Today’s events, 14th
of January, will be history someday, as the Egyptian people have been asked to
come and vote for the referendum on their new constitution.
Yesterday, the 13th of
January was the birthday date of the prophet Mohamed; it is also a bank holiday
for the schools.
So you leave your semi ordered
and greenish microcosm to go and hit the town.
The traffic hasn’t changed, in
case one hoped it might have; it is still insanely chaotic. Our own ride drove against
the traffic on the motorway for 2 minutes and finally crossed three lanes so
that we could go home without a detour.
The most impressive thing was the
cacophony of the mosques. The prayer was longer, particularly the midday
prayer; at that moment, all the different muezzins start singing and recite
their call. If you hear one of them at a time, it is a beautiful experience,
but this time, as they all sang together, at different speed, it reverberated
in the desert as a haunting sound, as though the city was crying out.
The opportunity to share a
barbecue in the desert presented itself and it was a wonderful trip.
As you approach the desert, near
Saqqara, which we visited a month ago, you drive past a “canal” which looks
like a trench, covered in litter and drive past the sporadic presence of a
donkey or camel amongst the cars. Welcome back to Cairo.
Yet, a few kilometres away lies one the most
peaceful and breathtaking place on Earth: The Sahara. We say that pictures are
worth a thousand words, so here they are, to work their magic!
As we arrived, we saw horses,
beautiful and strong Arabian stallions, being trained, running in the desert;
they were healthy and well looked after, which contrasts with the ones we had
seen at Giza. On this note, most people suspect that Giza is the one place
where to see pyramids, but there is an entire alley of them across the desert.
One after the other, you get
blown away and for me, the highlight of a desert wasn’t one of the pyramids. To
travel between each, the jeep option is the best (says the bump on my head),
with a driver who beams with a wonderful endless smile and occasionally rests
and regenerates himself through a homemade shisha; Hossam has the best wrinkles
you can hope for, the smiling wrinkles.
As we rode in the car (and he is a
crazy driver), I looked at him and he lent me some of his happiness for a second. If you
think about it, I don’t know his life history, but he must have his own
problems and he doesn’t seem to have much materialistically speaking: his car
starts with a button that you press, he made his own shisha pipe and yet he has
the most contented smile I have seen in a long time! It is impossible to look
at him and not to smile back, and that hasn’t happened to me in a long time in
Europe.
Also, the great thing about the
desert is that the possibilities for getting from one point to the next is
entirely up to you, you can follow the prints from your car or make your own
journey.
However many pyramids they are,
they never cease to amaze you, the same goes for the innumerable hieroglyphics.
Even the sandy colour sometimes wraps itself in shades of gold. It is flabbergasting!
A collection of wonderful
moments, from running, to jumping, sliding, wrestling, building castles, sharing, laughing, smiling, beeping and
hugging in the biggest sandpit of the world, which once again, happened in
inspiring and unreported Cairo!
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