Date:         Fri, 18 May 2001 18:22:04 +0300
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:  Siwa oasis (long)
Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

As is tradition now, here is my wife’s write-up of our most
recent trip out into the Egyptian desert, with some editing
on my part for more vanagon content.  If you like maps and
want to follow along try:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/PCL/Map_collection/africa/Egypt_rel97.jpg
,  you can see the location of Siwa (Siwah) on the upper
left part of the map.  Again if you would like to see our
photos go to
http://albums.photopoint.com/j/AlbumList?u=1304082  .  The
name of this “album” is Siwa Oasis Trip.  FWIW about 30 of
you reprimanded me for NOT posting the last trip report in
full,  I’m flattered.  We hope you enjoy this report.

***********************************

Our last major trip in Egypt took us yet again into the
desert – this time back to the Western Desert, to visit Siwa
Oasis.  This oasis differs from the Western Desert’s other
oases for two reasons: a) it’s set off by itself, far to the
west, about 50 kilometres from the Libyan border; and b) its
indigenous population is Berber, whereas most of Egypt’s
other indigenous peoples are Bedouin and Nubian.  While Siwa
has been quite remote, both culturally and geographically,
from most of Egypt until quite recently (the asphalt road to
Siwa was built only in the early 1980s), it’s becoming a
popular destination for tourists.  Nevertheless, we hoped to
visit Siwa before it’s been irretrievably damaged by what
passes for “tourist development” in Egypt.

We left on April 24 for our five-day trip (also our shortest
major trip).  Siwa is a long (!) way from Cairo – over 700
kilometres – so, rather than rush, we decided to take two
days to get there.  This plan also gave us an opportunity to
stop and visit one or two places along the way.  The route
to Siwa is fairly straightforward:  from Cairo we headed
northwest along the Cairo-Alexandria desert road for a
little over 100 kilometres, at which point we turned left
onto another northwest-heading road that eventually arrived
at the Mediterranean coast at the town of El-Alamein (more
on this in a bit).  From El-Alamein we headed west along the
coast to the town of Marsa Matruh, where we spent the
night.  From there, it’s another 300 kilometres south-west,
through flat, featureless desert, to Siwa.

There is another route to Siwa, only recently opened – a
road that travels roughly 400 kilometres east from Siwa,
through barren desert without a petrol station or rest house
in sight, joining Siwa with the Western Desert oasis of
Bahariya; from Bahariya one can then travel on to Cairo.  We
had contemplated traveling to Siwa in a “loop”, making use
of the Mediterranean route to get to Siwa, and the
Siwa-Bahariya route to return to Cairo.  However, after
having enquired with several people who’ve actually driven
the latter route, we discovered that:  a) the paperwork
required to take the Siwa-Bahariya road (it requires police
permission) is time-consuming and cumbersome; b) the road
isn’t particularly interesting, and c) most significant for
us, the quality of the Siwa-Bahariya road is so poor that
one is virtually assured of having at least one, and maybe
more, shredded  tires along the way.  So while the
adventure, and the fact that we’d never traveled the
Siwa-Bahariya road before, was appealing to us, we decided
not to put the van through virtually certain difficulties
for little or no special reason – heaven knows the poor
vehicle has been unintentionally put through enough by us
already!  This is all a rather long-winded way of saying
that we decided to take the Mediterranean route to and from
Siwa.

Our first day consisted mainly of driving, with one
memorable stop, at the town of El-Alamein.  This is the site
of the WWII Battle of El-Alamein, during which Rommel’s
advancing army was stopped in North Africa by a collection
of Commonwealth forces, led by Montgomery.  I knew very
little about this battle before coming to Egypt; a few
months ago, however, while reading the “Levant Trilogy” I
came upon a fictionalized account of the battle through one
young British soldier’s eyes.  In preparation for our stop
here, I also read what our tour books had to say about the
battle.  At El-Alamein our main stop was a visit to the
Commonwealth Cemetery:  a large, well-kept place, filled
with rows and rows of graves, their headstones identifying
the young Commonwealth soldiers who died throughout the
North African campaign.  I found the experience of wandering
through the cemetery to be a very moving reminder of the
useless destructiveness of war, and the value of peace.  In
and around El-Alamein are also several separate monuments to
soldiers who fought here: Greek, Australian, German and
Italian.  We briefly visited the German monument; however,
since local police insisted upon escorting us the 500 metres
or so into the monument,  and hanging around while we
visited, we decided against stopping at the other monuments,
which we were at least able to see from the road.

