Egypt

Taking the ferry from Aquaba in Jordan over to Nuweiba in Egypt, we get chatting to a gobby Canadian girl and her boyfriend. She is one of those Asian-American girls for which nothing that comes out of her mouth, regardless of how seemingly amiable, isn’t laced with a formidable dose of latent aggression and spite. Regardless, the four of us decide to share a taxi to the main traveler drag of Darhab, once docked. No sooner are plans hatched, when a couple known to the two keg-yanks show up. Christina listens in growing outrage as they offer this new couple the same taxi space, just minutes ago offered to us. I find it funny, but Christina won’t let it drop and makes a point of vocally repeating how nice it will be to share the ride. The Asian-American girl’s face explodes in a bloom of crimson, looking as if she’s just had a vat of gin main-lined into her spine, as she splutters her new terms and her bloke hides behind his Lonely Planet. Christina then sits contentedly, as the vessel sails a turbulent sea of tension.

Ras Shaitan

Alighting at Nuweiba Port, the scene resembles one not too dissimilar from the mass panicked exodus seen about 26 minutes into every Will Smith disaster vehicle. Having had our passports taken off of us on board, we eventually find the office where we are to collect them, stamped. We are asked where we are from. Upon hearing we are both British, the guard rifles through a huge pile of passports and fishes out two British ones, not giving them even a cursory check to see if they are ours. They aren't. His co-worker snores loudly on a chaise lounge. Later, when being summoned through security, just a couple of security scanners in a huge barn, the poor bastard in front of us is made to open a pack of souvenir lighters for the purpose of bequeathing one to the guard.

We decide to head to Ras Shaitan, a secluded strip of dessert and ocean about and hour and a half away from Darhab. A pot-smoking Bedouin Muslim in a pick-up truck taxi's us and an American couple who are heading the same way. He wants to charge a ridiculous amount and succeeds. Half way down the road, it starts to rain and we pass a villager getting drenched. The driver stops for him, and we all become incensed after paying the extortionate fee. He races off a moment before the drowned rat almost reaches the truck, our driver shouting,

“Sorry wet man, no ride. Bush and Blair here. They too important to help you. Bush and Blair here…”

 I force myself to turn and see the man slowing to a halt, trying to regain his composure, continuing to absorb water, and I inch a little closer to hell.

We stay at Ayash Camp, simple rustic huts dotted around beach-side sand hills, back-dropped by dramatic dessert mountains. 

Ayash Camp

Hut at Ayash Camp

The utopian ambiance is offset, more than just a touch by a group of armed soldiers and an enormous tank stationed at the entrance to the camp. It’s a place where neighboring Israelis come to get stoned, compare dredlocks and sing fucking Nelly Furtardo songs around a campfire. A very real possibility exists that , come nightfall, a car jam-packed with improvised explosives, could park itself close to a group sing-along, detonate, and send the melody of Lenny Kravitz’s car commercial anthem ‘Fly Away’, splintering off into the ether. This sadly happened on two occasion in 2004, hence the military presence. Why the guards aren’t under equally strong orders to eliminate the threat of ill-informed wankers with guitars, is less easy to explain.  

Ayash Camp is staffed by a revolving door of perpetually stoned young Bedouin men. A grimy cracked plate of food ordered hours ago will eventually be dropped onto your filthy damp rug.  You waft off the multitude of flies and only then realise the food isn’t what you ordered. You point out this out to the incoherent waiter, who giggles, stoops to retrieve the dish and then staggers off, trying to lumber each group with the food until someone is too famished to refuse another plate. Again, you begin the long wait for the next shambolic figure to lurch itself and a large tray through the sand. When you do finally begin to eat, a cunning collective of cats, dogs and insects circle you, before one group eventually has the bottle to besiege. When it comes to dishing out leftovers to the aforementioned stalkers, priority is given to the dogs as one cursory and regrettable peek inside the wretched hovel of a kitchen suggested that the cooking staff were in fact feline, a massive posse of them, nipping between prepared plates and gorging on enough of each one to ensure the taste and temperature were just right.

The ADHD chap you attempt to order food with. Note shoddy hippy art of Unicorn watching a UFO.

