Pt 1: Forty Days in the Middle East

FROM CAIRO TO THE CONNEMARA

A SOJOURNAL

 by

Rob Cox

FOREWORD

Revisited twenty four years after the events it describes and fashioned from the meticulous ninety thousand word journal I maintained for the duration, many hours of video footage and soundscapes captured at regular intervals on microcassette, this is the story of an Awfully Big Adventure.

On the 20^th February 1997 my then wife Tess and I boarded a flight to Kuala Lumpur on the first leg of an expedition which would last nine months and take us through seventeen countries from Egypt to Ireland. Although we functioned as a formidable team, were together twenty-four/seven and relied heavily on each other to successfully navigate the many considerable challenges along the way we each, in a very real sense and on many levels, travelled different journeys. We have long ago gone our separate ways and so, while it’s a source of great regret to me that we cannot share the rich memories of what was without doubt the experience of a lifetime, and while Tess is necessarily a figure in the sweep of the narrative, this is how it all looked and felt to me; seen through my eyes only, informed by my motivations, my sensations, my observations. 

I began this project in 1998, immediately following the trip, but as our relationship deteriorated and it became increasingly clear that Tess and I would finally separate after more than twenty years of marriage the task became impossible in the emotional thunderstorm that swirled about us well into the new millennium. I shelved it in 1999 and effectively forgot about it until I came across the manuscript again recently while rationalising storage space in the study. I’m resolved to complete it now the passage of time has cleared the dark clouds and, although it’s inevitably a subjective account, to relate events without artifice or bias. So, with all the best intentions, it’ll be interesting to see how far I get…

January 2021

 

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AND A QUICK FOOTNOTE

It’s important to remember this is a document of its times, times before Facebook, Google, smartphones and even reliable internet. Digital photography hadn’t arrived yet, 9/11 was a Porsche and ISIS was an Egyptian goddess. You’ll be time-travelling through the last century – literally. All statistical and other contextual information was current in 1997…and I gave up smoking 15 years ago.

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 PART ONE:

FORTY DAYS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

                                                                                EGYPT, JORDAN, ISRAEL

Modern air travel means less time spent in transit.

That time is now spent in transit lounges.

P J O’Rourke, Holidays in Hell

GETTING THERE

Waiting was the one skill we failed to practice in all our preparations for the Awfully Big Adventure. We practiced walking for kilometres over all sorts of terrain in all sorts of conditions carrying all sorts of loads; we practiced speaking in foreign tongues and cramming large numbers of things into very small spaces, but Bridgetown, Western Australia (1997 pop. 4000) offers few opportunities to practice waiting – you get toey if there are two people before you at the bar. It was therefore sobering to discover that the name of the game on the first leg of the long journey we’d so blithely undertaken was WAITING. Although it was no ordinary tattered-Time magazines-at-the-dentist type waiting, I’d still personally have found the trip to Cairo a whole lot more fun if I’d stayed at home and watched it on TV.

We’d already waited long enough when we woke up in room 1203 at the Perth Park Royal Hotel on the morning of Thursday, February 20^th 1997. It was more than two years since the wintry night my wife Tess and I, under the influence of a raging fire and a bottle of red, hatched this crazy scheme – crazy for a couple of fitness-challenged forty somethings like us anyway. The Awfully Big Adventure began with idle fantasies about being somewhere else, as you have when it’s minus 2 outside.

Bridgetown had been our home for the best part of ten years, a record for us. Before we washed up here we were habitual nomads, moving all aver the continent from Sydney to Darwin to Perth and never staying more than a few years in the one place. In Bridgetown, however, we found a little slice of paradise and set about putting down some roots. We bought a wonky ex-forestry house on three acres beside the Blackwood River – position, position and position – and threw ourselves into the renovation project of the century. We’d only just completed the work and at last reached a point where we could reasonably be expected to relax and enjoy the fruits of our strenuous labours. We both had secure, comfy jobs - Tess as a computer lecturer taking night classes and I teaching the next generation of rock/blues heroes how to annoy their parents by playing drums and loud guitars – and we woke up every morning looking into a long future of contented semi-retirement.

So where was the problem? Basically, the problem was there weren’t any problems. It was all too easy and we were just too young for it. But where do you go from Paradise?

