Egypt Trip: March 1999

I'd been fascinated with ancient Egypt since I was a little boy. My parents had supplied the history books out of their desire to provide me with a cultured upbringing. But it was my decision to pour over them and it was my innate interest that pushed me on. I puzzle over what drew me to that ancient civilization. Perhaps it was simply a response to the superficial images of wonder that the mass media supplied: pyramids and mummies. I remember being interested in the process of mummification. This was intensified after visiting a Burlington museum early in my life. There was a empty mummy casket in the middle of the room I wandered into. I fixated on that casket. It wasn't so much a fascination with death. I was struck by the age of the thing. I knew little of history but I knew a vast mysterious expanse of time separated myself from the time that casket first saw the light of day. The museum had a musty smell to it; one I could only associate with the majesty of history. Later my parents and I watched a documentary in our tiny Vermont apartment. It invoked images of the dark recesses of Egyptian tombs and the inside of pyramids and I was haunted as I lay awake that night. I envisioned the Golden Mask of King Tut floating out a dark closet and hovering over me and my hair stood on end.

Well time passed and dreams became realities. I went from reading of Tintin's adventures traveling the world to having those adventures myself. In 1996 my family and I moved from Vermont to Kuwait after my parents got jobs as teachers at an international school in the Middle East. My world had truly expanded and I at last got the chance to visit Egypt. My parents were to attend a teachers conference there and my brother and I were to go along. Many other families we knew were going along: playmates who were students at our school and parents who were teachers.

We arrived in Cairo in March of 1999 and checked into the Semiramis InterContinental Hotel; a hotel I have forever after come to associate with the word "swanky." Think the 1932 movie "Grand Hotel." We lived like kings only a short distance from the resting places of actual kings. There was a fine dining hall for rich and decadent breakfasts, a private swimming pool and our favorite pleasure drug television. I watched some insipid American music videos that became special because I shared them with people I cared about.

The teachers conference was being sponsored by something called "Near East South Asia Council of Overseas Schools" (NESA). I never attended the actual conference though I was at the party given in NESA's honour. It was a gala affair with real whirling dervishes: men in elaborate Oriental costumes who spun themselves around wildly to music.

Egypt is a major tourist attraction and the place was certainly in the troughs of commercialism by the time I arrived. My mother and the various female teachers hit the shops immediately and I went along to some of them. The women's chief interest was gold and there was no shortage of that. As in Kuwait, Egypt's many little shops were great fun to behold. Unlike the sense of conformity found in Wal-Mart each Egyptian shop was unpredictable and extremely personalized according to owner. I felt like Howard Carter as I surveyed the jumbled assortment of exotic knick-knacks that crowded the shelves. I eventually got a personalized souvenir: a framed scroll that had my name in hieroglyphs.

I got to see more exotic knick-knacks at the Cairo Museum. I passed through whole roomfuls of artifacts that occupied every niche of ancient life. It was a lot to take in. There's never enough time to spend in a museum. However, I was happy to eventually come face to face with the Golden Mask of King Tut enclosed in glass. No fear now; just contentment at familiarity.

I suppose the climax of any tourists' excursion is a glimpse of Egypt's ruins. We, after all, were tourists after teachers and students. We all rode out in a bus and soon were standing out in the sands of the desert in the heat with the sunny blue sky overhead and the pyramids before us. I knew a dream had been realized. The pyramids are some of the most familiar images from all of ancient history existing as the old houses of Boston: firm, proud, resisting the new. Yet the pyramids are like a Monet painting; once you move in for a much closer look the grandeur of the thing is gone to be replaced by odd and disappointing clutter. Monet's fantastic paintings look like ordinary blobs and blotches of paint up close. Likewise Egypt's pyramids are mere masses of chunky stone when one stands at the foot and looks up. A sense of proportion is lost. No doubt they'd look better with the smooth, fancy outer covering they once had. But that material was eventually needed for mosques.

And so it went like clockwork. First the pyramids then the ruins at Karnak, the Temple of Hatshepsut at Luxor, and the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Everywhere I went there was grandeur, columns, statues and hieroglyph carvings. King Tut's tomb was on the route too though it would no doubt have looked better with all it's treasures left intact. Having survived the tomb robbers of centuries past they had at last been carted away by men of a somewhat nobler station, at least in theory. My father was an ancient history teacher and I knew all about Howard Carter in the Roaring Twenties. Come nightfall there was a massive party near the Sphnix complete with a hammy narration and laser light show. History lessons need not be so dramatic.

This trip came complete with a cruise down the Nile in a ship. After we were through with Cairo we boarded and set sail. The ship had a disco and a hot-tub but these were mild trivialities in comparison to siting on deck and seeing the countryside glide past. We eventually arrived in Aswan and after visits to the Edfu and Philae temples, the feluccas, granite quarries and a dam the whole affair wound down and soon we were boarding the plane for Kuwait.

I like to think I took from Egypt some essence and romance of the place that will remain with me always. Perhaps they will always be superficial images of wonder but at least I've seen them in person. The Egyptians, like other Arabs, have a penchant for generosity and hospitality and storekeepers loved to have Westerners visit them. They were also keen on bargaining. They would shout advertisements from the streets as they had done for centuries. I wouldn't rank their efficiency very high but they at least have heart in what they do.