Cairo

On our first morning in Cairo, we head to the huge museum, situated just of Tahrir Square, now famous for the main hub of the mass protests that were to follow. The Mummy Room is fucking amazing. I had expected a gaggle of the archetypal, wrapped-in-tissue sort, most often seen belting it down corridors in Scooby Do. These ones however, are all unwrapped and that, their skin in tact, along with fingernails, hair and even eyelashes.  It’s mad. A sign asks patrons to be silent whilst observing the corpses, a limp gesture that is completely lost on the Italians in attendance. Italians are so fucking loud. They move in enormous tribes and scream absolutely everything that crosses their minds at each other, and all going off at the same time. In the spectrally lit mummy’s room, two middle-aged Italian women, stand facing each other on either side of the well-preserved remains of Queen Hatsheput, hollering at the full capacity of their lungs. The monarch shifts slightly in her 3500 year slumber, briefly opens her eyes and mumbles at them both to, “Fuck off…””

The museum itself is heaving and we only stand the entire thing about an hour, tops. As fascinating as all the assembled relics may well be, the most astounding off all the sights on offer was a couple in their thirties who were both equally fuckwitted enough to think it was acceptable to leave the hotel both completely attired in ‘Ed Hardy’ clothing.

We head to the Pyramids in the late afternoon but they are shut by the time we get there, which is more vexing for Christina as she has been to the site before and wasn’t interested in a second visit anyway.

We end up paying to watch a ‘Sound and Light Show’. The event is attended primarily by North American tour groups. Everybody entering the site is subjected to airport-grade security. The body scanner for the line we are stood in suddenly breaks down. Middle-aged North Americans are so irritatingly dramatic. The woman behind me immediately starts up in a cloying Mid-West drawl, “Yeah…oh God…. Yep, I knew it, its bust... Oh Jeez, I guess we are all COMPLETELY screwed…totally screwed here…”  whilst I half-pray that the sudden lapse in security is a pre-cursor to an imminent atrocity. The sound and light show itself is alright for a bit. It’s all holograms and loud conjecture, in which all the Pharaohs talk a bit like Oliver Reed.

I return to the pyramids alone the next morning, Christina worried about leaving me alone and at the mercy of the terrifying Cairene traffic. I find the area on my own, but am clueless as to where the actual entrance is. I make the mistake of asking some Arabs, who say they’ll be happy to show me. They lead me down a quiet alley way before reaching a dead-end and what is essentially a camel car-park. When I get irate and ask them where the entrance is, they tell me I should pay for a camel ride. I stumble off swearing incoherently. Even though I'm still there for opening time, an endless procession of tour buses is already streaming into the site and the queue for the tickets is enormous. More annoying than that are the elderly tourists who push their way past, cynical inch by cynical inch. One old bastard is really determined to get into the queue well before his deserved place, and some mutual elbow work commences before I eventually just let the fucker in before me. Glancing around me, septuagenarians in colour-coded caps dart about in every direction; pushing everyone else out of the way in their attempt to blow as much of the prospective-inheritance as possible and fit in every world wonder before they shuffle off in the direction of the pharaohs.

Cameras are banned inside the pyramids themselves which is odd as there’s fuck all to photograph, save for the fat arse in front which is clambering its claustrophobic meander into the core of the frigging thing. The frightening trek is sound-tracked all the way by the incessant wailing of the Italians.

As I leave the site, the ceaseless motorcade of tour buses file into the site, mirthless foreigners at the windows, bouncing powerful bulb flashes off of the glass and straight into the lenses of their Nikon cameras. The Lonely Planet suggests exploring the site for at least four hours, but there doesn’t seem much to do after about 40 minutes. I stagger about in the heat, trying to force the chorus of ‘Walk like an Egyptian’ by The Bangles out of my head.

The Lonely Planet winds me up with it supposedly helpful suggestions. Many of the writers seem to have mistaken the assignment as a license to immerse us in their pretensions. The author of the Egypt section commences some indulgent paragraph about smoking hookah/sheesha with the line,

“Ah sheesha, my one weakness, my Achilles heel if you will?”

No Rafael, I won’t. Why not use spend your time finding out where I can get something decently priced to eat that won’t leave my ring-piece looking like a freshly sliced blood orange and my stomach feeling like I’ve taken a gut-shot. I hate fucking hookah’s anyway. There was a time when I was in D.C and some girl I had just met, dragged me all over town as she simply had to show me this ‘really cool’ bar. When we eventually found it, it was just a room full of Ivy League wankers gurgling on tomorrow’s sore throat, in-between spouting long-winded bollocks. Furthermore, to enjoy smoking a water-pipe is not something I would describe as an Achilles heel. An Achilles heel is not being able to walk past a American Apparel billboard, without having to dash into the nearest Mcdonalds bathroom to shiver one off the wrist.  Way back in Turkey, a different Lonely Planet write annoyed me when discussing the hot-air balloon ride he took at Cappadocia; 

“…We used the katabatic currents of cool air to surf down the valleys and rose on the warm anabatic winds…”

Oh, learnt a new bit of science have we, Mr. Bainbridge? Why not use the page and print to inform me where in Istanbul I can drink enough beer to get drunken, without having to spend the subsequent hangover trying to piece together the final moments of my entire savings. 

