Right so finally getting to Egypt, now that I've been back for 2 weeks....

When I think about how wrong I had the arab world in my head it kind of alarms me. I think I expected birkas and moorish men weilding crescent moon shaped sabres and lots of men on the back of pick up trucks being rowdy and firing off guns - well that's what you see on the news. You expect that everyone is poor and miserable and horribly angry. Nothing is farther from the truth. I think you become a little deluded by what the media sells you, when I was little I think I really believed that all Russians were like dolph lungren in Rocky IV - 7 foot tall and a monosyllabic evil he-man programmed and brainwashed to destroy everything in his path. Now I just think all russians are either gangsters or lesbians like tatu. ANyway I digress... The Egyptians were so welcoming and friendly and open, especially the desert people. I got invited to so many campfire singalongs lit by a big yellow moon and found an arab father figure in Mr Badhu who kept the horrible german boys away from me and guarded me as I slept and when it go so cold that I shivered he threw his camel scented blankets over me and he just smoked his sheesha and I heard it bubble as I drifted off to sleep. The funny thing about the desert people was how open they were with you. I went for a dinner of salad and henna - I swear it was henna, smelt like it, looked like it, didn't know it was edible at snoozi and said's house and after the meal my friend karine and I were invited to the ladies quarters to thank them for cooking. Karine lived in Siwa and could speak a bit of the local language and they started to tell her about their swollen legs. Then they hiked up their skirts all the way to the tops of their thighs and showed us. They seemed to expect that as westerners we carried around doctors kits, but all that I could offer them was tiger balm. I know it's a remedy for most things but I wasn't sure on this occasion that it would work.

But I loved Siwa - the people were so beautiful - literally physically beautiful, they had caramel coloured skin and blue green eyes - they were berbers originally from morrocco, and they were always prepared in their houses for visitors. The rooms themselves were quite bear but they stacked 12 matresses in the side of the room with about 5 or 6 rolled up carpets next to them. The shops were never open, it was actually a tough place to buy things, you had to search out the proprietor and beg him to open, I guess it's a way of weeding out time wasters.... Siwa seemed as untouched by tourism as you can get in Egypt, and they seemed to like it that way, some things you paid for some you didn't, like our trip out to the great sand sea - it was like the english patient or lawrence of arabia. whatever way I say it, it won't do justify to what I saw. I saw oases and swam in a cold lake in the middle of sand mountains, I saw mirages float up and float away, I saw ancient fossils from when it sea - petrified sand dollars and star fish. I sandboarding from the top of sharp spines of deep dunes. We even got mohammed the driver - a 50 year berber to try it too and nothing compares to seeing him with cigarette in his mouth coffir (headdress on) gracefully glide down to the bottom. I visited the ruins of the oracle that alexander went to consult and legend has it that he lost 500 thousand men in a sand storm on the way there. ANd when I left I got presents - a big bag of dates and a scarf.

Now I don't know if a lot of it is because I rank well on the traveller talking hierarchy - this is scale of how much other people might want to talk to you.

My friend Jacqueline is a number one candidate, she ranks above all others

1. she's female
2. she's pretty
3. she's dutch (dutch and canadian are the most popular, followed by british commonwealth)
4. she speaks the native language
5. she has a sense of humour
6. she's nice

My friend David on the other hand is kind of at the bottom - this by the way is all superficial first impression stuff

he's big and hairy and wears speedos and is gruff and is Israeli (this is horrible but true, I think sometimes through no fault of their own, just a language barrier but Israelis can sound a little pushy and a little scary, everything comes out as if it is fact that what they say is the truth, the only truth and everything else is offensive and wrong). WHen he first came to sit next to me on the beach in Sinai I didn't want to talk to him. But then he offered me lemongrass tea with lots of sugar and I was in. If you don't rank high on the hierarchy you have to have a pull. Tea is a HUGE deal in Egypt, everyone in the desert has rotten teeth and it's because the way they drink it it's one part sugar one part tea. They have a ritual of pouring half a bag of sugar into an enormous cup and then pouring tea in it and repeating this process until the sugar is all dissolved, then they pourout individual cups and add more. It becomes addictive all the sugar highs and the headaches from the come down. David was great though, he spoke arabic and made friends with all the bedouin guys, he seemed to have an appreciation for things that I would get annoyed about. Like the fact that they have no sense of distance, everything is cigarette smoking distance, we walked 15 km from nuweiba to the camp and everywhere we stopped to ask how far long until ras sheiten, they'd say oh cigarette smoking distance...

