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 eat away at their edges and they will begin to look as worn and tired as everything else around here. Great mounds of excavated sand dot the landscape aping the desiccated mountain range lining the horizon to the north. Mohammed al-Sisi the ex-general (natch) and current president beams a smile of approval at his handiwork from numerous billboards. His government was probably desperate for the international recognition of hosting COP27 after 10 years of tumult in the country. Sometimes things slowly decay like these roads and sometimes they violently break like the Arab spring that reached Egypt in 2011. Across the middle east brutal dictators were forcibly replaced in massive popular uprisings by...less brutal dictators. Unrooted democracy does not bind together loose and sandy soils it seems. There is an awkward juxtaposition between the dead museum that half of this country is, that the tourists flock to see, and the living, breathing, struggling half that swirls around it. Innumerable resorts occupy Sharm as oases of calm order for the foreigners, functioning yet banal villages shimmering in the heat. Being the gung-ho adventurers that we are we've chosen a basic hotel in the Naama bay area that has a bit more life to it. Or it will do once we've got a few cans of Egyptian Stella in us. Ah who I am I kidding, we're both in our forties we'll be in bed by midnight.
It's been over a decade since we first set out for the orient, that orient in our youthful naivety being almost everywhere. Times change and people change and sometimes people don't change and either way seems disagreeable to me. Cut to dramatisation...
'The man trudges on, weary and dirtied by the disappointment of boundless and groundless expectation. Life's virginal simplicity has been given up to the advancing years. He moves through the little personal landscape he's been cultivating to death for some time. Enough back-breaking hours have been put into it though now and it is time to leave. He squints to see the lush meadows that he knows lie beyond. What the fuck has happened there!? A smoking ruin of bleached earth is all he can see. And now, suddenly, he is in it. His salty tears are consumed by the fractured earth and they quench nothing, heal nothing. They run on and on but all that seems to mean is that the balance is overwhelmed and the ecosystem cannot right itself with a thunderstorm and a promise to be better anymore. He tries to retrace his steps back towards himself, or a version of that isn't slowly crumpling inwards like a plastic bottle sinking to the depths of the ocean. A version that isn't poisoning the same well he drinks from. But the way back is barred and onward is the only option though if a direction could be directionless then this would be. Still, thinks he has problems does he? Well get in line, the queue for sympathy starts at tower bridge. A haze glimmers and smudges the desert's horizon and months have passed. It is an oasis or a mirage? Perhaps, he muses, a mirage of a remembered joy. But now just a hollow pastiche of friendship as he sees it. Two weeks of going through laboured and tiring motions. If you love someone let them go, as they say. If you hate them then you should also let them go he suspects. To summarise, let people go. Otherwise you find yourself trying to turn the head of a well-worn screw. The higher the pressure and the greater the effort the more pieces break off from the unyielding fixing. And so what then is modern friendship? It feel to him like a tribute act recounting the hits with grim repetition. They'd play the new stuff but there isn't any. Still, he trudges on towards the mirage that may be nothing though it is somehow something. He long to be warm again, to be held in a Mediterranean embrace. Starved of intimacy or even contact he settles for that.' Scene ends.
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 eat away at their edges and they will begin to look as worn and tired as everything else around here. Great mounds of excavated sand dot the landscape aping the desiccated mountain range lining the horizon to the north. Mohammed al-Sisi the ex-general (natch) and current president beams a smile of approval at his handiwork from numerous billboards. His government was probably desperate for the international recognition of hosting COP27 after 10 years of tumult in the country. Sometimes things slowly decay like these roads and sometimes they violently break like the Arab spring that reached Egypt in 2011. Across the middle east brutal dictators were forcibly replaced in massive popular uprisings by...less brutal dictators. Unrooted democracy does not bind together loose and sandy soils it seems. There is an awkward juxtaposition between the dead museum that half of this country is, that the tourists flock to see, and the living, breathing, struggling half that swirls around it. Innumerable resorts occupy Sharm as oases of calm order for the foreigners, functioning yet banal villages shimmering in the heat. Being the gung-ho adventurers that we are we've chosen a basic hotel in the Naama bay area that has a bit more life to it. Or it will do once we've got a few cans of Egyptian Stella in us. Ah who I am I kidding, we're both in our forties we'll be in bed by midnight.
It's been over a decade since we first set out for the orient, that orient in our youthful naivety being almost everywhere. Times change and people change and sometimes people don't change and either way seems disagreeable to me. Cut to dramatisation...
'The man trudges on, weary and dirtied by the disappointment of boundless and groundless expectation. Life's virginal simplicity has been given up to the advancing years. He moves through the little personal landscape he's been cultivating to death for some time. Enough back-breaking hours have been put into it though now and it is time to leave. He squints to see the lush meadows that he knows lie beyond. What the fuck has happened there!? A smoking ruin of bleached earth is all he can see. And now, suddenly, he is in it. His salty tears are consumed by the fractured earth and they quench nothing, heal nothing. They run on and on but all that seems to mean is that the balance is overwhelmed and the ecosystem cannot right itself with a thunderstorm and a promise to be better anymore. He tries to retrace his steps back towards himself, or a version of that isn't slowly crumpling inwards like a plastic bottle sinking to the depths of the ocean. A version that isn't poisoning the same well he drinks from. But the way back is barred and onward is the only option though if a direction could be directionless then this would be. Still, thinks he has problems does he? Well get in line, the queue for sympathy starts at tower bridge. A haze glimmers and smudges the desert's horizon and months have passed. It is an oasis or a mirage? Perhaps, he muses, a mirage of a remembered joy. But now just a hollow pastiche of friendship as he sees it. Two weeks of going through laboured and tiring motions. If you love someone let them go, as they say. If you hate them then you should also let them go he suspects. To summarise, let people go. Otherwise you find yourself trying to turn the head of a well-worn screw. The higher the pressure and the greater the effort the more pieces break off from the unyielding fixing. And so what then is modern friendship? It feel to him like a tribute act recounting the hits with grim repetition. They'd play the new stuff but there isn't any. Still, he trudges on towards the mirage that may be nothing though it is somehow something. He long to be warm again, to be held in a Mediterranean embrace. Starved of intimacy or even contact he settles for that.' Scene ends.
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