Nothing but pampered Western white boys using big words they've found on the internet to waffle on endlessly about their boring and self-indulgent experiences abroad... erm...

Back in Cairo, we go for a walk around what is referred to as ‘The City of the Dead’, an enormous complex of crypts and tombs that houses not only the dead but the living homeless. My guts drop monumentally before we get a decent butchers around the place, and I am forced to suffer the indignity of begging a 12 year-old Chelsea supporter for the use of his cludge. He leads me into his family’s tiny home, where I proceed to destroy the latrine with his old dear boiling rice just a few inches and a ply wood door away from my aberration, no receptacle for arse-wipes in site, nothing by way of a flush, and scores of flies circling my perspiring face.

Not far away from here is the wonderful Khan el-Khalili district, the real Islamic heart of Cairo where the buildings and mosques are spectacular.

City of the Dead

 Gleaned from pirated episodes of ‘Sex in the City’ alongside porn-streaming websites and embedded deeper by the shag–happy antics of Yo-Yo knickered European tarts on holiday, the esteem Egyptian blokes hold western women in is staggeringly low.

Inside the market (and in Cairo and Egypt in general) the treatment Christina recieves, regardless of wearing a ‘wedding ring’, a headscarf and holding my hand is wretched.  If we stop to ask young men directions, they all stare at her, while one laughs and gesticulates in Arabic, whilst the others all double-over in mirth. Whilst I am at the pyramids, Christina attempts a solitary walk around Cairo, but lasts just ten minutes before her nerves are shot and heads back to the hostel to read. I finally blow my fuse when a leather goods trader asks if she’d like ‘something special to eat…’ gesturing towards his johnson ever so tentatively upon ‘eat’. Male partners with dignity and common sense just walk away, not rising to it. Others with no common sense ask the offender if it’s true his mother engages in sodomy. The same ill-advised Mancunian boyfriends are then dragged away by an exasperated girlfriend, who actually would rather like something delicious, if not, interesting to eat, rather than watch an enraged pleather bag seller tear her pseudo-husband to pieces. Whilst venturing down a back alley we happen upon a packed café of shisha-toking local men, staring goggle-eyed at loud, widescreen televisions. Envisioning they are following events on Al-jezera, or observing a clerical admonishing, they are in fact watching Lycra-clad female WWF fighters roll around on the canvas. Within the strict confines of Muslim sexuality, the faux grappling probably wields the same appalled yet beguiled arousal as when young secular men gather around a Macintosh to watch ‘Two Girls and a Cup’.

Egyptian Phonics book for kids

Khan el-Khalili, Cairo

Many Muslim men in Egypt have bruises on their foreheads known as a ‘zabib’ (raisin) due to their observation of the compulsory call to prayer. Seen as clear signifier of meritorious piety, they range from small, barely noticeable blemishes to enormous angry pustular scabs. A newspaper vendor sports one so sore, that when he turns to face me I almost send a fountain of falafel-enriched vomit over his expansive carpet of print.

Bahariya Oasis

There’s nothing much to do at all in the Bahariya Oasis, but the peace and serenity after the madness of Cairo is bliss in itself. All we do is walk among the date and olive groves, occasionally reminded we are not alone by loud, almost aggressive catcalls emanating phantasmally from somewhere in the groves. Young Mohammed, who cooks the food where we are staying, excitedly asks us to come see what’s on the TV. He sits before the box, spellbound by a clique of sad and bored young women shuffling around a TV studio to Arabic dance music.  

Bahariya Oasis

 The Black and White Desserts

A guide is hired to drive us around the astounding Black and White Desserts. He’s a right sour-faced twat, who would clearly rather force knitting needles into his penis-hole than ferry us two around sand dunes for two days. His prospects of a tip vanishes before he even slots his key inside the ignition. The views however are just sublime.