The Nubians were lovely too, I met a guy, lets call him mohamed because most people were called mohamed, though there were a few ramadans and saids, but because there were so many mohameds I now can't remember who wasn't, I sat with him on his roof terrace and petted a baby crocodile - when the fishermen would catch them he'd rear them until they were a year old and then take them back to lake nasser, and watched the feluccas go by. In Luxor when I stopped for lunch the chef not only fed me but mended my shoe. My experience with the general population was so overwhelmingly positive it made me not really care about the hawkers and the tricksters. I felt wise to it all now. I rented a bike on the east bank in luxor and when I tried to take it across the river they told me that they weren't allowing bikes on today, or when two lads lied and said that the entrance to the pyramids was through the stables, I just pushed past them all. If anything I think a lot of egyptians are really embarassed by these boys - because they are mainly boys, and they often tell them off. I get more hassle from men in NYC then I got on the whole of my trip. I found that if you don;t wear a bikini and miniscule shorts that the men were really respectful. If they did show any interest it was often because they weren;t really able to have a chat with egyptian girls so they were just using an opportunity given to them to converse.

There is a phenomenon in Egypt though, a kind of a mirror to Thailand. If you go out to clubs or bars in Luxor and at the resort towns you see tons of 50 and 60 year old western - mainly english, women with young nubile toy boys. They were all a bit fabio beefcakey for my liking but the ladies enjoyed the pumping muscles. I guess maybe it's the whole omar sharif thing?

There is also another phenomenon of western women of that age, a type of traveller I like to call the battlin betty - after the first one that I met. They travel alone and Betty in particular was travelling off of the alimony her husband pays her which makes it doubly satisfying. They are all so spirited but something seems a little word worn about them, a little faded clint eastwood or jack palance grizzle about them. Betty in particular, she said in india she kept a stick with her at all times in case the men came up and tried to grab her. She mentioned she'd had a few altercations here and she had a mind to get a stick again.

Favourite Bits of Egypt

1. second hand market in Cairo it's like 24 hours or something - always people rummaging through
2. om kolthum cafe - play this classical arabic music star's music 24 7 and have walls covered in paintings and statues of her everywhere!!
3. egyptian museum - the layout, like it's someones attic?!
4. seeing a fennick fox in the white desert - white desert AMAZING!!!! Like a 3-d psychological blot test - 10 ft chickens and mushrooms, going to sleep in it looked like the moon, as the sunset the white rock formations turned gold and pink and purple and blue
5. Ramses smiting - EVERYWHERE he was really into his smiting
6. Amazing Sufi dancers - whirling dervishes like the planets, one guy twirled without stopping at speed for 35 minutes while playing a drum, just loved the music, each musician danced and talked with his instrument.
7. sinai gorges and canyons, so old and world worn, could see how the wind had shittled them down and the granite came in pinks and reds and blues and oranges.
8. Mr Badhi saying that marrying your cousin can be a problem, I said oh because of the close genetic connection, he said no because you're family is too involved
9. everyone had an opinion about diana and dodi

Most of all I just loved the people

India Round up

Yes I am so lame that I stopped writing my blog entirely and now that I am home and stuffed with chocolate and wine - b/c it's easter I am too lazy to write anything properly. So it all comes down to the list again...

The most important bit of news that I'd like to add is that I now have found justification for the girlie wimpering I carried off around the subcontinent. Having returned home, I immediately went to the doctors to see what kind of rare fungal spore I may be carrying or what creature may have imbedded itself within my scalp, and it turns out that my medical paranoia on this one occasion was right. I am allergic to dust! I felt so vindicated in that instant, after all my moaning about crap and garbage and shit, I thought, yes, it did actually get to me, I am now a damaged human being, my lifespan is now shorter...

If you can't get a tropical illness you might as well be allergic to the world.... So after this year I've decided to stop travelling and accept my fate as a lonely cat lady who has an OCD in cleaning. Within two years I fully expect to be living with all my furniture covered in plastic.

Anyway, on with the India list....

1. Pooh, all conversations become scatalogical in India, you may start off talking about the weather or a train timetable, but then in the background you'll notice someone squat down and start taking a dump. My friend Julie was having a conversation with her dad in which he said that he knew someone who had visited India and he said people just shit in the street, 'yup' julie replied, 'what they just shit in the street?', 'yup that's what they do'. Small children on trains aren't bound by the need to be stationary, they just wander up and down the car as it slowly leaks out. Sometimes, polite parents will take their children to just outside the toilet and let them deficate there, it makes you think that the toilet may only actually be for adults. While on a train journey, we learned quickly to evacuate whatever is in you early on, b/c visiting the toilet after about 6 hours on the train is like visiting the cell of the most depraved of mental patients. People seemed to open the door and shit there, not directing it anywhere specifically, nowhere near the hole. As you go past villages you see ladies on the side of the road with huge steaming piles of pooh around them, making dung patties that look so perfect and pretty and like sand dollars. You imagine that in the toilets on the train, maybe the work continues and that their industriousness would attribute to the mess?

