From Belgium, With Love

Our new friend Henrik is not only a ridiculously generous host or a hard-smoking, movie-loving, Egypt-studying Lutheran priest, he's also an accomplished travel planner, as we had opportunity to learn on the 6 day trip to northern and western Egypt that he set up for us and three of his friends visiting from Denmark, Canchanah, Mia, and another Henrik. We set out early in the morning a week ago, packed happily into a rented van. Although it took more than an hour to push our way out of Cairo, and our driver kept looking frighteningly like he was going to fall asleep as he drove, we made it to Alexandria and started our fun journey for real.

Alexandria was one of the central cities of the ancient world, but the physical evidence that remains of that is pretty limited-- a pillar here, a cool tomb there. The famous lighthouse, one of the 7 wonders of the world, and the ancient library, no longer exist. But in the last ten years the government has directed an international effort to build a new Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which we toured. Every aspect of the contemporary architecture of the building holds symbolic importance: the letters from all different languages carved into cement to represent the international character of knowledge, the pyramid-shaped wall to represent the contributions of Egyptian civilization, the slab resembling a rising sun to represent the centrality of Alexandria in the world of the mind, etc. The interior, also impressive aesthetically, attempted to be ecologically harmonious as well, with hundreds of eyelid-shaped glass planes in the ceiling allowing the grand main reading room to be lit primarily by sunlight. There was an expansive, well-organized (at last!) exhibit of photos, paintings, and maps of the city from different time periods in the basement, and a large screen linked to one of the 300 computers available for use exhibited the interactive digitized version of a French collection of histories and drawings of Egypt compiled during the Napoleonic Era. That night we went to a restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean, where we chose fresh sea bass from the selection of fishes lying on ice, and they grilled it for us with tomatoes and onions. (The only thing missing, which we did really really miss, was a good white wine to accompany it-- even fancy restaurants like that are alcohol-free). We discovered that all of us enjoy savoring yummy food and interesting conversation, commonalities that served us well throughout our trip.

The next day we drove along the northern coast toward Marsah Matruh. The water, when we could see it, was brilliant, glimmering in various shades of turquoise. But the view was consistently marred by the cement corpses of half-built resorts and condominium complexes, and their equally-ugly completed counterparts. We were able to make our way through an abandoned-feeling area to enjoy a bit of beach, though. We also stopped at the war cemetary of El Alamein, the site of a WWII battle between British and German and Italian troops that was considered a turning-point victory for the Allies. Arriving in Marsah Matruh we found the tourist parts of town bleak and abandoned, but that served us well, because when we went wandering around the market after dinner, we had the enjoyable experience of having hardly anyone pay attention to us (except for the man who waved and shouted, "Hello, America!" as we walked by). It was all lovely, but we were still hankering for beer. Henrik asked a young man on the street if there was a place we could buy some, and he pointed to a side street, which we went to, and still saw no liquor store. Henrik asked someone else, and he found another man, who found another man, who surreptitiously opened up a metal grate covering a small, set-back doorway, and led Henrik and Erik in while the women (trying not to be more offensive to Egyptian expectations than we inherently are) waited outside. We got a little worried when they'd been in there for 10 minutes, but eventually they emerged victorious, holding cans of beer wrapped first in one opaque bag, and then in another. We figured that probably everyone in town knew what the teal colored bag meant (and a woman had walked in while the guys were in there to chastize the seller for doing business during Ramadan), but we got back to the hotel fine and sat around enjoying the beer.

