxes so he can get his check at the end of the month which all non-working Haredi get so they can ostensibly spend their days studying the Torah and otherwise fulfilling their religious duty, which apparently many of them don't even do. So the guy turns red and gets out of the way and then motions for her to pull over after she's filled up, which she does, and they have a discussion in which he says he's offended by what she said, and she said well it's true, and you should get a job and work like the rest of us. He eventually says that she's taught him something and that he's gonna go home and get a job. She offers him her number so he can call her and let her know when that happens. He declines.

On the other side, another time she was at the bus station and saw a soldier who had earlocks and said she was surprised to see him cause there aren't so many Haredi who would go into the army. He said he decided to do it cause he thought it was right. As a result, his family disowned him for no longer being Haredi. They sat Shivah for him, meaning they mourned for seven days as if he were dead. Now he no longer has contact with his family. Apparently there are several organizations to help people in this situation, and he was in touch with one of them, though Sonia again offered her phone number to the guy if he should want to come for a holiday or the sabbath or something like this. What is the mentality of a person who would disown their own child for something like this? I will never understand it in my entire life.

By the way, the crazy people who talk to god aren't just Jewish, there are plenty of others all living within the city limits here, but that's hardly news. Let's move on to other things.

I visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial museum which was needless to say a very heavy thing to see, but of course also very important. It's a really well put-together exhibit with tons of information, displays, pictures, videos, and artifacts that takes you from before the war until the present day. If anybody should find themselves in Israel, it's something you have to see. I spent a lot of time there and even with as much as I have learned about the Holocaust over the course of my life, there were several new things I didn't know. I'm going to write about two horrible things I learned, which if you don't want to read you can skip the next paragraph.

In the videos there were survivors telling parts of their stories. The two main "oh my god" moments that stood out were children, often infants being ripped out of their mothers' arms, thrown into pits, and blown up with hand grenades. The other was a story of a man who stood next to his uncle on a pile of dead bodies in a mass grave, blindfolded, as they were about to be executed. His uncle heard the order about to be given and started to sing a Jewish prayer loudly called Shemah Yisrael before the gunfire rang out. The survivor telling the story was a kid when this happened, and he fell down on top of the bodies where he laid for an unknown period of time, apparently uninjured. Finally when the noise had stopped, he started to move. A hand grabbed his ankle. It was another kid who was somehow uninjured. They had missed them. They laid in the pile of dead bodies until they somehow were able to escape, though the video didn't let them explain where they'd gone immediately after escaping the pit. There were multiple stories of people who survived a firing squad like this. Can you imagine living your entire life with a memory like this?

Alright, so you get the idea of Yad Vashem. I went to the Israel Museum later. I saw fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. FYI, when you walk in the main Dead Sea Scroll museum, there is a dramatically placed display in the center of the room in which a scroll wraps around the entire display. This is not real, it is a reproduction. The guard even thinks it's real, or at least felt like telling me it was, but it is obviously not when you look closely. If you go off to the sides however, there are many real fragments of the scrolls in secondary displays. Also in the museum, there is an incredible archeological exhibit of various things dug up in this neighborhood. I don't think I was anything that was less than 2000 years old. In fact there were many artifacts between 4000 and 6000 years old, and they look practically new. It is amazing how many items like this there were, and how well-preserved or at least cleaned-up they are. Two other amazing things in the museum were the Jewish Art and Culture section, and within that section, I particularly enjoyed the section on Hebrew Manuscripts. There was a video showing the intricate process necessary to write the Hebrew Calligraphy, then to create dyes and inks to color letters, then to attach gold sheets and hand-paint additional ornaments on each page and letter. Here is one of the books I saw.

I spent a few days walking around modern Jerusalem, which is filled with clean streets, shops, restaurants, and an interesting pedestrian friendly nightlife district. I also wandered through various residential neighborhoods. Ohel Moshe is one of the first neighborhoods people moved into when they moved out of the walls of the Old City. En Karen is a former Arab Village, and when all the Arabs left during the war in 1948, other people moved in and now it is an exclusive and expensive community filled with a few restaurants, galleries, and many churches. There is also a monastery and Russian Church there hanging over the whole community which sits on hillsides right within view of Yad Vashem. In my travels around Jerusalem's more modern neighborhoods, I also stopped in and paid a visit to every vegetarian restaurant in the city. I met a woman from Calcutta who runs one of the two vegetarian Indian restaurants here. She has been living in Israel for a long time and decided there was a lack of Indian vegetarian food. Her restaurant and one other vegetarian place are right in the middle of the Mahane Yehuda market, a wonderful market of fruits, vegetables, bakeries, and places selling all other kinds of foodstuffs which are spread out for you to see. Fresh spices, juices, and yarmulkes among other toys and knick-knacks are also available. The market was fantastically clean and a joy to walk around. If I lived in Jerusalem, I'd shop at this market regularly. All the produce here in general seems to be incredibly fresh and the locals often talk about how much better it tastes than elsewhere. Maybe the secret to superior hummus and falafel is not the recipe, but the ingredients.