From El-Alamein we carried along the Mediterranean coast
road (though we actually saw little of the ocean itself, to
my disappointment) to Marsa Matruh.  As we drove I tried to
imagine what the area must have been like during WWII:  the
open, subtly-featured expanses of this area along the coast
covered with tanks and jeeps, shell explosions sending
blinding sand and dust into the air, and the terrible,
terrible casualties … Even today, in this now seemingly
“normal”, “peaceful” landscape, the ground is filled with
unexploded land mines.  The mines are especially evident as
one leaves Marsa Matruh for Siwa, where barbed-wire fences
and English signs warn passers-by of the land mines buried
beneath.  Apropos of this, we recently read that Egypt has
about 20% of the world’s land mines, which translates into
something like 17 million land mines!!

Back to the present … we arrived at Marsa Matruh fairly late
in the day, and began our customary search for a place to
camp.  One beach near the town – Rommel’s Beach, so called
because the general spent some time there during the war --
looked promising.  The police guards there told us that it
was simply a matter of obtaining permission from the tourist
police in Marsa Matruh, and it would be “no problem” for us
to camp on the beach.  No such luck … in Marsa Matruh the
tourist police insisted that camping on the beach wasn’t
possible.  Instead, they offered to let us camp across the
road from their office in a lousy parking lot!.  While we
were considering this, one of the officers also suggested
that we enquire at one of the hotels in town, a place called
“Beau Site”, where we might be allowed to camp.  We decided
to give the hotel a try.

After some twisting and winding through the town’s streets,
we came to Beau Site.  We discussed our situation with the
pleasant young fellow behind the desk, who agreed without
hesitation to let us camp in a driveway beside the hotel.
While that may not sound very interesting, it turned out
that the driveway opened out onto the hotel’s private sand
beach – so, we had a clear (and very nice) view of the
Mediterranean, which was perhaps 30 metres from the van!
(see photos).

After quite a reasonable, quiet (and free) night in the
hotel driveway, we left next morning for Siwa – with, not
surprisingly, a truckload of police who escorted us from the
hotel to the outskirts of Marsa Matruh.  From then on,
however, we were on our own.  The 300 kilometre trip from
Marsa Matruh is long and monotonous, through vast expanses
of flat, hard desert, broken only by a short stop at a small
rest house along the way.  We had heard that the police were
rather nervous about campers in and around Siwa, so we
decided to explore the possibility of staying in a hotel for
a couple of nights.  We found a hotel that fit our
requirements – cheap (15/18 Egyptian pounds a night,
depending upon whether the room had a private shower) and
“picturesque” (it had a pleasant, shady garden in the back)
-- the Palm Trees Hotel, located in Siwa’s main community.
We discovered soon after settling in there, however, that
what the hotel also had was a lot of mosquitoes, many of
which managed to find their way through the holes in the
door and window screens.   So I was able to add Siwa
mosquito (and, I suspect, bedbug) bites to my alarmingly
ever-growing catalogue of “bug bites I’ve received in
Egypt”.

We spent two days exploring Siwa, its human settlements as
well as its natural beauty.  And Siwa really is quite a
lovely oasis – rather, I think, what one’s image of an oasis
“should” be, based on media representations of deserts and
oases.  It’s a very lush place, with thousands of palm and
olive trees (its main agricultural crops) interspersed with
numerous small villages, and, I was surprised to discover,
several fairly large lakes, in addition to its many natural
springs (the latter are typical of most oases in Egypt).
One especially tranquil spot is Fatnas Island, a small
island in one of the lakes, but connected to the mainland by
a small causeway.  It’s a popular place from which to watch
the sunset, which means, of course, that the island’s
peacefulness at that time is disrupted by lots of people,
often with their radios and cell phones(!).  We preferred
our visit to the island earlier in the afternoon, when it
really was a quiet, lovely spot.

