Enjoying Exotic Egypt

Bassam was the name of our Egyptian tour guide. He was, in his own words, "a genius guide." He idolized Elvis Presley and struck pharaonic poses for the women and a few of the men. He claimed to have an extensive Presley music collection and an '83 pink Cadillac back home in Alexandria, but the desert heat creates mirages and all is not what it seems in Egypt.

During our one-hour drive from the old airport to the Mena House Oberoi Hotel next the Pyramids; I had the opportunity to fully appreciate the Egyptians' total lack of regard for traffic lights and regulations. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper, door-to-door, metal to wooden cart, Toyota to donkey, Ford to camel. There are as many donkey and horse carts in Cairo as there are cars. The only law drivers obey is that they must honk there horn every 4.5 seconds - -day and all night. The din is constant, loud, unnerving, and must have some meaning for the natives. They intuitively ebb and flow with precise disorder while bringing their vehicles (motorized and otherwised) to the brink of collision before adroitly executing dips and banks that would be the envy of the Blue Angles.

One bumper sticker I saw read in English, "I'm not deaf. I'm honking, too."

After a few days doing the tourist sites, we left the bustling bazaars of Cairo for the quiet of an uncrowded off-season Nile cruise. It was the fulfillment of a PBS/BBC Masterpiece Theater inspired dream to join Agatha Christie, Florence Nightingale, Liz and Richard in floating down this mother of all rivers.

Midnight and I was alone at the bow as we headed south into the dark evening of Africa. Mosquitoes breezed around the dim railing lights. A warm wind swarmed from the western desert. Shooting stars fell before us and the light from the lunge softly illuminated the starboard bank in a gentle beacon. Memories of those who have come and gone surfaced in the hot soup of the equatorial night.

"What do you remember? The face of a pretty girl." The Fleetwood Mac tune spun over and over in my head. I felt the oppressive romanticism of the night and spotted a flock of egrets flying overhead, the beating while wings flickering in the blackness as echoes of Joseph Conrad whispered to me.

"…and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky-seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness."

It was a genius night.

In the day, we passed mud cliffs, mud huts, mud bricks drying in the sun, mud-covered villagers washing themselves in the muddy water. Even the British-era cars of the Cairo to Aswan train rolling along the eastern shore looked like rust-stained mud.

A morning stop and shop at Esna turned into a death march. People were picked off on the souk (market) street. Dragged into stores and held ransom, people had to buy their way out. Of course, the Egyptian men wanted to help the Western women in and out of their clothes. "Miss, let me tie that across your chest."

One Aussie was lost for thirty minutes before a rescue party was organized to save her. We didn't arrive until she had received four proposals of marriage. At least she interpreted them to be marriage proposals. Something about a bed and children.

The sacred lake at Karnak in Luxor remains but the stone crocodiles surrounding it are gone. They once guarded the pharaoh's honor. The queen would bathe in the lake each morning. If she had been unfaithful or otherwise betrayed the king, the crocodiles were supposed to come to life and devour her. I guess such superstition had more impact in an era before CNN.

Luxor temple was a mixed-up harmony of philosophies. Coptic Christians had pained the images of Jesus and his gang of disciples over the carvings of the pharaohs and ancient gods. A mosque, still in use, stands over part of the temple just a hundred feet from an alter to Caesar Augustus and a hieroglyphic scene depicting Alexander the Great. It all made sense to Bassam. No problem.

The yellow sun was just rising in the haze behind Luxor temple when we took the morning ferry to the west bank to begin our trip to the Valley of the Kings. It was summer and the tourists were few. Our early start allowed us to beat the others to King Tutankhamun's little tomb. Unimpressive was the word that came to mind and still does. His treasures in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo are worthwhile but the hole he left in the ground isn't worth the ten-minute wait in the sun.

The temples in Egypt are filled with the sights of squatting turbaned men in robes holding aluminum foil covered wooden reflectors to illuminate the carvings and images of the ancient sun god. Baksheesh (tipping) for light. Baksheesh for dark. Baksheesh for everyone. Baksheesh is a way of life. Baksheesh please, bitte, s'il vous plait, pr favor, min fadlak.

Inside the bombs and temples, flash photography is prohibited in order to protect the colors of the paintings. Don't believe it. For one Egyptian pound, you can take enough shots to make a Hollywood director happy. I don't think artifacts were "stolen" by the French and others in the nineteenth century. I'm sure they paid an inappropriate amount of baksheesh to the appropriate government official. The past is all Egypt has to sell.

Thank God for the baksheesh and that Egypt still has past to sell-even if you can't take it with you. It's worth the trouble to see and smell and feel the living past. A visit to Egypt is, in the words of Bassam, no problem.

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