I spent two nights in Tel Aviv. I stayed at my cousin Avishay's place in a suburban part of Tel Aviv. We had dinner with my cousin Yoav and several of his friends to celebrate his wife Karen's birthday. The restaurant was outside of Tel Aviv in a mall looking out at the Mediterranean Sea. After dinner, I walked with Avishay and his girlfriend by the water and we studies the numerous yachts and fancy houses down by the port. The next day I visited almost every vegetarian restaurant in Tel Aviv, first stopping at Buddha Burger, a must-visit according to an Israeli friend, and then following the trail through the entire downtown area. That evening I met with my friend Mona, a Couchsurfer and Tel Aviv resident who assures me that if I were to one day live in Israel for any length of time, I could not stay anywhere but Tel Aviv since it is the New York of Israel, and she is probably right. I saw almost none of the religious influences that are everywhere in Jerusalem. Mona ferried me around on the back of her scooter, the first time I've ridden on the back of one since maybe Cambodia or Taiwan. There is something about the breeze as you ride through the city with nothing between you and and instant death but the skill of the driver who was in Nascar in a previous life and the ridiculous helmet you've been forced to wear of which I will never get tired. We went to a bar which I will consider "The Room" of Tel Aviv and another with chairs and tables on the impossibly fine sand maybe 50 feet away from the water. She also walked me around and pointed out all of the old buildings which were being turned into new buildings and sold or rented for outrageous prices. That being said, her apartment was much larger and the price much less outrageous than anything you'd find in New York, and that's in what seemed to me to be a very convenient and nice neighborhood in which to live. So when I come back to Israel, I'm probably living in Tel Aviv, though I will visit Jerusalem on the weekend, at least, after Shabbos is over.

Incidentally, the weekend here is not Saturday and Sunday. They work on Sunday. They have Friday and Saturday off. So Thursday really is the new Friday in Israel. Also interesting, they turned the clocks back here last week. The reason they do this is because of the Yom Kippur fast. If they did not turn the clock back, then apparently even though the fast is 25 hours no matter what, you wouldn't really get to sleep for one of those hours. So you are fasting for the same amount of time, but you are sleeping for an extra hour. Or something. This has apparently been going on for a while, but they argue about how retarded it is every year I am told.

So now I'm back in Jerusalem. I had a restful Shabbos and Yom Kippur. I went to Shul on Friday night for Kol Nidrei, but that was enough for me and I slept in on Saturday. Those last two sentences probably make no sense to my non-Jewish friends. Today I went into the city and explored one of the neighborhoods I talked about above. I also met some Couchsurfers unintentionally while visiting the Supreme Court and the Knesset, two places I hadn't really planned to visit but turned out to be really interesting. I caught English tours at both places and learned quite a bit about the Judicial and Legislative systems here. Then with the two German folks I met, we walked around a bit and I got to be a tour guide in a city I've only been in for a week, but hey, it's been a busy week. Now I'm back and tomorrow morning I'm going to Jordan, cause in this entire week nobody has tried to rip me off and that situation needs to be remedied immediately.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Welcome to Israel

Well, I kind of want to begin with the dozens of plastic-gun-wielding Arab kids pointing them at me and shouting and throwing rocks at each other if not quite at me while yelling what are definitely not words of greeting, but I suppose first I should say something about my departure from Egypt.

Hm, I hung out with that couple from Hong Kong, spoke a lot of Chinese, went to another giant temple covered with ancient hieroglyphics, this time on an island, and this time which had been moved from an area flooded due to the creation of a giant energy-providing dam along with the rest of Nubia. In fact a lot of temple sites in the south have been completely relocated brick by brick and put back together in some new place due to the flooding caused by the dam. It sounds impressive enough, but when you see the size of these places it is even more so.

After Philae Temple which necessitated vigorous bargaining for what would ultimately be an unfair ferry price anyway (I tried to let the Chinese handle that, they're used to it) we returned to the mainland and I may have taken a nap before meeting up with the couple again (Fifi and Qi, actually the 2nd Fifi from HK I have met, go figure) and we went to the Movenpick hotel on another island to watch the sunset. I frankly would've stayed in my hotel room at this point to just avoid contact with anymore hassle until I left Aswan, but it sounded nice and I felt I should fight my urge to withdraw. It ended up being this gorgeous 5-star hotel with an empty cafe overlooking the entire city where I had my first beer in Egypt. It's not so easy to come across beer in a Muslim country as it turns out. So I sipped my Egyptian beer and ate peanuts and smoked indoors while we watched the sun set, then returned and it was my turn to share something of my Egyptian knowledge with these guys who had more or less avoided Egyptian food during their stay. They told me they had KFC for lunch actually. So I took them to the koshary place I'd found the night before and they both loved it, though probably not as much as I did.

