PHASE ONE: MISSION-BOUND
Here' a question I plan to ask my students next time we study the present perfect tense*: "Have you ever tried to buy candles in the desert at night?"
My own answer to this question?
"Yes, I have."
Let me explain ...
It was a little after 1am, and we were way, way out of town. As our bus pulled off the road, I noticed three things: first, the imposing silhouettes of tall, bare hills, towering just metres away in the darkness. Second, the intense brightness of the stars. And third, some black goats on the dirt road in front of us, two of them huddled together for warmth and looking rather cute'n'snuggly.
I had absolutely no idea of our whereabouts, but the place looked like a roadside diner/tea house of some kind. A cheery neon "Welcome" sign hung over the roof, but the owners hadn't bothered to light it for our small group. There was also a little shop, which was the reason I decided to risk waking Yuliya (who was asleep on my shoulder) by standing up. I had to get off the bus, 'cause I had a mission. Probably a fruitless one, mind you … and yet one which had to be attempted.
"But why?", you might ask (and my thanks to you if you did :-)
The answer: it was all to do with The Belle.
See, Yuliya's birthday had fallen about ten days earlier, and we'd had a little celebration at my flat in Lviv. I'd promised her, though, that the real party would be in Egypt. It seemed to me that there would be no more appropriate moment to hold said party than sunrise on the summit of Mt. Sinai ... which was exactly where we were headed along this (almost) deserted highway. But of course, this meant preparations.
The gifts-and-cake part already had been taken care of – though cake-wise, I was only able to manage a twinkie bought from an all-night service station. However, I'd stupidly forgotten the other crucial ingredient – the things you’re supposed to put IN the cake and then set on fire. As a result, the following thought had been burning a hole in my brain throughout the first part of our journey:
"You idiot ... you've got no freaking candles!!!"
I wander into the shop, knowing my chances are slim. There I'm greeted by a friendly, slightly stoned-looking Egyptian guy who wants to show me every single thing he has. His collection is rather extensive, and over the next two minutes I see tiny camels, commemorative Sinai plates, pyramid keyrings, ashtrays, postcards, tiny tutenkhamuns, the cartouches of various pharaohs ... I think I could've been shown the entire contents of the Cairo Museum in miniature paperweight form if I hadn't been in such a hurry! So after the first half-a-dozen items, I blurt out the question in Russian**:
"Do you have candles?"
No comprehension.
Repeat the question in English.
A vague glimmer of familiarity spreads across his face … but we still have some distance to go toward full understanding.
Feeling sleepy and not really up to this, I do my best to mime the action of lighting a candle. Somehow, this does the trick – he understands what I'm after. And amazingly, in the small hours of the morning in the absolute middle of nowhere, I then find myself staring at two perfect little yellow wax cylinders with wicks at one end.
They're quite thick, and it's clear that only one of them will fit comfortably on top of a twinkie. But I’m so grateful to this guy for having what I wanted, that – explaining that it’s my wife's*** birthday – I buy them both.
Then a question from the shop attendant: "You are going to give your wife party?"
"Mm-hmm. On Moses Mountain."
"Aaaaaah", he says, and reaches underneath his counter to pull out a little ornamental bowl full of loose greenish-brown leaves.
"Your wife ... she smoke?"
"Er, no."
He shakes his head. "No, no cigarettes ... she smoke this?"
I can be a little slow to understand when someone is making a drug reference, but now I've got the message.
"No, thanks, she doesn't use hashish."
"Oh, come now my friend. Maybe she try first time. Perfect present for you, uh?"
"Thank you, but I won't".
I shift my attention to the collection of foreign currency stuck on the wall behind him, noticing a Kazakh 200 Tenge note and feeling the pull of nostalgia drawing me towards it. I inspect the note closely (though I'd seen hundreds of them before), and mention that I used to live in Kazakhstan, thinking it might help to change the subject.
It doesn't.
"Ok, well I have to go now. But thank you very much for the candles."
"No, thank you, my friend. I see you again some time."
As I walk out the door, he resumes combing the little hashish leaves around his bowl with a packet of tobacco papers.
