Egypt - March 2006, page 2
The first rainstorm of my trip was the night after the pyramids. And did it rain! But whatever rain falls, it is compunded by a virtually non-existent storm drain system, so if it rains fast, the water accumulates on the streets and needs to be bailed out. That's what you see going on here; there's just nowhere for the water to go on its own.
I don't know what the sign says, but we all know who this is: Hosni Mubarak, president of Egypt since the 1981 death of Anwar Sadat. Mubarak has been accused of holding rigged elections for many years, but last year he actually held one that was fairly open, and he won anyway. Why? Because it has been so long since Egyptian politics was free and open, no one knew who any of the other candidates were. So rather than risk putting someone incompetent in office (like the US would), the Egyptians figured that Mubarak wasn't so bad after all. And besides, he's taken all the graft he could handle, so now he has really been doing good things for the country.
When travelling, I really enjoy it when I get a chance to take a drive on a highway for long distances, because even though it eats up a lot of time, you get to see things you would never have otherwise had a chance to see. Driving on the Panamerican Highway in Peru, or the road back from the sands of Ceara in Brazil, and now the road to El Saloum in Egypt, I always find such trips to be very rewarding. That’s where this picture came from; evidently some kind of palace, I would guess, but who knows? It sure looks cool.
Once we reached the Mediterranean coast and turned west, we were travelling along the part of Africa that had been involved in the Rommel campaign in World War II. Here we see the Italian War Memorial at El Alamein, clearly visible from the main highway. The German memorial is not far from here, and farther down the road is the Allied memorial. English general Bernard Montgomery halted the Axis advance through Africa at this point, which eventually led to Rommel’s defeat and suicide at Hitler’s request.
Before I left, I was told by my KFC client that they had a lot of locations in Egypt, including one near the sphinx (right across the street, actually). I did not expect to see one in the middle of the desert, but here it is, somewhere between Sidi El Barani and Marsa Matrouh. And for the record, in Cairo, they were all over the place. KFC and Vodaphone kiosks were ubiquitous.
But most of what you see out there - aside from the sand and power lines - is shepherds, usually with goats but sometimes with sheep or other small livestock. Often the shepherd would be sitting on a rock watching over the animals to make sure they didn’t wander onto the highway, and sometimes they would have a couple of their children helping. And they all looked bored.
We arrived in Mersa Matrouh at around 6pm, just in time for dinner: blackened fish with vegetables, and it was delicious. The pita bread, which I had been marvelling over since I arrived in Egypt, was excellent, and the meal gave all of us from the bus a chance to talk a little more (on the bus most people slept while I took pictures). There was an American family from Seattle, a Swiss couple and their friend, an older couple from Wales who was here for their second eclipse, an Englishman, several Germans, and two women from Boston. A nice group.
The sun set while we were at dinner, so I have no further pictures from the trip out - but I did get this shot of the encampment where we were staying. There were several large-scale tents with rugs placed on theground, and then individual tents were given out for each traveler to stay in. It worked out OK: for a while there was word that they had run out of tents, and that was going to be a problem, and then they actually DID run out of blankets. But we all managed to survive the night, and we up nice and early at 7am on eclipse morning for breakfast.
And this is what it looked like that morning. Foggy, cold, gray - not at all the kind of conditions you want to wake up to on eclipse morning. To the right you can see German television setting up a report on the eclipe, which it turns out was broadcast all over the world; convenient total solar eclipses happen only a couple of times a decade, and no one wanted to miss this one.
But by 10am, the fog had all burned off, the sun was shining brightly, and everyone was set up. My tripod had actually broken the night before; I took the scope outside to show some people Saturn and Jupiter, and my tripod went bad on me. Fortunately it was fixable, but writing this reminds me that I need to get a new tripod before too long. In this picture you see about half our group, with our Canadian representative looking up at the sun with her eclipse glasses.
Eventually we got to totality, and the pictures of the eclipse are featured on that page, but I thought I’d include this picture here just because I like it so much. It really was an unbelieveable experience. I can’t say enough about it. And I can’t wait for the next one, which I think will be Shanghai 2009, although I’m thinking about going to Greenland to see the 2008 eclipse.
After the eclipse, we had lunch and then it was back onto the bus for the return trip to Cairo, which would end up taking eight hours. As we passed through the town, the locals waved goodbye to all the buses, a procession they had never seen the likes of, but will get a chance to see again: in 2027 another total eclipse grazes the city, and in 2060 an eclipse with almost the same exact path as this one crosses the town.
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