WRITING POEMS AT A PRISON IN NUWEIBA

It wasn`t my passion to drive myself off the beaten track that took me to Nuweibas's prision. It was rather a piece of experiment. When the employee of my beach campo stole 15 US dollars (3 days budget) from my bungalow, I decided to take the issue to the nearby police. Unfortunately for me, they must have had their own agreements, since they didn`t pay any attention to my problem. The said I should go the Tourist Police, that was 7 Km. away, but refused to give me a ride even if they had three pick-ups available. We argued and, guess what, the one that ended up in jail was me! Up here you can see my picture, inside Nuweiba's jail. At least I had plenty of time (one night) to give correct ending to several poems...

The ferry that I was eventually able to catch. I had my ticket when unexpectedely confined to prision. And was freed just two hours before departure!

SIWA: THE GLOBALIZED SANDS.

Photos: 1 and 2: siwi women. 3. Mechanical problems in the Sahara.

Many years ago, when the circular tables of the Coratazar Cultural Center at Mar del Plata were circular and centered as petals boiling mind travelers craving to hit the road, any road, then Viqui would say that routine is as sad as a physic map of la Pampa Province. When I started walking south from the Mediterranean city of Marsa Matrouh to Siwa Oasis, inmersed 300 kms in the Sahara desert, I couldn’t less than remember Viqui’s metaphor: the desert is so featureless that the map is all whitness and quadrants organizers of the most absolute nothingness. A red line challenges that void: it’s the road that the government built in 1984 to abreviate to a 4 hours drive what used to be a week long camel trek. Alexander the Great, on his way along the same path to visit the Oracle of Amun in Siwa and confirm his sinship of Zeus, took 8 days for his trip, which according to history was rather uneventful, with the rulers of neighboring Cyrene (present day Lybia) sending him war horses as a present intended to show sympathy and discourage an attack from his behalf.

Exiting Matrouh, evidences of mankind reduce gradually until the Sahara gains all its magnitude. A quarry 40 kms away and some oil fields ahead allow for some traffic and gives pulse to the road. 20 minutes after I set off a quarry bound truck beats the roadside and lifts me. Its driver makes it clear from the beginning that here we are bedouins, in Cairo they are arabs. The next driver were also going to prove good examples of local mind. It was a pick up carrying two sheep, and the drivers were interested in knowing two things: first, if there was rain in my country; second, if there were arabs… The answer: (with rain and without arabs) let him shocked in awe and wondering the requeriments for a visa… It is also interesting to note that, while the bedouins themselves are ethnically arabs, they use the label arab to refer to the settled ones, in opposition to their semi nomadism.

Eaten away the last sandwich, I was only hoping to anchor my tiredness in some inhabited place… A tank truck forward me until the oil fields, where some angel had opened a tea house, where I could buy provisions. The tea house itself is a cubic structure outside which the owner (the angel) smokes shisha. One of the walls calls my attention, there is a giant graffitti of a Nokia mobile phone with realistic details of each numeral key. “Do you sell telephones?” – I asked surprised. No as an answer. I looked inside: biscuits, some bread, tea, final stop. The mural is just decoration, altough I would risk considering it a sort of amulet , icon of the prosper West, an almost magic artifact. The mobile phone is a clear example of the irrational pattern of globalization. The devices have arrived here more as a mandate than as an option, and are seen in hands of people and farmers who should have other priorities. At night the oil digs cheer up in light as tiny Eiffel Towers. I travel now in another truck, we horn to clear the road of camels… In Bir-el-Nuss, a well to which modernity has added a restaurant, I am allowed to sleep. It is midway.

During the morning I make an attempt (failed) to reach Qara Oasis, extremely isolated, 100 kms away from Bir-el-Nuss, which is already in the middle of nowhere. But I am asked for militar permits. Then I continue on to Siwa, contemplating with envy the nylon bags, the only beings to transit freely without documents and at full speed towards Qara. I start to note that I am not Alexander the Great: the Libyans didn’t come to offer me their war horses, and the two crows that showed the good way to Alexander (according to his yellow press paid court poets) must be guiding genuine emperors-to-be. After an hour of walking, and matching the context, a Land Rover stops. A man from Cairo who is building a hotel in Siwa. After a while the Lan Rover starts puffing, sand in the oil bomb, which we dismanteled with the aid of my MSR kitchen tool. As a result we reach Siwa by night.

