Radio Australia Today Editorial
Archive for September, 2009
Phils Travel Blog – Part 9
28 September 2009
The Burning Bush wasn’t burning, and in fact is nothing like the drawings we used to see in Sunday School. It actually looks like a climbing rose that has been allowed to get out of control. I know that Jac had the same thought as me: it needs a good trim and some fertiliser. It is outside of this Greek monastry that houses the Bush that we hear of the academic theory that the diet of Moses and the burning of the bush could have combined to have a hallucinogenic effect on the great man. If so, it would’ve had to last until he climbed the mountain and returned with a flat stone that to him, if he was in a stupor, must’ve looked like papyrus, only very much heavier. In this holy place I can only think of the views, the extreme beauty of the aridness and the Mel Brooks sketch from History of the World Part One, where he, as Moses, comes down the Mount with two tablets, proclaiming that he has twenty (accidentally drops one tablet, smashing it).. err.. ten commandments for everyone to obey. Trust Mel to bring one of the great moments in religious history back to earth.
Phils Travel Blog – Part 8
28 September 2009
Last night another train back to Cairo, and we say goodbye to some members of our first group. They are heading home to the U.S., New Zealand or Sydney. Baksheesh (money tips) are given to Samma and the drivers, and after barely an hour we go down for the start of the next leg. Like dancers in a Jane Austen novel we are soon introduced to our companions for the next three weeks: Vinay and Jake from England, Steve from Brisbane and Carla, a Sydney lawyer. Our guide is another English, by the name of Chris, who volunteers to give us wake up calls in the morning. I wonder how long this service will last. Tomorrow we go to Mount Sinai, the place where Moses famously brought the Ten Commandments down after an apparition in the Burning Bush told him to go to the top of the Mount. He did, making a place of pilgrimage in the process.
Phils Travel Blog – Part 7
28 September 2009
A typically Egyptian breakfast of toast, jam and toast, and we head out early to the Valley of the Kings, a mass burial place chosen by the Kings of Egypt as a way of trying to stop their graves being looted by the same priests who interred them. Didn’t work. Tutenkhamen’s tomb was one of the few to survive the millenia and clergy intact,and even his tomb was partially sacked after its discovery by Carter in 1922. Today his riches are spread across the world, with many items in the Egyptian museum in Cairo. The young King himself is still in his burial chamber, and I wonder what he feels to know that his quite badly preserved remains are there for all to see. Actually not all who come to the Valley see him. I was a little surprised to learn that some members of the group baulked at the entrance fee. It was the equivalent of twenty Australian dollars, and apparently too much to spend to see the jewel of the Valley. To me it was like paying to go to the moon but saying no to hiring a spacesuit to go on the surface. Let me describe what I saw of King Tut while the others stayed in the tea room on the surface. A blackened, shrivelled little man with eye sockets that seemed to be of straw on a head that was shaped in a teardrop, and resting on a pillow as a child’s laid by a loving mother. A sheet covers the body from the neck down to the feet. The feet are crispy and barely resemble feet at all. The toes are as if dry roasted, and remind me, hideously, of the dried spiders that were offered us as a snack in Cambodia. Tut’s chamber is one of the dullest of the Valley. No drawings, no etchings. Coming out into the atmosphere once more I see the image that will haunt me. It is a 1922 photo of Tut’s treasure room. The items that lasted thousands of years are in a pile, broken and jumbled after thieves somehow managed to get in undetected, took what they wanted and destroyed the rest. I feel as if I have seen a kitten punched.
Phils Travel Blog – Part 6
28 September 2009
Travelling up the Nile by Felucca is something that is slow. Unbelievably, almost tortuously slow. But wonderful. Happy greetings to the other felucca captains, breaks on the shore for group release of the things that people need to release. It also gives time for the things that you don’t imagine you’d do on a felucca, like playing cards, listening to the music player or reading. My companion in this last regard is the book by former Australian state premier Bob Carr, My Reading Life, in which he goes through the books that he has read in a very reading life. So as we approached Luxor, the home of the Valley of the Kings and King Tut’s tomb, the group and I debated Bob Carr’s view on the great Australian novelist Patrick White (“a curmudgeon” “a genius” “a bore”) and Carr’s comparison of Barack Obama and Calvin Coolidge. In the group is a U.S. navy officer, Al, who offers surprisingly few insights into his various Commanders-in-Chief. Perhaps he thinks it is treason to criticise the President for using Premium instead of Unleaded,I don’t know. He is polite and a delight. He won’t swear, vowing that he has sworn off “cussing”. The group, Bob Carr, and I arrive in Luxor, but it too late to go to the Valley of the Kings. Probably just as well. Our heads are too full or the arcane (the name of Nixon’s dog for example) for the magnificence that is sure to greet us. Tomorrow.
Phil Travel Blog – Part 3
28 September 2009
One of the first things we had to do today was to decide what to do with our free morning. Go to Abdul Nasser’s famous Aswan dam? Go to Abu Simble? A museum? No. Jac and I allow ourselves to be hijacked by a friendly enough man who takes us out on his felucca (Egyptian sailing boat) to an island that Lord Kitchener stole from some local Nubian people and turned into his garden plaything. It was relatively boring, even for gardenophiles such as us. A guard on the island insisted on showing us where the best flowers were, and we allowed ourselves to be shown, as you do when the guard carries a weapon that looks like something Al Capone’s right-hand man would have carried on Valentine’s Day. The felucca man then takes us to a secluded harbour and we swim, mostly naked in the pristine Nile. The river passes through nine countries before it hits Egypt, and it stays clean. It is the last few hundred kilometres to Cairo is where the factories spew the garbage into the river. The biggest joy of the day was working out payment with the felucca man. I actually thought we had agreed on a price, but of course (in the Egyptian way) these deals never stick, and he jacked up the price. It was an earnest bidding war, he saying with all the delivery of an Olivier in a Shakespearian play how we are sending him broke, we saying how he was not sticking to the deal. No need to worry though. It’s all a game and at the end of the negotiation, he laughed, we kissed and the felucca drivers around us cheered us up the steps. We weren’t ripped off, in fact what we got on this day was worth far more than we paid. That final kiss was the diamond on the ring. We will remember this moment forever. Tomorrow we move onto Luxor and the Valley of the Kings.
