BALLOONS IN EGYPT

Three years ago this very week, I woke up on a boat on the River Nile, opened the curtains and saw the most astonishingly beautiful sight as a large group of balloons drifted across the early morning skies above one of the most beautiful landscapes and amazing places with regards to its place in human history.

A week later, after the most relaxing week I can remember ever having, I awoke in much the same place on the final morning of our river cruise (as it was something of a “round trip” of sorts) and, before we went off for a rather sombre “last breakfast” on board with the friends we had made, and before all of us all went our separate ways as that part of our holiday ended, some of our fellow passengers were heading off on a farewell early morning balloon trip.

We had decided against it…

Perhaps it was the earliness of the appointed hour, or the fact that we might have thought that our funds were being stretched a bit too far at that point, but I imagine that it was mostly due to me having one of my “Not for me…” moments, having always had a slightly dubious relationship with anything involving great heights.

And so, full of excitement and anticipation, off they went in a minibus and, within the hour I was able to point my camera at the sky and watch the silent majesty of a line of balloons drifting slowly across the sky as the dawn’s light gave way to the bright sunshine of another Egyptian morning.

I suppose that for a lot of people it’s the opportunity to make one more beautiful memory at the end of a beautiful week, or, for those of us thinking that this really could be a “once in a lifetime” opportunity to be there and do such a thing, perhaps there’s just an air of “Why the hell not?” in that giddy and hugely relaxed and excited “end-of-term” way that the ends of holidays can bring with them.

All I know is that I was very envois of the exciting tales that got told over breakfast that day of astonishing vistas and breathtaking views, even though I knew that I personally would have been weeping in the bottom of the basket and asking repeatedly whether we were back on the ground yet…

Plus, of course, I couldn’t have pointed my camera at the balloons in the sky if I’d been inside one of them.

You pays your money and you takes your choice.

I thought of that particular morning again this week when I heard of the terrible tragedy in Luxor, because, whilst I know that for someone, somewhere, a “special moment” is turning into a horribly tragic memory all the time, somehow this just seemed so damned unfair.

ONE YEAR ON…

I’m too gloomy to write anything of any substance today.

On this morning one year ago, I opened the curtains to be greeted by this view:

Nile@Dawn - 020310

This year, I was faced with a much more mundane vista:

Dustbins@Dawn - 020311

What a difference a year makes.

Last year I was in the “Valley of the Kings”,
today I’m walking through the valley of despair and such
things as 'holidays' seem like impossible dreams...

Sigh!

Never mind… Here’s an image of some Nile boats which I made up
sometime last year from my pictures taken on that trip.

Hopefully it will cheer you up.

Maybe it will cheer me up.

More tomorrow.

Probably…

EGYPTIAN TALES (3) The Mask of the Boy King

I make no apologies for returning to this subject this morning because I was genuinely upset yesterday when I heard about the damage done to some of the artefacts held at the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo and the thefts from the site at the ancient city of Memphis about twenty miles south of there.

I know that there are those who believe that things are not important, that it’s people that really matter, and compared to the loss of life during the current protests, the loss of a few trinkets that belonged to some dead people long ago doesn’t add up to much.

However, these objects have survived through the whole of recorded human history and are important. Our understanding of where we are now and where we have come from plays a great part in the building of civilisation. If we allow things to just get smashed up, allow the barbarian within us to win then we truly are no longer worthy of being called civilised any more.  Some objects transcend history, as anyone who has enjoyed “The History of the World in 100 Objects” or even just visited a museum or an art gallery should realise. Objects like these tell us more about ourselves and if we allow them to be lost, then they are lost forever.

I know I’ve recently been rather flippantly wittering on about the artefacts of my own childhood in these meanderings lately, and a few cheap trinkets that I’ve had for thirty years or so aren’t really all that important in the great scheme of things, but the Treasures of the Pharoahs are history, and it is not right for one transient generation to dare to destroy them, not least because such an act of cultural vandalism diminishes all of us and history might very well judge us and the times we live in very harshly indeed if we allow such things to happen. So much else has already been lost over the centuries, it would be truly awful to lose anything else to sheer mindlessness.

