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The Egyptian Experience
and
Kenya Safari
By Nilima Bhat
25th
September 2000
Salaam Aleikum,
The tan is taking its time
to wear off. (I hate getting tanned because I grey instead of tan).
But then the 40*C afternoon heat and the scorching desert sands
are a small price to pay for the destination that is Egypt; surely
the mother-of-all-destinations for any one with a travel bug!
Vijay was to attend an
Ogilvy conference and spouses were invited for the ride. The
conference was on board a cruise boat on the Nile!! This was one
jolly I wasn't going to miss of course and since I had enough
notice, I read up all I could before getting there from the most
respectable Time-Life book on Ancient Egypt to the kitschy River
God by Wilbur Smith.
It was a 3-day cruise from
Aswan to Luxor and we got a day before and after in Cairo. 5 days
in all and we really did Egypt. Did it in style, thanks to
a well-organised and thought-through itinerary by O&M Africa
who was hosting the event. Furthermore, knowing my Nofretari from
Nefertiti, and Ramses II from Hatshepsut and Akhen-Atun (!)
certainly doubled my enjoyment of this fabulous civilisation still
lying there in all its splendour after 5000 years.
We used our first day in
Cairo to visit the Great Sphinx and Pyramids at Giza. The pictures
never quite capture their size or scale. They say Egypt humbles
you and we felt very humble indeed as we stood at the bottom of
one and realised the top of our heads did not even reach the
height of the first row of stones. Each limestone block (that
looks like a little brick in pictures) is the size of a room and
weighs between 2 and 15 tons. And there are close to a million
such blocks in all and these pyramids are among the earliest
structures in history. We are talking 2600 years before
Christ.
How exactly they were built
no one knows for sure, with lots of theories, many quite bizarre,
but all equally awe-inspiring. If you like who-dun-its, read
Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods, Keeper of Genesis) who
wants us to believe that they are actually a map of the milky way,
left behind by a superior (extra-terrestrial?) race that pre-dates
even the Egyptian civilization by another 6000 years. Read it
before you laugh he's pretty convincing!
After crouching down the
steep, narrow, bare walled passages and ante-chambers of the 3rd
Pyramid of Menkaure, we climbed out to the blinding sunshine with
wobbly legs and spent the afternoon in down-town Cairo. Got
waylaid by a perfume tout, who, after luring us into his den
filled with beautiful coloured glass bottles, sold us some
essences of my fav perfumes, and then showed us to a very local
restaurant where we stuffed ourselves on grilled quail, trotters
in vine leaves and other such exotic Egyptian fare. As touts go,
we've been waylaid by worse I'd say.
Armed with various shopping
trophies (traditional papyrus painting included) we made our way
back to the Giza plateau for the much recommended Sound and Light
show at the foot of the Sphinx, with the Pyramids, the desert and
the clear night sky as backdrop. We were lucky to arrive early and
get front row seats on a full-moon night. The air is heavy with
the accumulated energy of millennia past and Time sits like a
palpable shroud on the whole plateau. I would have been happy to
just sit there and meditate; the silence speaks words no sound,
light or video film can really capture.
The next morning, after a
3.30am wake-up call, we assembled remarkably chirpy in the lobby
of the Heliopolis Sheraton and got acquainted with the rest of the
conference delegates who came from exotic places like Morocco,
Tunisia, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, etc. But O&M'ers are all fun
and friendly and this Africa team was no different. We had a
special early morning treat of being flown to the southern end of
Egypt to Abu Simbel. This is one of the highlights of any Egyptian
visit and is actually quite a way off the tourist track. In
addition to being a marvel of ancient sculpture and architecture,
it is also a marvel of modern engineering and technology. These
colossal temples of Ramses II and his wife Nofretari, carved out
of the limestone cliffs, were to be submerged in the rising waters
of Lake Nasser after the building of the Aswan High Dam. So the
whole thing, exterior and interior, in a painstaking nine-year
exercise, was taken down block-by-block and rebuilt on the higher
plateau overlooking the original site.
