Dahab
I wake up cold and stiff. It's 1am and the boat is gliding into Nuweibaa harbour. Orion still glistens unreachable above me but I am in a new country. Some say the country is called Egypt. Some say Sinai. I come to understand why but right now everything is confusing. I have been abandoned up here on the deck as everyone swarms to disembark and I pick my way unsteadily down to the smokey lounge where I am collared by the hyperactive Mohamed in an obviously fake uniform. "Guy William?" he asks "Motorbike England?". He parks me in the mouth of the ferry as it disgorges lorries and tractors dragging baggage trains, dockers picking up all the bags that fall off them and a mess of humanity. Three guys teach me Arabic swear words until he returns half an hour later. At the terminal scores of flashlights criss-cross inside shipping containers as people vie for immense packages that barely squeeze through the scanners. Mohamed gets on the back of my bike and directs me down a pitch-black dirt road, clearly intending to do away with me and we turn and turn again in search of the most private murder spot. We come to a sad little shack and he raps on the side until a sleepy little man come out with pencil and paper. The reason for his existence it turns out is to laboriously make a rubbing of the frame and engine numbers stamped onto the bike. I pay him about 80p and he goes back to sleep, his little rubbings stapled to the ever-growing pile of paperwork. We take this to the police who sit around in tracksuits and make private dark jokes. It's a scene from The Sopranos. Baksheesh and random pieces of paper make an inscrutable cosmic dance as we trek from office to office. I get exciting new numberplates in Arabic - nobody seems bothered that the only way to fix them on covers the brake light. Around 5am, having drained me of all cash and any sense of reality, Mohamed pronounces me Halas - finished. I ride off into an uncertain future down a dark and twisting road and gradually, as I dodge potholes and sand drifts the grandeur of the mountains around me swims out of the approaching dawn. I pass army checkpoints 3 times in the hour-long journey but my newly minted papers seem to do the trick and I find myself descending into Dahab just as the first magenta ray of dawn pierces the Saudi Arabian horizon across the sea. It throws jagged shadows from ghostly suburbs of unfinished hotels and I am drawn moth-like into it's burgeoning warmth and the smell of salt.
I can't get hold of Kseniya, the Russian girl I met in Palestine who has invited me to stay. I haven't slept in nearly 30 hours and I find myself at Abu Ahmed eatery, eyes streaming, head spinning, intoxicated by the sights and sounds of Dahab waking all around me. Goats, whole families on ATVs, everyone grabbing fresh Aish (bread) and clamouring I eat one of the most delicious breakfasts of my life - tangy foul, crisp falafel straight out of the oil, spicy aubergine and sweet, sweet tea. A guy who calls himself Ortega sits down in front of me. Turns out his dream is to ride his own motorbike to South Africa and he invites me, in my homeless predicament, to come stay at his house. After a twisted 2 hours of sleep I awake to a barrage of facebook messages from the customs man in Nuweibaa. He tells me I have to come back there is a problem with my paperwork. He calls me 'dear' and threatens to call the police. I Whatsapp the UK company who supplied my expensive papers and they contact Cairo who contact Nuweibaa and with remarkable efficiency the situation is resolved. If it had happened during the night when I was there I daresay I would have just caved-in and parted with even more baksheesh.
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Abu Ahmed eatery, Assala, Dahab
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With the security situation in Sinai, I had intended to speed through, maybe in a single day but instead I stay in Dahab for nearly 4 weeks. The town captures my heart in a way I have never experienced before. It's not just the playfulness and ready smile of the Egyptians, it's not just the infinite blues and warm breezes from the ocean, the place has a magic and energy I don't have words for. I meet extraordinary and inspiring people. The town is half partying divers and half meditating Russians and then there are the free divers who are half and half. The locals tend goats in the sandy backstreets and nothing happens on time and anyway time is by far the least dimension, dwarfed by the heights of the mountains, the depths of the seas.
Ortega's place is the afterdark hangout of divers, bedouin, footballers, party animals, mystics - most often all in the one person - and the midnight oil is well and truly torched. Swaying from soul-baring to sleepwalking.