The next day I did very little. I didn't go see any temples or sites or anything. I just relaxed. The details of my trip from Aswan to Tel Aviv are kind of uninteresting. The highlights are the Egypt Air guys at the airport initially telling me they had never seen a paper ticket before (non e-ticket) and almost not letting me on the plane to Cairo. Then I enjoyed getting fucked over one last time by a cab driver from the airport to the nice hotel I booked for my last night in Egypt. I splurged and stayed in a Radisson for $90 USD which was worth every goddamn penny. I had the hottest shower in history, actually was able to clean 3 weeks of Egypt off of my feet, and slept in a bed made of pillows although only for something like 5.5 hours. I also had a mixed drink which made the bed even better. As I recall they brought me a glass with ice and vodka in it, and then a can of Sprite on the side.

I arrived in Tel Aviv on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year for the heathen among you and for my friends who forgot or pretend to have forgotten everything they learned in Hebrew school (you know who you are). The airport was so clean and everybody I talked to was so professional. The security was hardcore as expected, though I attribute the ease with which I passed through to my fantastic shower the night before. I answered about 6 questions at the immigration desk where my passport was stamped (without filling out that stupid piece of paper which they have done away with in Israel) and then about a dozen more questions upon emerging into baggage check. We should totally profile people in the US. Israeli security is so much more ridiculous and efficient than ours, it's just embarrassing. Today we were pulling into an underground parking lot in a mall and the guy comes to the window and just says hello or something just to hear our accents and see where we're from before he lets us pass.

Anyway, so arrive in Israel, shared taxi with confused and lost German girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown plus a half-dozen others in which I end up lucky enough to be the first stop. I have spent the nights at my cousin Yitzchak's house and since it was Rosh Hashanah followed by the Sabbath, I didn't go out, I just stayed in the house, spent time with my cousins, slept, and was fed an unbelievable amount of food. They live in a neighborhood in the suburbs of Jerusalem called Ramot, of which it turns out there are several. It's not gated, but it reminds me of a gated community. There isn't much car traffic on the streets, most people walk, and there are some alleys and staircases leading between the streets which are quite scenic. It also turns out that in much of Jerusalem there is a building code that the exterior of buildings must be natural stone with which this whole neighborhood complies, so even though it is not that old, it feels like what I expect from Israel.

My first foray into the city was with Yitzchak and Sonia at night. They took me to a newly constructed outdoor shopping center also with beautiful facades covered in stone, though in this case truly old facades which had been meticulously numbered and taken apart, then rebuilt to turn what was apparently a former slum into a wealthy shopping center with upscale stores and cafes which was filled with people young and old and I'm told is so every night. This neighborhood is called Mamila and is adjacent to the old city of Jerusalem. We could see the city walls from the cafe in which we ate that night, but besides sticking our head in briefly, I wouldn't see the old city in earnest until this morning.

Sonia took me to another mall to pick up a sim card for my phone and then dropped me off at the Jaffe Gate of the old city. For the first 5 hours or so I wandered more or less aimlessly. The old city of Jerusalem is divided into four "quarters" more or less. The Christian, Armenian, Jewish, and Muslim quarters. The whole old city takes up about a square kilometer I believe, though I'm making that up and too lazy to check it. Maybe when I read the correct figure in my guidebook I'll come back here and edit it. The entire old city reeks of history. Here's the wall from the 2nd temple, here's the place where the virgin Mary was born, here's the place where Jesus was crucified, this is where Mohammed ascended to the heavens, etc. I didn't go in many places since for my first day I just wanted to walk around and get a feel for the place.

I will give the most limited possible impressions. The Jewish Quarter is incredibly clean and looks new, even though it is ancient. Apparently a lot of money was put into restoring it. The Armenian Quarter is also quite nice. These areas are contiguous by the way, there is no actual division, you just walk and things sort of overlap. There are some main streets many of which are filled with active markets, and then side streets which can be stairways, tunnels, and other twisting and turning paths. The Christian Quarter was filled with more tour groups than other places it seemed, though I suppose I saw quite a few near the Western Wall in the Jewish Quarter. It seemed to be populated almost entirely by churches rather than people, though each quarter had its share of residential streets away from the market-streets (Souks) filled with souvenir shops and restaurants. The shops vary in what they sell depending on your proximity to a particular tourist attraction. Some are shops of artisans selling jewelry, ceramics, rugs, metal or woodwork, paintings. Others sell trinkets like Egyptian shops, toys, clothes, especially plastic guns in the Muslim quarter. Near churches rosaries and other related religious items are popular. The markets in the Muslim quarter reminded me a lot of the markets in Egypt. They are very busy, and seemed to be populated entirely by Arab and Muslim communities. They feel more chaotic to me than the other souqs, but this could be my perception.

