Siwa pt. 3

On our night in the desert we all just slept out in the open as the temperature was probably right around 68 degrees most of the night. It was so pleasant that I had opted to use my blanket for my pillow until about 4 in the morning when I realized it was actually a bit chilly by then. Around this time mosquitoes came out and started harassing us for the three hour window surrounding sunrise that is apparently the only time they like to come out. Daniel and Mulu avoided the mosquitoes because after we had come down from our nighttime hike up the tallest sand dune, the two of them had were moved to bring their sleeping pads and blankets back up to the top of the dune to sleep up there. The tradeoff of avoiding he early morning bug bites was that they apparently kept getting sand blown in their faces. I'm not sure which was better, but it didn't really matter, as we all agreed it was a really peaceful night of sleep. Something about sleeping underneath the stars wrapped in the silence of the desert made it our sleep unjustifiably restful and so even though most of us had gone to bed past 2am we all woke up easily before the sunrise. Our Safari guides cooked us a delicious breakfast of jam, pita bread, tea (of course), and fuul (this is a beans dish that comes in various different forms throughout the ME; sometimes it's almost exactly like the refried beans you would find in a Taco Bell burrito, and other times the beans are whole and cooked with lots of garlic and spices; the latter is what we had here) while we watched the sunrise from atop the rocky outcropping next to our camp. I don't know why I didn't take a picture of our camp ever, but I suppose at the time I was just paying too much attention to the desert to even think of capturing our little outpost of civilization in the middle of it.

Desert Sunrise

After breakfast we packed up and headed back to Siwa for what we had originally thought would be our last day. Somewhere between waking up and getting back to town though Hemeida had offered us a little bonus addition to our Safari. He said if we would pay LE20 each he would give us a place to shower and clean up and then keep one of the trucks for us to ride around in so that he would take us to a few more scenic Siwan gems for the rest of the day. This might seem like a sneaky trick for him to get more money out of us, but given the fact that he was basically asking for $3.80 a person to do what turned out to be a lot of things for us, it was a great deal. We happily said yes, not even realizing what a phenomenal deal we were getting. I only learned later on when I went back to the Safari website to refer a friend that the stuff he took us on that day usually cost more like LE100 each. Furthermore, Hemeida doesn't even normally always accompany the groups out on these parts of the trip. Lesson learned: be nice to your tour guide. Judging by the fact that we have remained friends with Hemeida since our trip, having hung out with him a few times as he was in Cairo this last week (we're going with him to the big Egypt-Tunisia soccer match tomorrow night!), I know he was doing us a favor.


The trucks took us a to a colorful hotel/restaurant with a dingy double bathroom and vibrant cushioned seating area where we lounged for an hour or so as Hemeida took care of some business. One of the SUVs returned to take our bags and then we welked to Shallie, the town's fortress at the heart of the city on a hill that was surely used for good defensive measure back in the day. Having been there for thousands of years, Shallie is not exactly in the best shape, but it is still very beautiful and awe-inspiring to think about how this intricate city-center had been cut out from stone.

The better-kept parts of Shallie where people still live at the foot of the fortress' hill

Just a small portion of the vast fortress. Mountain of the Dead and the town's main mosque in the background.

After Shallie we met Hemeida in the town square where he had some slightly unfortunate news: the place that he needed to take the SUVs for some tire maintenance was still not open, so he had requisitioned a minibus for us to ride in instead. This meant that we would be cramming the seven of us plus Hemeida and the driver into an 8 seat bus. I say this news was unfortunate only because it's weird to say he had some news, not because any of us actually really cared. It was cramped, yes, but I think we all had come to expect and accept not being comfortable all the time in Egypt. After all, we were all dirty and sandy and you sort of just realize that getting to be comfortable and clean all the time is really not a necessary luxury all the time. By the same token, the bus seemed not to have working a/c, so we just rode with the sliding side doors and the trunk open to catch a breeze. Did the bus have seatbelts? Nah. But it did have not uncomfortable seats, a working engine, steering mechanics, wheels, and brakes. What more could we really ask for?


Our awesome minibus took us east to the salt lake to which our long meandering bike detour from the first day had gone, except the bus then turned down the road cutting across the lake that we had only taken photos of and turned away from before. The road stretched out straight ahead for what seemed like maybe a few miles, but it turns out I am a horrible judge of distances as it took us about 20 minutes to get across the lake. At first the water tracked along side our thin road, but then the water ran into flats either side. On the right was a rust-red mud flat which Hemeida told us had been the source of Siwans' building materials for most of the town's history, and on the left were the expansive salt flats.
Now I don't actually know if salt flats are technically the right term for these, as "salt flat" is one of those terms that I've realized I only know the meaning of by hearing it in different contexts, but based on the two minutes of research I just did in the middle of writing this sentence, I'm not sure that is actually the proper term, because this was almost like a thick layer of salt that had accumulated on top of (what I presume to be) the shallow remnants of this part of the lake. Either way, the flats-or-whatever-you-call-them were really beautiful. The vast crystalline landscape seemed a little dream-like, but every crunchy step reminded you that you were awake. What's more, the salt tasted pretty good. I don't know if there's such a thing as high-quality salt, but this seemed like it must be it.