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Shanshan, Ortega and Shady
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I spend 3 consecutive dawns meditating with a small group of Russians, lead by Kseniya down psychic flightpaths to projected ideals and reallocated memories. When I open my eyes the third time they are moist with the bittersweet of parting.
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Kseniya and Helen - my meditation buddies
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Ortega is a dive-master, a dreamer and a pharmacist at the local hospital. After years of hard graft at university his job there involves doling out pills and filling in a gigantic daily ledger. Then copying it all laboriously into a monthly ledger. Then taking it 300km to a lady who has monstrous piles of ledgers who compares, pill by pill to work out what he needs to reorder. Egypt is stuck in the past with its bureaucracy and nepotism he says as we sit on a moonlit beach sipping gin and mint. He gets me all set to dive with the assistance of Noor and Nadya at Mirage Divers but then the doctor tells me that, because of the heart medication I am on, if I dive I will start bleeding from my eyes or some such trifle..
I ride a camel, with a group of lovely Transylvanians, to Abu Galoom up the coast, a beautiful laidback camp of palm-frond huts and submerged Japanese gardens. I spend some time fixing Ortega's water pump and helping him pull his motorbike apart. I am hoping to inspire him to make his own odyssey. The past catches up with me and I find myself on a Whatsapp group of schoolfriends planning a reunion and I marvel at the middle-aged-schoolboy conversations I lurk through, odes to the futility of time. There is no way in town to copy a key and it's like the Bermuda triangle trying to get hold of Dahabis so I am often locked-out of Ortega's house and have to climb the crumbly walls of his compound in the warm darkness.
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| Sushi and Shima - Ortega's dogs - loudest snore ever! |
Amr is another dive instructor. We talk about Yuval Noah Harari, Eckhard Tolle and Wim Hof. AI, quantum computers and brain hacking. Explains the schism in Islam between Sunni and Shia and how the prophet's grandson was murdered. Tells me how as a zealous teenager he studied atomic physics with the sole intention of finding a job in the US and causing a nuclear accident in the name of Islam. Then, before university, he took a year and read everything he could find about other religions, especially Sufism and the idea of a personal god and the course of his life changed.
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| Assala, Dahab |
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| Lighthouse, Dahab |
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| Assala, Dahab |
The kids run around barefoot in the goat shit and sand of the Dahab backstreets. I watch as two eight year-olds make a fine game of rearranging all the ATVs outside a shop while a six year-old sets up a little stall selling soap powder. Driving is done slowly but in random directions and you never know when a toddler will scuttle out in front of you. I'm often on the wrong side of the road which is only an issue when someone else, also on the wrong side of the road decides to revert at the same moment you do..
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| Assala, Dahab |
I meet Svetlana and we bury carrots and beets in a fire and eat them, licking off the ash and blowing on them like a scene from The Turin Horse. She has lived a few lives. Her father was a famous physicist who fixed some problems in Einstein's Theory of Relativity and then died in an enigmatic train accident when she was 12. A biophysicist with 15 published papers on cancer cells to her name. Survivor of Perestroika and 3 years of near-starvation. Theologian. Psychoanalyst. Finally found her heartland in the mountains of Sinai where she guides and finds the bedouin handicrafts that she sells at Dahab's Friday market. She feeds my mind Arabic, my soul Sinai mysticism and my mouth green leaves. I fix her shower, her HiFi speakers and build her a yoga trapeze. We make trips on the bike up and down the coast and into the mountains.
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| Svetlana - off to the Friday Market with her Bedouin crafts |
Next door to Svetla's house there is a tiny mosque with an ancient muezzin, lungs battered, from a lifetime of shisha no doubt, who rarely gets through a call without broadcasting a coughing fit to the neighbourhood.
The muezzin near Ortega's house is completely tone-deaf. He sounds like a drunk being electrocuted in a well. Hearing the Aden (Call to Prayer) is one of the most intoxicating and beautiful rhythms of my time in the Islamic world - even when it wakes me up before dawn - but Dahab muezzins (they're not singers, singing is Haram) are a breed apart.
