Oasis Holiday

  

Ari in Egypt

     What's a girl to do when she has a Thanksgiving weekend, and no one to spend it with? The solution is to embark with a colorful cast of characters on a desert adventure.
The ex-pat community center (CSA) in Maadi offers an annual trip to the Bahariya Oasis, which straddles the Black and White Deserts about 300 km south of Cairo. Since the CSA caters to all ex-pats, on Thursday morning I found myself waiting at the Center to embark on a six hour bus trip with a spunky Australian woman, one quiet German, a Lithuanian couple, an Irish lawyer, a hybrid French-American family,  four American teachers from Egyptian schools including a very loud-mouthed woman from the Chicago area, and last but not least a very normal family from the States. That made the total fourteen adults and four children.
Our bonding began as we watched in horror as the driver hurled our duffel bags onto the roof of our bus, and then we departed. Six arduous, boring hours of desert (the corn-field equivalent of Egypt), one disgusting pitstop in the middle of nowhere, and a few near collisions later and we and all of the bags arrived at our hotel at the Bahariya Oasis. Upon our arrival we were greeted by the owner, Peter, a very bubbly gallabiya-clad German man with a comical accent who made us eat our lunch before checking-in and freshening up in our rooms (mistake). Then barely an hour after our late lunch, we were subjected to a two hour hike up to ruins from WWII (not worth it) on the top of a mountain. The scenery was hardly breathtaking, but I got some good sunset pics, and the torturous walk enabled me to chat with my traveling companions who had been living the expat life for many years. One American woman had worked in eight foreign countries!
For our Thanksgiving dinner that night, we ate in the hotel's beduoin tent, a very contrived affair with local musicians and dancers. The food was superb, and yes, they did have turkey, but I didn't touch it. The fare included eggplant (yum), root vegetables, carrots, brown rice, lentil soup, and oranges for dessert. Not really Thanksgiving food, but it was the best I probably could get in Egypt.
That night I slept about ten hours, and was fresh in the morning for our all-day off-road excursion to the Black and White Deserts. I was lucky to be in jeep #1 with Abdul, the head man of Bahariya Oasis. He was very well spoken and seemed to have done everything from being superintendent of the local school district to graphic designer to bedouin musician (he even got to travel to the U.S. and France).

 Abdul

At our first stop in the Black Desert, named thus for the igneous rocks found there, we played in and around the sand dunes and explored the nearby rock formations. The most amazing aspect I found about the desert is the glorious and haunting silence for miles. Truly amazing.



Our next stop was another semi-horrible pitstop at which the toilet facilities were so abominable that there was more dignity in going in the desert, and so the majority of us did just that. At least we had a good laugh, and it is liberating to think of the entire desert as a big litterbox. Thank goodness I packed toilet paper and hand sanitizer.
We also were supposed to get a lunch from our hotel, and because breakfast and dinner from the previous night were so delicious, we had high hopes that were immediately squashed when we found some icky looking meat kebabs, and a bag of chips packaged for each of us. After straggling far too long at the pitstop in waiting for our guides to finish praying at the mosque, and still very hungry, we headed out to the White Desert which is one of the strangest, most interesting places on planet Earth.
The white rock formations in the desert are made of chalk that was originally at the bottom of a huge sea bed, that eventually receded and that the wind whipped into strange shapes. The blocks almost look like icebergs, but since it hasn't rained in ten years, and the weather was in the 90's (F) this week, I can guarantee that it was not ice.

 We arrived back from the desert at 7:30p.m., and had a nice leisurely dinner throughout which the travelers who were stuck in the jeep with loud-mouthed Chicago woman complained about their ears ringing from her incessant chatter. All of the single travelers (mostly teachers) on the trip seemed to take a liking to me, the youngest adult on the trip, and I found them all easy to talk to. Especially fascinating was learning about the ex-pat lifestyle, and the ease with which people can grow accustomed to different surroundings and form their own communities within the very foreign, alienating Egyptian culture. 
We were all so exhausted that the majority of us went to bed directly after dinner and rose early for the half day excursion to the Bahariya antiquities sites. We went to a very poorly constructed museum filled with Zahi Hawass's loot from Bahariya, the golden mummies. After seeing the hall of mummies at the Egyptian museum, I was not too impressed by these Egypto-Roman mummies. However, the poverty stricken Bahariya people stake a lot on these archaeological finds to bring in tourism, so I gladly patronized the museum. The group also went into an underground Ancient Egyptian tomb. I say "the group" because after walking down the rickety steep stairs to get to the bottom of the pit and finding a two foot high opening, my claustrophobia got the better of me and I decided that one tomb (Saqqara) was enough for this trip. Instead I waited up top with Dorothy, the Australian, and Ingrid, the German and chatted with them. Dorothy's excuse was that she was tired of old stones and faded paint. My thoughts exactly. Boisterous Dorothy lived in Saudi Arabia for a year while working at a university there, an experience about which I was fascinated to hear. She told me that Saudi Arabia is not an easy place to live, and that the only thing she was able to do there was shop. After a while, she said, it got so boring that she applied for a transfer. Her life in Egypt has not been much easier, so she is leaving permenantly for Australia in the next month. I say, good for her.
When the group returned, we got on the bus only to find that at our driver's error, we were stuck in the sand. (A new experience for me, and now I can add sand to my repertoir of stuckage: mud, snow, and sleet).  The tour guide Sherif would not under any circumstances let the women of the group help push the bus, so ten women including me stood around and watched four not-so burly guys and four little boys try to push a twenty-seater bus that was getting further stuck in the sand. Oh, Egyptian sexism. It took about forty minutes to get unstuck at which point we were already late for lunch, and thus for our 1:30pm departure time.
Not much else happened on the trip that is left to report, except that we got further delayed in a horrendous traffic jam getting into Cairo, and our bus driver who was about to take a traffic-laden route started swearing like a sailor on leave when we tried to direct him on a better road. We were right, but he was still livid at our impertinence.

The tour ended without ceremony. Each one of us stood around ready to quickly catch our duffel bags from the top of the bus in order to beat the others in the group to the taxis. Our goodbyes were rushed, which was hard. Even harder for me is that it's difficult to say goodbye to people that I feel close to even after a short time knowing them, with the knowledge that I will probably never see them again. That's how I feel about the ex-pats I met on this trip. They will always be in my memory for making my Thanksgiving 2010 one for the books.