Sand dune

Black Desert

Half way through the day, we stop for lunch at a brick shack in the middle of the dessert, where Bedouin men of all ages prepare food for the tourists. We are served a tuna-mayonnaise slop, the tuna of which is closer to the ‘cat food’ end of the sea-food spectrum. After trying to eat, we sit in the sun outside. One young local lad spots us, or rather Christina and then runs off to get his friends. After a prolonged period of pointing, laughing, staring and making strange noises, the more dominant chimpanzee of the cartload proceeds to take his top off, climb a wall in front of us, and swing backwards and forwards his eyes buried deep into Christina's, waiting for the moment she is impressed enough to stand up, turn around, bend over and get impregnated.

By dusk we have reached the heart of the White Dessert, we set up camp.

White Desert

White Desert

This place is just breathtaking. As night falls, the landscape becomes oddly unreal, completely lunar. The only signs any other human life are the occasional smatterings of drums that come across on the light winds, or the tiny flickering camp fires. It’s one of those places where the silence is so deafening that your ears ring aloud with it. Such startling surrealism is abruptly shattered as soon as our fucking misery-hole of a guide has finished washing the pots. Sat chain-smoking without a dash of conversation, he fills the evident void by blasting tinny and discordant RnB shit out of his phone. He then calls his German ‘girlfriend’, a former patron of his organization, who is now back in Frankfurt and starts interrogating her with subtle insidiousness: “So are you going to go out and make dancing tonight… tell me…?”

Great.

We sleep on rugs under a vast expanse of stars.

Camp

White Desert

Luxor

To get to Luxor, we have to take an exhausting series of busses and trains for well over 48 hours. At one point, we bus through the infinite dessert on a bus sparsely populated with Bedouin men, one to the direct left, who just stares at us with his mouth agape. The rest of them watch the recent remake of ‘Assault on Precinct 13’ on the flickering TV. During one scene, Maria Bella leans forward in a revealing top and stretches to the base of her long legs to attach the buckle on her stiletto. The stagnant air suddenly comes alive with sexual malevolence. If a Western woman makes such an erotic saga of doing something so functional as to make sure her shoe won’t fall off, you can’t blame Egyptian men for thinking it’s alright to come on to them with the subtle sexual prowess of Peter Sutcliffe. At one point a soldier boards the bus, makes his way straight over to us, check our passports and wants to know exactly where we plan to get off the bus.

The Valley of the Kings is amazing, though intolerably hot. As the hieroglyphics and daubings inside the tombs are under protective glass, you can get right up close. They are in bright colours and look like they could have been done in the last week. When you spot what looks like a small fuck-up in the brush stroke or an awkward looking cat-headed tart bunged on at the end of a column just to make up the numbers, it’s astounding to think of the many thousands of years since they were done.

Colossi of Memnon, Luxor

We head on to The Temple of Hatsheput, where instead of marvelling at the Osirian Statues or scratching my chin at the ornate inscriptions, I concern myself solely with envisioning the events of the 17^th of November, 1997, shuddering at the brain images I allow myself to conjure.

Temple of Hatsheput, Luxor

The next day an event occurs where I lose my mind in almost its entirety. Unable to cope with any more of the rip-offs, the hassle, and the pestering of Christina, I finally blow it. I should have seen what was on the horizon when I force my face into that of a machine gun toting copper, after he stares right into her thrupennies, nudging the colleagues astride of him whilst he does. Bolstered by my ill-advised bravado, a moody taxi driver drives us a few hundred yards and charges us the bankrupting sum of £2 for the trouble. Refusing to pay him, I force Christina out of the cab and we march on, whist he crawls the kerb shouting. I tell him that if he wants the money, he’ll have to get out of the car. He does, and comes at me. I jump into the stance that Robert DeNiro does after being escorted from Cybil Shepherd’s office in Taxi Driver. Christina runs off upset whilst I see panic set into the middle-aged man stood wilting before me. As a bystander rushes over to mediate, all the fight drains out of me and is replaced by shame and self-pity. I drop double the amount of the fare into the breast pocket of my former adversary, telling him I am sorry and head on after Christina. She has decided that I am psychotic and that doesn’t want anymore to do with me. As our time in Luxor (and together for that matter) is almost at an end, in a show of laughable self-righteousness, we both claim the Temple of Karnak as our own, heading to our final tourist hotspot in separate taxis, one cab tailing the other. We try to avoid each other at the enormous complex, but fail repeatedly and very quickly the whole situation becomes funny.

Like all the sites of Luxor, the place is bewildering in its history, shape and heat and we leave after about forty minutes, a possible record in philistinism. 

Karnak, Luxor

Karnak, Luxor

We wile away the remaining hours in Luxor by taking a felucca ride down the Nile. I try to relax while a recurring panic attack blasts its way through me, punctuated by shame, abject sadness and a little paddling in the Nile itself.