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| Svetla's house |
I acquire an Egyptian tattoo (burn) to go with my one from the Cambodian jungle while wrestling with the sand at Wadi Gani.
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| Wadi Gani |
On the coastal road south of Dahab, I meet a German called Josef. He says he rode a motorbike here from Germany 36 years ago.
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| Coastal road south of Wadi Qnai |
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| Sinai Solstice Sunset |
St Catherine
At the main checkpoint on the way to the mountain retreat of St Catherine, the soldiers nose their rifle muzzles through my luggage, piece by piece, even squeezing the toothpaste. I sit in their little shelter and make friends with their CO, Zaki, a gentle man who is studying law while he does his military service. I'm pretty sure this is the only reason I am allowed to continue. Motorbikes are a big issue in Egypt: ISIS use them for attacks - materialising and then vanishing into the desert at high speed. "Don't come back" they say quite categorically. Perversely, I do show up again but with a little patience, smiles and playing dumb they let me visit a second time.
With inscrutable wisdom, the mountains hug the little village, saucer eyes on me at every turn. I find Svetlana and we go bask in the sunset at Wadi Feiran.
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| Sinai's daily miracle |
I climb Gebel Katharine, Egypt's highest peak with Ta'mein, a bedouin herbalist. Halfway up, Ramadan serenades me on Sinsemia under his Almond and Olive trees and feeds us delicious bedouin style Koshari (like risotto).
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| Ramadan's Semsemia - an Egyptian harp made from a petrol can |
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| Ramadan, playing his Sensemia - Gebel Katharine |
From the summit, I can see the Red Sea to the East, the South and the West. I feel the rocks vibrating with a message I can feel but not decode. It's below zero. I meditate and the sun explodes into a thousand spangles. We huddle in a little shelter and Ta'mein produces an outstanding example of his horticulture. The descent, under a sky first rose then blood then pitch, is a song to my feet, picking their way unerringly down the steep crumbling path with no discernible input from yours truly.
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| Summit of Gebel Katharine - highest peak in Egypt |
I visit the monastery that lies in the palm of the mountain where Moses received the 10 commandments, the day Jo dies. Mother of Nic and Al, my first love and oldest friend respectively. I listen to the monks chanting in Greek and light a candle for her. I turn around and the candle is gone and I understand. The smell of candles dying, the cool flagstones collapse time back to my choirboy days and I weep.
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| St Catherine's Monastery |
Sinai is a meeting place. Here you can meet the silent whisper inside. Territory of Abraham, the first man to conceive of God as a person not a multitheistic inner projection. Land of his son, Isaac, first man to envisage God as someone to form a relationship with. And of his grandson, Jacob, the first to talk of life after death.
Air fragrant with the scent of over 400 herbs, over 100 of which grow nowhere else on earth, half of those endangered. Svetla's bedouin friend, Dr Ahmed, is a highly educated man who works to cultivate them and use them medicinally. He is a national TV personality and he shows me around his garden and cave-like surgery. His potions are laid out on a pricelist. One is for cancer, one is simply called Viagra. Mostly for politeness, I take some powders for a cough.
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| Svetla in Dr Ahmed's herb garden, St Catherine |
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| Svetla and Dr Ahmed in his surgery |
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Svetla - ready for a chilly journey
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| Kinda wondering what goes on here... |
Father Justin is from Texas. He kindly shows us the monastery library, normally off-limits. Here the very earliest books of Christianity are stored, including the Codex Sinaiticus, the first copy of the bible, from the 4th century, preserved by the freakishly arid climate. He explains that the monks would recycle the parchment by scratching out the previous text but they are now able to recover the various layers using different wavelength X-rays. He shows us how book-binding evolved. Elsewhere, in the Vatican for example, they rebound books but here, uniquely, they have the original bindings.
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| Father Justin shows us the ancient books in the library at St Catherine's Monastery |
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| Some of the newer books in the library at St Catherine's Monastery |
The monastery houses some amazing icons. The detail and expressions are exquisite.