The terrible thing is that, should a looter succeed in getting hold of these unique and precious objects, and decide to break them up for the precious metals and jewels they contain, then it would not only be a tragedy, but it would be a crime against history. Reducing the gold and jewels of the Pharoahs to its basic monetary value is just a scandalous thing to consider, as would these items falling into private hands. 

They belong, like all great art should, to the world.

The people of Egypt know the symbolic value that some of the Treasures of the Pharoahs has to their country’s place in the culture of the world. The Mask of the Boy King is such an important part of that image that they even chose to put in on their coins and I was very pleased to hear that it was the ordinary people who understood the importance of this, and it was they who linked arms around the museum in an attempt to stop any further damage. This is like the people of London spontaneously taking it upon themselves to link arms to try and stop someone from stealing the Crown Jewels such is the iconic status of that Mask of the Boy King.

Deep in the very heart of that suddenly oh-so-vulnerable seeming Museum of Antiquities in Cairo, there is a room that everyone who has ever visited must surely have wanted to go into. This is the room where the most valuable of the treasures from the excavation of the Tomb of Tutankhamun are displayed. In the centre of the room, in a rather surprisingly fairly plain glass case that mask was waiting for you.

It is an amazing thing, so iconic and so beautiful. You’ve seen pictures of it a thousand times and yet it still surprises you with its beauty and its great age and craftsmanship. You used to be able to quite literally able to walk right up to it and, apart from the glass of the case, be virtually nose-to-nose with it. I know, because, like so many others, I was once able to do precisely that. I stood there and stared into the eyes of an object so very famous and so very old for a good few minutes and, for the briefest of times, I felt the whole weight of history and the cultural significance of that most famous of objects and we were alone together, just me and that mask for one moment in its long, long history.

It has survived through so very much, been waiting in the darkness through centuries of events that we can only read about in history books and for one fleeting instance of time it’s unseeing eyes were locked with mine.

That remains one of the most vivid memories that I carry with me and it would be an absolute tragedy if no-one else ever gets their own chance of having that moment for themselves.

EGYPTIAN TALES (2) The Step Pyramid

EGYPTIAN TALES (2) The Step Pyramid

Believe it or not, when I was a spudlet, I took Architecture for “O” Level and one of the buildings we had to learn about was The Step Pyramid, the Pyramid of Djoser designed by the ancient architect Imhotep - a name sadly hijacked for a Hollywood villain when we should be honouring his memory every time we go upstairs - back in a time when my own ancestors were still trying to work out whether a cave was a better option for sleeping in safely in than a hole in the ground was.

It is considered to be the first true example of what we recognise as a Pyramid today and a massive leap forward in the history of structural engineering, being a stepping stone on the way towards the possibility of the achievement of building of the more famous cluster of Pyramids on the Giza plateau.

I’ll admit that on my own visit there, I’d managed to remain slightly underwhelmed by the more famous “classic” three Pyramids at Giza. I’m still quite shocked at myself for this. How is it possible to be underwhelmed by one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and the only one we still get to see? It’s not that I don’t appreciate how wonderful they are, and the sheer magnificent fact that they are there at all, it’s just that somehow the experience left me feeling slightly let down. Maybe it was the huge car park sitting pretty much adjacent to one of them, or perhaps the vast amount of traders desperate to get my attention (and my hard-earned currency) or it could have just been the fact that I was feeling slightly miffed that I had been stuck for rather too long inside our minibus.

Having arrived slightly ahead of the crowds, it was a source of great irritation to me to be obliged to sit inside the thing watching all the other coaches arrive whilst we were given an archaeological lecture on the history of these wonderful structures, when all that I wanted to do was get out there and photograph the living daylights out of them before too many people and vehicles got themselves in the way. I should have had more patience. It’s not as if they were likely to be going anywhere soon, and the guide was being paid to give me all that hard learned knowledge.

I can be so ungracious at times.