Nile at Luxor

Nile at Luxor

Back to Cairo

After a long train journey back to Cairo, followed by a long and rejuvenating sleep, I promise that I won’t lose my temper again. The firm resolve is extinguished within 30 seconds of leaving the hotel. A young gentleman stops Christina in her tracks, contorts his face into a sneer, and looks her up and down whilst hissing. I go at him, but the lady pulls me back and I resort to screaming at him. My ugly words come out all high-pitched and effeminate. He stands there beckoning me on whilst backing off at the same time. 

Within a minute of this incident, a middle-aged man overhears us mention an ATM, and then follows us over Talaat Harb Street. He proceeds to stand right up front with us as we try to get money out.  Christina begs me to let her deal with him. Her patience lasts a fraction of a second before her language ends up being more colorful than mine. Whilst she bellows at him, I repeatedly bounce my head off of the ATM machine, whispering “Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off… why… why… why…”, like a disturbed office shooter at the conclusion of a machine gun rampage, holed up in the disabled toilets whilst he hears choppers circling the building. When Christina finally gets him to clear off, a couple from Montréal appears out of nowhere and they each offer us their condolences, apparently as defeated by Egypt as we are. 

Straight afterwards, I order a falafel at a packed counter. When one is placed on the surface, an old lady next to me picks it up, rifles her fingers through the pita, the salad and the sauces before deciding that that one isn't hers and passing it on to me. I want to cry.

Mosque in Cairo 

Cairo

Back in the markets, Christina begs me to not rise to any of the insults and slurs and to let her deal with them. To satiate my pathetic need for ‘face’, I camp it up when they whistle and letch, pretending that I believe they are referring to me. It’s only later that I read that bloke on bloke sodomy is as rife amongst ‘straight’ males in Egypt, and another calamity could have easily ensued.

Sinai Peninsula

Defeated and exhausted, we head back to Sinai and Ayash Camp, for more utopia, Klezmer-singalongs and diarrhea. The coach journey there is unbearable, my iPod unable to compete with the Koranic caterwauling blaring from the speakers. A brief silent interlude occurs between changing the tapes. What he replaces it with is a recording of some man, simply screaming in reverb-drenched Arabic. This goes on for the remaining three hours.

Darhab

After a few nice days back at Ayash Camp, we head to the package holiday Mecca of Darhab, not far from Sharm el Sheikh. Darhab is basically Majorca with a much higher chance of being eviscerated whilst sipping on your Pina Collada. I was aware that the holiday hotspot has been a firm terrorist target for some years, however entering the area is eye-opening; armed guards everywhere, very few operational roads around the hotels and complexes, and check points and road-blocks at all entry points. Welcome to Intifadaville!

It takes a good few days for the paranoia to lift and until it does, its effects are continuous. For instance, looking a collection of fake Rolex’s inside a glass cabinet, I suddenly freeze then take sudden back-steps having had a ‘premonition’ of the whole display being blasted square into my face. Enjoying a glass of wine in a restaurant, I suddenly grip the table, envisioning a wave of fire, electricity and human limbs laying siege to the dinning room.

We take a trip to ‘The Blue Hole’, a deep and wondrous sink-hole for snorkeling and other bollocks. Loads of nouveau riche Russians holiday in Darhab and they are interesting to watch. Whilst snorkeling, I spot one Russian woman down there with her infant son, the child wearing an out-sized mask and no snorkel. He flails around, panicking like mad, while his fully insufflating mother tries to point out fish and that. He looks right into my eyes, looking for help. He has no fucking idea why he is down there, a place where you can’t breathe, where there’s a huge hole you should be falling into!  Intermittently, the mum hoists him out of the water by his wrist and bollocks him in an enraged flurry of angular capital A’s and back-to-front R’s.

The violent stomach cramps and the shits obviously return, and so in Darhab, the whole trip comes to a conclusion with me spending the final days, either writhing about on the bed of a dark room in agony, tearing my anus away with heartbreakingly harsh toilet paper or trudging up and down a row of ambient-lit atrocity targets.

On the way to the airport, the mini-bus driver almost ploughs us into a flock of goats and its accompanying herder. Everyone on board is sent smashing around the interior.

 After checking in our bags, I head to the toilet, which also functions as the police men’s social club. An officer at the adjoining urinal shakes his pissy-dick out all over my toes. I’m wearing sandals. Egypt’s final test. I sink my teeth into my bottom lip until my eyes water.