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| Detail of Icon, St Catherine's Monastery |
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Icon - St Catherine's Monastery
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| Detail of Icon, St Catherine's Monastery |
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| Detail of Icon, St Catherine's Monastery |
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| Detail of icon - St Catherine's Monastery |
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| Book - St Catherine's Monastery |
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| Detail of Icon, St Catherine's Monastery |
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There is a letter from the prophet Mohamed to the monks, signed with his hand-print. When he was a young camel driver the monks looked after him and in the letter he says that Christians are to be respected and protected in Egypt. Someone needs to send a copy to the idiots killing Christians across Sinai and the Western Desert.
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| letter from the prophet to the monks |
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| St Catherine, St Catherine's Monastery |
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| Detail of icon - St Catherine's Monastery |
There is the descendant of the burning bush that Moses found. It's now kept behind a barrier - people used to try to reignite it apparently.
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| Svetla at the burning bush |
We sneak off the roads when the army aren't looking and explore the beautiful desert and its treasures, like these Bronze Age tombs, with their doors towards the west - the departed would then walk off into the sunset.
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| Bronze Age tombs - near Maiyet Ramliya Spring |
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| Bronze Age tombs - near Maiyet Ramliya Spring |
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| Near Maiyet Ramliya Spring |
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On the way we meet a bedouin man and his two sons. They show us a way to get around a collapsed track. I follow on the bike, the two boys standing in the back of the pickup laughing and calling to me as the churning wheels kick up a huge dust-cloud which plumes off the the east.
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| St Catherine |
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| St Catherine |
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| St Catherine |
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| Selima and Svetla doing the Books |
Ras Sheitan
We take a trip up the coast to Ayash camp in Ras Sheitan, just north of Nuweibaa. Just because it feels so nice to swoop along the ocean we continue up to Taba on the Israeli border and get lunch in a little restaurant that has more than its fair share of cats.
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| Cat chorus at restaurant in Taba |
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| Tower for collecting birdshit fertiliser - near Nuweibaa |
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| On road to Taba |
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| Ayash camp, Ras Sheitan |
It doesn't get more laidback and serene than this. More incredible snorkelling and slow walks collecting shells and coral from the water's edge. In the evening, there is music around the fire. There are amazing musicians from Tunisia, Egypt and Israel playing together. This is the real peace process.
On the way back we take a detour out into the desert via Wadi Silli. I am just about able to keep the bike upright with 2-up in the sand
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| near Wadi Silli |
In the middle of nothing and nowhere, Youssef is reclining with a shortwave radio so we drop in for tea and a chat about baby camels.
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| Youssef puts the kettle on - Wadi Disco |
Sometimes apparently he brings foreigners out here and they 'make big party'. Hence Wadi Disco..
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| Tea with Youssef - Wadi Disco |
There is this feeling in all my interactions with the Bedouin. They are one of the oldest cultures on earth and for them the very best thing that they aspire to is to sit and drink tea with a good person, usually their family and it's not about what is said but simply feeling another soul. Svetla tells me I should be careful what I share with them, that they don't understand me, my complicated and distant life and that if I tell one that I have been to Israel for example, then every Bedouin in Sinai will know this within a week, such is the bush telegraph. I say I have to remain open-hearted, that this is how I stay safe and I believe that if you display a level of distrust then it is mirrored in everyone you meet.
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| Young camel at Wadi Disco |
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| Cave at Wadi Ghazala |
Nabq
Another trip takes us down the coast to the mangroves at Nabq, not far from Sharm el-Sheikh. Again we decide to take the backroads.
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| Road to Nabq |
There are a few challenging sections where I have to get Svetla to walk.