After the salt flats we piled back into the bus and kept on driving to the far end of the lake. When we reached the "shore" again we headed right and drove another fifteen minutes to the tiny hot spring of Abu Shrouf. This is the first hot spring that didn't have a walls and pipes built around the spring to better regulate it into a sort of natural hot tub, and we mostly just looked at it for like five minutes and then got back into the bus to go to Abu Shrouf's cold spring.
Surrounded by palm trees this spring was large, the size of a small swimming pool and, after trekking around in the sand all day yesterday without showering since, it was the most refreshing swim I may have ever had in my life. There was a small hut at one end where you could buy sodas and sheesha from a bored-looking Siwan. Daniel and Mulu, as is often their way, got a sheesha while the rest of us swam. I stayed in longer than the rest and was eventually joined by our mischievous minibus driver. He started taking running dives and flips into the pool, so I decided to join him. This is sort of a silly detail, but over the summer, I had finally taught myself how to do backflips, but only off of diving boards, so two days before, when the poolboys at Cleopatra's bath had been doing backflips off the high wall, I had been too chicken to join them. But when our driver (whose name I can't remember...) challenged me to do a backflip off the much lower pool edge I decided to join him. After a couple more practice jumps I had managed to get my body all the way around without freaking out and twisting awdwardly mid-air a couple times in a row.

Having bonded over our poolside acrobatics, the driver and I then had a race to see who could swim to the bottom and then to the far end of the pool first. It felt a little unfair when I beat the desert-denizen, but I think it made him like me even more as we hung out at the far end of the spring speaking in a mix of broken English and Arabic (which, I might add, is still one of the most exciting things I get to do here in Egypt). When some Italian tourists showed up, including some bikini-clad twenty somethings whom our driver seemed especially interested in, he elbowed me and asked me the question that most all Egyptians ask whenever you have a conversation lasting more than about 6 sentences: if I was married. I laughed and told him no, to which he responded sagely observing that "in America, these things are different." We then decided we should probably do some more dives and splash the Italian tourists (don't worry not too much, all in good fun).

As we lounged in the hut talking with the Egyptians and eating the snacks we had brought with us, another instance of the Siwan generosity occurred when Daniel started feeling a little sick from some combination of the heat, low blood sugar, and dehydration. Two Siwans quickly jumped in a car to go pick some dates, while the guy selling stuff at the hut pulled out some of the ice water from the cooler and started pouring it over Daniel's obliging head. The dates, as usual, were delicious when they came ten minutes later.

The dates picked by our helpful Siwan friends. They were all gone in about 8 minutes.

We stayed at Abu Shrouf for about three hours before heading back to town. At this point most of us had started to feel the lack of sleep's effects and we mostly napped in the bus, except for Daniel and I, who had the seats next to the open doors. Forty-five minutes of trying to keep my head up and awake we arrived back in town to get some dinner. The seven of us and Hemeida sat down at an open restaurant and ordered some food and relaxed. It was at this point, while we were waiting for our food that a Siwan came over and invited us to come to his desert party that night. We apologized and told him we were taking the 8pm bus out of Siwa and would not be able to make it, to which he shrugged and told us to take his flyer just in case. Fifteen minutes and some encouragement from Hemeida later, I and all but Nav and Mulu had decided to take the 7am bus the next morning instead of the one that night. This turned out to be a great decision for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was that it turned out the Bus Nav and Mulu were supposed to get on broke down making their trip last an extra four hours. We didn't find that out until later, but we knew from the moment we got back in the bus to head up to a peninsula nicknamed "Fantasy Island" that we had all made the right decision anyway. Our driver greeted us each with big red lollipops which somehow, strangely, were the best lollipops I have ever had. Flavored something like sour cherry they magically had the perfect balance of sour and cherry, and we were all sort of touched that the driver had thought to make such a nice, but totally unnecessary act of kindness.

The correctness of our decision was only further reinforced by the fact that Fatnas Island (the real name) was stunning. As we drove to drop off Mulu and Nav at the bus station, Hemida seemed a little agitated and kept indicating politely that he wanted us to hurry up, though we didn't know why. We drove up a windy palm-tree lined road as dusk began to fall until we reached the western lake and crossed over a land bridge to Fatnas. Looking out at the water as we crossed, we saw tall, skinny-legged birds with curved beaks and pink wings relaxing in the twilight waters only to realize with a shock that these were, of all the things we never expected to see in Siwa, Flamingos! We reached the island and parked next to another hot spring. Led by the hurrying Hemeida we walked through the thick palm trees in the receding light for a minute until the trees suddenly opened up before us to let our eyes feast on this:

and

I did not expect to see a gorgeous sunset over water out in the middle of the desert.

