Siwa is a rather incredible place although I definately plan to travel there on different terms the next time around. As previously posted, Siwa is a town located in the far North-Western territory of Egypt, within the heart of the Sahara and near the Libyan border. The people are ethnically Berber, as opposed to Arab, and the language consists of a unique blend of Berber and Arabic.
Here is a Slide Show of Photos! You can also link to the photo page directly, here.
Upon going to Siwa, things started off a little rough when I awoke at 6:27 in the morning - needing to be at the Fulbright Office at 6:30 for departure. However, everything in Eygpt runs on "Egyptian Time" and consequently arriving 15 minutes late was basically the same as being early. We left Cairo in a massive yellow bus covered with pastel polka dots, I guess to advertise just how ridiculous wealthy American tourists can be.
We first went to a musem where the last bast of WWII was fought within the Sahara. The museum had a lot stuff - old tanks, uniforms, weapons, radios... pretty much everything. The funny thing is that the English translations on the information panels was absolutely crazy! Many of us were wondering if the person hired to write the English phrases really even spoke the language, or if the person hired instead had only a cursory understanding and simply used a dictionary to constantly translate the words... void of context, sentence structure etc. The end result was something like this:Many days much war fought the German army was desert, salt." Salt?!!! That was an exact quote! So yeah, the museum was a blast.
We also stopped at a beach on the Mediterranean coast. It was the first time I ever saw the Mediterranean Sea from land, having only previously only seen it from airplanes. It was a beautiful blue, spotted with dark navy spots of ice cold water. I climbed the cliffs along the coast and found some really interesting rock formations and Arabic graffiti.
Later we arrived in Siwa and began an intense three day regimen of running all over the various tourist destinations within the region. Oh the agony! I mean, I had a good time and all, but this is NOT the way that I travel. To be herded about like a group of goats from one place to another, driving around on a silly yellow bus, with cameras clicking the whole time, the tour guide yelling about some inane historical fact and all of the people in the town looking at us with wide eyed stares? Talk about weird and creepy, I can't imagine why people ever travel this way. Within 4 days, I only spoke to about 3 people who actually live within the town, I learned nothing of the language, nothing about the food, the clothing, the music, the literature, and the list just continues. Ultimately, I know nothing about Siwa. I can only compare it to visiting New York and only going to the Statue of Liberty and Times Square - what do these to things have to do with living in New York? Pretty much nothing.
I should insist however that I did have decent time. I made it a point to wander off frequently, especially when in proximity to abandoned towns and buildings. I have always loved these sort of places, whether I'm in Cincinnati, Bangkok or Egypt, there is so much to learn and explore through abandoned human settlements. Within one city in particular, I simply ditched my group and took off like a mouse in a maze, simply climbing the walls of these roofless buildings when I would find a dead end. I discovered all sorts of minor curiosities, evidence of religious shrines, an oven for baking, remnants of a pagan temple, a former mosque, an olive press... it was certainly the best part of the trip.
On another day we spent 8 hours trecking through The Great Sand Sea, out in the Sahara desert. It was a long long day of driving up and down MASSIVE sand dunes, broken up with opportunities to drink tea by an oasis, collect fossils in the hills, and go swimming in a hot spring. I was the only one who appeared to feel uncomfortable within the super slimy water of the hot spring, but I toughed it out anyway... after all, I wasn't the only one who was going to smell like sulfur for the next 48 hours.
The last thing we did was go to a place called the Mountain of the Dead. It used to consist as the primary burial site for Siwa, where mummified bodies were stored within about 1,400 family tombs. However, during WWII the bodies were removed and the people of Siwa lived within the tombs to hide from the war. After the tombs were later evacuated, the mummified bodies remained outside - as the climate is so dry that it really didn't make a difference- since many of the tombs were destroyed during bombings. However we were told that in the 1950s, the government of Egypt came to clean up the site and all the mummies were removed to an unknown location. The place was sorta interesting, but it became much better after wandering off on my own. The funny thing is that I came to realize that the "cleaning" of the site actually meant, "pushing most of the bodies off the side of the mountain." As I wandered around the outskirts, I constantly found shattered pieces of bone and assumed these were animal bones, but after discovering half of a sun bleached pelvis, and the end of a femur, it was quite clear that these bones belonged to people. Later while climbing to the top of the mountain and exploring the caves along the way - one of which contained a ruined temple to the Egyptian god Amman - I found a large portion of a mummified body, crushed beneath a massive boulder. Good times!
We went to a few other places as well, like a natural spring that was the former vacation spa of Cleopatra and a temple site once visited by Alexander the Great. One night a guest lecturer provided an overview of the history and culture of the area, while at another time, some of those who recieved grants to study music in egypt gave us an impromptu peformance in the hotel. All in all it was a good time, but I really look forward to going there again the future when I can engage the place and people in a way that is more within my own parameters. If anything, I guess that means No yellow, polka dot tour bus.
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