I thought about Alexandria, but I just went there, so I’d be sending them on their own. I also considered St. Katherine’s Monastery out in Sinai (don’t really know how to get there) and a few nights camping in the Black and White deserts (dying to go, but it’s a little pricey). Then a fortuitous email came my way from the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE).
The email was an announcement of an upcoming trip into the desert in February to visit the oases of Bahareya and Dakhla – and their attendant archaeological sites. This is actually a big deal, because the Supreme Council keeps a stranglehold on access to sites of historical importance. You know, if it’s important and interesting, God forbid people actually get to look at it, and think about what it means. In some sense I can see their point, but isn’t there a middle ground between keeping out the riffraff and keeping everyone out?
I checked in with my guests, and when I didn’t get a terribly negative reaction, I signed us up for the trip. Really, the setup was perfect: I didn’t have to do any of the planning, the three nights of the trip were over days when I don’t go to campus, and the price was reasonable – LE 1700 for 3 nights, including all meals, transport (over hundreds of kilometers), entry fees, hotels, an accompanying Egyptologist – and of course, access, access, access.
I’m typing this entry during the long haul from Bahareya to Dakhla – we’re somewhere in the desert between Farafra and Dakhla [Feb 13]. But I want to start with yesterday, and begin at the beginning of the trip. Basically, the three of us are the youngest people on the trip (as I predicted), but the group is quite small, friendly, and intelligent (overall). Our bus is big, with big cushy leather seats (take that, Family Transport!) and nice big curtained windows. Occasionally we get a snack, and it’s comfortable enough to sleep. So we’re basically traveling on the kindergarten plan – juice and a nap. Rock on.
Yesterday [Feb 12] we got to Bahareya around noon, so we made excellent time. We checked into the Palm Village Hotel outside town. The hotel is quite nice – by all accounts it’s the best place in town and features the “Dr. Zahi Hawass Room” – but to be frank, Bahareya is a bit of a dump. And this is coming from me, madly-loving-desert-girl.
We started off by heading to the “museum” of the famous Golden Mummies. Back in the late 1990s, a local man was leading his donkey across a stretch of scrubby sand when his donkey fell in a hole. After extracting the donkey, the man looked in the hole … and bam! Egyptology dreamland! He alerted the authorities, who called Zahi Hawass, who was then able to run in and “discover” the mummies. To his credit, Zahi did put a picture of the donkey in the book he wrote on the Mummies. But still, doesn’t the word “discovery” imply “the first time”?
“Museum” is being generous, by the way – it’s a squat bunker with padlocked doors with a couple of guys standing around. But inside the bunker we found 10 of the lovely golden mummies under glass. We saw a few men, a few women (including the famous “bride”), and a few children. No pictures allowed, of course, but I did make a few sketches.
The high point of the day, from my view, was the next stop – we actually went to the excavation site in the Valley of the Golden Mummies. This was where the access paid off. We were actually able to enter two of the tombs and look at the mummies in situ. A lot of the mummies are in terrible condition, crumbling into chunky dust or with limbs falling off and stacked nearby. At least two poor fellows had lost their heads, and only one of them still had his head, neatly balanced on his chest. And somehow we had permission to take pictures without a flash.
It’s hard for me to describe why this was so cool. The pieces themselves are very damaged and some are hard to see. I think part of it is the knowledge that very few people in the entire world are able to see what I’m seeing. Part of it was knowing that I was way out in the middle of nowhere (and Sahara nowhere at that!) looking at buried treasure. Another part was more clinical, the excitement of a scientist looking at another scientist’s work in progress. All I can say is, “It was fantastic!”
The rest of the day we spent trucking around to various underwhelming archaeological sites. I’m glad my visitors came on this trip before heading to Upper Egypt! These sites are all interesting and important – especially considering their locations – but they don’t evoke the visceral response I felt in, say, Karnak, or the Valley of the Kings, or Philae, or Giza.
Briefly, we went to Qarat Qasr Salim, where we visited two underground tombs with quite remarkable, colorful paintings. The paintings weren’t as brilliantly executed as those in, say, Alexandria or Luxor – but then again, consider that Bahareya is a gazillion miles away from anything. Where did the artists come from? Libya? Memphis? Thebes? And how much did that cost? The two tombs were those of Zed-Amun-ef-Ankh, and his son, Bannentiu.
Next we went to the Temple of Ain El Muftella, which seemed to me to be almost entirely reconstruction. We saw two partial reliefs of the god Bes (only his feet and his tail, so it’s tough to tell what you’re seeing), and a few unremarkable reliefs of the gods. The thing was entirely underwhelming. Our next underwhelming stop was at the Temple of Alexander (funnily, the new Lonely Planet has it labeled as the Tomb of Alexander, which is an entirely different kettle of fish). The Temple is important because it contains the only depiction of Alexander as a pharaoh, making offerings to Egyptian gods. But the face of the figure is gone (probably wouldn’t have helped anyway, given the stylizing used in Egyptian art), and so is the cartouche identifying the figure as Alexander. So I wasn’t terribly impressed by the evidence, or by the tiny temple itself.
We returned to the hotel with time to kill before dinner, so I took a shower to wash off the desert. I had an actual bathtub, but the shower spigot was handheld, so my shower was nice and hot, but Navy. And splashy, because there was no shower curtain, which is a common problem here. The end result was cleanliness, and I tend to remember my crappiest showers fondly because they followed periods of extensive filth. Like when I was up in Devon – ghastly boiling hot showers from tiny streams of water, but they felt like heaven after four days of not showering.
It’s a bit chilly out in the desert in February. The heater in my room wasn’t working, so I found an employee and laboriously explained in Arabic what was wrong. The man followed me to my room and firmly pressed the Power button. I thought, Yeah, buddy, I already tried turning it on. He spent awhile fooling around with the buttons on the unit and the buttons on the remote, and in the end he gave up. He said something to me in Arabic, and when I didn’t understand he repeated it in perfect English. I felt like an idiot.
When I came back to the room a bit later, I found a portable heater sitting outside the door. “You see?” I said to my friends. “This is why I love this country!” I plugged the heater in and turned on the coils – promptly flooding my room with enough light to read a book. My face fell. “And this,” I continued, “Is also perfectly Egyptian!” I realized I’d be spending all night with my head under the covers to block out the light, or my head under the covers, freezing.
I watched a little of the sunset from the roof of the hotel, hung out a bit, and then ate a reasonable dinner. I was exhausted, but I dragged myself back up to the roof to look at the sky for a few minutes.
And boy am I glad I did, because it was stunningly beautiful. There’s no moon right now, so the stars have the sky to themselves. The Milky Way streams across the center of the blackness, with so many stars that constellations like Orion and Cassiopeia are hard to pick out. I could actually distinguish the individual colors of the stars, they were so bright. The silence was deep, punctuated only by the occasional braying donkey or receding motorcycle engine.
Suddenly, I remembered why I went into the desert. It wasn’t to see temples or mummies or gold. I go to the desert for peace and beauty. Everything else is a bonus.
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