If asked to describe Siwa, I shuld say that nothing I imagine can resemble more a miracle. After 300 kms of plain desert, of compact emptiness, it is hard to believe my eyes: for kilometers the palm trees don’t leave patch of sand at sight, only interrumtpes by two large blue lakes. On the streets the disbelief rises: people speak not arabic but siwi, a local bereber language. The people don’t look after any other I have ever since, and the are a synthesis of all the peoples that have roamed in the area: algerian bedouins, black people from Sudan, and arabs. Their skin is dark, their forehead high and broad, and finely curly hair. In top of that, one family is composed by blond blue eyed individuals…
Since the construction of the road-umbilical string, Siwa seems doomed to resign slowly its cultural uniqueness in favour of the Nokia and the moods of Cairo, Arabic has replaced Siwi at schools, and tourism rises as a kind of reparation prize, while the government forces the bedouins at neighboring Abu Shrouf village to leave their tents and move to houses. The siwans, however, promise to offer some resistance in this wrestling contest with the global village… Siwa continues to be a highly conservative townn and the few women who venture to the streets covere themselves from head to toe. Often they move in groups, over donkey drown karts. More than women they seem an apparition. The population continues to be divided in 11 tribes, and any new resident must suscribe one fo them. Regardless its curious mix of tradition and change, Siwa can praise itself of being, of all the place he could choose between, the spot where Alexander the Great demanded to be buried. With the sun falling behind the Oracle of Amun, I can consider the trip succesful. Bah… there is not such a thing as a failed trip: each step under the sun is unique and beautiful.

FOLLOWING ALEXANDER THE GREAT’S TREK, AND STUMBLING ON THE WAY.

Photos: 1. Pyramids. 2. Kids at SOS Children Village at Al Amria Suburb. 3. Magdy and his cusin, guardians of El Alamein German Militar Cemetery.

The difference is great. Between Alexander the Great and me, I mean. He counted with a 50.000 men strong army. I am alone and traveling by thumb. He strived to forge an empire, I like them only when they crumble down. Maybe motivated by the unoble ambition of having something in common with the Macedonian Star it was that I put the finger on the map over Siwa for the first time. At least this way we would have a route in common. Siwa is an oasis emerging against all possible forecast 300 kms south of the Mediterranean Coast into the sands of the Sahara Desert, not far from the Lybian border. It always owed its fame to being the site of one of the most famous oracles of the Ancient World: the Oracle of Amun, that was believed by the Greeks to be a local manifestation of Zeus. Having taken Egypt from the Persians without fighting, Alexander marched from Memphis magnetized by the fame of the Oracle, anxious to legitimate his sonship of Zeus.

When I left Cairo, the adventure had an operistic oberture when I discovered that the road to Alexandria boasts in its western side not less than the Pyramids. The road to Iskendereia (one feels in the Classic Age when using the local label) was anything but average. First my wallet with 100 dolars was stolen by some impoverished mummy, leaving me with mere 20 cents and 220 kms ahead. 1-0 for Alexander. In such humiliating circumstances a Daewoo stops after only 15 minutes waiting. The driver was a man in his early sixties, spotlessly dress in a suit, while her companion was a woman: 40 years younger than him, thick lips, dark skin and a blue hejab covering her hair. Then the man, becaming a strange statistic case for my road notes, offers me the lady with the only condition of having preferential seat. That’s what I calll to receive 1000 spoons when you need a fork, and it’s only another example (gay truck drivers, etc) of those choices that, repressed by a police force that applies the Qoran, only finds decompression in sealed private spaces and with foreigners. Anyway, 1-1.

On the first night I was hosted and fed by two watchmen that would jump out of their bed with a loaded gun at the minimum noise. On the morning a taxi driver accepted to take me for free to Alexandria, strange event in a country where somebody seems to have swap the Quran for Adam Smiths’s books. “Why not money?” –the man cried and bumped the wheel with his head. He droped me in the suburb of Al Amria. 30 kms from the center. There, a woman that steps down from a motorcycle taxi guides me without my request to a branch of SOS Children Villages. All without words, as obeying a secret choreography of destiny. She is one of the mothers that literally consagrate their lives to raise and educate orphans, from KG to University. She makes me visit each of the houses, 75 children in total. After the visit I could readily say that the village is truly an isle of sanity in the middle the urban chaos that pervades the rest of the suburb, where children work in the vegetable market that smells to donkey’s flatulence.