Finally, wandering through the residential streets of the Muslim Quarter of old Jerusalem and more or less alone, a little kid yelled at me in Arabic twice. I asked later what it meant and somebody told me "Finish" but I'm pretty sure it was "Get the hell out of here." No harm was necessarily done, but then later I started to feel like there might be a pattern when kids started pointing their plastic guns at me and firing repeatedly. They didn't actually shoot any of the plastic pellets at me which it seemed were in short supply, but it was still disconcerting. I saw this quite often. Also, I would say 90% of the Arab kids I saw had toy guns. I wonder how the soldiers and security (of which there are many) deal with it since the guns kind of look real in many cases. I saw kids with handguns, shotguns, and ak-47s. The kids in those neighborhoods call out to tourists and harass them a bit. This doesn't happen in the other quarters as far as I saw, nor did I see any non-Arab kids with toy guns. I felt unwelcome in the residential streets of the Muslim Quarter. Later I was walking in another area before I had learned to just stay clear of these streets and the kids were having a toy gun battle while simultaneously throwing rocks at each other, and not pebbles. Then one kid broke a huge rock in front of me into pieces and was picking up the pieces to continue throwing to the far end of this narrow pedestrian street as I tried to get through between them. They did not stop as I walked and though they didn't throw them at me, the whole thing just felt volatile. In all my time in Egypt, I never saw anything like this nor did I feel this sort of tension.

All this being said, I feel I should say I had a few nice interactions with Arab shopkeepers, a few in a restaurant and another at a cafe. I spoke Arabic with a few people who were nice. Also after walking the streets, I walked around half of the city on the ramparts of the old walls, which is a beautiful walk and extremely peaceful. When rounding the corner of the city in the Muslim Quarter, there were some kids trying to pull their friend up onto the ramparts through a very narrow shaft in the stone and he was pretty stuck and they asked me to help, so I helped lift the kid up through and we all laughed and they said thank you and it was like a normal interaction with kids, but that was the only one where kids didn't try to intimidate me or something like this.

After walking up on the walls, I hiked to the top of a hill called the Mountain of Olives beyond an enormous Jewish cemetery and watched the sun set over Jerusalem. I met an Austrian girl and her mother who told me they were nervous about walking down alone because some Arab kids with a donkey had been aggressively asking them for money and when her mother declined, one of the kids had hit her mother and the girl had hit the kid back and sent them running. I offered to walk down with them and we ended up walking a bit and then eating dinner together. She was a very interesting girl, a doctor from Austria but living in Germany and with some pretty amazing travel tales of her own of which I was at times envious, though in particular I was impressed that she had worked 6 weeks with an NGO in the slums of Manila. I have always felt a particular respect for those who go to practice medicine in the parts of the world where people suffer horribly and have no money. It's one thing to give money to help people like those, but it's another thing entirely when you can go and make a difference with your own hands and the knowledge you have.

So there it is more or less, my first few days in Jerusalem. By the end of the day I had put some of the negative experiences in the Muslim quarter behind me and had begun to sort of develop a picture of what the old city is all about. This is only a very small piece of Jerusalem and an even smaller piece of the whole of Israel, so tomorrow I will begin at the Yad Vashem holocaust museum and probably visit the Dead Sea Scrolls among other interesting items at the Israel Museum before heading to the modern downtown area of Jerusalem to contrast today's adventures. My cousin Yitzchak told me that Haifa is a city of work, Tel Aviv is a city of play, and Jerusalem is a city of prayer. The backdrop of religion is indeed everywhere here, despite the obvious presence of many secular Jews, but I think as I spend more time here I will begin to piece it all together.

I told my cousin Yitzchak and his daughter Shira about my experiences in the Muslim quarter today and they both said the same thing: "Welcome to Israel."

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Luxor, Aswan

The internet is not what one would call reliable in southern Egypt, which is probably just as well, but I should probably write something about the last several days before it turns into a novel.

I might as well write this in a stream of consciousness style since I have dozens of disparate notes about noteworthy events in the last few days.

I flew from Cairo to Luxor for $55 usd. The train ride was something like 12+ hours for about $20, or $50 for a sleeper car, so I preferred to save the time. I had the nicest cab driver ever on the way to the airport who not only gave me a fair price, but with whom I had a great and genuinely pleasant conversation half in arabic and half in english after which he said something super nice about being really happy to meet me. Interactions such as these are worth mentioning since they are rare.

I met a Malaysian guy in the airport on his way to Eritrea for work. We spoke Chinese. I thought he had an insanely high voice until I met this Japanese guy at my current hotel who sounds like Michael Jackson in his prime. Which reminds me, a shopkeeper I spoke with last night went out of his way to bring up Michael Jackson and the anniversary of his death, almost in the same sentence as 9/11. Also, in the Egypt Air office in Aswan they were playing Michael Jackson's greatest hits, but I was the only one singing along to "Say, say, say." The new terminal at Cairo airport was really clean, and really empty, though my flight was pretty full.

Arriving in Luxor was comical. Upon leaving the airport, the cab drivers and hotel hustlers descend upon you like vultures. One guy suggested 200 English pounds for a ride to town. The fair price for foreigners is 50 Egyptian Pounds, which is about 18 USD. This is about a 15 minute ride mind you. So I listened to outrageous prices for a few minutes, then gave up and called my Couchsurfer friend Paola who runs a hotel in town and sent her husband to come pick me up for free. Paola is a Colombian woman who moved to Luxor, married an Egyptian guy, and now runs his hotel with him. She was super nice to me, gave me great prices on the room and on the tours I did, and I was really glad I stayed there. It ended up being 3 nights.

