jencat | Life is tough...

Ok, well, that might be exaggerating a little... I'm sat outside a bungalow in a resort on a private island in the middle of the Nile, the sun is shining and we went stargazing in the desert last night, so not that tough, I'll grant.

It will bug me a little when I'm back at work on Friday and the general assumption is that two weeks' holiday somehow equals doing sod all. Frankly it's hard work even staying awake in 43 degree weather, let alone doing anything, and dear god, we've done a hell of a lot recently. Sure, I guess you can probably relax a bit more if you don't mind going crispy red with third degree sunburn, going down with sunstroke and every stomach bug going and wandering around rural Egyptian towns wearing not very much... There are lots of folk we've travelled with doing exactly that. They seem to be having fun, and I keep staring in awe at quite how red someone's skin can get while they're still apparently ambulatory.

I'm more of the frequently-reapplied Factor 30 plus school myself. Plus covering up, wearing a hat all the time and developing a worrying reliance on alcohol hand gel everytime I touch money or food. I get that we've travelled at the wrong time of year -- Luxor is pretty damn unbearable for a big chunk of the day, heat-wise, and Aswan should have been worse except we only had a short stop there. Cairo really wasn't so bad, except our guided tour ended up in Saqqara at freakin' 3pm. Deserts plus anytime after 8am equal Very Bad Idea, in my experience.

Sure, it would have been preferable to see a lot of the stuff we saw at a better time of day - the temp is lovely at 7 or 8am, and the light is better in the evenings - but I get that it wasn't practical so it didn't happen. Egypt is all about the practical, and it works, for the most part. I know exactly why we have guards with submachine guns accompany the tour coaches everywhere (and apparently each American tourist here gets their own guard when out and about). I get why every building has a metal detector, and airport-level x-ray machines, and why the Arab guys behind us in the queue for Luxor Museum this morning got held up a lot longer by security than we did.

We're tourists in a country where tourism provides 20% of the GDP and employs a hell of a lot of the workforce, for very little money. We're Western, in an Islamic country and the last car bomb in Cairo was... four months ago?

It's not that I've ever really felt unsafe in the time spent here, and I'm not trying to spook myself even more - being British, the ever-present guns dangling from every other guard's hand are plain unnerving all by themselves. We're not big on guns at home, to put it mildly.

But I didn't quite twig that the '97 Luxor massacre was at Hatshepsut's Temple until we got there, and it caught my eye in Rough Guide. On one level you can stand there and imagine how it looked back in the day, with an avenue of Sphinxes leading down to the Nile, and terraces lined with fountains and myrr trees from Sudan (Hapshepsut kinda rocks, we established that several times).
On the other hand, it's a temple that's more facade carved into the rockface than a constructed building. We arrived at 11am and it was basically a gigantic oven on the edge of the desert - there's very little actual shelter, and the sun is pretty much everywhere as it faces east.
It got to me when I was standing there, how exposed you are. Now I've gone back and looked up the details of '97, it turned my stomach. I had assumed it was a pot-luck shoot and run, rather than the 45 minute systematic cull that actually happened. If you're on the middle terrace, there really is nowhere to go except down a sheer rock face or exposed staircase. Basically, shooting fish in a barrel, so to speak. I'm not surprised at all that 63 people died there. I'm frankly amazed that anyone made it out of there alive.

But... It wasn't the worst thing that's ever happened here. Eventually it shifted public opinion back against the extremists, and then 9/11 happened and the world changed again.
Heh. It's going on for 5pm now, two tiny lizards are warring on the patio, the last of the muezzins are calling and I will absolutely miss that sound after I leave tomorrow.