There are choices to be made when you’re on a schedule and have limited time. Is it worth seeing the Pharoah’s solar barge? Is it worth going inside one of the Pyramids? Would I rather spend the time walking over to the far corners of the structure beyond where the traders and other visitors don’t tend to bother to go and snap away with the old camera? I think you can probably guess the option I chose. Maybe next time for the other stuff. If there is a next time, of course…

In many ways the Pyramids at Giza remained more inspiring from a distance. The evening before my visit I’d been up to the roof garden café of our hotel and they’d been visible, rising up above the skyline of the traffic and the buildings of the city and I’d just sat there drinking my lemonade and couldn’t take my eyes off them, with my mind in a constant loop every time I tried to look away – “There are Pyramids at the end of the road… There are PYRAMIDS… at the END of the ROAD…”

Anyway, the hustle and bustle of Giza was well behind me as we trundled up towards Saqqara. Having a pleasant enough lunch had made me much calmer and I was happy to listen patiently to the history of the Step Pyramid without so much as a single (if you’ll pardon the pun) tut. Our little bus bounced and swayed its way up the rocky road, giving us the occasional glimpse of the top of it as it rose above the line of the dunes. The bus was eventually parked in another busy car park, this time more wisely positioned outside the compound of the Pyramid itself. Across the car park, beyond another sand dune stood the Pyramid itself, rising majestically above its current companion, a workman’s metal hut that happily the Pyramid will long outlast. That metal hut will rust to nothing, and the stones will endure.

To get into the complex itself you have to pass through a roofed colonnade, which on that day was very busy, the narrow passage with its battened floor having to deal with tourists both arriving and leaving at the same time. Whilst I know it’s easy to assume that everything you see in Egypt is from a more ancient time, the flooring is a modern addition to help preserve the monument and to make it safer for we latter-day explorers to navigate, so I was tickled pink to hear an elderly lady marvelling to her friend at how well preserved the “ancient” wooden floor was.

Another right turn into a vast open courtyard, and there it was. Right in front of me. All those years on from sketching away in my Architecture notebook and I was there, right next to it. I could hardly stop taking pictures of it. It’s just so beautiful, and so there and it had been there at Saqqara for over four thousand years. 62 metres tall, on six levels, considered to be the first human-made, large-scale monumental cut-stone structure in history and it’s still there, outlasting anything and everything built after it. Admittedly nowadays it’s looking a bit battered and it’s got a fair amount of scaffolding where it’s being restored, but just being next to it, standing next to something that has survived from the dawn of history, a big old chunky symbol of something we like to call civilisation, well, it just moved me in a way I find difficult to understand fully. I don’t get awestruck very often, but I believe that for the all-too-brief hour or so I was there, that’s precisely what I was.

It is just such a beautiful, mesmerising building. It is a bit wounded and the scaffolding around it is rather essential it seems but, during that one short hour, I was magically transported back and started thinking about my fifteen-year old self, scribbling away with my pencils in a long lost exercise book. I wish I could have travelled back and told myself that one day I’d actually be there, that one day all those facts and figures would actually have a purpose and a meaning and a context, that one day those dry old days of lessons and learning would strike me with such a resonance and a profound sense of history, and would quite simply astound me in ways my cynical, teenage younger self could never have imagined possible.

EGYPTIAN TALES (1) Hoopoe Hoop-la

We were lucky enough earlier on this year to be able to have a holiday in Egypt and one of the optional excursions we signed up for was a couple of hours birdwatching around the Nile near to Aswan.

Now, over the last couple of years the beloved and I have become very fond of watching the birds, albeit in an understated and uninformed kind of a way, and we’ve taken to encouraging the various Finches, Nuthatches, Tits, Robins and suchlike to venture into our little postage stamp of a garden so we can watch them feed and be generally diverted by their busy little lives, but we hardly consider ourselves to be experts or anything approaching that. One or two of the little brown birds seem to have become very adept at keeping their mysterious identities to themselves, and the many, many Jackdaws have become something of an all-consuming – if fascinating to witness – pain when it comes to topping up the feeders. Woodpeckers occasionally show up, and once (and only once) I saw a Sparrowhawk perched upon a nearby fence for a couple of minutes before it went on its way.