We flew back to Aswan to
board our boat, the M/s Orchestra, in time for lunch. Like excited
kids we explored the floating hotel and gleefully discovered the
swimming pool on the deck, the restaurant and lounge with a dance
floor, shops, etc. We also realised that we had the whole boat to
ourselves. 30 people on a luxury boat meant for 100. The O&M'ers
had to get on with their conference and just as I thought I was to
fend for myself over the next three days, we were told the spouses
had a packed itinerary chalked out, complete with a professional
Egyptologist guide to escort us around. So we set about shopping
and bargaining in the local bazaar: incense, spices, camel leather
shoes, Egyptian cotton shirts, etc. Everywhere I went, the
friendly Egyptian would declare "India?!" and follow
that up with "Amitabh Bachchan". Finally I had to update
them with the fact that it was now "Abhishek Bachchan"!
The 17-hour cruise from
Aswan to Luxor was simply divine. As the boat sliced through the
cool waters of the Nile, there were mud-brick villages and ruins
on the palmed, green banks on both sides with the harsh desert and
cliffs just beyond. Onboard, in the cool evenings, there were
jolly 'galabaya' parties (with these mad advertising types dancing
on the tables!) and whirling dervishes, belly dancers, etc.
Each city in Egypt has so
much to see, but if I have to pick any one, it has to be Luxor. It
has the 60-acre temples of Karnak and Luxor dedicated to Ammon-Ra
on the East bank and the Valley of the Kings and Queens on the
West. This is where you truly get a sense of the scale and
grandeur in which the Pharaohs lived and died. We drove to the
Valley of the Kings and Queens through a landscape that can only
be described as Biblical. In this royal Valley, for over half a
millennium, Pharaohs and their wives were buried in tombs carved
out of the mountain cliffs. Tombs, whose walls were carved and
painted with exquisite hieroglyphs and scenes from the royal
lives, and then stuffed with unimaginable wealth of gold, precious
stones and artefacts needed for their after-life. One tomb we
visited was left unfinished, as the pharaoh must have died
suddenly. It is truly a 'work in progress' tomb, with spelling
mistakes in the hieroglyphs having been 'proof-read' and marked in
red by a supervisor for correction. The rough stencils of figures
still to be carved and painted makes you feel the craftsmen have
just stepped out for a chai and a smoke and would be back shortly.
Such is the freshness of the paint and smooth lines of the
finished work. Not far is where Howard Carter found Tutankhamen's
tomb, miraculously untouched by the many robbers down the
centuries. The only tomb to be found in its original state, its
treasure, all now in the national museum in Cairo, revealed much
of what is known of the funerary customs of the Pharaohs.
On our last day back in
Cairo we went to the museum and saw it all with our own eyes: the
famous solid gold death mask of the boy-king, his mummy,
jewellery, throne and alabaster viscera jars! It took Carter eight
years to simply catalogue the 2000+ items, so you can imagine we
needed the better part of the morning and the afternoon to just
'look' at them. Finally, even die-hard history buffs like us had
enough and needed some retail therapy to unwind. The
'Khan-e-khalili' (say the 'kh' as gutturally as you can) market is
where every shopper ends up and we went expecting the sepia-toned
bazaar straight out of the 'English Patient'. Somewhat
disappointingly, it was more like Sarojini market in Delhi or
Bhuleshwar in Bombay. No doubt, if you scraped the soot off some
of the walls, you'd probably discover a once fabulous mosque. We
were out looking to add to our collection, an Egyptian piece of
statuary. A young chap, realising we meant business, gave up
trying to sell us the usual touristy junk and took us (patli galli
se) to a hole-in-wall whose owner turns out to be a PhD teaching
bio-chemistry in London when not peddling some rather unique works
of art at home. We found just what we wanted: a stunning pair of
statues of Horus and Anubis in hammer-stone. We probably paid too
much of course, but the mint tea and pleasure of haggling made it
worth it.
Ok. So now we are back in
good old London and we almost welcomed the rainy, chilly weather
after all that heat. The next pressing problem: where to put up
the papyrus and the statues? We love buying stuff, but one item
from our 'home-museum' free to anyone who can suggest where we
should put them up!
Khuda Hafiz.
Nilima
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