What if we bit the proverbial, hung up the slippers and bailed out? Where would we go? What would we do? What challenges could we pose ourselves? Vexing questions for sensible people.

Fortunately, on this particular night we were sensible only compared to the inventor of the left-handed toothbrush, so the answer was simple: we’d travel, of course. As far as we could for as long as we could with whatever means we could muster. We warmed to the theme, uncorked another bottle and indulged ourselves. Tess wanted to see the Pyramids, I talked about revisiting Israel, Tess went all gooey at the thought of Ireland, I longed to gaze upon the Mona Lisa and climb the Eiffel Tower on a balmy Parisian night, we’d both die to sail the Greek Islands. We intoxicated ourselves with romantic destinations – not to mention the red – and at some stage during that long evening we talked ourselves into it, committed ourselves to the bold enterprise.

We’d begun our family early. While our mates were sowing wild oats we planted a crop and our youngest would be flying the nest soon. We decided we’d rather have a late adolescence than none at all and we might never have a better chance. In this way fancy became fact – the Great Mid-Life Crisis Adventure would happen.

Within weeks we’d roughed out a route and made serious enquiries. Within months the thing had gathered its own irresistible momentum as we pestered travel agents, devoured travel literature, soaked up TV travel shows, test drove travel gear, haunted travel expos – we even bored ourselves with travel talk. We went into training: walking, hiking, swimming, weights, the works.

In the odd lucid moment we paused to ask ourselves the inevitable question: What the hell are we doing?! Then one of us would say, just casually, “And where will we be this time next year?” or “I see it’s 36 and clear in Madrid” and we’d be off again, writing away to embassies for visa applications, faxing travel organisations for membership forms, snipping paragraphs out of newspapers and pasting them into the four year old guidebooks we bought in the second-hand store, collating weather information on a basic spreadsheet, me practising Italian, Tess learning French, plotting new red lines on maps photocopied from my trusty Reader’s Digest Great World Atlas, 1962…

Life beyond the Awfully Big Adventure was just too far away to contemplate.

A lengthy process of fine-tuning – a bargain here, a blow out there, a compromise somewhere else – brought us to the final plan, a grand expedition that would take us backpacking through the Middle East, around the Mediterranean and across Europe – seventeen countries on three continents. And if that wasn’t ambitious enough, we expected to cover it all in nine months.

Our shoestring strategy relied on affordability and flexibility but we allowed ourselves a few luxuries in the first ten days to cushion our transition from the comfort zone to life on the road. Business Class would guarantee us maximum comfort and minimum fuss, not to mention the free champagne. After a recovery day in Cairo we would join a package tour – the only one we’d take for the duration – which would see us through the first week in Egypt. By then we should be ready to go rogue and become travellers.

There was just one other appointment we’d have to keep. We arranged to collect a car in Nice on June 2^nd. After nearly four months of planes and boats and trains and buses it would bring a new mobility to our travels.

Our feet cooled distinctly when it came to putting the property on the market. But we went on soothing inconvenient doubts like a couple of addicts supporting each other’s habit for the elixir of youth. With 177 sleeps to go Tess put a countdown list on the fridge and time accelerated. The last few months of life as we’d come to know it passed in a blur of tying up loose ends, finessing final arrangements and packing our accumulated possessions for storage. Would they mean the same to us in a year’s time?

Would we even last the distance? The kids were quietly sceptical and our friends just thought we were nuts, not for going overseas – which they envied – but for pulling the rug out from under our own feet and sacrificing the possibility of ever returning to the old life. Only time would tell if they were right, but it was a mighty powerful stimulant to be masters of our own destiny again and we were hopelessly seduced. We knew that after nine months on the road we would return very different people, if not exactly reborn, and relished the prospect of having to re-establish our new selves in a new reality. What the hell, if you’re going to have a mid-life crisis you may as well do it properly.

The weeks immediately preceding D-day were consumed with micro-preparations, like rationalising our packs to the point we could just about cram everything in by jumping up and down on them while cursing richly. How we would survive without the stubby holders and hair dryer was anybody’s guess. We did a few laps of the lounge room and convinced each other we’d get used to staggering around like a navvy under a load of bricks.