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| Rocky road to Nabq |
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| near Sharm el-Sheikh |
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| Mangroves at Nabq |
El Tor
I finally peel myself reluctantly away from Dahab. I've been calling this my African journey and after 12 weeks I still haven't even reached the continent. I ride around the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula and up to El Tor. I had intended just to stop for some food and, if I liked the town, staying the night, but it's such a palava at the checkpoint. They insist on knowing which hotel I am staying in and on escorting me to it. So there are six men with machine guns in two trucks, one in front and one behind as I ride into town. Not the most subtle of entrances. If I wasn't a target before then I am now. I say I want to eat before I find a hotel and they take me to Abo Ali restaurant where the obsequious Ali fawns over me with his US-twanged english. He recommends Gebel Al Tor hotel and when the bodyguards come back I go check-in to the cavernous place. It's on a street barricaded at one end and with a checkpoint at the other. Once I am off the bike they leave me to wander on foot on my own. I wander the broken streets and feel the weight of many eyes. It's been a while since they last saw a foreigner. At the beach there are a few families enjoying their Friday together. I follow the shore past little dunes and waste outlets under a passive cloudy non-sunset and feel melancholy for the love affair with Dahab that is now ended. I pass a line of decapitated lampposts, their live wires erupting at deadly angles and wave as some of my bodyguards pass in their truck. I pass a large Coptic church, surrounded with barbed wire and gun emplacements. The shops have rabbits and chickens in cages awaiting their fate as the town wakes up and bustles with its Friday evening festive feeling. I pass a large overflowing bin writhing with cats and overflowing ahwas (cafes) swarming with men smoking shisha and watching football. I get my hair cut by a very serious man who erupts into a huge smile when I pronounce the job Jahid Jazeelan - very good. I examine my burn dubiously. It doesn't seem to be healing. Should have peed on it like Svetla told me.
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| El-Tor |
In the morning I stare at the ceiling, listening to the harsh tones of the checkpoint radio below my window. I decide to visit Hamam Musa, a public pool with a view over the town. Again the escort and on until they discharge me at the town limits. The road up to Suez is stark and beautiful. I stop to take a photo and a police truck appears from nowhere and hurries me on.
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| On road to Suez |
20 miles or so before Suez I am given another police escort which takes me all the way to the far end of the heavily fortified tunnel.
Finally I am in Africa.
Cairo
I hit the pure anarchy of Cairo's ceaseless rush hour at dusk. I listen to In a Silent Way to keep myself calm enough to cope and the interlacing streams of red lights and white lights braid me into city life.
Nawara is one of the special people I met in Dahab. She is a talented filmmaker writing her first feature. She is one of my tribe and with typical Egyptian generosity lets me stay at her place in downtown Cairo. There is a postcard of Andrea Arnold's Fishtank on the wall and I know I am in good company. She is a genuine-article left-wing intellectual. Her uncle is the president of the Egyptian communist party. Her father a well-known theatre director. She takes me to the coolest bars that remind me of Kray Twins-style east end pubs and squat era Hackney happenings and to houseparties that feel more like conspiracies where I am cooked for by the leader of the Syrian opposition, get drunk with Gadaffi's minister of transport, talk about his 1956 evacuation from Port Said with Zacharia Ibrahim a famous folk musician and meet a man who shared a stage with Cream and Jimi Hendrix. A pair of Libyan journalists, who look like Groucho and Harpo Marx get Nawara to translate - "Tell him! His country is splitting my country in two!" - I relate my experiences in Nablus and Hebron and make my heartfelt apology after which they ply me with copious whisky. We listen to a great Oud player and sing and dance and somewhere in the wee small hours the leader of the Syrian opposition gets in a fight with a Palestinian singer and a glass is broken.
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| Hassan's houseparty, near Talaat Harb, Cairo |
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| Hassan's houseparty, near Talaat Harb, Cairo |
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I really enjoy Cairo traffic. It's a video game. The most important thing is to make no sudden movements and show no fear. They can smell it. I learn to use my horn and join the staccato atonal bedlam. I have conversations with adjacent drivers at high speed while dodging sandy potholes, slippery rubbish and the pedestrians that amble guilelessly across the five lanes of insanity.
Nawara tells me how, when she was travelling near Nuweibaa, she had a big problem because she has a middle name that sounds Christian - her father converted from Christianity - and the police wouldn't let her go until her mum sent through a picture of her ID which (scarily) shows which faith she is.