Luxor was actually not as brutal in terms of hassling as I had been led to believe. Maybe because I was prepared for the worst, it didn't bother me as much, but while there I felt more relaxed and able to fend off aggressive salesmen than I did in any other city I have been in, including Aswan. A little bit of Arabic was all it took and I got rid of them pretty easily. Luxor is much smaller than Cairo or Alexandria. It's kind of a dusty town with a big bazaar running through the middle of it. Maybe it's the heat and maybe it's Ramadan, but even walking through the bazaar wasn't that bad. Sure, every 10 feet somebody would say "hey buddy hey buddy hey buddy hello hello hello excuse me where you from america! very good! obama!" or something like this, but they at least don't follow you down the street. I would say only 1 out of 10 follow you down the street. That being said, along the water in Luxor they are pretty hardcore. These guys are all trying to sell boat rides. Everybody pretty much approaches you like they're your friend and want to know you. They shake your hand and hold on so you can't get away. They engage you in some conversation using between 1 and 3 facts they know about your country. For some reason when talking to Americans, they always say "Alaska!" or "I have friend in California!" or things like this. There must be some kind of tout phrasebook, which incidentally is something I would actually spend money on unlike the rest of the crap they are selling.

So the first day in Luxor I went on a tour with 14 other people in a van to see the Valley of Kings, Hatshepshut's temple, and the Valley of Queens. Uploading pictures will have to wait, the internet connections here barely load the websites. I met a bunch of interesting people on that trip, but my favorite was the Chinese girl from Sichuan who is traveling for 2 years by herself. She had just come from 3 weeks in Sudan, and before that was in southern and eastern Africa by herself as well. I think she's been on the road for close to a year already. I met a nice Indian couple from England who also were well over a year and had been all around the world. Another Chinese couple were taking a break from working in the Sudan and had come up to Southern Egypt for a bit. The tomb sites are in the hillsides, and you pretty much descend into tombs of varying depth where you can bas-reliefs and carvings and occasionally sarcophagi. The reliefs are sometimes very colorful and though it was short and we only went in a few tombs, it was 1000 degrees so nobody minded and overall it was a nice tour that spared me the hassle of arguing about prices. They do position the souvenir bazaar area by the exit so you have to walk through, but as I said before, in Luxor it just wasn't that hard to breeze through.

The next day I woke up at 4:45am, was picked up at the hotel, taken to a boat where I had tea waiting for the other guests to arrive, crossed the Nile on the boat, was taken by van to a landing site where I watched a bunch of guys inflate a hot air balloon, which I then got into and flew up over Luxor. This was probably one of the highlights of my trip and I'm really glad I did it. You get beautiful views of the tomb sites and temples, of the Nile, and of the east and west banks of Luxor, the latter of which is filled with farming villages and fields of mostly sugarcane and bananas. In the distance are mountains and desert. That night, Paola invited me to her in-laws house on the west bank for iftar, and I sat in a room with the men while she sat in another room with the women, and we ate on the floor with our hands while the mosquitos ate mostly me. Paola's husband has 10 brothers so it was mostly them with whom I sat. There were children running everywhere and a lot of women in the other room. I was told by one of the kids that 20+ people live in the house, and that everyone in the village is related to each other, though how that works I don't know. It was certainly authentic, although I frankly felt a little uncomfortable not being able to communicate well and being the one infidel, though they were all very nice.

A number of people will ask me if I am Muslim in general. These are usually random people on the street, or shopkeepers. It is usually the question after where are you from and what is your name. I always feel weird saying no since I don't know what they then think. Like, oh, you're not Muslim, I guess you're going to hell so good luck with that or whatever.

This is weird. So there is apparently a sex "industry" in Luxor which I read about in my book, but it is not foreign men and local women, it is older foreign women and young local men. Had I not read about it, I wouldn't have noticed, but I did in fact see a bunch of older homely women running around with 20something men. Apparently the men get the women to buy them things til the money runs out, it's not exactly a prostitution type situation though apparently that exists too.

There are no garbage cans in Luxor at all. I don't think I saw a single one. In Cairo at least they have a few token receptacles lying around that nobody uses, but in Luxor they don't even bother. I seriously had to carry trash around with me until I get back to the hotel.

I don't recall if I mentioned it, but there is apparently an Egyptian law that every driver must honk at least 6 times for every 20 feet they drive. I probably get it more since every taxi driver will repeatedly honk and slow down and drive alongside me and yell 5 times if I want a taxi in the opposite direction that I'm going, even if I'm not looking or making eye contact or have already gestured twice that I'm not interested or said in both English and Arabic, "No thank you, I'm walking, I don't want a taxi." But it's not just me, a guy will be driving down the road with no traffic and no people in the way or anything and he will honk 3-4 times for fun. I am not exaggeration. If anything I am understating.