Unfortunately, as the oasis is below sea level, Siwa’s water
supply is actually quite salty; the saltiness is
particularly evident along the lake edges, which are ringed
with salt.  The salt has historically been a problem for
Siwa.  In the past, people built their dwellings and other
buildings out of local mud brick; in addition, they used
large chunks of salt, available locally, as part of the
building matrix.  Most of the time, this particular
construction method posed no problem to Siwans; however, on
the infrequent occasions when it has rained heavily in the
oasis, the rain has dissolved the salt chunks.  Thus, many
of Siwa’s old buildings have collapsed or are in ruins and
are quite dangerous.  This state of affairs is strikingly
evident in the remains of Siwa’s old, almost completely
abandoned, town and fortress, called Shali.  At a distance,
Shali looks as though it was made out of large pieces of
cardboard which are disintegrating after having become wet.
We wandered about through Shali’s ruins and could see the
large chunks of salt throughout what remains of the
town/fortress.  Needless to say, modern construction methods
no longer use salt blocks …

We took several excursions through the oasis, coming across
interesting (and, as always, very(!) old) mud brick ruins of
pharaonic and Alexandrian times, including villages, temples
and rock-cut tombs, often set in the scenic landscape of
palm trees, small mountains and lakes which covers the
oasis.  In ancient times, one of the temples here, the
Temple of the Oracle, was the home of an oracle so important
that Alexander the Great braved the desert (a 15-day trip by
camel caravan) to seek out the oracle’s legitimation of his
divine rule.  Also, Cleopatra is reputed to have visited the
area:  one of the springs in Siwa is in fact known as
“Cleopatra’s Bath”.

Alas, our pleasant meanderings were (only briefly, thank
goodness) interrupted by … you guessed it, van trouble.  It
was on our return to our hotel from one of our excursions,
along a back dirt "path", that I happened to glance over to
the van’s instrument panel, and noticed that the needle on
the engine heat-indicator gauge was much higher than it
should be!  I immediately mentioned this to Malcolm, who
then also looked at the gauges; he noticed that the battery
light was also ON.  Malcolm stopped immediately.  We both
rushed to the rear of the van to find … coolant spewing out
of the top of the secondary expansion tank, and the
alternator/water-pump belt just lazing about on top of the
engine!  How could that be!!!!  Both of our hearts sank.

We decided to go have a glass of juice while the engine
cooled off so we could work on it.  Upon our return, Malcolm
saw the oil filler cap was lodged in under the water pump
pulley (the van’s oil filler tube is not original equipment,
but rather is a flexible radiator hose with a rubber
"stopper" in the top).  The cap had deep
grooves in it from the pulley.  Malcolm checked the water
pump pulley and the alternator pulley; both seemed OK.
After some discussion about it, Malcolm came to the
conclusion that somehow the cap blew/jiggled off and became
lodged in the pulley, heating up the belt, which then just
squeezed itself off the pulley.  We put the belt back on,
lodged the oil filler cap in a better place and had no
problems on our way home.  What a freak incident!

While we had no trouble with the van for the remainder of
the trip, I confess I kept an even closer eye than ever on
the various indicator gauges on the dashboard.  However, we
did manage to relax a little, and after a couple of days
traveling about Siwa, we headed back for Cairo.  As we once
again planned an overnight stay in Marsa Matruh, we decided
to do a little exploring around the place, particularly as
we’d read that west of the town were numerous very nice
beaches.  We arrived at Marsa Matruh, in the early
afternoon, with plenty of time to find some beaches.  After
we got lost once or twice (as usual) and asked directions
once or twice (also as usual), we did indeed find a couple
of white-sand beaches.  The second, called Agiba Beach, is
spectacularly located in a tiny cove, surrounded by cliffs.
We followed a small staircase down from the cliffs and spent
a while walking along the tiny, perfect beach – well, it
would have been perfect were it not for the litter:  plastic
bags and bottles, styrofoam containers and cups, and paper,
scattered everywhere along the beach and floating in the
water.  While we’ve come to expect garbage and litter
wherever we travel in Egypt, it still disappoints me
greatly, particularly when such an idyllic spot has been
spoiled.

Returning to Marsa Matruh, we tried our luck again at the
Beau Site hotel, and were again cheerfully welcomed into the
hotel’s driveway to camp for the night.  We completed our
long journey back to Cairo the next day.

As I look back on our various travels throughout Egypt, I
realize that we’ve tried to make the best of our time here,
and the holidays available to us.  While Malcolm and I have
sometimes wondered about the wisdom of bringing the van to
Egypt, I’d have to say, in retrospect, that the van has
provided us with many unforgettable opportunities to see an
Egypt many travelers miss.