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A Sentimental Journey Across Egypt, Libya,
Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Italy XI
Day Twelve
(continued from ish 222, day eleven, in which there is much walking about.)
By this stage, I had absolutely no idea what day it was. I had been marking a rock in the desert with little slashes, like they do in prison movies (in the cell, obviously, in the prison movies, and not on some mountain made out of crystal in the middle of the Libyan desert), but of course was nowhere near those rocks at the moment and I got some dirty looks while trying to carve slashes in building foundations. Since a good deal of those dirty looks were from people carrying what looked like heavy artillery, I was inclined to stop carving up rocks to mark the passage of days.
In Egypt, they take tourism pretty seriously, as it accounts for... well, I was given a percentage figure for it, and it seemed quite high. Say 90%. I'm almost positive that isn't the correct figure (as sure as if I'd chosen 96%... though, thinking about it now, it might have been 96%, I don't know, let's just assume it's a high number). Anyway, because it's so important, they want to ensure the tourists' safety, make sure they have a good time, tell their friends at home what a good time they had, show them the rugs and little bits of plaster that look like rocks they'd gotten in the bazaar. Fair enough.
However, in certain areas, the number of tourist and otherwise police carrying impressive grade machine guns around creates and atmosphere of, well, to be honest, eating at McDonald's never seems like a good idea, but when there are two or three guys sitting around front, joking around and smoking up a storm and lazing about on a plastic lawn chair, the two or three of them all carrying machine guns, it suddenly seems like less good of an idea. Actually, walking around by McDonald's seems like a very bad idea in itself.
So there are loads of guys with guns, something like you'd imagine Montana would be like if there were a load more people and it were warmer [see disclaimer].
Yesterday afternoon we'd been down the road to Karnak Temple, which used to be connected to Luxor Temple by a road lined by mini-Sphinxes. In it's day, it must have been stunning. These days, it's a bit less stunning, but you can still catch glimpses of areas they've blocked off, where the avenue used to run between two incredibly old buildings.
That's not the point though, the point was something about time, and it all blending together a bit without a rock to make your mark on. Events, more than days began to take a bit of precedence after this long out of our own elements, and this morning, the day I've wantonly named twelve, we were set to trek on donkeys up some cliffs, into the Valley of the Kings.
disclaimer:
NB. I've never actually been to Montana, just going on rumour. Sorry, to avoid any more of the hate... well, disagreeable mail we've been getting. Well, not so much the mail we're worried about, unless they can do exploding emails, it's more the guns we're worried about. Just kidding. Ha ha. We love you guys. Honest.
We're a bit short this week, as the office gets out and about to Hungary for some reason or another. See you next week with more of day twelve!
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