Then it was February 20^th and there were no more sleeps to go. In ten hours we would depart Perth International Airport for a one night stopover in Kuala Lumpur then on to Jeddah and Cairo. At last we were really going.

We sprang out of bed like a couple of kids on Christmas morning and strode down to the Barrack Street jetty for breakfast. Fortified with lashings of bacon, eggs and hash browns we sauntered back along the Swan River foreshore, through a little stand of date palms on Riverside Drive, trying to get our heads around the fact that in three days we would actually be breathing Egyptian air and strolling beside the Nile. It was a splendid Perth morning and our heads were full of postcard images of the Nile bathed in clear, warm sunlight. Exhilaration wasn’t the word!

1203 resembled the day room in an obsessive compulsive ward as we waited for the limo – another perk of the Business Class tickets – to take us to the airport at 12. We arranged and rearranged our packs, adjusted and readjusted the harnesses, checked and rechecked our documents, repeated ourselves over and over again. We walked around, we sat down, we stood up, we drank coffee, we filled the ashtrays - all this in our undies so our travel clothes didn’t get too funky before we even left the ground.

The limo arrived punctually and we rode out to the airport like a pair of potentates. More than once I reflected that tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future, we would cease to be part of this neatly clipped, well ordered world, that tomorrow the people and the cars around us would be doing the same things they were doing now. For us, no two of the next 257 days would be the same. There was a certain satisfaction – ok, bordering on the smug – in knowing our erstwhile colleagues were already up to their necks in the same old same old of another school year while we were off into the exotic unknown.

It was way too early for the check-in desk. This gave us the opportunity to wait another 45 minutes. When the lights at last began to roll for flight MH124 to KL we completed the formalities and headed upstairs to emigration which – surprise, surprise – wouldn’t open for another hour. A tad testily we spent our last coin of the Commonwealth on stale sandwiches and cold coffee and bored holes in the customs doors with our eyes. In the very near future I would remember this hour fondly as a model of patience and composure – there were probably 150 others cooling their heels with us – but at the time it was a severe irritation. Not only was I looking forward to plundering the freebies in the sumptuous sounding Golden Wing Lounge, but I was itching to play with our duty-free toys.

Personalised invitations admitted us to the Golden Wing Lounge, inner sanctum of the well-heeled international traveller. We immediately lowered the tone of this elegant neighbourhood in our functional travel togs. It’s worthwhile describing our ensembles here because we wore them, or minor variations thereof, every day for the next nine months. His: black t-shirt, blue jeans, chunky brown hiking boots complimented with a red flannelette shirt for cooler climes and a blue cap for occasional wear, all accessorised with a purple day pack. Hers: blue t-shirt, maroon leggings, heavy grey woollen socks, same chunky brown hiking boots with a lime mohair jumper for the cold and a battered Akubra for the sun; accessories included one maroon day pack with one small teddy bear peering out of the front pocket. Both daypacks had been kicked around the back yard to make them look lived-in and sported little Australian flags lest we be taken for a less welcome nationality in the Middle East and summarily executed.

We tried to look as though we did this every day but I don’t think the handful of corporate suits scattered around the room were fooled for a minute by our air of casual indifference. Why would they be? We weren’t.

We had ninety more minutes to wait so I helped myself to a few spicy chicken wings and a stiff scotch and settled down to fiddle with the duty-free loot. The centrepiece was a schmicko new video camera, complete with one of those dinky little LCD screens, perfect for shooting the Awfully Big Adventure Movie. By the time I’d unpacked it, read the rule book, twiddled all the knobs and pressed all the buttons the battery was charged and it was ready for Scene 1: Tess reads magazine in the Golden Wing Lounge, PIA. Gripping stuff,

The boarding call came a little after 4. The excruciating wait – long flat periods punctuated by brief spurts of intense activity – was over.

The view from 30,000 feet was mind-numbingly beautiful. On the right the flayed carcass of the West Australian outback spread away to the eastern horizon, on the left the featureless turquoise expanse of the Indian Ocean seemed infinite as it blended with the late afternoon sky where the western horizon should have been. The jagged intersection of waterless land and landless water lay obscured directly beneath us. As the A330 Airbus followed its coast hugging course due north we toasted the success of our seamless planning with complimentary champagne.

Next time: Don't Burn Your Chickens...