Aqaba (Jordan) --> Nuweiba --> Dahab --> El Milga (for St Katherine's Monastery) --> Cairo --> Alexandria --> Siwa Oasis --> Alexandria --> Cairo (with daytrips to Giza and Saqqara) --> Dakhla Oasis --> Luxor (with daytrips to the Valley of the Kings and Queens, Temple of Hatshetsup, Colossi of Memnon and the Temple of Karnak) --> Aswan (with a daytrip to Abu Simbel, Aswan High Dam, Philae Temple and the Unfinished Obelisk) --> Wadi Halfa (Sudan)
Nuweiba is a port and, 8km to the north, a small incomplete town (mostly roads surrounded by empty lots with a few buildings added to the roadside) and, further north of that, a collection of beach-side camps. I rolled up there to the recommended Soft Beach and got hold of a single cabin for 15 Egyptian Pounds (about $2.75) plus the same again for compulsory breakfast. What better place to sit on my backside in the sun and try and beat this nasty cold of mine? Which is what I did for three days. It also gave me the opportunity to read some books (Soft Beach, like many hostels, collect books however most of these were in German on account of the owner's German wife).
After this time of relaxation I needed something else to do so I went to Dahab, a resort town (although one not overwhelmed by resort hotels as Sharm el-Sheikh is reputed to be) and spent another night there en route to St Katherine's monastery at the foot of Mt Sinai.
The whole Sinai peninsula is basically a big collection of rocky mountains with some sand chucked in and, unsurprisingly, Mt Sinai fits exactly into this mould to the point that it is indistinguishable from all the other mountains on the peninsula. Moses was there, right? So it would appear a little biblical? Perhaps it would be bigger, perhaps shrouded in cloud? N.O. Of course you can climb it - either by camel track (even on a camel if you wish) or on a very steep flight of stairs. Many people, many of whom are pilgrims, do this and I didn't because I arrived there in the early afternoon (when it was too hot) and wasn't going to climb Mt Sinai to see the sun rise (early bus the next day ... honest). So I checked out the monastery then pottered around town then caught the one daily bus to Cairo at 6am.
Cairo is a fascinating city. No doubt it is huge - about 20 million people all shoehorned into the same city - however it has details that give it a charm that places like Amman just don't have. For a start it has a bloody great river running through it: always good. Downtown has hints of European (specifically French / Hausmann style) architecture and there are several areas of "old" Cairo: Islamic Cairo to the east of the city and Coptic (Christian) Cairo to the south. In between all this is a big mish-mash of motorways and fly-overs and roads clogged by traffic. Crossing the road (as in Tehran which is also blighted by traffic) means bolding stepping in front of a car and hoping it stops which usually it can because it's travelling so slowly.
I also had the distinct pleasure of meeting a long term travel companion in Cairo. My Chubby Little Friend (CLF), Paul, with whom I worked during my time at university, had lost his job about seven months earlier and, more recently, lost his girlfriend (she wasn't down the back of the sofa either ...). With nothing to do and with a passion for travel he asked to join me and, with need for a human shield for my future travels, I readily agreed. He flew into Cairo, timing his arrival at the airport for midnight and later arriving at the hostel where I was staying at 2.30am. The gate was locked so rather than sleep on the street he found another hotel down the road.
Our first few days in Cairo were marked not by a frenzy of sightseeing but rather of planning and getting visas. Our next planned destination is Sudan followed by Ethiopia so we hunted down these countries' embassies. Sudan's embassy is a dump: it looks like it should be sheltering homeless people. Their visa application requires declaration of blood type amongst more banal questions (I'm A+, one of the few times I got an A). They also require a letter of 'no objection' from our embassy so we trekked to the New Zealand embassy, which looks positively space age compared to Sudan's, and paid 200 Egyptian Pounds ($35) for a letter which basically regurgitates our passport information and asks the Sudan embassy to give us a visa. Which they did for $100. Each.
Having aced the visa process our plan is to meander down the Nile to Aswan before taking the weekly ferry (which leaves each Monday) to Wadi Halfa in northern Sudan. However, before going south we did a trip to Alexandria and the oasis town of Siwa in the very north west of Egypt, a spit away from Libya. Aexandria is basically a mini Cairo - the same town planners' passion for motorways - although no real 'old city' (however Alexandria makes up for this by having a big market which we spent ages walking through). The lighthouse and library are long gone although in an effort to get noticed again Alexandria has built a new, modern library which has letters from all the known alphabets in the world (claims Lonely Planet) carved into the exterior walls. One of the big positives for Alexandria is the presence of Mohammed Ahmed's, a budget restaurant which offers a range of foul (bean) based meal for $1 a dish.