Shuffling out into the darkness under the non-functioning neon sign, I feel extremely fortunate and happily disposed towards everything ... especially the goats, who are still huddling together, looking even cuter than before. I figure there can't have been too many occasions in history when a chance meeting between two people at completely cross-purposes (a souvenir shop attendant / amateur hash dealer and a foreigner seeking party supplies) has gone so well.
PHASE 2: ASCENDING
For the next hour-and-a-half we tried to sleep on the bus, knowing that it would be our only opportunity for rest tonight. It was difficult, though ... we passed through some amazing desert terrain which drew the eye, and (it seemed to me) a couple of minor military outposts. These were fascinating, in that I could make no sense of their locations at all. They seemed to just rise out of the sand without warning, and I had weird "This must be what it's like to suddenly come upon an Iraqi resistance camp" thoughts.
Anyway, just before 3am our bus pulled up at the foot of Mt Sinai, and we were guided to the departure point with our torches. Yuliya switched on our torch and we started moving, staying a little way behind the others in our group so as to enjoy the silence.
A few minutes later the torch was switched off, never to be used again. "It's more beautiful without it", Yuliya explained. How true.
For the next three hours we climbed the 1800 metres towards Sinai's peak. The first two of those were done in darkness ... though it wasn't completely dark, thanks to an elegant half-moon which illuminated our path beautifully.
I didn't have an answer to that question when we booked our night-time hike – it just seemed like the thing to do. But I have one now, and it's this: those mountain peaks and boulders and valleys are perhaps even more beautiful, and certainly a lot more mysterious, when glimpsed in outline under the moonlight. Sometimes a rock lying on the path ahead seems to take on the form of a reclining bedouin, almost visibly breathing the night air. Then you see one that’s an animal, or a house, or some other semi-familiar object. And then, at other times, the shapes looming up before and around you are entirely exotic and alien. There were moments when we could easily have imagined that we were space tourists, dropped on the surface of another planet.
In fact, I've never seen so many goddam camels in my life. If I were to add up all the camels I'd seen before tonight, and multiply the resulting number by 20, I still wouldn't be close to the number of times I heard the words "You want camel? Good camel!" last night.
This was sort of cool at first, but after the 100th sales pitch, I began to lose patience:
"You want camel? Good camel!"
"No! Bad, baaaad camel!"
I really shouldn't be so rude. This is their livelihood, after all.
PHASE 3: UNCLUTTERED/UNBUSHED
The last 150m or so of the ascent was quite challenging to say the least, especially after a sleepless night. But a few doubtful rest stops later, I finally reached the summit ... where Yuliya had been waiting for me for some time. (Damn these naturally fit people!)
I can't say that the sunrise itself was especially spectacular – I've seen more dramatic horizons, to be honest – but the views around us were definitely worth writing home about (so I am!). Even though we were sharing the occasion with a sizeable crowd, who lined up along the narrow summit like a string of brightly-coloured teeth, there was still a sense of peacefulness at the top.
I remember reading once that Nietzsche used to go walking in the mountains of 'Upper' Bavaria****, because the sensation of vast openness helped to focus his thoughts, stripping away all that was unnecessary and bringing simplicity and clarity. On Sinai there was a similar sense that the world had suddenly become 'uncluttered'. As we stood level with the wispy clouds, daylight resolved the grainy blue silhouettes around us into well-defined rock massifs, and a kind of 'natural lens flare' effect gave the whole scene a filmic quality as the sun crept over each peak. But in the spaces between them ... only sky. And we were in it.
And so we watched the day's arrival, stabbed a twinkie with a candle, did the little birthday rituals (a quick rendition of "Happy Birthday", unwrapping of presents) and posed for a few pics.
And that, in short form, was our Sinai experience. The rest of the excursion mostly involved a tired descent (thankfully via a different path – Yuliya and I both hate back-tracking!), and standing around for ages waiting to go into the monastery which supposedly contains the ‘burning bush’.
For those of you unfamiliar with the burning bush myth, it’s worth spending a minute or two trying to come to grips with the sheer monumental absurdity of it. Here’s the abridged version:
Basically, this regular guy called Moses was out wandering in the hills one day when a bush suddenly burst into flames next to him. Naturally he was surprised – and if he’d been a more level-headed fellow, he probably would’ve concluded that his family’s bread supply had gone mouldy, and that the mould contained hallucinogens. Or else wondered if his wife had started slipping hardcore hashish into the dough mixture. But Moses really wasn’t what you’d call an ‘anaytical personality type’.
