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A Sentimental Journey Across Egypt, Libya, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Italy V
Day Six (cont...)
(cont. from now209 and from Day Six, also and again slightly earlier, for you bleacher bums.)
So Aswan. Not the desert. The abundance of cars, pavement, people, and lack of vast amounts of flat land, interrupted by not a whole lot made it pretty clear this was not the desert. The one thing confusing the issue a little bit was the presence of a reasonable quantity of sand, most of it airborne, though not in a malicious, windy sort of way. Sort of like leaping into one of those rooms full of plastic balls, only in this case the plastic balls were covered in a soft-grade sandpaper.
However, occasionally stumbling blindly forward, which could have had just as much to do with the fact that we woke up early than it had to do with the sand whipping about in the air, you'd hit the odd building, taxi driver, calesh, or scorpion (not that anyone hit a scorpion while flailing about, it was just a thought that passed through my mind when I realised I couldn't see where I was going, and that this was a prime opportunity for a scorpion to strike if there ever was one, and I was sure they probably knew a lot of tourists had this sort of problem upon arrival in Aswan and hung around for the easy picking).
While we're on about the sand, one thing I can recommend: if you have a pair of brand new, embarassingly white trainers, take them to Egypt. You know the kind: you grab them in the store, and due to the special lighting they use in shoe/sport stores the shoes look passable and quite hip, and only manage to make your feet look sort of clown-like, which is a general improvement. So you're tricked in to buying them only to find, when you get them home and try them on, maybe hoping to hop on a bike and cycle somewhere or run or something else sporty and managing to justify your buying trainers when you haven't done anything remotely active in weeks... only you realise, upon putting your new trainers on your feet that they 1) make your feet look remarkably clown-like, so much so you wonder how it is you're going to get your feet from under the table, 2) make a slapping noise when you attempt to walk in them much like a pair of flippers you wore once when you went snorkelling, and 3) are hideously, glowingly white, the kind of white you recall seeing on some old fella a few weeks ago, which brought a smile to your inner commentator, after you regained your vision. And the whiteness was the worst of all, because it only highlighted the fact that you had these horribly clunky gunboats on your feet for all and sundry to see for miles and miles.
Well, now there's a solution, instead of putting the trainers back in the box and trying to make yourself believe that running in your bare feet is going to be better for yourself, anyway. Take them to Egypt and walk around town in them. If you're really desperate and in a bit of a rush, take them around the desert for a few days. Now, you may worry, them being rather large, and white, that they might attract scorpions, perhaps believing they'd found Scorpion Heaven in these gleaming palatial potential homes, only to become rather annoyed when they get served their eviction notice the next morning by your foot, to which they file their official complaint by stabbing you with their poisonous sticker thing. Luckily, from the previous five days in the desert, I had a suspicion that any attempts by scorpions to enter my trainers may have been thwarted by the sheer height of the trainer, a sort of Everest for scorpions... I wasn't going to get overconfident, but I had hopes, so long as I didn't run into any adventurer scorpions who fancied themselves a bit of a mountaineer I was all right.
At any rate, by the end of your couple of days in the desert your shoes (and absolutely anything and everything else you brought with you) will be completely and utterly covered with sand. That horrific white that shone like a little shoe-shaped city on a hill will have turned a lovely and discreet sandy-brown. The thunderclap flap of the soles against the pavement will be replaced with soft scratching noise as sand tumbles from every possible surface of the shoe like a new design twist on the traditional hourglass. And if you can tell time from hourglasses you have the added bonus of now not having to wear a watch!
After some extensive testing and research, namely keeping my trainers and not, say, losing them off a bus or anything, this appears to be a permanent thing, as over a month after having returned from Egypt (and arguing with passport control officers about taking back an inordinate amount of sand, the upshot of which was that I had to promise to post back envelopes of whatever fell off my trainers for the next few months), the trainers are still a lovely, subdued sand-coloured biege.
We retired to a pool at the hotel in Aswan after negotiating a fare with a cab driver at the train station. My point about the sand was proven yet again when concentric circles of sand rippled outwards whenever one of our troupe leapt into the water. And again when sandwiches arrived poolside and, though I'd ordered chicken, there seemed to be more sand than chicken either in the sandwich or left over, embedded in my mouth from the previous so many days in the desert.
disclaimer:
Here you have it, more of the travelogue, already immensely popular with our readership.
Next week we're sure to ruin it all by introducing aliens, caught by our journalistic talents as they invade Egypt, live!
Or watermelons, sentient watermelons. You just wait and see.
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