From Cairo to the Connemara: A Sojournal

Pt1 - 9   INTERLUDE: THE GRAND POOBAH   The sign outside the Arab Bridge Maritime Company promised a “luxurcous” voyage on the turbo cat across the gulf to Aqaba. After three days in the desert, including two nights at the Al Fairoz, we hardened adventurers were in the market for a few creature comforts, but the less-than-lavish appointments inside the terminal reminded us that the Arab definition of luxurcousness doesn't exactly coincide with our own. We showed our tickets at the gate and straggled round a few corners into a dingy concrete security hall. An Italian tour group clogged the approach to the x-ray machines and behaved as though they were vying for a seat in the Titanic’s last lifeboat. Finally an exasperated customs officer threw up his hands like a primary school teacher in front of an unruly class of ten year olds, shouted in Arabic and waved them all over to the side where their forlorn female guide stood with a limp little flag on a stick. This clea...

 Pt1 - 8:  LET MY PEOPLE GO: CLIMBING MT SINAI   We stumbled down into the dust and dragged our packs from the belly locker. Ali had just informed us that the next bus to Nuweiba would be leaving in nine months; several of us who planned a life after Sinai found this revelation disturbing. A young American guy complained about missing an appointment with his cousin in Eilat as if it would somehow induce Ali to admit he was joking and promise to lay on a bus for our convenience two days hence. Unfortunately, Ali was one hundred percent serious and drove off in search of a feed. We decided we’d already travelled far enough with Captain Deadeye and there had to be a better way to get to Nuweiba, but we’d worry about that tomorrow. For now the priority was finding somewhere to crash…er, sleep. While we fiddled with our harnesses the little group dispersed into the night and we looked up to find ourselves quite alone. A place called the Al Fairoz looked like the best bet...

 Pt1 - 7:  THE EAST DELTA BUS TO ST CATHERINE   We already had our tickets for St Catherine courtesy Ahmood, Motas and a leetle baksheesh well spent. They’d swerved through the South Sinai bus terminal at Abbassiya en route to the plane for Luxor and bought them for us, so this morning we could strike out on our first journey as free agents with a short head start – we knew our way around the bus station and we didn’t have to hustle for tickets. Beyond these small certainties though, anything could happen. From now on even the simplest things we took for granted in our daily lives back home, the things we did automatically, satisfying our most basic needs, would be a challenge. We would have to rely on our wits, to adapt, to be agile, to concentrate, to stay alert and aware, to do our research, to assess options, to make calculated choices, to observe cultural sensitivities. We would have to think on our feet, be careful who to trust, to finely tune our scam radars a...

 Pt1 - 6:  EXTREMELY CAIRO TOO   Don’t try this at home folks, but to simulate a stroll around Cairo attach a hose to your car’s exhaust, pass it through the window and bail out just before lapsing into a coma. Technically, this is an understatement because one doesn’t so much stroll around Cairo as mount a commando operation. The other thing we learned very early on about negotiating the city on foot is there are no straight lines here. To get from A to B you must pass through every other letter of the alphabet even if B is just across the road. The target of our first mission was the Egyptian Museum. Just for fun I pressed record on the microcassette. (All barely audible against a wall of sound like a chainsaw symphony with horns) Me: “Overcast morning…cold wind blowing…looks like Hitler’s Berlin in 1945…dog turds all over the sidewalks…smell of stagnant water and rotting vegetables…approaching Tahir Bridge…” Tess: “Aaaarrrggghhh!” Me: “They’ve torn up the...

  Pt1 - 5: THE STUFF OF LEGEND   The forty minutes to Luxor was just long enough to consume the endearingly turdy little croissants that pass for breakfast on domestic Egyptair flights. To get off the subject straight away, the croissants arrived in plastic containers that disappeared in the West yonks ago – now I know where they went. After environmentally responsible packaging came in the stockpiles of PCB, CFC and other politically incorrect materials must have been dumped on third world airlines. It's an indication of how with it I wasn't that I found myself  wondering if the pastries were flaky because they were served up on something with the half-life of uranium 235. Although we occasionally passed over the fertile patchwork of the Nile floodplain, which hasn’t flooded since the Aswan High Dam came online in 1968, the terrain was mostly a canvas of rugged bare hills and rivers of sand that from this altitude looked like petrified ganglia. We entered the ter...