During the day, people pretty much just lay around. I talked to Paola about living in Egypt and at that particular moment she was dealing with an employee problem and explained to me that the aspiration of Egyptian men is to smoke, drink tea, and sleep and that they are used to living in the desert so there is dust and dirt everywhere and they don't mind living in it. She said this creates a lot of problems getting them to work in a hotel for tourists who expect a slightly higher level of cleanliness since she will ask someone who works for her to clean something, and he will say he did, but there is grime and filth everywhere that he just can't see. As I was paying my bill, there was a shouting match about how said employee had been sleeping on the couch in the lobby with his feet up and smoking. She seemed to me on the edge of losing it, and I don't blame her, I've been here for 2 weeks and I'm losing it, she's been here for 2 years.

This also reminded me of another place I was where there were many insects and cockroaches and nobody seemed to mind or notice even. I remember an old Mario Joyner routine where he talked about visiting relatives in the ghetto and how there would be cockroaches falling from the ceiling and landing on you and everyone that lived there just didn't even seem to notice. That being said, the biggest insect I have seen was still the scarab I saw in the desert which although large, was very slow moving and didn't concern me overly. Although come to think of it, Joey the American couchsurfer in Cairo showed me a picture of an enormous spider they have in Jordan, so maybe I shouldn't jinx anything.

So anyway, Luxor's last day was spent visiting Karnak, a ridiculously enormous temple complex that was in use for 1300 years and constantly modified and added on to by many different kings. The Great Hypostyle Hall was my favorite room, filled with dozens of enormous columns each inscribed with large reliefs and heiroglypics. The scale of the room was overwhelming and I'd actually put this on par with the pyramids as far as amazing Egyptian monuments to see when visiting this place.

My last night in Luxor I made my way to a restaurant I'd read about and had a snack the day before, and upon arriving I spotted a couple who I'd seen the night before so I suggested we sit together and we ended up eating dinner together and then going up on the roof of their hotel adjacent to the restaurant to drink tea and smoke sheesha. The roof terraces I have seen in several hotels provide a fantastic escape from the chaos below and I was glad to have run into these guys since due to summer and Ramadan I still have encountered surprisingly few travelers when not on tours. These guys were from London and I think they had the right idea. They spent a few days in Cairo and Luxor, then they were heading straight to Hurghada, a beach resort where they will spend the next days. I would have never thought 10 days on a beach would be desirable until I tried to travel independently in Egypt.

So now I'm in Aswan. I arrived last night and while taking a walk along the Corniche during iftar and enjoying the quiet streets without any touts, 3 guys outside of what I later learned was an officer's club asked me for a cigarette, and then took the pack from me. Then they asked me for money. I said no money and give me back my cigarettes, which they eventually did though not before they took 5 for themselves. I was upset by this since up until now people might hassle, but this is the first time someone actually took something from me without asking. There were no cops around cause of iftar, and I didn't find out until later that I could've gone in and talked to the officer in charge and probably sort it out. It was kind of a bummer and really the final straw for me. Although Aswan is scenic and they have a nice market street which is less hassle and cleaner than Luxor's, people still call out to me and try to sell me tours on boats or spices or whatever over and over. I have pretty much run out of patience for it. At least after dealing with those guys, I was walking back and told a shopkeeper about it and he was really nice about it and when I told him I wanted to get food before I did anything else, he recommended a good place around the corner where after having what will probably be my last koshary in Egypt, I felt better. I then went back around the corner and sat with that guy for about a half an hour who didn't try to sell me anything, just asked about the US and we talked about our lives. His name was George.

Today I arranged a cheap ride to the ferry terminal through the hotel so I can visit Philae Temple, supposedly one of the nicer sites to see. Somehow in the next 24 hours I will try to find a low-hassle way to take a Felucca (traditional Egyptian boat) ride on the Nile so I can do that before I leave, but then tomorrow night I bought a plane ticket straight to Tel Aviv (well, a connection in Cairo) but I'm really done here and excited to go back to a place where I don't have to haggle over what is a fair price for a bottle of water (hint, it's less than 20 egyptian pounds) and where I can walk down the street without having people try to guess my nationality and shake my hand every 30 seconds. I will spend the next 10 days or so in Israel I think though doing what I have no idea, since I haven't read any of the book yet. After that I will go to Jordan to meet my old friend Aimee Fraulo who is flying into Amman on the 20th and we will go from there down to Petra and travel around a bit. I suspect until she arrives I will spend most of my time in Jerusalem, a city I'd like to stay in for a while and get to know well and which I anticipate enjoying a lot. I am also looking forward to restaurants being open during the day since Ramadan has made lunch a challenge for the last few weeks, though that will be over in a few days so Israel or Jordan should be equally easy.

I met a couple from Hong Kong, I'm meeting them in an hour to go to Philae. Tonight I may have to get koshary again at the same place just so I can get my fill until I manage to find it in New York.

