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
are interesting (if contrived), the shops
are...well they're still shit. But travel should be more than a product picked off a shelf, unwrapped and then thrown away. There are endless sayings about its benefits and what the unexpected experience can teach you about the world and the people in it. These sayings too are transposed onto posters and t-shirts and magnets in defiance of the original, uncommercial intent. I say take my money, just give me what I want. But in this moment on the Nile maybe, just maybe, I begin to allow myself to hope that, as the monolithic cruise ships start to disappear off our stern, that maybe, just maybe this trip could be something special.
Part of the problem, as I said in the last post, is that I find myself no more moved by the world famous sights in these places than I do by the places in-between. They are too familiar I suspect, the wonder unavoidably reduced by knowledge. But this spot on the river, with goats grazing disinterestedly on one shore and a boat repair shop on the other is new. The captain heaves a dry cough at the tiller and the first mate brews tea and the moment feels like it only belongs to me. No-one is telling me the history of this or that and I am left to feel for myself. To un-know. The honking din of Cairo is far away and my senses are finally allowed to settle from their constant agitation. I can now savour every sound. The sporadic Arabic between the crew, the clinking of a teaspoon as it mixes leaves and sugar, those soft sloshes against the side of the boat. I stretch my legs and feel the soreness of Mount Sinai still in them and soak in the joyous revery of this place in between. The sun sets a pale orange and as the wind drops we meander with the current downstream
Captain Migo now moves around the deck with a furrowed brow and brisk intent while Mustafa replaces him at the tiller and sits with an enigmatic, faraway look on his face. To understand the thoughts of any other person is the external challenge and even more so those whose race or religion, whose entire life's experience seems so far from your own. The philosopher Wittgenstein said it well -
The older I get the more I realise how terribly diifcult it is for people to understand each other, and I think that what misleads is the fact that they all look so much like each other. If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn't expect them to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are.
And yet there ought to be a unifying simplicity to our desires. The freedom from, the freedom to, the basic currency of happiness. Perhaps Migo wonders when his persistent cough will clear or how far we will get today. Mustafa thinks of his second job (he has several) or his fourth daughter (he has several) or maybe the wedding in his village we are told is taking place tonight. Yes maybe that, as it transpires we are stopping at his village and, though I am far from certain about this part, going to that wedding. I have ignored one of my rules of travel - always bring a blazer, and the consequences may soon be felt. We moor at one of the many engine houses that pump water from the Nile to irrigate the fields beyond its high banks. And so, as Mustafa points to a small ladder running up the side of the rusted pipe, the 'what the fuck' moment arrives. They come along with a kind of inevitable unpredictability when I travel. Your head, your heart, your gut and whatever else you might think with launch into furious debate about whether to step forwards or to step back. Whatever part of me that says 'forward' usually seems to win and so it si now as I place my foot on the first step of the ladder. Mike seems even more apprehensive which somehow emboldens me. The path through the foliage is unclear in the dark but Mustafa seems to have night vision. Minutes pass and any hope of retracing steps is long gone. As a cluster of buildings appear from the gloom there is no music or appearance of celebrations to reassure us. Mustafa indicates we should enter an open doorway of one of the buildings. The structure looks like it is in the process of being built. Or knocked down, I couldn't tell which. It certainly didn't look habited as I crossed the threshold into...oh fuck.
Weak overhead lighting shows bare brick walls and a dirt floor, no furniture. It is a place where hostage videos are filmed and people are shot when the government doesn't negotiate. I suddenly laugh out loud at the absurdity of life. What else to do but laugh? I had no practical response to the situation. I've never tried to count how many of my nine lives I've used up but couldn't complain if this was the last of them. Mike would probably feel more aggrieved at our new accomodation though. "Toilet?" says Mustafa. He is a courteous hostage-taker I'll give him that. I accept the offer after seeing no point in uncomfortable captivity and am grateful that our new home has an en-suite. Ablutions done we are, to our much greater relief, led out of the building. As we walk on children begin to appear and then a kind of public space opens up with clusters of men sitting on lined-up benches. Decorative strings of lights are suspended from poles and a sound system is being setup. This is either a wedding or a hostage video with high production values. We take a seat and someone brings us tea. More kids appear and start to gather around the, I hope, unexpected guests. One of the kids plucks up the courage to try an English word, "hello!" he fires at us. We return the greeting and this encourages them to scour their memories for other words and phrases. "What your name?" says Mohammed, "Where you from?" says Ahmed, "Fuck you!" says little Yousef. That one gets him a timeout from Mustafa. It's turned 8PM and the celebrations still seem a way off from starting so we shake a few hands like we're local dignitaries and offer a few tentative 'salaam aleikums'. This is the wedding party for the bride we learn and she is Mustafa's cousin's daughter. Tomorrow will be the party for the groom, apparently neither will attend the other's party. I don't know how that works but further questions seemed likely to be lost in translation. Maybe this is like a hen do although I couldn't see any women or sashes or plastic penises so I wasn't sure. I sat content to let the weirdness wash over me while Michael sat alert, backpack still on his back and ready to make a dash for the treeline. The only entertainment so far had been a child no older than five wandering around with a lit firework in his hand. Mustafa tells us that he must leave now for his second job and that we should wait here for Captain Migo to collect us. Now we are alone in a small village on the banks of the Nile at the wedding of a person we have never met and surrounded by people that don't speak our language and kids that only know the swear words. Right. After some time Migo appears. He is a man who seems perpetually in the flow of the moment as no sooner are we are on our way back to the boat than we are sitting in someone's lounge with a group of young men. A life on the river means no direction is ever certain. We are offered more tea, cigarettes, hash. With one last, alarming flourish Migo leaves the room and coming back wealding a curved sword. Again I laugh with the thought of all the rigmarole taken to get us to this point of death, how inefficient. And someone will have to cleant he carpet. Again we narrowly avoid death by the fact that no one wants to kill us and Migo simply wants us to have a look at the sword he's made rather than have us accommodate it in our fat western bellies. This turns out to be Migo's house in fact. We finish our tea, bid goodbye and start to walk back. I hope we were polite, if awkward guests, even though we left our comfort zone back on the boat. As we gratefully crawl under blankets in the cool night air and with the clock past midnight the sound system starts up in the distance and the party gets started. Travel, bloody hell.
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