Still I have visited houses made of pooh in the Thar Desert and they were beautiful constructions, personalised by individual lattice designs, cool smooth lines. So pooh put to certain uses can make something beautiful and practical.

2. While in India, I had 2 apocalyptical experiences. The first an earthquake in the middle of the night in darjeeling and the second a sudden ice storm in dehli when it was about 30 degrees - huge cubes pelting down. All the locals seemed rather amused by it all, a bonus of not having a biblical frame of reference

3. Taj Mahal - it just really is that special. Instead of pigeons flying about the place there are green parrots. YOu turn the corner and see it and the only thing I can equate the feeling to is when I saw the magic castle at disney land when I was 7. That's was a fairytale should look like. It was amazing to see something so perfectly pristinely white and sparkling and clean and peaceful - in india. Even though it was 38 degrees out, the stone of the taj mahal felt cool. All the colourful patterns were inlaid stones - lapis lazuli blue, quartz black. Just the symmetry of it I think made you feel calm. Of course, the taj was more a testiment to muslim creativity and engineering. I can't tell you how gutted I was, I had found something in india to be in awe of and it's wasn't even indian, it was turkish!

4. beggars - we started calling them the zombies. As we were sitting in a 4 x 4, waiting to go up to darjeeling, a family of beggars slowly shuffled towards us, doing the head bobble thing and tilting backwards and scratching at the glass, I felt like we were in the night of the living dead. You just become so desensitized and there are children covered head to toe in soot who come up to you to try to hold your hand and you shrink away from them b/c they are so filthy. Can you imagine, recoiling from a 3 year old? The vast number of the people who have nothing and live in crap (people do live at the dump, but in a way it's better there, they can make houses out of garbage and children can find things to play with) means that after a while you just stop caring. There are levels of nothingness, some people have tarpaulin houses set up on the pavement or cardboard boxes. Others have nothing to shield them - we saw a man covered in fresh burns and he had nothing to shield him from the elements of keep his sores clean, I think he was the person with the most nothingness. But when you do find something to care about, it isn't people, it's puppies. Seeing a tiny puppy on it's own on the train platform, not knowing how to take care of itself, but desperately wanting love and knowing it'll be dead in a few days. The indian people kick it and it yelps and your heart breaks even more. But the way the indians see the puppy, a pest and a scavenger and a leech is sort of how you end up seeing the beggars. I would've given half my sandwich to the puppy, but I probably wouldn't to the starving person - it's a horrible indictment of oneself....

4. Indian tourists - the funniest people in the world. When we were at the Himalayan Mountaineering institute - which was really nice, it celebrated the gurkhas as opposed to the white guys who climbed everest and other neighbouring peaks, the tourists would put on local traditional garb and pretend to be tea pickers. They'd all have their pictures taken by a hedge with a basket on their heads pretending to pick tea leaves. They're so cute, they buy wooly hats with the name of the place that they've visited and wear them immediately and eat lots of ice cream. Then sometimes, they ask you to be in the picture. It makes you feel like a masai mara warrior or something that worthy of picture taking.

5. monkeys on bridges - dangerous things, in rishikesh, they sort of had you cornered as you crossed the river, they could always sense if you had food in your bag. I actually witnessed a lady vs monkey fight. She was ferocious, obviously a veteran and eventually the monkey backed off. Be good bloodsport to bet on.

6. Agoris - a hindu sect who worship Kali goddess of destruction and once or twice in their lives they have to eat human flesh. So they go down to the burning ghats and take a chunk of the bbq body as the family of the deceased look on!!! India's kind of a weird place b/c you have intense superstition - curse of the he-shes , so you have to pay them to ensure they don't; they believe that the ganges in Varanasi a place polluted with millions of decomposing corpses is clean - it's the mother, free from bacteria, fine for a morning bathe as you swim past floating dead pigs...

