But yes, Siwa. I was interested in Siwa because some of the bottled water we consume here has "Bottled in Siwa Oasis" written on the labels, and I guess I like to know where the food I ingest comes from. The trip is roughly nine or so hours from Alexandria, mostly on a coastal/desert road that I missed the first time around since we left at six pm on Wednesday night (we arrived around three am). I was awakened by the bus rocking violently side to side on the dirt road that led to the hostel -- I found out later that there is only one paved road in Siwa, and it is in the way back of the town (not by our accomodations or anything else central). We stayed at the Palm Trees Hotel, which is a nice name for a vaguely crappy joint -- think Crazy Camel Camp in Dahab, but worse. The rooms were stained with years of cigarette smoke (and smelled like it, too) and the blankets were disgustingly unclean, but it was a place to sleep and so we crashed.
After four or five hours of sleep we woke up to discover the joys of the bathrooms. There is only one on the end of each hall, home to a shady-looking toilet and shower with no hot water, and a sink. Oh, and about five million mosquitoes. Considering my intense allergy/tendency to be a homing beacon for mosquitoes, I was particularly overjoyed to be bitten in the night by those fine specimens of useless evolution.
We took a tour of Siwa Thursday. First, we went to the Mountain of the Dead, which is a hill where rich folks were buried back in the Greek/Roman periods of occupation in the area, when some wealthy families relocated themselves to Siwa for the beauty. It wasn't really touched until World War II, when the locals used the tombs as bomb shelters from air raids, and made a bit of profit from chipping away the paintings and selling them to mostly the British. A few murals remain, though, and honestly they're really quite amazing to see -- I'm vaguely certain that they were restored in a less-than-quality fashion in the not-so-distant past, but it was still a wonder to behold something from so long ago.
The Temple of the Oracle was next. Although the area is pretty much wrecked you can still tell that one of the buildings was definitely a temple. We stopped at 3in Cleopatra in the afternoon, which is a clear spring where the locals usually hang out. The boys swam -- the girls were less than eager. At the restaurant next to the springs we met our first Asshole Tourist, and he was damned lucky Chelsea responded to him first otherwise I would've laid into him like none other. That douchebag had the nerve to tell us, "HEY. You're in an Egyptian house -- take your shoes off!" I mean, dude, 1) we're not in a house, we're on the roof of a restaurant, 2) we're been here for two months and know a little bit about Egyptian culture, 3) you are shirtless, wearing shorts, and speaking in a British accent, and 4) you don't know jack shit about Arabic otherwise you would've understood the nasty names I called you from across the room.
But I drank an amazing mango-pomegranate smoothie there.
We watched the sunset from a little peninsula on a natural lake in the oasis, looking out over the Libyan border. It was beautiful for sure, although sadly enough there were lots of clouds and we were unable to actually watch a sunset. Dinner was at a rather nice place with interesting architecture if only moderately passable food, and after all the hubbub we went off exploring the ruins of Shali, the old, original fortress-town of Siwa.
Shali was built out of a special salt/sand/rock mixture, and stood the test of time until three days of rain made the thing melt. We climbed around there at night like a bunch of hooligans, and got scared away by a pack of wild dogs that seemed none too friendly. But hey, it was entertaining. At the base, I found the most beautiful scarf in the world, but I am poor and I do not have the four hundred guinea necessary to pay for it. Two hundred, deal. Four hundred? Not on your life.
It was Thursday night that we all realized why we felt so weird in Siwa -- of the total three or so adult women we'd seen, they were all veiled, but not veiled in your typical burqa way. I can handle the burqa. It is irritating, but I can handle it. I cannot handle this: the women in Siwa wear black mesh to obscure the entirety of their bodies, including the whole face, with a large traditional Siwan shawl draped over their heads and the rest of their bodies. They simply sit there, usually in the bed of the donkey carts driven by their husbands or sons. And because of their appearances, they scared the shit out of me -- they were like ghosts, or some sort of sinister priestesses. It really was unnerving.
The next day we took a random trip out to Mount Dakroor, in the back of Hameida's (our tour guide) pickup truck, and shopped around for some souvenirs. Chelsea and I met a nice man who claimed to have lived in San Francisco for thirty-two years, and he had the California driver's license to prove it, so while I'm sure he bs-ed half of his life's story I think some of it was true. At any rate we bought a lot from him and he gave us tea, so I liked him.
Then, in the afternoon, we loaded ourselves into cars and went off to spend the night in the desert. When I say the desert, I really do mean The Desert -- this is the Great Sand Sea, or something like that. When we went joyriding with the Bedouins in Sinai, I was entertained by the desert driving -- here, it was the Real McCoy. We slid down more hundred-foot dunes than I ever thought I would see in my life, let alone crest them and then gun down them, engines blazing and passengers yelping like a pack of puppies. It was amazingly fun, and amazingly beautiful, too. We stopped at two natural springs in the middle of the desert, one cold and one hot, neither of which I partook in, since I do not want bilharzia and I was too lazy to change my clothes. We also harassed our first tourists in Egypt. They were Italians, and if by some weird chance one of them reads this: don't take it personally, Sameh is just an ass anyway and we've been in Egypt too long.
We stopped for the night at a Bedouin camp. Instead of spending the night in the camp, we trekked out into the desert and laid under the stars, which sounded like a great idea but ended up being the coldest, least-prepared night of my life. I enjoyed, despite probably making my existant cold worse -- I saw a total of nine shooting stars, including one with a bright orange tail and one with a long, long green and blue tail. We watched the sunrise, too, since it was buttfuck cold out and no one could really sleep -- Khalid wussed out and left in the middle of the night, back to the camp where they had a fire going.
My glory of the weekend? Wearing the same clothes for two and a half days in a row (too cold and lazy to change after the night in the desert) and getting seven mosquito bites on my face in the middle of the Great Sand Sea. The middle of the desert. I also did not take a crap for three days, leaving my penance to be using a roadside "restaurant" in the middle of nowhere, where the kid charged my half a guinea for nothing but a bowel movement and stomach pains the rest of the five hours back to Alexandria. I leave you all to beat that.
another truckstop on the way another game that I can play another word I learn to say
another blasted customs post another bloody foreign coast another set of scars to boast
WE ARE THE ROAD CREW
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