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| Christmas lunch with Nawarra |
Nawara's cat, Lulli, is a little confused. She comes miaowing into my room and sits on my phone, my writing, my pills to claim my attention and begs to be stroked. When I do stroke her she attacks like Pearl Harbour.
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| Lulli won't let me have my meds |
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| Kasr el-Aini, Cairo |
Nawara tells me tales of the revolution. She was there camped out in Tahrir Square in 2011, making films of the kids who got hurt or sent to prison. "We were played by everyone" she says. "The Muslim Brotherhood, given substance by US and UK policies, came from all around and amongst us. Then the army and the business men stood back while they attacked us." Classic divide-and-conquer. "A lot of women were raped in the square then - nobody talks about that."
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| Barricade left over from revolution, Kasr el-Aini, Cairo |
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| Much of the amazing graffiti from the revolution has been painted over but some survives |
I hear stories of the absurdities too. Like how telephone conversations are ineptly tapped - to the point that sometimes they just break in with some inanity when you are chatting on your mobile. Like Abdel el Atti, an idiot from the government who announced he had found a cure for Hepatitis C (which is a bigger problem than AIDS here). He had a homemade-looking antenna that, he said, could detect the virus and that he then fed the patient his own virus now transformed into skewers of Kofta... I read an interview from the time: "I hope that the invention turns out to be true but I don't have confidence this is the case," said 35-year-old taxi driver Ahmed Morad. "I don't believe anyone ... everything is very confusing. It is like a salad."
Another of the inspiring people I met in Dahab is Maisara, a meditation teacher. He shows me around the arts centre he uses for classes,
The Art of Seeing in Heliopolis and I join a group discussion of the film Wall-E, which by an odd coincidence I use as a reference at the film school I teach at in Ealing Studios. He and his friend Rania invite me to a concert of
Zār possession music from Upper Egypt at the excellent
Makan club in downtown. It's amazing. I am a nut for odd rhythms and there are rhythms here that warp my mind. The atmospheric empty arpeggios of the
Tanbura a six-string lyre. Amazing drumming that really shifts gears and singing to break any heart but I think my favourite thing is the
mangour, a leather belt sewn with many goat hooves. The two serene old guys play this shaker-like instrument by gyrating their whole body and the little breaks that they make are such an indescribable joy to watch.
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| Zār music at Makan |
I visit the labyrinthine Egyptian museum - an embarrassment of riches on a par with the British Museum.
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| Heiroglyphs, Egyptian Museum, Cairo |
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| Heiroglyphs, Egyptian museum, Cairo |
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| Heiroglyphs, Egyptian Museum, Cairo |
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Horus, the raven-headed god, Egyptian Museum, Cairo
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| Boat people servants for the Pharoah in his afterlife, Egyptian museum, Cairo |
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| Servants for the Pharoah in his afterlife, Egyptian museum, Cairo |
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I wander the endlessly fizzing streets around me, just breathing in the pure energy.
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| Streets near Khan al Khalili, Cairo |
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| Khan al Khalili, Cairo |
Even though I have been in Arabic speaking countries for a good couple of months now and diligently keeping a note of all the words I learn I am frustrated at my progress. Partly this is because I keep moving and the Arabic changes as I go. Partly it is simply that Arabic is pretty hard to learn with some sounds that the muscles of my throat are just bewildered by. Partly it is because of this con-trick they call Modern Standard Arabic which nobody actually uses. So I start to learn 3ameya, which is Egyptian Arabic or slang. This may be a bit more use to me as most of the Arabic world understands it because of Egypt's successful film industry. I get lessons from an old actor called Adel at his house in 3abesaya and try to master the letter '
ayn (represented in 'Whatsapp speak' or by the number '3') which only seems to be understood if I pretend to be a wolf choking.
