Breeding Superlatives (Egypt)

I had the most guttural of "holy crap" moments in Egypt. Now, "holy crap" moments do occur fairly frequently when I travel with my eyes open, but the one in Egypt stands out in particular.
I was walking through a forest of pillars in Karnak Temple, Luxor. There was colossal pillar after colossal pillar and I was dwarfed by them- an ant in a Walmart. I realized that this was one of the very places that I had studied since elementary school. To me, Egypt held such mystery that it became some sort of mecca in my 7 year-old mind. After moving to Colorado, I'd go to the Denver Museum of Natural History and lose myself in the mummy room. I was fascinated.

Being here today, amongst these unmistakable landmarks, the pyramids in Cairo and the seated stony faces of Abu Simbel before held a special type of accomplishment and significance for me. But at the same time, actually being here and really feeling it in the fragility of the moment has a complete entity in my life held a sense of bittersweet tenderness.

It is funny to glance back across the landscapes of my life to that 7 year-old girl with her mummy book and try to convince her that yes, she would get go Egypt and me traveling the world at 24 and doing it alone. I don't think she would have believed me!

Life pulls us down strange paths and I've learned, for better or worse, nothing feels as it's supposed to so expectations are just a confining waste of time.
Egypt is truly the land of superlatives. Oldest, edgiest, bluntest, prettiest, dustiest, finest, biggest, craziest, harshest, noblest, muckiest, zippiest, busiest, brashest, most, amplest, fullest, grandest, the list goes on. Egypt breeds superlatives in every corner of the country.
Most people told me I was insane to go to Egypt as a woman alone; that I would be hassled and grabbed and hate it. Most people told me they would never go back to Egypt.


I loved it the moment I breathed in the salty sand dune desert air. I loved the humidity that engulfed me when I stepped on the tarmac. I was excited from the first glimpse of the green snake of the Nile interrupting the leather of the desert from the airplane.


I thrived on the chaos of Cairo (which says a lot for someone like me who doesn't like big cities)- trying to negotiate the most erratic torrents of traffic. The urgency and craziness of traffic in Cairo can not be overstated. I was bounced off a bus and a car in my first hour there, but luckily not hurt!


Something strange happened to me in Cairo. The busyness people hate became a dust devil of amusement to me. The harassment of men became easy for me to ignore, I think people who complain of harassment in Egypt haven't been to the rest of Africa because I had no problem just ignoring and being rude back to the blatantly inappropriate and lewd comments of men here while the "hello"s and "how are you"s because I stand out as a white person in other parts of Africa warrant a polite response and become exhaustive and wearing. The rude people in the streets became helpful and pointed me in the right direction. The people out to cheat were friends and kind and offered me free drinks. I left Cairo on the night train to Aswan feeling like I had been to a different city than the one everyone had told me about.


Getting to smaller and less touristed towns only reinforced the appeal of Egypt for me. Here is a place out of an epic novel that matches a cheap postcard at the same time. It is scenically the most beautiful place I've ever been. The countryside is ribboned with fields of startling green tended by men in tunics and turbans with their camels and donkeys. The greenery is spliced with an imaginative desert that ranges from soft sand to hardened rock dunes.


Antiquity is a the forefront of the present- ruins splatter along the Nile. Villages still are made in the traditional square mud walls where words like quaint, historic, functional, sparse, mysterious, simple and beautiful collide. The curvature of mosques breaks the angular continuity of villages like this.


Larger cities like Luxor and Aswan have narrow allies that wind through the yellow adobe buildings to spotlight the Nile which is the vein of life in this desert. There are endless stone allies that twist through cities lined by markets with a sky of strings of colorful flags leftover from Ramdan flapping and glittering in the humid air.


Men bump into me down these cobblestone streets as they carry huge trays stacked with round Egyptian bread. Counters with fruits, sweets and baklava compete with endless shops marching down the way with all the same pseudo-authentic kitschy tourist treasures.