So the prospect of seeing some birds we were unlikely to ever see at home was pretty much irresistible, and we gathered up our travel binoculars and our cameras and set forth on our excursion, fully expecting that we’d come back disappointed as sometimes tends to be the case with these sorts of trips. The previous year we’d chugged up a Loch to see “Seal Island” and there wasn’t a seal to be seen. This trip, however, was excellent. The local guide was very knowledgeable about the local bird life and seemed to know where pretty much every nest in the area was positioned so we saw a whole range of birds, from Bee-eaters to Cormorants, from Gannets to Grebes, from huge Osprey right down to the tiniest lovable little black and white Kingfishers and loads of others whose names I now have to look up, including a large "green" wader with massive almost comic red legs and feet which I took loads of very blurry pictures of, which I eventually started to believe I probably imagined due to the heat and dehydration, but which was almost certainly an African Purple Gallinule, an name which goes a long way towards explaining why I thought it was green I suppose.

Anyway, it was a good little trip. Well worth it if you ever get the chance.

At one point, though, as we floated peacefully along through the Papyrus reeds, I spotted a shape out of the corner of my eye; a tiny silhouette that slightly resembled the head of a pickaxe. I leaned across to the beloved and pointed, asking “What do you think that is…?”

Almost at the same moment our guide leapt across the boat in sudden excitement. “A Hoopoe!” he cried “Over there! A Hoopoe!” and just for a brief moment, there it was, and, before I could bring my camera to bear, it was gone. Much discussion followed about this elusive little bird and how spectacular it was when it crested, but sadly it made no other appearance, and we drifted on through the rest of the trip. Cameras clicked. Binoculars scanned and it was generally agreed that “a good time was had by all” as they say.

But now I had a mission. We had another week to spend in Egypt. I was determined to get a picture of a Hoopoe somehow. Every little trip or excursion thereafter would find me scanning the rocks and stones, hoping against hope for a glimpse of that distinctive head popping up to have a look at the funny tourists below, but I was always disappointed. It became something of a small running joke between the little gang of travellers we had hooked up with. Where was I off to? Off looking for another Hoopoe I expect.

And so it continued through temple after temple. In one temple someone from the group spotted one, I was told, right at the top of a particularly large pillar, but by the time I’d navigated myself around all the spectacular architecture it had gone. If it had ever been there at all. I was beginning to suspect that some gentle mockery was afoot. Another time, we were talking to a couple who’d just come back from a walk and they were describing this lovely little bird they’d just seen. They weren’t sure what it was, but it had this funny shaped head…

By this stage “Hoopoe” was rapidly becoming something of a term of mockery and derision in the cabins and hotel rooms temporarily serving in lieu of MAWH Towers for the duration. In fact, by the end of the week I was starting to doubt that I’d ever seen one at all, and whether they actually existed, when a carving of one was pointed out to me on one of the temple walls. I wasn’t exactly sure at first, but yes, there it was, that distinctive shaped head, drawn into the rock by a similar obsessive thousands of years ago.

By the final morning I had all but given up on ever seeing a live version of this elusive creature. We had a 6AM start for our last excursion of the trip, before heading off to the airport later that morning. As we clambered into the motorboat that morning, I got the impression that by now, even our tour guide, the rather splendid Mahmoud, was in on the joke. There were a lot of birds nesting on the rocks alongside the Aswan Dam, and I half heartedly and dutifully shot off a few photographs, but I really wasn’t up for the chase any more and I concentrated on enjoying being on the water that morning and trying to absorb the memories to look back on later on that week when I was back at my desk.

The Temple of Kalabsha was the final visit of our long strip, and a very impressive place it is too. It was very early in the day and the birdsong was almost drowning out the historical facts that Mahmoud was trying to tell us. In amongst all the birdsong was a delicate, lyrical little sound that went “hoo… po… hoo… po… hoo… po…”

Could it be…? Surely they’re not named after the sound they make…?

I looked up, and there at the top one of the temples, a distinctive little head was sticking up, and for once I had the right lens on and the camera switched on and was able to take the snap you see at the top of this page. Ten minutes later we were back in the boat and heading homewards, so he really couldn’t have appeared any later on in our particular holiday, but sometimes the time is just right to make a very special moment into a very special memory, and just for once I really did believe that “everything comes to those who wait”.