The following morning we set out for the place that was the main point of the trip—the Siwa oasis, the only town in western Egypt, set in the desert in the northwest, close to the border with Libya. It was a cool thing, after driving for 5 hours in a barren desert landscape, all of a sudden to see thousands of palm trees, weighed down by luscious bunches of dates. In Siwa, as elsewhere, the hotels we were staying in were none too nice, but a friend had recommended that we go check out a certain restaurant at the good hotel. This we did upon arrival—and went back twice more within 24 hours. The restaurant was set up on a roof, in the midst of a grove of date palms. The look of the small hotel, unlike any others we have seen in Egypt, was harmonious and temperate, with a sense of flow and intimacy. The main dishes varied between decent and good, but what kept drawing us back, in addition to the atmosphere, was the appetizers and desserts. The baba ghanouj, olive tapenade (made from local Siwa olives), tahini, hummus, and salads were fresh and bursting with interesting flavors. Then there were date milkshakes, date crepes, and an ethereal apricot pudding, cold and smooth and perfect. We had a funny moment the second time we went to the restaurant, for tea and dessert that night. The waiter asked where we were from, and the Danes, wary of being received poorly due to the recent reignition of the cartoon debacle, said, as they had before, “Belgium”—a country they had chosen for its smallness and the unlikelihood of people knowing much about it. But the waiter responded with enthusiasm: “Oh, Belgium! The queen of Belgium was here six months ago” (the Danes look at each other, wondering if any of them know the name of the queen…). “Do you speak French of Flemmish?” Mia: “Flemmish” (a lie). Waiter: “A waiter here lived in Belgium for 8 years! He is your friend. Maybe he is downstairs….” Mia, smiling through her teeth: “Oh, uh huh, great….” After that the Danes decided to suck it up and try being Danes—too nerve wracking the other way.

The central activity we were going for in Siwa was two days and two nights out in the desert, exploring the sand dunes (which stretch all the way to the Atlantic Coast of Morocco) by 4WD by day and sleeping peacefully under the stars at night. The first afternoon with the jeep, the plan seemed to be on track. We stopped to swim at cold and hot springs (they are scattered all over the oasis), raced roller-coaster style down steep inclines, occasionally pushed the car when it was stuck in particularly deep sand, and generally spent hours admiring the incomparable look of desert stretching into desert stretching into desert. But then, when the sun set, our driver pulled the jeep into a camp where several other jeeps were parked. It was exactly what we weren’t looking for: the lights of the city were fully visible; there was a tent and a dirty outhouse (which we got unwillingly directed to when we tried to wander off to pee in the sand); there were a number of other tourists there, with more arriving regularly, with the accompanying noises of jeeps and talking; the food was cooked not over the fire but in a kitchen; and, to top it all off, because of a small spring, the place was swarming with flies and mosquitoes. We tried to make the best of it, asking for our own fire, away from the other tourists, and eating around that, now and again feeling like naughty teenagers as we snuck sips of the beer Henrik still had in his bag from Marsah Matruh. But as the evening went on, pretending that we were somewhere else became a bit more challenging, because, much to our chagrin, the Disney-esque “Bedouin Party” we’d seen advertized on some tour company posters began. For two hours, around the main fire, Bedouin guides banged drums, played accordion-like instruments, clapped, and sang, as they led tourist women in shaking their hips. Three times, the owner of the company and of our jeep came over, scolding us to come join the party, trying to pull Mia away to dance, and completely, absolutely refusing to accept that actually we just wanted to sit and talk, and that this party fit nowhere into our picture of a night in the desert. He finally walked away disgusted, but by that point the feeling was pretty mutual.

There were some more misadventures the next morning, as our jeep headed into town, not back into the dunes as we had thought. After some long arguing about whether we had to pay more (no) and what the rest of the trip would be, though, things got worked out, and we got what we were looking for. We visited some cool tombs, including one with perfectly preserved 3000 year old mummies lying in greeting in the walls, went to some more springs, and then happily went back into the desert. We spent some time walking around an area where the normally-distant fact that the desert was once under the sea was wonderfully evident, as the ground was full of calcified shells and fossils of small sea stars. Then we ran into some dunes that tried to suck the jeep up, getting stuck over and over again (that was fun, though) and eventually having to find an alternate route. We stopped back at the camp for dinner, but then enjoyed the feeling of leaving the other people and Bedouin party behind and heading out to our own spot, behind a dune, where the city lights could not be seen. Our driver built a fire and sat and talked with us for awhile. He is 25, and has been working since he was 11, when he stopped going to school. He likes Siwa (“none of the women smoke here,” he said with some admonishment as Mia and Canchanah lit a cigarette), and he doesn’t want to leave Egypt, but he wants a European wife (Mia or her sisters seemed to be on his list). It was nice to talk to him, but also nice when he left, and we were alone, without a jeep, without noise, to have our night in the desert. Canchanah (who doesn’t drink) made the rest of us even happier when she remembered that Henrik had brought a bottle of cognac with him to Egypt. He retrieved it from the bag, we toasted each other and the desert, and enjoyed our starry, silent night.