7. TRansport, while in india a very real fear for me was dying in transport. Sarah Julie and I took a 48 hour journey into the deepest pits of hell. Beginning with our descent from darjeeling - all three of us at some varying degree of shitting and vomiting bile at this point after not consuming anything for 3 days apart from a bowl of porridge - ahhhh the life giver, I will always love you porridge, the despair we felt when we couldn't find anything but curry to eat when we were sick and then stumbled upon porridge, anyway we piled into a little car where the driver switched between having the engine off rolling down the mountain and turning it on and belting round blind corners overtaking other vehicles at full speed. How he could gamble with our lives is one thing, but they only way we could rationalise it was that he had a death wish and didn't care who he took with him. He laughed as we cried and made crazy faces in reference to us to the other passenger. In the end after opening the door to jump out of the moving vehicle he realised he'd have to be a little more accomodating. Once down in the valley we got on an old rickety bus where people were sleeping in the overhead compartments. That night on the bus was like spending a night with mike tyson beating the crap out of you. I don't know how many times I hit the ceiling or was thrown bakwards and forwards as we went past a graveyard of overturned bus and trucks knowing that could very well be our fate. Then we got on a train in the cattle car shoved into the sidecar with the back and front of my head up against two mens crotches. THEN we took a rickshaw for 2 hours with 23 people hanging off of it through an area of town black with coal dust. And then I swore to hate india forever....

8. Decorated Rickshaws - they take such pride and care, covered in rhinestones, named, it's so flashy and vegas, they should export them. And they cut out eyes from magazines - I thought it was a sexual thing, but it's for protection, so someone has their back always.

9. Tibetans, Tibetans!!! They are the best part of india, they have the best sense of humour and crack jokes all the time. The guy who ran the hotel we stayed at in darjeeling was one of the dalai lamas top four guards in the sixties and seventies and he led many of the exoduses - exodusii? I don't know grammar, across the himalaya from tibet. He had amzing pictures of the black hat sect and the warrior monks and tons of him in tibetan get up, whatever the season he had the same john wayne stance and was always grabbing his gun in his holster. He'd talk about his 'digs' when he was a student in leeds and how he liked the pub. And talked about how sometimes he'd have to shoot people in the crossing because it was so dangerous. When I asked him what tibet used to be like, he said it was great - tons of parties all the time. I felt like I was talking to a real life cowboy. Tibetan monks rock too, the wear cut off t-shirts with free tibet printed across them - they look like rockstars - can you imagine a vicar or a rabi or a nun looking so cool? Plus I went to a tibetan funeral and everyone who attends gets a little party bag with goodies and cakes in it. I think we're approaching religion from totally the wrong starting point in the west.

10. Sickness - I;m going to try to describe the pain - but those of you who don't want to know what came out of my body don't read, so this is really only for me I suppose. Coming out from both ends, but mainly my arse. And when there was nothing solid nor liquid to evacuate, bile and blood came out. I have never experienced burning sensation like it, I was pretty sure part of my sphincter had been squeezed off and now my intestines were trying to push their way out. Cramps to me were also an indicator that my stomch was on the long march out of my body, and so I lay awake for hours at night contemplating how I might survive with my insides on the outside? Or if I could push them back in. When we finally received medical treatment, our bodies became confused and our stomaches became swollen as if we were pregnant, I thought it was my stomach giving up forever and on the verge of exploding as a final measure. When we called the doctor out he seemed equally bemused by our reaction. I still can't believe that I am truly healed. For a month after I couldn't go to the bathroom without poohing something... But Sarah and Julie and I now know each other in a way in which no one else will, as if we had been in prison....

11. rajput mustaches are the coolest things ever - giant waxed mustaches that are longer and fuller than most girls hair. We saw one guy with a mustach so massive you could see either bushy end from behind curling up.

12. english influence - mainly positive I think, lots of parks and botanical gardens and pretty public spaces, the only evidence of chav poor taste is in the fort in Jodhpur in one of the state rooms where they covered the ceiling in giant xmas baubles, it looked like the ceiling had developed leprosy. I think they kept it as a little dig to the british, which is fair enough.

13. I love that Indians smack children, because we met so many obnoxious little boys and whenever they step out of line, they get clouted on the back of the head with a ruler or whatever is hard that the person can find - they need the weapon.... In the desert we had a 'music man' come (in daylight the next morning he came up to all of us individually and announced I'm the music man you know, proudly) - who had a sitar but seemed to only bang the strings and not pluck them or use the frets and then he'd sing scales, but whatever, not the most proficient musician in the world but it was very atmospheric by the campfire and nice to all hang out together. His son had spent the whole day following us around and galloping around us while counting to five and at each number sitcking his bum in our general direction and smacking it, that night he started accompanying his dad in his precocious presumptuous way and we assumed the proud father would be happy to have his son and heir engaging with him, but instead he threw a rock at him and told him to keep quiet and moved him to the outside of the circle. I've never been so satisfied to see someone be bullied essentially. If only we could do that with annoying children in the western world.