Thursday, September 02, 2010

the Desert

I will begin at the beginning.

I decided to go to Bahariya Oasis from Cairo. So I needed to take a bus. It was unclear from my travel sources which bus station in Cairo I needed. So I took a bus station tour of Cairo before making it to the El-Mouneeb bus station in the borough of Giza, which is to Cairo as the Bronx is to New York. Also, for the rest of the story when I say an Arabic name you should say it aloud and try to imagine yourself telling a non-english-speaking cab driver.

So anyway, Turgoman bus station (Mahattit Turgoman), El-Azar bus station, and finaly El-mouneeb. I end up on a desert-bound minibus with a dozen Egyptian people staring at me the whole time. They stare here a lot actually, especially kids. So it's about a 4-5 hour ride from Cairo to Bawiti, the "capitol" of Bahariya Oasis. We stop on the way at a "rest stop." So I went to Burger King and got a veggie burger and fries. No, not really. It was actually a bombed out husk of a building in the middle of the desert with a bunch of snacks and drinks, but no doors, no windows, and nobody behind the counter. Everybody from the bus headed into the mosque to have their mid-day prayer. After maybe 10-15 we reboard the bus and the driver decides to pop in his favorite CD. He fast-forwards to his favorite track, muslim hymn/affirmation #whatever, and then continues to select tracks for the next hour or so at high volume while the passengers who aren't sleeping bang their heads to the beat. I think I have some video footage of this moment.

We finally arrive and I am picked up by the errand boy of the Old Oasis Hotel who took me up to the hotel. The grounds of the hotel were surprisingly beautiful. I spent the rest of the day sitting among the palm groves and marveling at how fantastically quiet and peaceful this place was compared to Cairo. I arranged a trip into the desert and that evening helped aforementioned errand boy make a website to help him promote himself as a tourguide in the area. I am not going to post the website cause the dude totally ripped me off, but that was more or less resolved later and not worth getting into for now until I write a separate entry specifically about scams and rip-offs in Egypt.

Anyway, the next day I walked around the town/village a bit. It was early and the paths between crumbling buildings are small so the only traffic was the occasional donkey. It's a scenic town although it still suffers from the unfortunate lack of care of people with regard to garbage in the street.

The real adventure starts in the afternoon. I ride over to another house where the driver who will take me/us into the desert lives with his korean wife. Here I meet the other people who will come along on the trip, all of whom arrived that morning from Cairo. I was the only one who slept in Bahariya that evening. In fact, I'm pretty confident that I was the only tourist in Bahariya the night before. So the Korean lady makes me a "vegetarian" lunch which was actually pretty good. Some kind of noodlish creation in soup, but I did not get sick so perhaps the soup was really vegetarian after all. We get to know each other a bit and then we make one more stop to pick up a few more people, and here is the scene:

There's me. Then Alex is a girl from Korea traveling for about a year around the world. A Korean couple who chartered their own separate vehicle but who camped with us at the same site. Two Japanese folks who had met that day, a guy named Max who had lived in Taiwan for 5 years and spoke Chinese really well. He was on a long trip too, something like 5 months. Then a Japanese girl the details of whose trip I did not retain. Finally Ray and Giulianna who both live in Madrid, though she is originally from Peru. We made friends quick and set out into the desert where we stopped at various places over the next few hours to take photographs and explore scenic spots eventually making our way to the White Desert around sunset to make camp and eat dinner. It was already mostly dark by the time we arrived in the White Desert, so we sat and ate dinner as the stars came out around us. As some of you know, I'm not much of a camper, but once we'd finished eating dinner and talking, people dragged their thin mattresses to wherever they liked and the lights on the van went off and it was just us under the stars and I must say, it was pretty incredible. I laid awake for a while just enjoying the view and checking once in a while to see if any of the desert foxes were anywhere near me. They are kind of all over there and though harmless, they are not really afraid of people since it seems like every trip out there feeds them. When I woke up in the morning, there were tracks a few inches from my head, but I guess better that than a scarab on my face, like the one I found the next day in the sand that although also probably not dangerous, is not something with which I wish to be better friends.

I woke at dawn to the sun rising over the strange mushroom-shaped rock formations in the White Desert which look not unlike a road-runner cartoon. We walked around the desert for a while as the sun slowly came up and the temperature began to increase. On the drive back we stopped first at the "Crystal Mountain" area which looked less like the wizard's castle in Conan the Destroyer than I'd hoped, but is in fact an area with tons of large pieces of quartz littered everywhere which was actually pretty interesting to walk around a bit. Lastly, we stopped at a sand dune which was less impressive than the Great Sand Sea I'd hoped to visit given more time, but was memorable since they brought along what look like snowboards so we could sandboard down the dune. It's a good thing there is no video of me doing that because Deb would probably laugh herself to death if she saw. I would've stayed longer to perfect my technique but it was getting pretty darned hot at that point so we bailed back to Bahariya.