After sitting and drinking some Shay BiNa'ana (mint tea) as the sun set over this unexpected tropical paradise, we headed back into town to do some last minute shopping and then got into one of the 4WD trucks (tires now working) to head out to the desert party we had been invited to at dinner. The party ended up being at a sort of big permanent campsite where a group of local Siwan men played drums and sang/chanted various songs while some younger boys danced. Later in the evening, the boys actually did some bellydancing (they were still wearing their galabaya robes, I might add) which dispelled any misconceptions I had about the agility of males' hips compared to girls. It was mostly tourists with their Siwan guides at the "party," but there were a few Siwan families there too alternately clapping or singing along. Sitting in the bright colorful tent, we were brought tea and sodas (included in our LE20 minimum charge entrance fee) as we watched the mesmerizing show for probably about an hour or hour and a half.


We were all starting to feel pretty tired, but we had heard that we could head to a hot spring that night if we wanted and so we made the inspired decision to soldier on despite our creeping exhaustion and the prospect of our 6am wakeup time for the next day. It seemed like we had picked wrong when the first two hot springs we went to turned out to be closed (I don't really understand how hot springs get "closed" but there was barbed wire), but we arrived at a third one to find what was literally a hot spring in the middle of the desert. A few bushes huddled close by which we used to change into our bathing suits behind, but mostly other than that it was just us, the hot spring, the desert, and the stars. About half of us had been planning on not going it for various reasons of fatigue and sunburns (the latter being mostly me), but as soon as we got there we all changed our mind except for Shayna who was feeling sick to her stomach. The water was hot, but felt pretty amazing in the cool night air. We sat and talked with Hemeida and Fathi, our driver from the day before, about Siwa and its history, as well as about how Fathi learned to navigate the desert (basically he did it by saving up some money and then offering to accompany and help an older professional driver around the desert as he led safaris free of charge). It was a pretty magical way to end what had all around been a magical experience, and we all agreed it was well worth the lost sleep.

On the ride back we all got Hemeida's phone number for when he would be coming to Cairo and then he took us to a cheap hotel to spend our last night in. It turned out the hotel was pretty abysmal compared to our first hotel and not much cheaper, but it served its purposes well enough and we all mostly forgot about it. Our bus back in the morning was long but more comfortable than our first one and not really worth going into detail about. We arrived in Cairo after dinner time to the stark contrast of Cairo's obnoxious cab drivers and stifling pollution. We were curious to see how the city would be different after Ramadan, but after so little sleep, we were all a little too cranky to deal with the loud contrast to the place we had just been. I don't exactly know how to sum up our trip, but without a doubt, it is one of the most amazing places I have ever been. Last night, when I was hanging out with Hemeida at, of all places, the Hard Rock Cafe (it was his idea to go there, not mine), I was retelling him how much I had loved Siwa, and reasserted that there was some kind of magic about the place that touches people. I'm not one to believe in supernatural things, but I think that's a pretty good way of describing what it's like. I think we would not have had such a charmed experience if we hadn't gotten so lucky to befriend Hemeida, though. He told me last night about some of the more horrible Safaris he's gone on with Europeans expecting wildly inappropriate services of the Siwans the meet and of prissy tourists not realizing that some sand and some sweat were going to be par for the course. I guess it helped that we were there to make the best out of every possible experience. So...I guess...go us?

Or maybe Siwa just really is magical after all.

* * * * * * * * *

Phew ok, finally done with Siwa. Now I'll start writing about Cairo again hopefully. This coming week is going to be a short one as it is Armed Forces Day on Wednesday (national holiday) so I think me and the crew are going to head to Alexandria. I really am going to write about Cairo though. I swear. I've been to some clubs and become sort of friends with a couple of guys among whom one is a full-time model (he makes more money in a day than I, a spoiled American, spend in two weeks here), one is the third-ranked martial artist in Egypt, and one is the second-ranked boxer in Egypt (to be fair, I've been hearing things like this about various sports a lot of times). I also made friends with a bookstore worker who wants to improve his English and taught me how to play backgammon. I beat him both rounds we played. Basically, there is not enough time here. My ALI program, in addition to having one more day of class than the rest of the school, gives more homework, and has more intense teachers than, from what I've heard, the whole rest of the school. And there is just not enough time. But I will persevere with my blog, I promise!

P.S. I love when you guys send me email updates every once in a while and please don't take my tardiness in responding as evidence that I don't! I just usually have homework. I promise I'll respond as soon as I can!