Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 9 - Luxor We'd arrived in Luxor despite, or rather because of, Egypt's magical ability to bend our plans to its cynical will. After the wedding we hadn't made it downriver to Kom Ombo as I wanted because the wind wasn't with us. Maybe Captain Migo always wanted to trot out this excuse as he could more easily pickup another fare in Aswan but after toiling against the wind for half an hour I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Even the elements here are trying to cheat you. Back to Aswan then, I could live with that. What I found harder to live with was the fact that the entire structure of Aswan Railway Station, physical and procedural, was made of graft. Rule 1 in ensuring you don't get ripped off as tourists in a country know for ripping off tourists is to remove the human from the equation. For example book your accomodation online through a reputable website. Or, if you fancy a ride around town in a horse and cart then negotiate the price wit...

Day 7 - Aswan The packaged, cliched, tourist experience is like the common cold in that everyone gets it, it just varies in its severity. But as the wind picks up, a distant call to prayer rings out and the blue waters of the Nile slosh gently I feel at peace with that. Our felucca tacks slowly down river and the winter sun glints off the surface and warms my face. This sort of travel I favour is not, it must be said, relaxing. It is a ceaseless fight to avoid being corralled into the templated trip shaped by the thousands of people that have done it before. "You want to visit this temple?" "Papyrus shop?" "Traditional village?" No, no and no. Confusion ensues. There is nothing else. So many people give up in the face of remorseless, insistent conformity and I don't always blame them. Egypt particularly is not a country that lets you off-road, they've been in the tourism business for millennia after all. The temples are incredible, the villages ...

Day 5 - Cairo Another day, another sunrise. I hadn't signed up for this one. We'd arrived back at Sharm el-Sheikh airport at 4:30AM after managing to find a bus in Suez that was going south. Have you ever tried to explain to airport staff in Egypt that you need another passport stamp because the one you have doesn't let you go to Egypt? It is an agonising task and the language barrier was formidable. Their solution was to fob us off onto the next colleague who would ask the same question as the last one - "which your flight?" There was an inability to fathom why we were there if we weren't getting a flight. None of them could take even an intellectual baby-step towards understanding our issue. Initiative had been thoroughly trained out of them if it ever existed in the first place. An hour and 20 minutes later we got to someone with good enough English and an alert enough mind to allow us to elaborate on our problem. The airport Einstein took us to a small ba...

Day 4 - Mount Sinai and Suez After an hour of increasingly intemperate battle reason lay bloodied and exhausted on the floor and rules had triumphed. I'm not familiar with countries that have a culture of mistrust in individual decision-making. It seems strange to me that the authorities in these countries think that multitudinous overlapping and sometimes contradictory rules are the key to maintaining control. As if the whole thing will spiral into chaos if a person is empowered to assess a situation and determine the appropriate course of action by themselves. The rules-based order probably coincides with patriarchal, elder-venerating societies for whom top-down control is the only control. But what do I know? I've never used a successful military career as a springboard to start a coup against the first democratically elected government in my country in 50 years, only through lack of opportunity though. My unfamiliarity does in no way reduce the blinding frustration when yo...

Day 3 - Sharm El-Sheikh There are only 3 reasons to come to Sharm El-Sheikh A love of beach resorts A love of international climate change conferences A love of diving Our decision to come here wasn't based on any of those things, it was based on 4. It was the cheapest place to fly into and there is a ferry that quickly transports you to the interesting part of Egypt I'd based reason 4 on the fact that Sharm had a ferry port, Hurgada (on the 'mainland') had a ferry port and on Google Maps there was a dotted line in between. Stupid boy. The reason that there are 3 reasons is that the ferry stopped operating 10 years back. So, moving up the list we quickly decided we'd better do some diving to justify our coming here. As the boat pulled out of the harbour the sandstone cliffs reflected off the scattered aquamarine waters like a Monet-Hockney collaboration that could never have happened. The dive briefing droned on into its 20th minute and, while all...

Day 1 - Sharm el-Sheikh The shiny new infrastructure clings loosely to the dry ground as our taxi hurtles along the tarmac from the airport. If you shower a desert with water it sometimes flowers, if you soak it with money does it also bloom? It has been a long time since Sharm el-Sheikh was the small fishing village that the Israelis found when they invaded the Sinai peninsula in 1967 but it has, from appearances, recently had an extraordinary amount of money lavished upon it. The place must have warranted this largesse from the Egyptian government due to it being the host city of the COP27 summit. These annual summits are where countries discuss how awful climate change is and agree what not to do about it. The unsubtle 5-lane roads that have been laid provide an equally unsubtle irony about the environmental costs of holding an environmental summit. Is there any mitigation in the fact that they are now almost completely unused in their pristine, bombastic state? In time nature will...