When I reached the center of Alexandria –in the car of a manager that payed my hotel night-. Looking around I was assaulted by the impression of having been there for ever. I would have never imagined that Alexandria resembled so much Mar del Plata (my city in Argentina). With french style architecture lined against the seaside boulevard conveniently named corniche, horse carriages and cafes that mix in their menu british ale with greek food, Alexandria has allowed the belle epoche a passage to modernity. What reaches the present is an hybrid: elaborated iron street lamps and trams shake hands with shisha bars and local fishermen that knee over the sand at prayer times. The number of foreign consulates in the city attests to its cosmopolitan history, but it also makes you wonder in what does the Slovakian consulate use their time…

When Alexander arrived here he found reportedly a tiny fishing village calle Rhacotis. Over that embrio he ordered the foundation of a big city that would bear his name and would become the greatest center of culture of the Classical World, with the famous Alexandrian Library as its centerpiece, which is said to have contained 500,000 scrolls. In its rooms Euclides proposed his geometry and the circumference of the Earth was first calculated. In the 4th C. the Library was burnt down, in the name of Christianity. Egyptian Authority needed 1700 years before erecting a substitute. The fact that it was inaugurated in 2001 under the government of the dictator –still in power- Mubarak. Also nowadays Egypt just seems the last place on Earth that could natural produce such an offsrping as the replacement fot the famed library. (The average Egyptian cannot read a map) The new library is, in any case, an esthetic triumph: its glassed surface projects a beam of light, including the other local legend, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, which rated among the Seven Wonders of the Old World.

From Alexandria, the way to Siwa. Distant some 600 kms, is made in an “L” movement, as the horse in the chess. It ‘s 300 kms to the west along the Mediterranean Coast until Marsah Matrouh, where the Afrika Korps had their base during WWII. I travel first in a Toyota Corolla of a Egyptian Christian residing in Italy, who presents me a kilo of dates an a weird sacred oil that –he assures- will protect me from the wolves of the desert. The fiirst day I only covered 100 kms, arriving by night to the German at El Alamein, where 4200 soldiers rest. As said by Albert Schweitzer: “There is not a better argument for peace that the tomb of a soldier”. Magdy, member of the bedouin family that guards the mausoleum, allows me to camp outside its walls. The we trade: he offers me bread and cheese and I write a letter in English to somebody called Jean Lucqe in France. Then he asks me why I don’t believe in God. He is brave enough and goes on with an analogy: “If there are 10 people and 8 tell you that certain place is dangerous, do you believe them?” Ontology by consensus, a bedouin masterpiece. I remind him that the 4200 soldiers behind us were also obeying a majority, not to talk about the terror that threads consensus, not to talk aboout Mubarak, the new Faraon of Egypt… The next day I made it to Marsah Matrouh.

CAIRO: NEW YEAR'S EVE IN A 1960 FIAT. "LITHUANIA? WHAT PART OF THE UNIVERSE IS THAT?

Photos. 1. Pyramids. 2. Ain Hudra Oasis appears suddenly beyond a rocky hill. 3. Unexpected New Year’s Eve with our taxi driver.

Nthe number 400 seemed to much of a superlative to designate the tattered, rusty, shaky bus that was delivering me to Cairo International Airport, where Sigita’s plane would land at 2:10. At the sight of a foreigner in the bus, the ticketman chopped the 25 piastra ticket off with a mix of pride and skepticism. Asked if the bus was going in fact to the airport, the same man raised his hands to heaven and exclaimed: “Imashallah!” (God wanting), which shows how in the Middle East the idea of God is intimately interwoven with lapses of random efficiency.

No less than bus number 400, the way in which Sigita and I had met leads to the search of the threads beyond the puppet, and makes one wonder if things happen for a reason or simply happen. It was an afternoon of the last August. I had crossed that morning the Lithuanian border from Latvia, by hitchhiking as usual, and in the moment I walked along the Green Bridge, the sign bearing the phrase “Aplink Pasauli” was still hanging from my backpack. Admiring the peculiar contrast between the soviet style hammer-in-hand worker ornamenting the gate of the bridge and the towers of the newly built Europa Center behind, I had almost forgotten I was after a supermarket. Sigita was also crossing the bridge on foot, due to a mechanic failure of her Mazda, with the lazy pace that all visit to the dentist should inspire in normal people. Our eyes met for the first time over the question: where is the supermarket?” Now, an old taxi that reproduced with fidelity the sound of an oil generator was driving us to the infamous 2-dollars-a-night pension. In the ground floor of the fin de secle building, a wooden elevator that may have once accomodated french speaking aristocracies now lifted and landed glossy eyed penniless backpackers.

