Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 15:04:06 +0200
Reply-To: Stebbins <stebbins@AUCEGYPT.EDU>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Stebbins <stebbins@AUCEGYPT.EDU>
Organization: The American University in Cairo
Subject: Cairo Report: Desert Oasis trip (long)
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This is our report on our recent trip around Egypt's Western
Desert Oasis Loop. If you like maps and want to follow
along try:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/PCL/Map_collection/africa/Egypt_rel97.jpg
for an overall map of Egypt. For general web pages of the
items on our trip try
http://www.egyptvoyager.com/oases_egyptian_frameset.htm .
First, some idea of our planned route: we decided to head
south from Cairo along what's called the Cairo-Asyut desert
road (not on the URL map). This is a relatively new road,
and parallels the Nile Valley on its west side, running
through the desert. The road makes the trip to Asyut (or so
we'd read) much quicker than traveling through the Nile
Valley, where the road is well traveled and passes through
many small villages and towns. We planned to stay
overnight near Asyut and the next day head southwest to
Kharga oasis, spend a couple of days there, then travel west
to Dakhla oasis, also for a couple of days, northwest to
Farafra (not on URL map) oasis for the same time, slightly
northeast to Bahariya oasis for a day or two, and then
continue northeast back to Cairo – traveling in a roughly
teardrop-shaped loop.
The trip was complete with van problems and solutions. The
words below constitute my touch up of my wife's (Pat)
rendering of our trip, I've edited it for a bit more vanagon
content. Again, if you are interested in our photos, go to
www.photopoint.com and type in stebbins@aucegypt.edu in the
upper right hand corner where it says “Visit Albums”, guest
book. These pictures are called Desert Oasis Trip, or some
such. Be warned that there are over 90 photos.
As with our Sinai trip, we took off on our western desert
oasis trip with somewhat low expectations – in fact, one of
our main motivations to take the trip was simply to “do
it”. Also as with the Sinai trip, however, we were
pleasantly surprised by what we found, and had a few
“adventures” to boot.
However, as with many plans (and certainly so in Egypt), one
needs a little flexibility … We made a good start out of
Cairo, found the Asyut desert road with no problem
(actually, we scouted it out a few days earlier), and off we
went. The trip was mostly uneventful for several hours, as
we traveled through rather monotonous desert scenery, broken
occasionally by the ubiquitous police checks (where we're
asked our nationalities, where we've come from and where
we’re going – ostensibly so our whereabouts are known as we
venture into the desert. Also, the officer writes down our
auto license number. We found, perhaps due to ingenuity, or
lack of proper supplies, that officers often used their
hand, or a newspaper, on which to write this information –
so we gained very little confidence that, were we actually
lost in the desert, anyone would be able to find our license
number, let alone us (once the hand had been washed and the
newspaper thrown away).)
As we neared Asyut, the police checks became more thorough,
more details, then at one police check we were told to pull
over and wait, we did - 15 minutes, until a car full of army
officers arrived to escort us to the next police check 50
kms down the road, were we waited again for 15 to 20 minutes
for an army escort to come from the next police check to get
us to escort us again! This went on until we were told
that we could no longer continue along the Asyut desert
road, but must travel, with a police escort, east to the
Nile, and then along the Nile Valley to Asyut. This
surprised me greatly, since I thought it was travel along
the Nile by lone tourists that the police were anxious
about. At this point, we were maybe 20-30 kilometres from
Asyut, and since it’s not a good idea to argue with the
police, off we went toward the Nile, with another (of what
turned out to be six) escorts – this time, five or six
military types riding in what’s called a “Hummer” – sort of
a squat jeep on steroids! What with driving behind police
escorts, being dropped off at the end of one escort’s range
and waiting for the next escort, we took about 7 hours to
reach Asyut from Cairo, not the 3 or 4 we’d originally
anticipated.
Normally, this wouldn’t have been a problem. But we’d
planned to make our first night’s stop the rest house of the
Coptic (Christian) Convent of the Virgin Mary, in a small
town outside of Asyut – and their doors closed at 6 p.m. At
about 6:10 p.m., we, and our latest escort, arrived at the
Convent. The police, not at all perturbed that the place
was obviously closed for the night, banged on the door. A
Coptic priest and nun answered, let us in and very
graciously agreed that we could stay the night (which cost
us the grand total of 12 Egyptian pounds or 4 US$). It
became clear, in our broken communication with the police as
they left us, that we should expect to see them again the
next morning when we departed. Malcolm and I were both too
tired to worry about that at the moment. After a brief tour
of the convent (where, reputedly, the Holy Family took
refuge), we were shown to our room – very simple but
functional. As an aside, I must say that whenever we’ve
visited a Coptic monastery or convent, we’ve been shown the
greatest hospitality and kindness – and this Convent was no
exception.