To get to Siwa one gets on one of four daily buses from Alexandria, drive west along the coast past endless resort villages (most of which are still under construction) for 40 kilometres until El Alamein which is marked only by a few cemetaries and memorials and thankfully not resort villages. After a later rest stop, the last four hours (300km) of the journey follows the road south west from the coast through seemingly endless desert: flat, beige desert unlike the splendour of Wadi Rum. It is inevitably a small town surrounded by a sea of palm trees (as oasis towns surely are) however also one in which pretty much every inhabitant caters to tourism in some way. There are safari tour companies everywhere, plenty of hotels for a small town and loads of little kids with donkey and cart taxis. We slept in the next morning before hiring bicycles and cycling around town, to the inevitably named Cleopatra spring on the eastern edge of town and, later in the afternoon, to the great salt lake on the western edge of town.
After a couple of nights in Siwa we headed back to Cairo via Alexandria.
Giza! The cherry on the cake. For the unintiated (as I was until my visit), Giza is just on the edge of greater Cairo's city limits (meaning that I already had a sneak preview of the pyramids when our bus to Alexandria drove right past them to reach the Alexandria Desert Highway). "Hire a taxi," intones Lonely Planet (both the Middle East and Africa editions), "the easiest way to see the pyramids" (Giza as well as Saqqara and Dashur - 20km and 30km from Giza respectively). Not for us. Passionate about saving our money (for tea and ice cream) we took the bus and microbus (van) service to Giza which worked just as well.
Approaching the pyramid entrance the road is lined with tourist traps: we were careful but inevitably they found us. How about a horse ride around the pyramids? No. How about a ride with a horse and cart? asked one incredibly persistant young man who followed us for several hundred metres with his obedient workers and set of wheels. No (repeatedly). Hey, says another guy outside the pyramids, I'm a tour guide inside the pyramids but, before his patter gets too frenzied, I asked for his guide ID: it's at home. Unfortunate for him.
Inside is remarkably calm and nearly void of sellers of tat. The sphinx is right behind the entrance and we spent some time around there and in the adjacent cemetary, guided (for free) by a young statue salesman (who had already sold his three cheap wooden statues and was bored) called Alberto. After parting with Alberto we headed not for the pyramids but for the top of the nearby hill to get a panoramic view. From there we could not only see a fantastic view of the Giza pyramids but also the pyramids of Saqqara, 20km to the south, near Memphis, which we visited the next day.
Giza was definitely worth the entrance fee although I'm still equivicating (even now) about Saqqara's pyramids. Whereas the Giza pyramids are in effect Pyramid 2.0, Saqqara's pyramid (built for a chap called Zoser by his number two and high priest Imtohep) does a good impression of rubble and was in fact Pyramid 1.0 (Beta version) preceding Giza's pyramids by some hundreds of years. In Saqqara, however, we did get to walk into the tomb under the (very small) pyramid of Titi. Took some photographs too until a grumpy local guide told us to stop (something to do with rules).
To get to Dakhla, we in fact travelled through another two of Egypt's oasis towns: Bahariyya and the small and ugly Farafra oasis. This meant spending the best part of twelve hours in a bus looking at desert although there were some variations worthy of photographing. Unlike Siwa, Dakhla is not a single town but a collection of hundreds of hot springs spread over a distance of some tens of kilometres. We stopped first at the smaller, northern oasis town of Al Qasr for a night and spent the next day looking around the old town and the irrigated fields to the south. In particular we aimed to find a large hot spring, in which one can swim, and which locals assured us was not far away and easy to find. Some hours later, we asked yet another local for directions to this mystery hot spring (using a combination of Arabic pleasantries and mimes to indicate "hot spring"). Her children took us to a bore hole where a petrol-powered bore was pumping huge amounts of water into a small tank feeding the irrigation ditches. After photographing our "hot spring" we left.
The other main town in Dakhla Oasis is Mut (pronounced 'moot'). It is fairly ugly but has two redeeming features: huge flocks of ibises land outside our hotel (the Gardens Hotel) each night to roost in the palm trees and it has a bus station so it is easy to leave. We did a daytrip to the small nearby town of Qalamoun ("with its improbable desert lakes," gushed Rough Guide's First Time Africa). We went to Qalamoun: it was baking hot and empty although we found some lakes! One had a dead, half rotten cow beside it but we held our noses for the sight. Returning to Mut we bought some pastries and "malt beverage" (alcohol-free beer; see also Iran) and, having brewed some tea in our hotel room took the lot up to the roof to watch the sun set and the ibises go to bed.