Tunics float past with turbaned head in them. Incense spirals so thick that it looks like smoke and adds to the mystical quality reinforced by bottles of perfume and baskets brimming with spices I never knew existed.


On busier streets donkey carts battle for road space with cars and huge tour buses. Tourists jump out of the Egypt-world bubble of their tour bus and snap as many photos as possible, dressed in appalling clothes for a Muslim country and lumber back into their plastic Egypt with hundreds of photos before they have seen anything.

For the first time I viscerally feel the adage, "Visit a country before it is ruined by tourism." In the touristy Egypt I find what was promised to me. There is the constant hassle and a culture that thrives on cheating everyone as much as possible.

I prefer to escape to the countryside where the greetings are genuine and smiles aren't leering. Here men sit and drink tea and smoke shisha, the 2 national pastimes, on every corner. Wherever I go, I see men riding donkeys and that always has a slapstick humor to it. No matter how dignified one can look in a well-wrapped turban, this is lost by the cartoonish quality of riding a donkey. They are just too short for riding and everyone bounces along with their legs frogged spastically out and comically close to the ground.

The attention of the men is wearing. It is constant and unrelenting and the one thing that made me hate the country at times. Even girls who are plain like me are bombarded with every step. Covering all my skin did nothing to help. I had to escape. I went for a 2 night felucca trip down the Nile.

Floating the Nile is the definition of chilling. Everything moves in slow motion as you pass by the lackadaisical churning of life on the banks of the Nile. One morning I found myself sitting in a small rowboat with the felucca captain, a local fisherman and his son. Typical Egyptian hospitality, the fisherman was making us food and tea that somehow continued to appear out of the sparseness of the splintered rowboat. Even the ever present shisha manifested itself. With the felucca captain translating, the fisherman offered me 1,000 camels and 1,000 horses for me to be his wife. I am told this is quite the dazzling offer. He even said that he would promote me to the status of his first wife. It was tempting, but I am sure his other wives would not be happy with the arrangement.

Touristy sites are impossible to avoid. That is where I began to get tired of Egypt. Cheating is a way of life. All the men, every single one that I met no matter the circumstances, without exception, are sleazy. the historical sites that I would love to spend all day enchanted by quickly lost their appeal as I bounced off huge groups of tourists. It is rare to see Muslim women out of the house and when you do they are shrouded in black, turning a woman into a dark ghost. This is fitting for her place in Egyptian society; even in restaurants women sit in their own section with smaller tables.

Police with machine guns follow tourists everywhere after recent attacks on foreigners. They are hyper-vigalent yet seemingly incompetent. We have to travel in police convoys and I swear they would turn on the sirens just for fun. Endless passport checks prevent any type of sleep on long drives. As for any sort of public transport I have taken, every single driver I have had has been certifiably crazy. Evidence includes the constant and thorough making of sound effects (by more than one driver) and swerving to hit a biker whom he did not feel should be on the road.

Despite warnings of terrorists and bandits, I made my way to a small city on the Sinai, Dahab. I am finding it impossible to leave this place. It has the sparkle of the Red Sea and Saudi Arabia taunts me from across the water, playing on my inability to see a place and not be allowed to go with the harsh reality that I cannot get a visa.

The pouring-honey pace of Egypt slows even further here and I feel I am in a black hole where nothing gets done but chilling. This place is known for travelers that come with the intention of staying a few days and they end up here for over a year. If I didn't have a commitment in Kenya I could guarantee I would be one of them. I even have a few jobs lined up as if I needed more of an excuse to stay.

Despite the difficulty with the men and tourist areas, Egypt is the closest to that perfect place I keep searching for. But those scars make it far less than perfect, often bordering on intolerable. Still there is the intrigue- the camels, incense, perfume, spices, turbans, tombs and temples I have read about since I could read, the ocean that folds into the sky with out a dividing line and the deserts that pull me towards their variety and brutal peace. All of it is deliciously compelling. Egypt- I think that says it all.