Climb a mountain, be closer to god.
(PHOTO: Mt. Sinai, Egypt)
Cairo was both confused and self-obsessed.
With thirty-million people living there, there simply wasn’t a singular opinion on anything. You couldn’t choose an adjective to describe the city without finding an immediate and unavoidable contradiction (or at minimum, the expected street hassle).
Further, it’d be difficult to find a city with more self-appointed critics: everybody had a thoughtful (if idiosyncratic) solution to whatever ‘problems’ Cairo was then suffering. In the same breath, Egyptians would illustrate the city as both the most marvelous melting pot this side of high white heaven, and still equally perilous, difficult, impossibly ‘unfair’ to either the rich or poor (or both), and flat-out ‘obsolete’ as anything but an Arabesque backwater of trinkety souvenir shops and an impressively unorganized mummy museum. The majesty of the pyramids, and Sphinx, of course, requires little introduction or description of its merits.
Cairo was certainly a dusty Arab outpost but had the unseemly flashing lights and crooked-tooth street whores of any Middle Eastern metropolis. Cairo was brim-full of shisha cafes, whereas invariably-mustached men would read Arabic newspapers, drink syrupy neon hued juice and puff like 21st century street sultans on the wet musky molasses smoke that is fruit-cured Egyptian tobacco. But despite the legions of local men whiling their time away in backstreet cafes, there was a sense of intense urban rush that rivaled any well-populated occidental capital.
My hotel, just near the Royal Museum, was formerly the British Officers’ Club and felt perfect for both cliched (and overly literate) English gentlemen and their more visceral and eccentric cousins. With mahogany paneling, 40s appointments and a cigar-and-brandy lounge, again it was split impossibly between seeming dated beyond compare, and having the romantic air of a charmed and historic landmark.
After a couple days, I bought bus tickets east - straight across the Sinai Peninsula and shooting directly for the base of the ubiquitously biblical Mount Sinai. It seemed to be an important stop for anyone in the region, whether or not you considered yourself a ‘believer.’
At dawn the next morning I boarded an orange city bus that seemed all ready to just open up and throttle itself right across that hot, dry desert. The sunlight was already piercing when I sat down. Within a couple moments, the only other Westerner aboard approached me.
At this point in my travels, I’d been deliberately avoiding the typical cling-on backpackers. Understandably, the road gets lonely and meeting with a more familiar mentality can be of certain relief. I’d spent the last 5 months traveling on foot through the dusty, Islamic region between Tangier, Morocco, and Conakry, Guinea. For thousands and thousands of miles, I’d go without encountering a single American.
At first, it’d been two weeks without that familiar American accent. The deeper I’d get, Europeans started disappearing from the lineup. The buses became darker and darker with local skin and local dialect until suddeny I felt like the only white Jewish-American on this strange and disillusioned continent. After a while though, being alone meant being independent, having more options, less responsibility or push to keep the routines of home. It felt good, and just seeing that lone Welshmen caused me to fruitlessly look in the other direction. What I hadn’t considered was the great extent a lonely traveler would go to meet someone from ‘anywhere but here.’
The Welshman had been in Egypt for nine weeks at that time and was headed, like many plain lost vagabonds, for Dahab, a slumbered hippie outpost on the Gulf of Eilat’s jagged coast. In the 70s, the town had become a kind of collective resort for outlaws, dropouts, drug smugglers and misfits. By the 90s, Dahab had become a semi-posh beach spot like everything else, but a generation of Opium Trail wanderlusters had a hard time forsaking its colorful past.
There’s an unfortunate cliche that follows that certain brand of travelers around and in this case it turned out to be true. He boasted profusely about his hard-earned ‘road education,’ and notably for the fact that he hadn’t bathed or even undressed in almost 5 weeks. Pressed to the filmy glass window, this was a poorly-kept secret.
Polite but clearly seeking solitude, I decided to switch seats and regain some of my own space and contemplation. For the next six hours, I rode blissfully across the desert, snapping throw-away photos through the window glass, watching the last miles of the African continent pass me by (the Sinai Peninsula marks the far western borders of the region known popularly as the ‘Orient).
At sundown, we stopped suddenly at a roadside vista about half way across the Sinai Desert. Without the absurd pun, this was, indeed, “God’s country,” with half-eaten roadkill along the desert highway, sun that could literally blind you, and heat of 115 f and upwards. The land was dry, famished and forgotten by man.
At the vista, there was a small boarding-room hotel with 15 or so simple concrete rooms, a coffee shop and a tiny adjacent grocery. The passengers all got off the bus, one-by-one lighting cigarettes, rushing for little paper cups of Egyptian-style espresso and greasy lamb-meat sandwiches on dry, stale bread. I’d become familiar with these required stops: it was to break the journey, and the driver would be paid on percentage commission on the net of the passengers’ purchases.
After a half hour, some of the passengers became restless. The sun had slipped behind a mountain on the far horizon, and the temperature was quickly dropping. A second bus had arrived, and a handful of Australian tourists joined that miserable Welshman and I for a quick joint at the edge of the road.
Another hour went by and I became concerned. One of the Australians had learned basic Arabic at school and agreed to make an inquiry with the driver. From a distance all I saw was arms flailing, a lot of confused yipping, guttural sounds, and a displeased traveler returning with a long face, and even stranger news.
The simple explanation: when the rain came from the south, the wind came, too, and “blew the road away.”
When I asked about a detour, or a road crew from Cairo, it was suggested that we either wait until a road is built … or return to Cairo and ‘forget about Sinai.’ The last idea was ammended with an endearing prologue: “It’s pretty hot, anyway.” At eight hours to Dahab or Sharm El Sheik, or eight hours back to Cairo, we all agreed to wait it out, see what happened, most of us at least half-disbelieving this very foreign explanation of why we were still stuck at a truck stop in the black heart of the Sinai Desert.
After a hopeful false-start (we all boarded the bus, drove two miles east and realized the story was true - the road was gone), we decided to check into the hotel, drink a bottle of gin with a couple Arab pool hustlers, and wait for the road to be rebuilt. It was misadventure at minimum but getting back on the bus for an eight-hour ride to the city I woke up in seemed pretty foolish.
At five o’clock in the morning, the sweet driver attempted unsuccessfully to wake me in room 9. Simply drunk, as were my strange companions in another scattered room down the hall, I’d blasted the poor soul for waking me up and fell back into my twisted black sleep. When the sun came up, the bus was gone and the Welshman and I were left to wait about 12 hours for the next ride. The Australians had managed to hitch a ride with UN workers sometime before twilight.
At midnight, 36 hours after departure, after that torturous day of waiting and throwing stones outside my very own ‘Baghdad Cafe & Hotel’, we arrived like bastard brothers at the foothills of holy Mt. Sinai. So gloriously relieved to finally be alone, I shouted a kind farewell, hopped off the bus, and literally ran into the darkness.
Half way down the dirt road to a Georgian monastery I’d hoped to bunk at, I stopped to rest. It’d been a long journey and a difficult year, and I really needed to know that I’d traveled half way around the world for something beyond 3rd world bus rides, fickle love affairs and questionable street food.
Almost defeated, I climbed up a dark and colorless embankment and put my rucksack down. I looked back to the valley, the orange bus sputtering towards Cairo and wondered for a moment what I was really doing out there.
Drunk with meloncholy, I looked deep into the subtle flicker of planets and stars churning optimistically in a too-dark night, and said a prayer: I didn’t want to be alone in the world any longer.