We awoke the next morning, had breakfast in our room and
spent a few minutes enjoying the view from the balcony
outside – the Convent is built into a cliff at the edge of
the Nile Valley, so we had a splendid view of the valley and
various nearby small towns. We headed out of the Convent
expecting to find our police escort waiting for us – which
they weren’t. However, at the Convent gate, we were halted
by a police officer and asked/told to wait, as our escort
was on the way. Finally, about 45 minutes later, we left
the Convent and met up with our escort on the road. They
took us to the edge of Asyut. From that point on, for the
rest of our trip, we were on our own, though we still passed
through many police checkpoints throughout the trip.
Aside from this slight change in our itinerary, the trip
went more or less as planned. Over 8 days and 2500
kilometres, we were able to spend a night or two in or near
each of the four oases, and to poke about each oasis,
exploring their main towns, archaeological sites and the
highly varied desert scenery we encountered. After the
Convent, every night we camped in the van: four nights out
in the desert, including one night in what’s known as the
White Desert, and one in the Black Desert, and two in a
fairly new, very pleasant campground just outside of Dakhla
oasis’ main town, Mut. Here, for 20 Egyptian pounds (US$5),
we had a lovely, peaceful place to camp the van and access
to a local hot spring. Malcolm enjoyed the hot spring
immensely; I declined the opportunity, feeling a bit awkward
about bathing in what seemed to be a men-only spot.
The oases were more different from one another than I
expected, reflecting different histories and different
positions/priorities in Egypt’s efforts to develop the
Western Desert. Kharga, the first oasis we visited, is the
largest of the four, and its main town is very “modern” –
wide streets and relatively new buildings. About 1900-2000
years ago, the Romans seem to have been quite interested in
this area, as evidenced by the numerous and often very
impressive ruins of mud-brick fortresses (often enclosing
sandstone temples to Egyptian gods) found throughout the
oasis. Also found in Kharga is Bagawat, one of the earliest
and best preserved Christian cemeteries in the world (c.
4th-7th centuries A.D.) – an expansive and remarkable site.
We spent one day traveling about 100 kilometres south of the
oasis’ main town, through the southern part of the oasis,
visiting various fortress ruins and passing through numerous
small towns. This is as far south in Egypt as we’ve driven
to date.
We looked for a camp ground that was mentioned in our book,
but they wanted E£40 to camp in a dirty lot, so we headed
back out to look for a desert site. We found a road the
took of to nowhere-in-particular and it looked pretty good
so we tried it. About 100 meters off the main road we hit a
loose sand pit and I tried to gun it over the sand but we
(as I had the front drive shaft out) we got stuck. I turned
to my wife and said “how about we just spend the night right
here”. She was not thrilled. We spend the next hour
jacking up the van and putting in the front drive shaft so
that we could get out in the a.m. Next morning we had no
problem getting out with the 4WD working.
The next oasis, Dakhla (
http://www.tourism.egnet.net/attraction/cities/oases/dakhla.htm
or http://www.egyptvoyager.com/oases_dakhla.htm ) seemed
less “modern” to me than Kharga. Its main town, Mut, is a
tumbledown, pleasant place; and like Kharga, the oasis as a
whole also has many mud brick ruins. Of particular interest
to me was the site of Qila al-Dabba, a large burial area
used as early as the 6th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom. Recent
archaeological excavations here have uncovered an enormous
burial monument known as a “mastaba”; its step-like
structure into the ground reminded me of an amphitheatre,
with a tomb at the bottom :-)). Also quite wonderful is the
town of Qasr Dakhla: its old city, full of lovely old mud
brick buildings (some four or five stories high), narrow,
covered passageways and some 500-year-old Islamic carved
door beams, is being preserved by the town’s inhabitants,
who provide free tours.
The trip from Dakhla oasis to Farafra (
http://www.egyptvoyager.com/oases_farafra_frameset.htm )
oasis is, in the words of the woman who wrote one of the
travel guides we used, “… a 310 kilometer … journey … over
the longest, most desolate drive of the loop between the
four oases.” For most of a day (what with police checks
and a stop for lunch), we traveled through a LOT of desert –
at one point, we even neared the eastern edge of what’s
known as the Great Sand Sea, a massive area of sand dunes
that stretches west across Egypt and into Libya. The main
town of the oasis is also called Farafra (so small it is not
on the URL map). It offered little respite from the remote
isolation of the oasis, being a very small, dusty town,
reminiscent (to me, anyway) of tiny prairie towns which seem
to be in the middle of nowhere. We stayed only a short
while in the town, then headed northwest into the oasis’
premier attraction – the White Desert (for better pictures
than ours try http://www.aucegypt.edu/hekman/whitedes.html
& http://www.aucegypt.edu/hekman/whitedes2.html#WhiteDesert
). Here the desert consists primarily of chalk; it’s
especially notable for its almost ghostly white colour
(particularly pronounced at night, under the full moon, as
we discovered when we camped there) and its myriad unusual
chalk formations: some shaped like mushrooms, ice cream
cones, and various types of animals, others great monoliths
towering into the sky. We took off on a dirt/sand track
among these formations, enjoying ourselves enormously –
until, at one stop during our meandering in the White Desert
we stopped to take a photo and Malcolm noticed a trail of
coolant behind the van. RATS!! We were only about 2 or 3
kms from the main road and thankfully, not much coolant had
escaped, and Malcolm was able to come up with a stopgap
solution for the leak. However, auto trouble in Farafra is
a scary prospect: we were 40 kms from Farafra, 500
kilometres from Cairo and perhaps 200 kilometres from the
nearest comprehensive assistance (Bahariya, the next oasis
on our trip). We had had this trouble before (a hose comes
off the coolant diversion block. We played it safe and
limped back to Farafra with the engine cover off and Pat
sitting back there watching to monitor the coolant system
(the low coolant warning light is not hooked up!!). The
temp fix held together to get us back to Farafra where we
filled up with water, ate lunch and decided to take a gamble
and forge on to Bahariya, relying on Malcolm’s fix – with me
sitting in the back seat of the van, carefully monitoring
the engine and coolant system to make sure nothing fell
apart (one of the “advantages” of a rear-engine vehicle).
