Shane Conder's Whateveritis of Nothing

It's been six months since we took our honeymoon around the world, going through Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, airports in Malaysia and Thailand, and China.  Overall, the trip was absolutely great.  We tried to blog through the whole trip, but a number of things got in our way, not the least of which was simply fatigue after keeping busy all day.

The farther away you get from a memory, the more those memories seem to consolidate on just a few moments in time.  This time in September, we'd already left Egypt and were in Kenya.

I thought I would share some of my strong, lasting memories of Egypt and perhaps along with a new picture or two.  That doesn't mean I'm going to go over everything I remember, but just some of the big, important items. Laurie has also posted her memories of the Egypt part of our trip on her blog, Naturally Speaking.

My main memory of our visit was that everything was very dirty and dusty.  And by dirt, I mean that there was garbage everywhere, in particular, in the streets and where one walked.  This was particularly notable in the markets where you literally had to walk on refuse while looking up out of the throng of people at old, crumbling buildings that look like they would collapse at any moment. The waterways, although covered in filth, also had many egrets in them, as can be seen here.

Also, don't trust what anyone says on the streets.  We got convinced to go off in one direction, only to find out they just wanted our money for a camel or horse ride.  We didn't want to comply, so they sent us further along only to find out we (supposedly) weren't supposed to be there.  On our way back out, guards and others were cracking looks and probably laughing.  It was not a pleasant experience but we fully learned that flat-out lies were expected. (And that's isn't of the misleading type of, "Buy this, best quality, real," that we would become so familiar with at the other end of our journey.)

Within the Citadel, I happened across the filthiest restroom I'd ever seen.  It was also probably the oldest.  Scary, too, was the fact that locals were filling up their water bottles.  From the looks of it, it would have been safer to fill up a water bottle from a puddle in an overcrowded cow pasture.  I didn't have any small notes on me at the time, so the tip I gave to the attendant was a bit larger than normal (by about 20x), but was barely $2 US.  After he realized what it was, he came running out when I was already 100 feet away or so thanking me profusely. 

A while after that, we got to hear the call to prayer while overlooking the city.  That was an absolutely amazing experience.  The sound and enormity of it was profound.  It's just not possible to miss the right times with that sort of announcement.  Naturally, off in two directions groups of pyramids could be seen through the haze, too, which just added to the mood of the view. 

The last impression was the absolute chaos at the airport on the way out.  I wrote about that before, so I won't go in to much detail  now.  Suffice it to say, if there had been a panic from real or a false threat, people would have died.  It could have been from being knocked over and trampled during a brief break in the crowd wide enough to fall in to.  It could have been from one of those metal luggage carts being dropped, since they would be handed over people's heads when they were in the way.  It didn't help that there were absolutely no other white people in sight.  We felt very out of place and a bit disturbed by the whole experience. 

However, it should be noted, that the people who actually did work there were actually all nice.  Sure, they had to deal with the chaos, but we never had any problems with them giving us a hard time, either going through the entrance security, checking our bags, checking our passports, or even at the gate security where Laurie kept setting off the metal detector.  (Eventually they let her through after asking if she had a knife or gun because they couldn't wand her because they had no female staff.  I suspect if that had happened here and no female was available for "wanding" she would have been held until someone was found.)

Those are my main memories that help remind me that if we ever do go back to Egypt we'll skip out on Cairo and head off to the other sites.  Hopefully they'll be a little more official and organized than the pyramids.  I'm not counting on that, though.

Posted by Shane on March 12, 2007 8:05 AM | Permalink