Our room seemed straight out of a Dostoievsky novel. And I say it with all the tenderness that I feel when confronted with sheets where the cigarette holes form constelations. Sigi downed her backpack and started to unpack. It seemed logic to me that the first thing to come out was a bag with fish. The second was a Polish map of Egypt and the third a complete make up set. When her succesful career as graphic designer is not keeping her busy, Sigi ocassionaly poses for the camara. I almost don’t believe her when she says that there are now posters with her picture in downtown Vilnius. That the girl-in-the-picture was gonna end hitchhiking in roads side by side with camel and donkey karts is something that the man-in-the-corner at Vilnius surely ignores. But nothing new for Sigi, who until the age of 12 used to accompany his father –journalist- in his trips around the ex USSR.

In any case, some adjustments needed be made. The fact that our first walk would take place in the most conservative area of Cairo –the Old City- didn’t seem to attenuate the cosmetic powers of Sigi’s make up set. As she was getting prettier with every second, I didn’t have the courage to halt such a promising process with the mundane proposition of: “Hey! This is an islamic country!”. The result was –of course- in the jammed alleys of the bazaar, a massive abandon of Qoran by vendors who lost control of their jaws to exclaim a lascive: “Welcome to Egypt!”. Next time, Sigi rolled a scarf round her neck.

And when is this guy start to talk about the Pyramids? It was an Arabic scholar who said: “All things fear time, but time fear the Pyramids”. We all have a timeless mental image of them, in solemn rest amid endless sands. As a result it comes as a surprise to discover that the Sphynx actually faces the 15 million souls megalopolis. How many millons were born, sweated, and died in front of her eyes? We all should have a Sphynx in our garden to remember the importance of the fugitive moment.

New Year’s Eve took place in a Chinese restaurant. On the way back, our taxi driver could only hit the right address of our hotel after one hour. So at midnight we were opening our cans of Stella in the back seat of a 1960 Fiat, while our drive shoutted out the name of our hotel to passers by with the hope somebody would give him a hint.

Next day we set off for the Sinai, where we started to hitch hike, passing on foot the Egyptian police check points. While hitch hiking in Egypt is in theory illegal, nobody can stop those who declare to be traveling on foot. When the officials read “Lietuvos Pasas” in Sigi’s passport, they ask what part of the universe is that. Somebody with a machine gun suggests that it is a part of Russia.For Sigi, whose parents lived closely the events of January 13, that is pretty much an insult. “Thanks God you are not from Kaliningrad” – I tell her. When my time comes and I say Argentina, the guys recite a list of football players. Diego has become a sort of password. All the same they let us through. Each time. We then visited the sea side paradises of Dahab and Tarabin, where Sigi would say, in a full demostration of Baltic character, that fish, colourful or not, are to eat and not to see behind a diving mask. On the way back to Cairo we crossed the inner desert of Sinai, many times sharing the truck cabin with egyptian workers hitchiking themselves. We stay overnight in Ain Hudra Oasis, where false beduins dedicated to tourism approach us to sell camel rides, while their daughters spy the West trough the shortcut of Sigi’s cosmopolitan magazine.

On January 9th a plane took off from Cairo Intl Airport. Sigi was inside. Time for me to start to investigate how to get iraqi, iranian, pakistani and afghan visas…

ON THE WAY TO CAIRO: CLOWN FISH AND MODERN PHARAONS.

Photos: 1.typic Peugeot 504 taxi (this one was happy to take me for free). 2 and 3: Tarabin.

To visit the ruined city of Petra, in Jordan, I had used my favorite tactic, partially genuine, that of disgusing myself of serious man with a project among hisn hands. Folder under the arm, the glasses that I seldom use and a vocabulary more complicated than necessary helped me to avoid the painful U$S30 ticket. From Petra southwards, the soles of my shoes headed to Cairo. Now, it was not gonna be so easy to dash straight forward through a desert which God used to test his own prophets with temptations and dilemas. In this way, with the sharp cold night enveloping the desert I had to choose wether to sleep inside a truck whose driver hd fallen in love with me or the star clad roof. None of the 7 species of poisonous snakes (not even God) called in for some chat a while and make uo for the length of the night. In any case, the tax was more reasonable than moses one: wandering 40 years in the same desert…

In the Jordanian port of Aqaba I boarded a Sinai boud ferry. Off to Egypt through the Red Sea. All very well known geographic accidents, though rarely we have the chance of linking them with anything else that long since forgoten religion classes. The ferry dropped me in Nuweiba, on of many beach resorts that dot the Sinai coast. I the 5 kms that I walked until finding a lesss touristy spot I could spot, beside camel-riding kids, the dramatic date of the rocky desert and the crystal clear waters of the Red Sea, with its palm tres pinned beach. I had never thought that camels and colour fish could share the same ecosytem.