After a few very uncomfortable, noisy, dusty/sandy
kilometers with the engine cover off and me peering into the
engine’s depths, we became confident enough to resume our
journey with all parts of the van back in place.
It was with some relief that we arrived in Bahariya oasis,
the northern parts of which we’d visited a few months ago.
However, this was our first time in Bahariya’s Black Desert
( for better pictures than ours try
http://www.aucegypt.edu/hekman/blackdes.html#Black Desert ),
in the southern area of the oasis – so called because of its
many small, black-topped mountains. We enjoyed our last
evening of desert camping here, and took a pleasant early
morning walk the next day to explore the nearby Black Desert
hills. Since most of Bahariya’s antiquities are off-limits
without official permission from Cairo, and since we’d
visited much of what else there was to see on our previous
trip, once we left the Black Desert we headed into
Bahariya’s main town of Bawiti for a brief visit, petrol
refill and a cup of tea. One place in town that we did
visit is called the Oasis Heritage Museum: a small
museum/gift shop owned by a local self-taught artist. It’s
a wonderful place, full of old, traditional oasis clothing,
jewelry, basketry, and so forth, as well as modern local
crafts and the artist’s own creations – clay figures,
paintings, and murals. We spent a delightful hour or so
here, then headed off on the final leg of our journey: 350
kilometres back to Cairo.
Almost all of the trip to Cairo passed without incident, but
we did stop every 50 kms or so to check the coolant-fix).
One landmark, about 200 kilometres from Cairo, was the
turning over of the van’s odometer to 250,000 kilometres –
way to go, van!!! Alas, the trip had an “interesting” but
stressful, end – when the coolant system finally gave way,
quite literally as we entered Cairo out by the Giza
Pyramids, just as we were turning into a gas station. Seems
as though the change from relatively high-speed, highway
driving to the slow crawl of urban Cairo traffic caused the
coolant system to heat up, expand, and to blow the weakest
link in that system (my temp fix), which just couldn’t
handle the extra pressure. Well there was much excitement
at the gas station as presto, everyone was an instant
mechanic! After deciding that the coolant diversion block
was not up to the task, we enlisted the aid of a taxi driver
(who had stopped for gas) to tow the van the remaining 5 or
so kilometers to our apartment. This epitomized life in
Cairo in all its chaotic absurdity: With pat in the taxi
giving directions, Malcolm in the van steering, the
enterprising taxi driver, who was certain about his
Peugeot’s ability to tow our big, heavy van with a highly
suspect, fraying, thin, rope, and who had seemingly little
notion about how to actually find his destination. Driving
in Cairo, is nuts at the best of times, but takes on an
added hysteria when the van is weaving behind a determined,
aggressive taxi driver whose main recourse to traffic safety
is to holler/honk at nearby drivers to keep out of our
way. Exhilarating relief is what we felt when we actually
manage to accomplish something in Cairo – in this case,
getting the van back to the apartment safely.
The bright side of the van trouble is that it has given
Malcolm the opportunity to exercise his automotive
inventiveness, which he loves doing. The parts to fix the
van had been ordered 2 months ago, but never made it to us,
so this time we paid for FedEx to be sure that we received
the parts (new coolant diversion block & reservoir cap). In
addition, Malcolm set out to improvise one of the parts –
essentially, to block the hole that keeps leaking coolant.
This he’s now done with a large rubber stopper, a rubber cap
to cover the stopper, and copious quantities of heavy-duty
engine epoxy cement. I think it would take a couple of tons
of dynamite to blow the part now … but this will be the our
“spare” part, as the new part arrived OK and has bee
installed.
All in all, this oasis trip was another of Pat and Malcolm’s
adventures, all’s well that ends well. It had its moments,
but was certainly not to be missed! Hope that you enjoyed
the story and the pictures.
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