Originally it was my intention to do the full desert circuit of oases and make my way to Luxor that way. I had explored an off-road option to an oasis called Dhakla which sounded like an amazing trip, but the prices being asked were very high and as it turns out the combination of summer and Ramadan does not make for an easy time of traveling in the hot desert. Most people I was told don't really even want to work. People who are fasting for Ramadan don't drink water, so going out in the desert isn't high on their list of priorities. Also, given the utter lack of travelers, I'd have nobody to share costs with me. This also made the prospect less than appealing. I decided to cut my losses and be happy with my two days in the desert which were fantastic, and head back to Cairo and down to Luxor the traditional route, saving the desert circuit for a non-summer, non-Ramadan trip.

So I went back to Zamalek in Cairo. I'm flying to Luxor tomorrow one-way for $55. The sleeper car on the train was comparably expensive and though the daytime ride was only $20 or so, it was 12 hours or something and this seemed more appealing. I did some research this time and found two budget hotels in Luxor and Aswan about which I am cautiously optimistic. There are some significant sites down in southern Egypt that I do want to see before I leave, specifically Karnak and Abu Simbel, and a number of other interesting things to do so I am hoping with the knowledge I have accumulated so far I will be able to avoid the hassles and focus on the good things.

In general, all of the sites, history, culture, museums, and other assorted experiences have been great here. It is anything related to hotels or tours or people wanting to sell you things that is difficult and wearing. I now have a much better idea of what I'm dealing with and I think I know how more effectively to book tours, something I had no previous experience doing since in China and southeast Asia I primarily traveled independently and had little use for organized tours. This is the first place I have been where a tour helps insulate you from the torrent of scam artists looking to part you from your money.

A few other random thoughts about the last few days:

The oases are notorious for mosquitos. The first night I spent some time trying to kill the ones in my room before I went to bed in the hopes that I'd do better overnight. We can say that I fought valiantly, but for every head that I chopped off, three more regrew. Aloe vera works wonders on mosquito bites though, I must say.

I noticed religion much more in Bahariya. Not that I haven't noticed it almost constantly in Cairo, but whereas in the big cities I saw women not dressed conservatively, in the desert I felt like every woman I saw was almost entirely or entirely covered up. Also, in Bahariya, I was sitting in the hotel relaxing in the evening and the call to prayer came which in a place like Bahariya is something everyone answers. So then I sat in the courtyard while some sort of sermon was given over a loundspeaker. Of course I didn't understand it, but it sounded seriously fire & brimstone to me. Another interesting religious experience which I enjoyed was being on the bus from Bahariya to Cairo when the sunset, at which point everybody breaks out food to break the fast and passed around dates. It was pretty festive.

Sleeping in the desert was my favorite thing from the trip so far. I was minorly concerned when our 4x4 broke down for 10 minutes, but we're not so far out that there isn't cell service so it's not like we were in real danger. It just feels like it wouldn't take much to die in the desert. But the stars and the camping and the people I met, that was all the best thing I have done since being here.

The only thing I'd want to come back to Egypt to do is a real desert safari where I could spend a week or two in the desert. There are some amazing sites out there that just aren't reachable at this time of the year or any time really unless you have a whole bunch of money to put into it, and doing it alone wouldn't be as fun as doing it with a bunch of people. Also splitting the cost would really be necessary. Besides the real desert way out in the south and west of the country, I wouldn't come back to Egypt. I have had so many difficulties as an independent traveler here and so many people have been dishonest and tried to take advantage of me that it outweighs the amazing sites I have seen. It is a shame the Egyptian government doesn't make more of an effort to crack down on the thousands upon thousands of people who I think are ultimately damaging the tourist industry, but apparently the mindset is hey, we've got the pyramids, they're gonna come no matter what, probably only once, so we have to get what we can while they are here. So now I'm going to Luxor, supposedly the worst of all in terms of tourist hassles. I found a hostel to stay at run by a Spanish couchsurfer who I hope will be straight with me.

Until I leave Egypt, I will have to follow the advice I'd give to others which is to try and find places to stay that are through personal recommendations, try to hook up with Couchsurfers as much as possible who will take care of you and be honest with you, try to shop around for tours and get many prices before you do any of them. Especially ask other tourists what they paid for tours. Finally and most unfortunately, don't trust what anybody says at face value if they work in the hotels or are tour guides. Every person who has been my "friend" has tried to take or taken more money from me than is fair. To be sure, there have been a few nice people, but they are far outweighed by the hordes. If anybody was going to come here, I'd say book everything in advance so you are completely insulated and don't have to deal with any money hassles while you're here, unless you have thicker skin than I do.

So, tomorrow off to Luxor, Aswan, and Abu Simbel. Apparently the boat from Hurghada no longer runs, so I will probably have to catch a puddle jumper to Sharm el Sheikh and a bus to Dahab, my final stop in Egypt which I hope will be the relaxed beach-front backpacker destination it is purported to be before I escape to Israel or Jordan.