The quiet beach resort was named Tarabin. The other only foreigners there were a Japanese that had been cycling his way from the land of the Borning Sun, an iraqi nationalized British on his way to spend New Year’s Eve in Baghdad, and one of those German or French families (never American) the do their best to reproduce in their holidays the atmosphere of a Robinsoe Crusoe’s Tale. When I approached to talk, they turned out to be from the Saxon community in Cisnadioara, and my mind blend time back to the sunny days I had spent strolling in the Breite with my Hans and other local friends. December 24 arrived, on of the weirdest 24’s in my life, I spent it around a fire prepeared with a chopped palm tree, talking with the Iraqi guy and a Sudanese, who turned up to sahre with us his melancholic dreams of, some day migrating to the U.S…

On the 25th itself, instead, I decided I deserved some socializing, so I headed for Dahab, popular spot among the hippies in the 60s and 70s, now has just become a trendy beach resort, partly due to the diving industry boom. The Just do it spirit replaced the Let it be. In general, the travellers I met there, mainly Australian and Canadians, didn’t seem to be moved to travel but nothing else but having the finnancial possibility of doing it. At 12 o clock, sorrounded by half Commonwealth, everybody was talking about their proffesional lifes. Eventualy, I was my turn: So what do you do? In these scenarios I feel insanely tempted to declare myself manager of the Umbrella Producing Society of Ulan Bator. While truth would be: freelance lazy, proffesional world wanderer with PhD in roadside walking, proud owner of a 1 Euro account statement… and so on. Beter to go on with the mask of the student until the first whilte hair flowers. And some stopped talking to me. Serious people are irritated when they realized that some people around are just keen on developing nothingness with the vehemence of a conspirator.

On the 26 I wsa back on the road to Cairo, arranging free rides with money asking drivers. It is illegal to hitch hike in Egypt and checkpoints dot all roads. It seems one is arriving to a battle field. In each checkpoint, I smily proclaim that I am walking around the world and hand them my passport. When they read Argentina, conversation turns to Maradona’s health. They tell me to be ware, that snakes and some lawless beduins inhabit the desert, and finaly, after relocating one of the soldiers (machine gun included) in the trunk of the pick up, they give me a short ride themseklves. Night surprises me in the city of Tur, with one of the archs of the tent broken, problem fixed thanks to the tools provided by the local barber’s shop.

The first truck I flagged down on the 27th was going to Suez in one piece. The Suez Channel is sorted by a tunnel. The light glowing in the other side comes from a different continent: Africa. My staying in the continent will be brief and limit itself to Egypt. I made it to Cairo at sunset. With 18 millon souls and its streets shared by happy horn drivers, donkeys and bazaar vendors alike, the city is the most chaotic place I have ever seen. Like a heart, though, it never stops, and even 3 AM is a sitable time to go for a stroll and start bargaining in the street stolls selling anything from trousers to featherful caged chiken. In the hostel were I crush I realize that all travelers have been in the city for several weeks. Some study percusion with local musicians, others Arabic. All excuses to justify the unspecific magnetism that the city provides. Sticking glue under the nomad’s shoes. All stuck like whale in the low tide, victims of a mysterious attachment. A good example is Denny, the Canadian. Running short of money he started to find a way of exporting egyptian watermelons to Canada. In an identic situation an Argentinean would only stretch to perform as Living Statue in the streets… In another aspect I feel a bit ashamed for my fellow travellers who, busy with the Pyramids, they don’t see the current pharaons. President Mubarak has sent to prison a political opponent some time ago, and some timid manifestations happen on the Talat Harb Square. The police, in a psycologic move to display the manifestators as dangerous, were sent to cordon them off as they walked, like a living hand in hand membrana of authoritarism. When the Islamic explorer Ibn Batuta visited the city he penned: “ Cairo, mother of the cities and site of Pharao the tyran”. Not much has change in a country that cannot find its Timisoara.