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| Adel, my 3ameya teacher |
Nawara also patiently teaches me a lot and I begin to feel a sea change. It's like a
Magic Eye picture from the 90s. I start to hear the words separate from each other and take on meanings. My perception of Arabic morphs from a harsh noise to a warm and expressive lilt with a delicate percussion.
I marvel as so many have marvelled before me, at the Pyramids in Giza. Imagine building your own personal mountain.
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| Khafre pyramid, Giza |
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| Great pyramid and Khafre pyramid, Giza |
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| Sphinx, Giza |
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| Menkaure pyramid, Giza |
I wander to Old Cairo and the heavily fortified Christian churches and Coptic Museum there.
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| The Nile-ometer that shows the water level, predicting famine or flood |
I see in 2018 with a lovely small group of Nawara's filmmaker friends. Saraa, a catlike actress, Hassan, a sound-designer/composer like myself and Alhwary, another inspiring Egyptian. He's a writer/director working on a film about mind control. He talks about Krishnamurthy and the 18 days of the revolution that were a time of hope that was crushed. Of friends who lost their eyes to rubber bullets. How he was raised with hate speech from the media and then found he was lied to. How women sang songs of euphoria when Sisi got in and how this craving for stability embodied in the military is a national flaw. He says we should all take a shower together and Saraa throws him a well-worn frown.
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| New Year's Day from Alhwary's place in Mohandseen |
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| NYE dreamers - Guy, Nawara, Alhwary, Sharaa, Hassan |
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| Checkpoint outside Coptic Museum, Hanging Church and St Georges |
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| Coptic Art |
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| Coptic Art |
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| Coptic Art |
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| Coptic Art |
In Nuweibaa, despite my protestations, they only gave me a month's motorbike license and I am dreading tangling with the epic Egyptian bureaucracy again to renew it. As it turns out it surpasses even my imaginings. I shuttle from the scrum of a traffic office in downtown - only getting anywhere because helpful locals take pity on me and translate and lend advice - to the airport, with a long and involved search to find the correct office, hidden behind a supermarket, to a random passerby who turns out to be a customs broker called Mahmoud who takes me to the police who say I first have to get a new stamp on my visa in Mogamma, the infamous civil service building behemoth downtown. This is despite the fact that I still have a month left on my visa. He then shuts the office for the day at 2pm. That's the first day. Next day I go to Mogamma, which is literally out of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Corridors and staircases clogged with sad-eyed refugees from Palestine and sub-Saharan Africa waiting in endless and heartless queues. Line after line of desks, groaning under the weight of overflowing reams of paper files tied with ribbons. I squeeze my way through paper-and-flesh jungle and by asking passing policeman and sheer trial and error find window 38 and the lady I need to speak to. This is where the tiny bit of Arabic I have learned makes a difference. She thinks it's cute and goes from barking out grim orders to even the hint of a smile and when I come to her window again she ushers me to the front of the queue. At the end of it all she says "Come back at 9am tomorrow" with a thumbs-up. I am not feeling so thrilled. Another day passes.
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| Mogamma, on Tahrir Square - Egypt's answer to Kafka's The Castle |
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| Window 38 |
Day 3: I go to Mogamma (with another in a long line of Cairo hangovers) but this time I know where to go and I scent the end in sight. I triumphantly present myself at window 38. She smiles, takes my passport and says come back at 1pm. Noooo! This means there is no way to get to the airport before they close at 2pm and then it is Friday tomorrow so that will mean an extra 3 days before I can leave and I have already stretched Nawara's generosity too far... I trudge outside and give the bad news to Mahmoud and he says go back and ask if you can have it quick. So I go and plead and she says I can get the stamp at 12pm - just enough time to make it to the airport. I kill time until midday then with my hard won little stamp I race to the airport where Mahmoud barges into a string of offices, shakes a lot of hands and doles out a lot of my cash until finally I have my carnet extended. Yes not actually an extension of my license but apparently the next best thing and an actual license extension would take a lot more time and money. Doesn't bear thinking about.
As an antidote to Kafka's nightmares, I go to the Cairo Tower for a birdseye view.
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| Giza Pyramids from Cairo Tower |