Even when the bush began speaking to him, and claiming it was the voice of God, Moses still didn’t see the drug connection. He didn't even take a moment to wonder if it was his neighbour Matthias – an annoying man with a practical joke fetish – who'd doused the bush in rubbing alcohol, set it alight, and hid behind it going "Moooooseeeees ... MOOOOseeeees ... listen to me, Moses, for I am your Lord and Father" etc. etc.
*shakes head*
Stupid story!
So yeah … we know that none of that ever happened – it was just an idiotic bit of Jewish literary bravado, which would’ve been rejected if the Bible’s editors had been able to find something more plausible and inspiring to add to their story than talking foliage. Therefore I wasn’t overly disappointed when I didn’t get to see the famous bush. Besides, by that time of the morning, we were beginning to to look a little dried up and charred ourselves!
PHASE 4: SHARMED, UNCHARMED
About four hours later – after a gruelling bus ride during which Yuliya suffered the violent effects of motion sickness – we approached a gilded, arched gateway in the middle of a small intersection. As the inevitable guys with machine guns waved us through, our guide said "So, guys, welcome back to Sharm el Sheikh."
"Fantastic!", I thought. I can finally get out of this awful bus and get Yuliya into the hotel room for some rest and recuperation.
Wrong!
The bus ride, it turned out, wasn't even close to being over. For the next hour-and-a-quarter, we wound through an endless maze of resort hotels, dropping off the various people with whom we'd been on excursion. Hionestly, I hadn't realised there were this many hideous resort hotels on the whole frikkin' planet, let alone that there could be so many in one place.
"Welcome to Sharm el-Sheikh" indeed; we were back in the city which one Englishwoman I'd spoken to earlier that day had called "the false Egypt". And how right she was.
The biggest challenge we faced in "Sharm" (as the locals call it) was finding an Egyptian restaurant. The hotels
have completely pushed out any semblance of local culture, and what's left is completely catered to people who want to be surrounded by palms and faux sphinxes, but without ever stepping outside their culinary or linguistic comfort zones. The second biggest challenge: working out whereabouts in the city people actually live. In one week, I saw exactly one crappy apartment building – and when I did, it was like "Look ... washing on clotheslines! It's a real block of flats!"
The rest of the time: wall-to-wall resorts. Seriously, there's rarely more than 3 metres separating them, and some even have adjoining walls. And the scariest part: they're building even more of the bastards. Appalling.
However, with all that said, I quickly worked out that the appeal of Sharm is not what's in it, but rather what's around it. We'd already climbed a mountain by moonlight, ridden horses through the desert and swum off pristine shores where the crystal waters were packed with exotic fish and corals (or at least Yuliya had – I was yet to acquire a pair of bathers at that point in the holiday). And the biggest thrill was yet to come: we'd signed up for diving in The Red Sea, and we were both terrified and painfully excited about it.
And that, my friends, is where I'll pick up in the next entry.
Till then ... take care )))
* Present perfect tense: er ... the short explanation is that it's a kind of grammatical tense which appears in a few of the Earth's languages (including English), but not in the majority. You therefore have to explain it a LOT to people learning English.
The detailed explanation is ... well, already known to a lot of people who read this blog, and probably extremely dull to 99% of everyone else. It's about 'aspect', and connections between past actions and present results, and so on blah-de-blah. If you've spoken English or another Germanic or Latin language from birth, you're damn lucky you never had to learn about this tense consciously – it's a real killer!
** Odd thing about Sharm el-Sheikh (from an English-speaking point of view): 90% of the tourists there are Russian, and it's surprisingly famous in the Russian-speaking world. Tell an Australian that you've been to Sharm, and they'll probably say "Where's that?" But tell a Russian that you've been to Egypt, and they'll immediately ask "Did you go to Cairo or Sharm el-Sheikh?" Hence speaking to the Egyptian shop assistant in Russian before trying English.
*** In Egypt I was continually asked about Yuliya "Is she your wife?" Easier just to answer "yes" sometimes than to explain the situation.
**** Rather charmingly, "Upper Bavaria" is called that not because it's more northerly than the rest of Bavaria (which it isn't), but because it's higher. There are simply more mountains there :-)
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