The next day was our trip to Luxor. There is no direct transport from Dakhla so we took the bus (at 6 am) to Asyut in order to catch a train to Luxor. Arriving at the train station a soldier waves us over. "The next train's not until 1am," he tells us in bad English. His friend suggests we get a minibus. We ask around anyway and find that there's a train leaving at 1545. We go to buy a ticket for this train and, as we do so, a solider by the ticket office shouts something in Arabic at the ticket guy. "I can't sell you a ticket for this train," he says (undoubtedly prompted by the soldier) but he adds that we can buy one on the train. Since some terrorist attacks against tourists in the Nile Valley in the late 1990s, Egypt has designated "tourist trains" between Aswan, Luxor and Cairo of which there are three per day. Each train comes with a number of teenagers in army uniform and armed with guns. We caught the 1545 train (which was 45 minutes late) anyway.
In Luxor we found a good hotel and, the following day, headed to the Temple of Karnak. It is big, full of columns and has enough hieroglyphs to make a stone-mason weep. It also happens to be quite a beautiful thing and we spent quite a few hours there leaving, thankfully, just before masses of tourists arrived.
We also picked up a tour to the west bank (but not The West Bank) to see The Valley of the Kings (VoK), The Valley of the Queens (VoQ), The Temple of Hatshepsut and The Colossi of Memnon. It is fair to say that, Temple of Hatshepsut aside, these places are vastly over-rated (and incredibly over-priced). The Valleys are, unsurprisingly, just that. There are 60+ temples in the VoK, of which three can be visited on the standard entry ticket (of about $15). If you want to visit Tut's tomb which is, according to consensus, just like all the others but smaller (he didn't last long so didn't have time to build a mammoth tomb) then cough up another $20. Unsurprisingly, no-one was seen entering or exiting his tomb. Other tombs can be entered for $4 to $5 each. What were the tombs like? Crowded for a start with streams of tourists filing through them and basically tunnels with hieroglyphs on them although some tombs have painted as well as carved decoration. Tombs appear to be rated (unofficially at least) according to the brilliance of the hieroglyphs: details and brightness of paint. It is worth pointing out that although hieroglyphs are often small symbols of text others can be up to man-sized (or larger) carvings or paintings (or a combination) depicting daily life.
Heading to the VoQ, we find that there are two tombs open to the public: the others are either permanently closed (due to unstable limestone) or open only to those with large wallets. The tomb of Nefatari, one of the top VoQ tombs, can only be accessed (says Nana, our guide) by handing over 20,000 Egyptian pounds - close to US$4000 - to the Antiquities Department in Cairo. No student discounts are available.
The Temple of Luxor, smack in the middle of modern Luxor town, is smaller and less interesting than Karnak but also about the same price. It is also lit up at night and easily photographed over the walls and through the fence so we spent a bit of the money we saved by not entering by doing a horse and carriage ride for an hour (for only 10 Egyptian pounds = US$2).
After Luxor, we headed to Aswan, our final town before heading to Sudan. Aswan is even more tourist than Luxor with a massive souk, loads of feluccas (and felucca ride salesmen) and not much else. It is, however, the gateway to Abu Simbel, the site where a temple to one of the many Ramses was found and moved 60 metres up the hill to avoid it being flooded by the Lake Nasser being formed by Aswan High Dam. As with the trains between Luxor and Aswan the tourist transit to Abu Simbel is controlled (apparently for our safety) with convoys of buses leaving Aswan from about 3.30 am to 4.30 am. Each of several convoys is formed of up to 40 buses, minivans and tour coaches (each of which is quickly checked to see if a bomb is strapped underneath) before leaving. These 40 vehicles, with the odd police car wedged in, then drive at speed across the desert highway for three hours often tailgating each other and carrying out unnecessary overtaking manoeuvres. It felt less safe than if we were able to make our own way there. The temple itself was pretty impressive although, having already seen plenty of colossi and hieroglyphs, a little of the same. The hieroglyphs were, however, well preserved and well lit.
The next day we tied up loose ends before going to Sudan: we bought our ferry ticket, freakishly found an American (actually, he found us) in the hotel who had come from Sudan and happily changed his Sudanese pounds for our Egyptian pounds at a good rate, tried to post Paul's sargots and had a good last meal.
And the baksheesh? It's a tip, or just another way of asking for money. The kids are the main offenders (and even chased our horse-drawn carriage with their hands held out) and it happens everywhere, especially in the south where the only industry aside from growing veges is the tourism.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire