Egypt part 7. Re-entry

Re-entry

(please go to part 1 if you want to read the diary in chronological order)

   From the moment we left Italy we felt a sense of unease. The coronavirus was beginning to threaten Italy although it had, supposedly, not entered Egypt. I had mislaid my official residency papers and was traveling on a temporary passport. I wondered what was going to happen when I returned. And compounding all this was the bankruptcy of our airline. They put us on an Arabian aircraft with no guarantee of a return flight. And all the while we traveled in Egypt, AirItaly would not answer a phone call or email. The details of our housing or travel after being kicked off the cruise ship remained completely up in the air. I had done some looking around Aswan Airbnbs from Italy some months before but we had nothing reserved and no idea what Aswan even looked like. And, finally, we didn't want to repeat our train ticket fiasco. The train return to Cairo was even longer than that to Luxor. The first thing we needed was a good WiFi connection. It's funny how travel today relies on that.

    Happily, Aswan turned out to be obviously prosperous and modern. Looking across the Nile from our berth I expected to see an island and a Nubian village. That's how an Airbnb host described it. What really impressed was a huge, multi storey hotel lit like Disneyland. We fired up Data Roaming, hoping the money held out, and hastily reserved the Happy Nubian Hotel I had spotted months ago. Feeling really disoriented, we clumsily climbed into the 50cent public ferry with our gear and sailed across. The gigantic tourist hotel slowly vanished behind palm trees as we approached the landing and details of the far shore came into focus. And surprise, surprise, we set foot on a crude landing giving way to a very poor, dirt paved intersection of footpaths between a confusion of mudbrick structures. Yes, this really was a Nubian village, Jazirat Aswan, its authenticity confirmed by domestic goats and a small gang of barefoot school boys. These guys greeted us excitedly, grabbing our heaviest bags, determined to personally guide us to wherever we were going. Wherever that was. "Animalia" I remembered from part of the description of the guest house."Animalia, Animalia" everybody repeated and we set off on a long walking tour taking us down alleys, around corners, across field paths and finally to a door which didn't look anything like I remembered from the Airbnb photos.

 Knock knock. "Animalia, Animalia." Animalia? An older woman pointed with authority to the kids. Off we went on a big tour of the island, ending up right next to the elementary school and not far from the landing. They got a tip and we got a good laugh.

    It was a nice place, very rustic and authentic with hand plastered walls and brightly colored accents. We occupied a third floor room with a comfy, covered balcony big enough for a picnic table and wonderful wooden benches furnished in gay pillows. We loved the contrast to the dreaded cruise vessel. But our anxiety remained because the WiFi proved too weak to stay connected. Determined to get organized, I insisted we return to the landing and either check with the WiFi at the dockside restaurant or return to the city in search of a connection. Luckily the restaurant generously offered a powerful connection as well as a great vegetable tagine, and I began to note the difference in cultures from across the river. The gagging repetition of chewy pita filled with a mysterious spiced porridge began to repel me to the point where I actually enjoyed the cafeteria food served on board the cruise. But this tagine! Wow! Finally something tasty. We found ourselves at the edge of Nubia, old Ethiopia. Skins darker, obviously poorer, probably discriminated against; but delightfully Rastafarian.  

leaving Aswan at dawn

   Train ticket done, Airbnb reserved in Cairo for the next night and we reassured ourselves with a schedule; but we still couldn't reach our Airline company. In our desperation we commandeered a friend in UK and another in Italy to continue non-stop calling to the help line. Tantalizingly, the calls were answered but would timeout after hours of waiting for a human assistant. Looking back on the experience, I realize this is where we made a mistake. We had purchased traveler's insurance before we left Europe and we were covered for cancelled flights. Aswan has an airport and so does Luxor and we should have booked our return from there rather than take the endless train ride back to dirty old Cairo. Upon investigating flight options, we ruled out a connection through Athens and chose one through Casablanca that returned us to Rome in one day. Anxiety continued to follow us on our long retreat from the upper Nile.
    Going out is fun. It's an adventure. Coming back is seldom joyous apart from the expectation of the comforts of home that beckon. Two weeks of kitchen sink laundries, doubtful meals, and the slow grind of lugging a ton of belongings takes a toll on the spirits. Yes, it's nice to have no housework or lawn mowing to think about but the strain of keeping all the details organized can be fatiguing. Have you got your passport? Why don't these socks match? I left my earbuds at the guesthouse. How much does that cost in Euros? Do we tip this guy? Why doesn't my roaming work? My batteries are dying.
     The before dawn ferry ride across the Nile proved the highlight of this day. I don't know how or why there was a boat available but we tipped the guy, you can be sure! We were the only passengers. Through some breach in cosmic logic, a private taxi had been prearranged by Ehad, our historian/tour guide. The driver was late meaning we could have slept another half hour, but at least we didn't have to drag our gear up the road to the train station. In a counter-breach in cosmic logic, the train we had acquired tickets for was one of the filthiest in service, just to prepare us for our return to Cairo. Probably. Alex, unluckily, had to use the loo only to confirm our impression of the cleanliness of Egypt's rolling stock. I held it for 10 hours. The guy on seat 61 says rail travel is the only way to go and he's very helpful with that and he says that the train from Aswan to Cairo affords one a true look into the Egyptian river life. He's right, of course, but you know, we've already seen quite a bit of it. And it's not that great second or third or fourth time around. So I tried to sleep after sadly finishing my book; but anxiety over our next connection kept me churning over how we were going to get from the Ramses Train Station in Cairo out to the far tip of Zamalek ("sa MA lek"), a new neighborhood for us.
    Uber, the only way to fly in Cairo, failed to function as soon as we arrived. No roaming. Why? Ha. too bad. It was dark. We dragged and dragged and dragged off into the night, checking every 100 meters until we finally flagged a taxi. English? Ne. Read Address? shrug. In we get. The poor host expected us hours ago. After a bizarre tour of one-way streets in the dark, the taxi reversed to a stop. Out. Pay a paltry note for an angry snarl. Where the fuck are we? Into a lit building and bewildering search for a flat number or floor number or ANYTHING...and then the phone rang. And a door opened. How this stuff happens in Egypt, I'll never know. If this were Rome or London? Past check-in? Forget it. Pitch your tent, roll out the sleeping bag. 
   Dina was our hostess and she was just painting on the face before stepping out into secular night life hidden somewhere in Cairo. No muslim restraints in evidence, in fact an obvious gay-lib attitude at play. The night was evidently young. We took our inspiration and stepped out for a walk around, finally opting for the desperate falafal take-out just outside the door (where the same hand takes your money and scoops out the ... the... what is that stuff, anyway?).
Later that same evening (or morning) familiar sounds of human eruption might interrupt one's sleep, and at 4something AM, familiar people smiled as we packed frantically for our dawn ride to the airport. We awarded Dina 5 stars as is the custom at Airbnb. She was cheerful, after all.
    This time Uber worked, thanks to Dina's wifi connection, and off to the airport we rushed. There's a lot to be said about traveling at pre-dawn hours in Cairo. One is likely to get where one is headed and in half the time. Once, while rushing to the airport to drop off Isolde, we ran into a daytime traffic jam inching our way along in stop-and-go traffic to finally arrive at the scene of an upturned motorcycle still in the center lane and a stiff, pained rider limping around in the lanes. Ah Ha! Maybe this is Trump's dream of every man for himself. Medicare for none and ambulances too. A post-apocalyptic scene. The driver swerved around and stepped on the gas.
    Air Royal Maroc flight to Casablanca left Cairo as scheduled to our utter relief. My stomach churned but not enough to refuse the wonderfully western cheese omelet and coffee (or is that tea? hard to tell). Umpteen hours later and another flight to Rome and I had to check my geography to understand that we were accumulating some fuck-all mileage that would qualify for platinum status if we were ever to contemplate visiting another muslim country. We should have flown to Greece, at least. By the time we reached Rome I had wolfed down another air lunch. The landing was one of those miracles of air travel when the pilot wrestles the bouncing craft into an impossibly smooth touch-down, generating an audible sigh of relief and rousing round of applause. At the arrival gate it was obvious I needed an unscheduled emergency stop at the nearest facility. Then, passing through the surprise body temperature screening, they stopped me. Alex had passed through ahead of me and could see on the monitor my face was defcon red. No sirens, luckily, but I was asked to try again. I was not feeling all that great and perhaps they could see I was suffering under my dual duffel bags. Somehow a squabble began over the testing instruments, I straightened as best I could and put on a Hollywood face. And passed through. Why? Who knows. I had a fever. I know i did. And at that moment, I would have enjoyed a week's stay in any old hospital. But no. They sent me through.
    We only had half an hour to make a train connection to our home station. Alex rushed ahead and I staggered along. We got directions, marched down the corridors, bought tickets somewhere and finally found the platform. There was the train, our last connection on this insane pilgrimage. We jumped on and sat heavily with a final sense of accomplishment. The train eased out, slightly early, and then announced its stops. Oh No! Wrong train. NO!! We interviewed the ticket-taker independently as well as a number of passengers and formed a new strategy. Off in Orte, back on the train we should have waited for in Rome.
    Luckily the train stopped in Chiusi and went no further of we would have slept through the stop. Then one final drag to our car, a fumble for the keys... and ... home.
    The news next morning confirmed that coronavirus had been detected on a cruise ship in Egypt. In the meantime, Italy declared self imposed social isolation and was about to shut down completely. Now we began to wonder if that dry throat, that runny tummy was actually a deadly disease. We self-quarantined and the vacation was over. Back to real life.

Egypt part 6. Old Hands

Old Hands

    

    Everywhere there is evidence of old hands at work. It pops up from the sandy floor as if out of a Shelley poem. Ozymadias is actually the greek name for  Ramses II, Egyptś favorite pharoah. You can read all about it somewhere else but I´ve got to admit: when I was there I felt that transporting whoosh out of my place and into a completely different perception. The whole effect is spoiled by the crowds, just like it is here in Italy; but when you get home, a lot of that is forgotten. Crowds are familiar, an enormous, elongated, granite head of Akhenaten is strikingly memorable.

     Bored on the train, I would take peeks at downloaded google maps with our blue, GPS dot creeping along. I´d repeatedly scan the distance from the Luxor railway station to the public Nile ferry where we would be crossing in the dark to find our next Airbnb. It was a poor preparation for the romantic beauty of the Luxor waterfront at night, The Kornish. Endless, tiled, lit, clean, it followed the Nile east bank all along the edge of the city and, most strikingly, along the eerie, lit columns of the Luxor Temple. Docked by their tens and twenties sat the enormous cruise ships, idling, smoking, spewing waste water into the river. An impression of contrasts. But dominating everything was the Temple. Next day our guide led us through the site along with visits to the nearby museum and the Karnac temple a kilometer away. The morning after that, off we drove across the Nile and into the Valley of the Kings.

    The pyramids are really old. They are like landforms. And, yes, there is a Temple near the feet of the Sphinx, but it all looks fairly battered and eroded as if it really belonged to the earth. Word is that the largest, and oldest, pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) was completed around 2560 BC. Thatś almost 4800 years ago. Early Old Kingdom. Oldest of the seven wonders, the only still evident. The necropolis at Giza is on a plateau representing the very edge of the desert just south west of Cairo. The plateau is absolutely loaded with little pyramids, grave sites, as well as the three huge pyramids that oddly dominate. 

     The temples are sites of cult worship. They are characterized by human scale architecture and meant to be occupied during celebrations by holy people and rulers. They are generally newer elaborations constructed around or on sites of very ancient shrines. The best examples on the upper Nile are Ptolomeic (305BC, Macedonian, self-declared Pharaohs) and share design features such as the ridiculously enormous double gates (pylons) and densely columned hypostyles. There is an impressive string of them up and down the Nile and many are intact enough to get a good idea of their design, histories, and purposes throughout history. The Luxor Temple dates to 1400 BC, New Kingdom.

    The tombs in the Valley of the Kings are grave sites. These are also relatively recent, from 1500 to 1000 BC. They are cut into hard sandstone. Our historian/guide pointed out the continuation of the pyramid symbol as represented by the mountain peak at the head of the valley. The tombs are numbered by order of King Valley discovery, Tut being KV62. Most remarkably, the hieroglyphfic Templinscriptions remain brightly colored, giving a very convincing impression of the original condition. This being the New Kingdom Thebes, there was easy access to Nubian mineral wealth and the tombs were loaded with golden goodies which encouraged rampant looting shortly after the door was closed on the pharoeś mummy.

    This is the list of sites we visited:

1. Egyptian museum-    king tut's stuff
2. necropolis at Giza including sphynx and great pyramid
3. Luxor temple  - dedicated to rule of kings (check)
4. Luxor museum - brilliant statues particularly small diorite king tutmose III 
5. Karnak temple - dedicated to Amun Ra (check)
6. Kings Valley - KV6, kv8, kv2
7. Temple of Hatshepsut - 
8. Colossi of Memnon -
9. passed lock at Esnu during the night
10. Temple of Horus at Edfu - horse carriage ride at dawn. 
11. Temple of Philae - moved to isle of Agilkia
12. unfinished obelisk - likely hatshepsut. fault crack

   To visit the Temple of Horus at Esna we had to rise before dawn and, with boat loads of other tourists, mount battered horse drawn carriages for a brisk chariot race to the site. 
   I found the Temple at Philae really interesting. And lovely. Remember the European comet lander that fell in a hole? It was named after the temple at Philae. This Ptolemaic temple (and others) found itself partially submerged after the construction of the first Aswan dam in 1902 and its subsequent raising through the next 30 years. Evident damage to the Philae temple prompted Unesco to take on the project of moving it block by numbered block a kilometer away to the higher island of Aqulkia. Scattered blocks in organized rows still reveal numbers assigned during this remarkable project.
   The site must be reached by boat, much like it always has. The boat ride (think of aquatic bumper cars at the landing) winds through rounded granite outcroppings, the blue waters contrasting the sandstone temple beautifully.  
Wikipedia presents a well written article on Philae. 
   Our host, Maryanne, described our progress up the Nile like going back in time, yet our visits to historic sites went in other direction. The oldest sites are near Cairo and as we sailed up river, the sites became newer and newer. But she was right. The differences between a 3000 year old temple and a 4000 year old tomb are not immediately evident, but the life along the river banks looked increasingly rustic, eventually giving way to Nubian villages.

Egypt part 5. Five Stars

Five Stars

          If you're ever stuck shopping for a special gift, a Nile Cruise should do it. I'm going to pass it on when I can. It's an experience I won't forget and it did shake us out of our rural utopia of backaches and home repair. Luckily, our hosts had done it some years before; and although the experience has suffered somewhat, we benefited from their trailblazing, not to mention historical knowledge. 

towel crocodile provided by the
cleaners

     Day one began early with a walk across the gangplank to the big reception doors on the side of the vessel. That was an exciting moment. I fumbled with the video button on my phone and got some shots of peoples backs grunting luggage. But it turned out not to be our vessel. We walked right through it and out the other side. And into the big reception doors of another vessel. And out the other side. And into the big reception doors of another vessel. And out the other side. Each ship provided a grand hotel lobby designed by Trump Inc. All variations on somebody's idea of senseless opulence. I lost count but we finally came to a stop. Up a carpeted staircase to a circular mezzanine surrounding the Trump Inc. chandelier. Up another carpeted staircase and down a carpeted, darkly paneled corridor. Now it's getting low, tight and sort of ship-like. Framed paintings suggested the atmosphere of a Mozart era seraglio. Dark haired beauties wearing sultry expressions and clothing revealing anatomies unlike any seen ashore. Our two cabins were at the very end of the corridor. Top floor, full stern behind. Each cabin was crammed with two beds, a single blocking the large glass window and a double blocking everything else. Other amenities included a warm cabinet refrigerator, empty; drawer fronts that easily came away in oneś hand; wobbly light fixtures with very little light; one distant electrical outlet; and a small drinking glass. The mystery of the fetid

dampness was solved when I discovered a persistent drip wetting my back when visiting the loo. That also explained the wet carpeting. A crew member lifted out a ceiling panel revealing a water tank partially wrapped in electrical tape which clearly needed more electrical tape. We got that and a towel for the floor, but the drip never stopped and I found it best to take a small umbrella to the loo.

    It had been ten days since we arrived in Cairo and eleven since I last saw my old coffee machine. Or any coffee machine, surprisingly. All coffee up to that point had been brewed from Nescafe crystals and powdered milk substitute, so the cafeteria coffee reflux boilers and real milk were a welcome relief. Actually, as cafeteria food went, I thought it was pretty good and I wolfed down lots of it. What was disconcerting was the view out of the high window. River water lapped up at about eye level reminding one what the view might be like from one of the lifeboats, if you ever survived the rush out of the dining room. Further, it was best to forget the depth of the Nile channels. The draught of this monstrosity couldn´t be much. We were likely sitting in the bilge while sipping our watery coffee.

  The deck just above our berth held rank and file of sunbeds, a little swimming pool, an expensive masseuse, an expensive bar, and a lot of awnings to hide under. The deck offered a nice view of the surroundings including a lovely assortment of fellow tourists, mostly from Germany, running from just fat to clearly obese; and proudly naked. Or just. We spent a lot of time enjoying the view.
    These gigantic floating hotels must number in the hundreds. Often we would sail in the company of two or three others, enjoying their diesel exhaust and disturbing racket. In port, they would tie to each other sometimes in tens, reaching out into the channel. The most charming craft on the river was certainly not our floating hotel but the local sailing vessel, the felucca with its ancient, elegant, curving lanteen rig. They hardly look like efficient sailors but I noticed the prevailing wind blew upstream while one could always rely on the current to bring one home. We did spot a few two-masted excursion lanteens called dahabiya. These really evoked a by-gone period and the fact that every one I saw was dragged by a tug did not convince me of their seaworthiness. Whatever, when I dole out my Nile Cruise gift package, itś going to be on one of these.

Egypt part 4. Comfy interlude

Comfy Interlude

     Our challenge is to get out of Cairo and up to Luxor and on to our 5 star luxury liner. This Nile cruise is the whole reason we are in Egypt and something we began to really look forwarded to. 

    Luxor is located at the big kink in the river about 700 km up river. Luxor used to be Thebes and it was the capital and cult center of middle and late kingdoms. East bank is the city, west bank is the grave yard. It takes some 7 hours by car and over 10 hours by train to reach from Cairo. A line of three in front of a ticket window never, ever moved so we followed online advice and decided to buy our tickets after boarding. Early in the morning, we dragged our stuff onto an empty train feeling smug and paid the fare, receiving a scrap of torn paper with arabic pen strokes. One stop later and our seats were challenged. Two stops later and we found ourselves standing. With ten hours to go. I retired to the noisy space between the cars and sat on my duffel trying to read my paperback. Alex succeeded in being given a seat by an egyptian gentleman who even now chats with us on WhatsApp.

   Luxor: what a relief! Oh my goodness! Our Airbnb on the west bank offered a clean rooftop terrace all to ourselves. I got very excited identifying the Temple of Hatshepsut on the far hillside. At our feet, farmers tended lovely green plots of grain and sugarcane starts. I wiped my finger on the tile. No black. Just a bit of Sahara dust which never left us. From here we had an electrical outlet and a wifi contact with our bankrupt airline and coronavirus. We spent the whole day up there, and in the evening watched a loud, muslim wedding reception in what must have been the grange hall. Free apple juice in back-to-school cardboard boxes. Simple, dirt streets. Cheerful children. Steet falafal for supper.

     Next digs lay across the river where the other half lived. We had a night in the palatial Pavilion Winter, an extension of the old Luxor Winter Palace Hotel. From the grand staircase, almost 100 years ago, Howard Carter announced the discovery of Tut's tomb. Lavish reviews show up on Trip Advisor, and, yes, with its enormous private garden it did look like a suitable place to spend one's winter. Alex swam in the heated pool and I began to feel far more important than I deserved.
      

Egypt part 3. The Icons

The Icons

     It's all about the pyramids. Isn't it? Really. The pyramids, sphinx and, oh my god, Tutankhamen. King Tut. Teenage heart throb, died at 19. So lovely, so golden. And it's all here. The whole story and all the wonderful goodies. All laid out in this gloriously old fashioned, dusty museum from the turn of the last century, which is about when he was discovered. He's upstairs in a glassed-off window suite with a lot of his tomb furniture set out in the hall approaching. As soon as you enter the great hall of the museum the draw is palpable. Right past the ol' Ramses colossus and straight up the stairs. There's time for the alien Akenaten later. Past the huge, garage sized sarcophagus boxes, once nested like russian dolls. I loved the detail of the heavy metal hauling rings on the corners. 

The Golden Mask

     And the coptic shrine a highlight with its four, delicate, adoring golden goddesses protecting each elevation, hands outstretched, facing inward. Inside was once an alabaster refrigerator containing four alabaster mini sarcophagi containing his lovingly mummified guts. Ear your heart out, Donald Trump.
     The nesting coffins a ridiculously over-the-top execution of golden workmanship. Crazy beautiful, that Nubian gold so soft and smooth.
     It might have been 10 GB pounds to get in, I don't remember, and whatever cost and difficulty to get there; but it leaves a big, big impression. It tells a big story of human devotion, human effort, and human weakness. Weakness in the mortality of the half deity, and weakness in the mob psychology of the adoring followers.
   Back on the street we look across the glittering Nile, wide, drifting, graced with the odd felucca sail. Don't look too close, there's plastic pollution all over our planet and this is no exception. Before the old Museum stretches a new development project under construction to open the public space like a Paris jardin de la ville. Too bad about the garish Ritz-Carlton that grabbed the waterfront first, but the intention is clear. Right there is El Tahrir Square, which is actually a big, congested round-a-bout. If you type Cairo into google maps it will drop you on the obelisk of El Tahrir Square which commemorates the revolution (I've forgotten which one). I'm pretty sure a lot of rough neighborhood was cleared away for all this grandness, I know because our apartment is just there off the square.
    But we really came here to see the pyramids. And they are in Giza, roughly
14km away from our pin drop on El Tahrir Square. Too far to walk. Perfect for Uber. My tip for this part of the trip is to make sure your Uber driver is taking you to the Giza Necropolis, not Giza. We went to Giza and it was an eye opener. First, an elevated flying freeway took us, at great speed, on a tour of the most frightening maze of vacant, unfinished, 20 storey apartment blocks you'll ever witness. As far as the eye could see. How a society could afford to construct such useless, costly structures... I don't know. And all of them the same: reinforced concrete skeletons infilled with mudbricks, soaring to great heights, all with dead, empty eye sockets of windowless holes. Never occupied, perhaps like the empty tower blocks being built on the south shore of the Thames. A sudden off ramp onto the ground and we find ourselves on narrow dirt tracks, dodging goats, and wandering aimlessly through the canyons as the driver looks for the pin drop of Giza. "No, No. Pyramids. Pyramids." He does't speak english but he understands. We are out of there.
    The pyramids are located on a high plateau of land rising suddenly above low housing squalor of suburban Giza. Opportunistic guest houses saturate the approaches but, luckily, the plateau remains relatively unscathed. It is the very edge of the desert and it is our first step off the relatively green, congested Nile valley. From here it is open, vast, dry dust. Sort of like the sea, but lifeless. To walk out that way too far would be pretty stupid. Of course the forms are obvious. There they are. Nothing is hiding them. As you approach from the ticket office, one lies behind the other. They are small mountains surrounded by remarkable pavings that are staggeringly old. There are a few scattered blocks lying about which have been sloughed off, but most of the original limestone blocks that formed the smooth skin have been recycled by ancient builders. You sort of wonder if you stood there long enough you might be crushed by the next eroding block the size of a mid sized car.

    A short walk and then you realize that there must have been hundreds of these pyramids all over the place. It's a cemetery. But there are three big ones. And then there's the sphinx. It sits apart, below and somewhat dwarfed by the pyramid of Kahfre. The site has scale and majesty in keeping with it's age.

Egypt part 2. The Street

The street

I'll try to get this to
play, but it's just
a lot of car noise wih
 pedestrians having
 close encounters

    Cairo is home. Second time in Africa for me, but first time in North Africa. I'm a little surprised at the state of the place. After doing some reading, I chose to stay downtown to get a feel for the older architecture and to enable walking to popular spots like the Egyptian Museum. Isolde came prepared to explore the souks in the poorer Islamic quarter and, of course, the pyramids are really why we are staying in Cairo. 

bakery

    As we set out onto the street it's glaringly obvious we are foreign tourists. Shirt, hair, shoes, skin, language, knapsack, the bewildered look, it's so obvious. Surprisingly, we are often greeted with a cheery "welcome to Egypt," or "where are you from?" The early anxieties slowly ease as we get lost and then find our way again. Flash around, "where are we?" Oh. It's right there.

Walking around are a lot of women in full black peering through mail slots. And guys in floor-length dressing gowns. The street signs just aren't there, not even in Arabic. What my google map says doesn't show up in my actual reality and street view doesn't exist so there's no double-checking with an image. We find we have located ourselves in the middle of the DIY tech neighborhood. The shops are really tiny, cluttered; and the windows jammed with boxes of modems, digicams, motherboards, laptops, microphones, headphones, cabling, battery boosters, and earbuds. And that's just the stuff I can identify. Then the next shop, a meter and a half away, is crammed with the same stuff. Sometimes it spills out onto the street like a fruit stall and you have to step over stuff. The pedestrian course is never clear. Or carefully paved. A dirt section here, then a boulder of hardened concrete, a person cooking something, ten meters of shiny tile covered in diesel filth, broken mud bricks, an abandoned car. A couple of old guys smoking a hookah and looking at you. I reminds me of walking in the mountains. You can't look up because you'll fall down. It took us a while to figure out how to cross the street. Just find somebody you think you can keep up with and position yourself just downstream and try and stay in their traffic shadow.
    OK, Isolde. Off we go to the street market. As we weave our way east, things get even shabbier. Shabby Shiek. Now we enter kitchen appliance land. Roads blocked by rickety delivery vehicles wobbling under towers of boxed washing machines, fridges, dishwashers, microwaves, all that stuff. The sidewalks become canyons of the stuff, most of it stays in the box to avoid street contamination. And it's the same as the DIY electronics land, every shop is selling the identical thing. And they are tiny shops packed together in whatever corner of street level space available. But this isn't the souks, oh no. We open onto a sort of intersection with a freeway soaring over it. The crowds thicken. There's a mingle of traffic and pedestrian that approaches perfect solution. Equal parts. One dissolved into the other, moving in a sort of slow Brownian Motion. Then, down the sidewalk and the stalls begin and it is the most chaotic arrangement of useless stuff you've ever seen. I suppose it's a shopper's delight, but I'm entering one of Dante's levels. The main drag becomes a covered corridor so tight I have to step into somebody's tent to let a wide, black bedsheet go by with somebody wrapped inside. Looking at me. Then a guy yells and shoves a wide hand cart spilling bread rolls through. Overhead dangle pillows and fabrics and naked mannequins. It's impossible to tell the tent, the display, the product or the proprietor apart. It's all part of an intentional confusion, I'm convinced. Pause with curiosity and you're dead. They pounce. First of all it must be established that they have a close friend or relative who lives just down the road from you in Italy. Or California. Then you're let into a special secret about something. Then comes the invitation to have a little tea. No, No! It's free, no pressure. I'm not trying to sell you anything. Then the soft, silken hands slowly close around your common sense and stifle it and you find yourself looking at the Treasure of Indiana Jones uncovered for the first time and it's mesmerizing. Alex fell into such a trap and after half an hour snapped to the reality of her shopping bag full of exotic spices. Price: $400. US dollars, but disguised as egyptian pounds with too many zeros. It's an experience. Luckily we had Isolde there with her cheat sheet of Arabian numerals and a clear understanding of human nature.

Egypt part 1. Cairo, Anyone?

Cairo, Anyone?

This experience has a dissonant thread running through it. And it begins before the beginning. It was one of those times when you open the drawer while packing the night before and the passport is not where it's supposed to be.

Here's the Shortened long story:

waiting for a passport, Italian style

   
Our plan of a leisurely train ride to Bologna for lunch before going on to the Milan airport morphed into an early trip to the US Embassy in Florence. There we split while I waited for a temporary passport and Alex went on with her train ticket. We teamed up again in crowded Bologna to find the train schedules to Milan all scrambled by a fatal derailment. I had spent a lot of time planning and purchasing our connections at Trenitalia.it. Now all that effort did nothing but prove my naivete in trusting that these things actually work. Pioneering new routes through uncharted territory (including the frantic Milan underground) we met our plane before takeoff only to find that AirItaly had gone bankrupt, adding more evidence to a developing theory of mine. They courteously placed us on some arabian aircraft and off to Cairo we flew. 

      All cities look dazzling approaching in the night air. I tried hard to identify stuff from my memory of the map, but it’s really only ever a bunch of lights. I think we arrived at quarter to 5 in the morning. Terrified, actually. Everything was in Arabic which I remembered must be read from right to left. But that didn’t help. We knew to look for the government guy selling visas and I had to ask him a couple of times before I believed him. Cash only. US Dollars. A hundred of them. Then passport control with my paper passport. Then out on the dark street crammed with hustlers in taxis. A particularly slick con artist had his own little podium where he was pimping cabs in elegant english. OK, OK. Off we go in a battered car across the parking lot where he had to stop to wash his hands and bow to mecca for a few minutes. Half an hour later we’re downtown in a pretty grotty slum just off a grand waterfront roundabout. He’s got the window down asking directions until we work around to the front of a corrugated steel and wrought iron gate where we got dumped on a broken sidewalk. 6AM. Dark. Not blending.
     The dark iron gate creaked open and a sort of Arabian Gandalf character beckoned us in. Then into an intimate phone booth of an elevator. Then some fiddling in the dark with a key and into a bright white room smelling of paint and fresh floor varnish. Not bad for the price. Everything looked new, including the cardboard furniture and plush velour bedspreads. I took off my fetid hiking boots, admiring the shiny varnish pine flooring, and checked the facilities. Bidet, good. Overhead hot water tank had to be switched on. The loo had a mysterious chrome nozzle thing down there and I tried the

view out back

 knob on the side sending an arc of water across to the floor in front of the sink. Got it. No loo paper. Mirror spanking clean, sink OK; but Damn! I stepped my socks into the puddle of water. Dabbing the bottom of my wet sock with the towel I left a distinct black stain. The bottom of my feet were black. I wiped a finger across the tile. Black. Across the varnished pine. Black. Across the carboard furniture. Black. Kitchen counter? Black. And so on around the apartment, out the door, down the lift, onto the street and throughout Cairo, actually. Everywhere. The place is hopelessly filmed in a diesel soot mixed with desert dust. Where it's been cleaned lately, it's hard to spot; but it's there. Where it hasn't been cleaned, which is everywhere outside, it covers everything in a thick, brown cake giving the city a monochrome miserableness. The Cat in the Hat's relentless spot. I had a look out the window just to make sure. And more than just dust, there's a lot of other stuff accumulating as well.
  It was early morning and an emergency check for

Cairo in the morning

complimentary coffee came up blank. Knives, forks, microwave, fridge all brand new. Fridge didn't work because the wall socket had no current, but that got fixed. But no coffee. Into our luggage and soon we had a cup of tea going. It's the first step to feeling at home. I forced through the paint-sealed balcony door for a bit of fresh air. Dawn in Cairo. Empty street. I could spy onto the roof of a next door building and there was a woman leaning over the parapet seeing what I was seeing. Me for the first time, her probably not at all. I'm sure she must have missed the jumble of junk littering the roof gutter, and the abandoned car, and the confusion of satellite dishes, and the spaghetti of wires. But she didn't miss the quiet. I did, because I had no idea what what coming. Our single pane balcony doors soon resonated with the traffic below once it started up for the day. And on into the following night and every night thereafter.      

      Isolde arrived late that night, coming from London on her own. We arranged a cab for her from the smiling taxi pimp at the airport. He sent us reassuring phone photos of their rendezvous and I walked out onto the street to meet her. I waited a long time, worrying just like a parent is supposed to. I stood there in my white shirt trying look easy to spot because the building entrance certainly wasn't. It was approaching 2 in the morning, fewer and fewer cars going by. But I spotted her near the intersection, next to some headlights. I walked up, relieved, reached into my pocket and gave the driver a tip. We hugged. "Who's that guy?" She said. Who. "The guy in the car?" I had tipped some innocent stranger probably a day's wage. She had been dropped off previously without me noticing. Laughing, hugging, reunited.


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post script

I wrote this in my travel notes after leaving Cairo- 

Next time, I would skip Cairo. The museum is being moved to the pyramids and the government is moving East to a new city of several million people. Cairo is expected to double its population and perhaps it is best left to the Egyptians. So far, Luxor is far nicer! There is an airport here and a car rental would get one to Giza much more quickly than the train.

Sri Lankan diary. Part 4

  In a particularly cold December, the beaches of Sri Lanka have to be the main attraction. Shortly

after we left, both Europe and America fell into a deep freeze making us feel even more grateful to Jaquetta for masterminding this vacation. Eveline and Charles's beach hotel was the final destination but our reservation began after Christmas. Long before leaving Europe Caroline booked the Daffodil Holiday Guest House on Unawatuna beach as the place to meet Scarlett and Isabella for our Christmas weekend.

  If the beaches are a main attraction, I'd say the lodgings, generally, are not. I shouldn't complain. We stuck to rock bottom prices, and they were cheap. In fact too cheap for the last place and too cheap for this latest place as well. Upon arriving, after a long and sweaty bus ride to a vague destination chosen from Google maps and a laden hike

into a crowded, tacky beach community, our Rastafarian host sheepishly asked for more money saying he mistakenly quoted, thinking we would automatically be taking the breakfast. Poor guy.  I didn't feel sorry for him. Scarlett and Isabella had their own room. Thomasina and Isolde had their own room. The eight of us took every room, and in this competitive little Beach town, a full house at asking prices can't be that bad. It didn't take much convincing. Our house in Italy is offered as an Airbnb accommodation and I found myself, at first, sympathizing with these small business having to cope with rude tourists. But now, writing this, I think they could have done better. All of them. And the whole process of relying on guide books is ridiculous. These places are creepy! Unfamiliar beds, weird plumbing, tasteless decoration, thoughtess furnishings. Anyway, enough ranting. Maybe I'll write a post about Airbnb hosting.

looking for the beach?

  While we were spreading out in our beach resort, Scarlett and Isabella stepped in off the street, dazzling everyone. We now presented six striking women, one fit dude, and an odd looking old man who needed a haircut. Walking down a narrow, winding concrete Lane, running the gamut of shanty tourist businesses, one had to peak between buildings to get a bearing on where the water was. Once gained, the beach was great. A rocky point with a Buddhist shrine on it protected a sweeping bay with a rocky island. The rubbish shanty bars and restaurants on the Lane generously spread nice shade constructions and comfy furniture out on the sand without ever asking us to drink or leave. The place was full of polite people having fun on holiday. After many days in the interior of a hot, humid country,

this, believe it or not, was the top nosh.
all you can eat and a roof top
dining terrace

enjoying their hot crowded buses, we were ready for a plunge. Thomasina, Isolde and Dominic must have felt especially ready because they got in trouble trying to swim to the rocky island. A local on a surf board had to be sent out to steer them back in. And, yet again, that evening Alex somehow sniffed out the best all-you-can eat rice and dal curry joint on the “strip” were we could take plates onto the wobbly flat roof under palm fronds.

  Before we left Europe, Dominic proposed we throw our names into a “secret Santa” lottery which was such a good idea that we appointed him the administrator. I drew Ev & Charles's young son Alex and decided the only thing suitable would be a Ferrari t-shirt. Sounds easy but it wasn't. In fact, it wasn't until we got to Kandy that I found one. This was on a quick stop in the market stalls which also netted me (and Isolde) a pair of leather peasant sandals along with the discovery that we had been seriously duped by the prices of ayuverdic essential oils at the botanical gardens the day before. I padded around proudly in my locally made sandals thinking I was blending in nicely, until I hit the salty sand and realized that one needs native feet to wear native sandals. I quickly rubbed up bleeding blisters that are going home with me.

   We spent two nights at the Daffodil which was a nice change. Too much of our valuable time was being spent on government buses ticking off well trodden tourist traps. The girls got a proper visit to the island in a glass bottomed boat along with a dive to see the little coral reef. This was Christmas day so we treated ourselves to a baked fish cooked on an open brazier on the beach with all the other tourists.

  On boxing day we backpacked out to the highway and caught the coast road bus to Balapitiya where we walked down a jungle lane and out of SriLanka and into the Calamansi Cove hotel, a white-walled compound of four private villas, two four bedroom owner's houses with private kitchens and big, fanned verandahs, a fresh water swimming pool, restaurant, bar, library, life-guarded natural beach front, and a white- jacketed staff to keep things cut, pruned, sprayed, and immaculately tidy. We arrived before EV, Charles and the boys, and met by a group of polite staff who immediately presented us with cool, damp white washcloths, lifted the bags from our shoulders, and led us to our private rooms. Wow. We weren't leaving for eight nights (Thomasina, Dominic and Caroline left early after six nights).

  And it was a lovely week of big family meals, lots of little outings on bicycles and tuk tuk, hours by the pool, and swimming in the surf.

  Happy New Year all.

Sri Lankan diary. Part 3

  On the 23rd of December our van driven by Blackie crested the mountain pass crowded with small vegetable farms and we descended a few hundred meters into the old tea station of Nuwarelia [“New wah rail ya,” accent on rail]. The guide books give it a pass, but Blackie drove us through at a stately pace, passed the golf courses, parks, and what must have been a polo or cricket field. He grandly drove us up to the front door of the grand Hotel, waving to the uniformed doorman and on down the road to the somewhat distant train station. Call me a sentimental imperialist dog, a capitalist pig, out of touch with the people, or an insensitive tourist; but I thought this place showed off Sri Lanka at it’s finest value. How I missed this on our itinerary, I don’t know. Here was clear cool air, good living, fresh vegetables, a minimum of awful squalor and a sort of harmonic feel of agreement with the mountain environment. We should have booked a stay here. If I were to do it again, I would. Catching the train here was a good strategy on Blackie’s part, and we could have done it without him had we only known. All too quickly we were through Nuwarelia and onto the not so beautiful train platform

where the intrigue reached it’s peak. Blackie corralled us on one spot, put me in charge of the tourists, took a handful of big denominations and began his bribery. One minute he was part of the gang, cracking jokes with us; the next minute he would vanish and return to introduce me to someone who didn’t speak English. “Wait here for this guy. He will reserve the seats for you, he works for the railroad, I have known him for 25 years [he didn’t look a day over 23], the seats might not be together. He will cost 5000 rupees.”

  The train finally rolled in. There was a great shifting of people. Damned few got off that I could

count. We stayed put. Blackie and his man could be seen shuttling back and forth among the rail cars. Then he reappeared with a shake of the head. No reserved seats. You must stand. Come with me. We raced down the platform, stepped into a car, “No! Not that one.” Back down the train. Another car. People scurrying like sand crabs, leaving us like clods in slow motion with our heavy backpacks. Up step. Cram in. 5000 rupees returned in the scrum, and we found ourselves waving goodbye to Blackie as the train slowly gained speed. Despite his failure, I wished him well and felt he had done his best to the end.

  I can't decide if it was the highlight of the trip, but it did deliver wonderful scenery, winding slowly through the mountains on a fairly high traverse. Local farmers did try to use it. One poor guy sat on the sink. A couple of others brought their collection of hoes, cultivators and sacks of potatoes aboard, tangling the feet of the tourists. We found ourselves across from the counter of the dining car, windows only on one side. The car was crowded. Those who stood at the windows across from the counter held their territory, but sitting on the floor at the two open doors at the end of the car

delivered the most fun, and comfort. The train would pass a little tunnel, emerge on the opposite slope, and the sitters at the door would find their feet hanging over a sick-making precipice. One valuable door seat was occupied by a snoring, tattooed backpacker who tempted me to roll him out on a suitable traverse. The rest of us stood, pitching and weaving, staggered by the ageing track, stooping occasionally for a peak at the countryside. This could be a bus trip in that regard except for one thing. No road. Without a road to deliver customers, there were no roadside vendors with piles of coconuts, stacks of worn-out tires, smudgy cook fires, rusting tractor parts, cheesy Chinese clothing, and empty, rotting vendor shelters soiling the country. The views out of the window looked a lot better. No wonder this train ride is so popular among guidebook writers. And the popularity didn't really hit me until we pulled into Ella, our highly recommended, “quaint” little mountain town. The great press of white faces squeezed out of the train and clogged the platform, everybody dressed in the backpacker uniform, like me, leaving the train luxuriously empty. A local, caught in the crush looked at me and said, “Badulla is better..” Badulla is the final stop, and looking carefully at the map, we missed a nice length of track. I'm haunted by the thought that Blackie had the right idea but the start/stop stations wrong, but I'll never really know.

 

 Ella, then. Our next goal, The Tunnel Corner Guest House, we found under a low corrugated, verandah roof. The disarmingly smiley host had our rooms ready and served up a nice, complimentary tray of undrinkable tea or coffee on our arrival. Our low room contained two double beds with full, four-posted mosquito nets and no room for luggage and people. The mosquito nets almost touched the ceiling. Once two adults and two teenagers filled the beds, the temperature became unbearable. There might have been a window but I don't remember it; but it's surprising what one is willing to forgive for a place to safely drop a heavy backpack in a hot climate. Next stop, the loo. And then, the Wi-Fi password. After the long train ride, we didn't have a lot of time left for Ella, but we did have the intention of walking to the top of Little Adams peak. And that was great. It was such a relief to get ones feet on the actual ground. Dominic ran to the top in an alarming show of fitness, then he ran back down to us and ran up again. We stood on top just at sunset.  Leaving Ella, we also left the Central Highlands. Our bus rumbled across increasingly flat, hot, and humid open country occasionally relieved by sodden rice paddies or small lakes and clumps of rubber and coconut jungle. Throughout SriLanka I felt frustrated by my poor preparation for the plant life.
    Back in Dambulla, I loved it when Ebony and Teak trees were pointed out. Mango, Jack fruit, Papaya all grew in a jumble and I tried to keep them sorted. Three types of coconut were identified, including the hairy brown ones for eating (remarkably tender and mild compared to the dried out pulp we find in the supermarkets), and a smooth yellow one that locals would try and sell. They would lop the top off and stick in a straw and charge 100 or 200 rupees. My favorite is the pineapple, it's rough skin sliced off and the fruit radially sliced to present big up when held upside down by the leaves. You break off chunks of the spears getting sticky hands. Mangos are sliced longitudinally alongside the big seed giving two “halves” the flesh of which is crisscrossed. Then when the skin is inverted, the fruit is popped up presenting little cubes and the hairy seed with its rim of fruit gets handed to the kids.

      Move. Eat. Sleep. Move. Eat. Sleep. We were becoming nomads and the act of actually living in Sri Lanka seemed to be slipping through my fingers. We walked the length of main street once, then back, then stood in front of a restaurant that had a gadget high in a tree that projected tiny moving colored lights all over the road. There was nothing to learn here, except that mass market tourism is king.

      Next morning up early for a bus to Tissamaharama on the boundary of the Yala national park. At this point we had a gap in our planning. Leaving Italy, we had been unable to connect the tour from the mountains to the coastal resort where we would join the rest of the Cadell clan. In the way, stood national parks featuring wild animal safaris. Blackie told us to go to Yala and to get an old scout to drive us and that's what we did. The day before, Caroline and I made an Airbnb reservation on the fly that looked like a remarkable bargain, and with that as a goal we set off. The host of The Tunnel Corner escorted us to the roadside and waved on a couple of busses until the right one arrived. We'd have to anticipate our jumping off point and hire tuk tuks but we were assured that this was the bus. It was surprisingly empty and we all found seats, but the comfort was short lived. Two or three switchbacks down the gorge we passed a truck on its side, somehow missing the precipitous plunge that some of its cargo experienced. After a couple of stops, I found myself compressed securely by my neighbor for the rest of the two hours across the flat alluvial plane of southern SriLanka.
       Shortly after we turned up in tuk tuks on the outskirts of Tissamaharama, La Safari Inn realized we were staying for cheap. Their listing at AirBnB allowed me to book all six of us for $24. I was put on the phone to the owner and held them to our agreement. Airbnb already had my money but unbeknownst to me, they cancelled our Airbnb reservation. That wasn't very nice. They finally agreed the damage was done and rather than risk a bad review, they let us stay. It would only be fair if we employed their Safari services to terrorize the animals. But they only offered a morning drive and we had already arranged something for the afternoon. The hotel workers were very nice and offered us bicycles to explore the surrounding rice paddies, which I did, and I tipped them nicely.  The rest of us took the Safari which went well, everybody had a great time even spotting one of the famous leopards. That evening we walked a kilometer or two to the outskirts of Tissamaharama where Alex and Caroline chose another dirty little restaurant which the rest of us would never dare enter. And, once again, we enjoyed several helpings of tasty stuff for next to nothing, entertaing the locals while we were at it. We walked back through dark jungle tracks. And next morning, we were on another bus.

Sri Lankan diary part 2

  I'm not speaking for everyone, but I loved the Ameelia Guest House. I think the girls hated it.

Caroline felt Alex and I got the best room. It wasn't especially clean or comfortable: No screens or mosquito nets, no soap, no hot water, a crude cabinet with a clothing rail but no hangers, thin mattresses on creaky wooden slats, spiders the size of tea cups, geckos in the shower, and a long way to the shops. And all this for 23 bucks a night. For two. We took all three spare rooms, Dominic and Caroline in one balcony room, Alex and I in the other. We stashed the two girls into a damp, windowless cell. For the first time since we landed, I felt we had finally escaped the well trodden tourist track and stepped into the country of the SriLankans. Kumari and her husband Abey have lived in the house for 30 years. It is named after their younger daughter who attends law school near Colombo. Ameelia was home for the holidays but I only spoke with her once. Kumari and Abey were clearly proud of their house and possibly blind to its shortcomings in the eyes of western travelers, yet completely generous with anything it could offer. The garage was spread with mangoes recently harvested from the huge tree over their driveway and ripe ones were selected for us. The house is built on a steep north slope with a nice view of high mountains to the north. Unlike the last stop, we were in a modest family home in the suburbs away from the noise and mess of town. It is a brick structure with a white plaster veneer. A clean, tiled verandah spreads across the front with an attached double garage alongside over which they have built two bedrooms with adjoining balconies and two bathrooms in the back. Their kitchen reminded me of the old masonry kitchens of rural ltaly with its crude gas burners mounted in a large masonry niche in the wall which was likely a wood burning fireplace originally, the whole thing fairly grimy with age. Every sink and water tap we encountered in SriLanka was loose, and the Ameelia house was no different. When you turned the tap handle, the spout would revolve until water poured off the side of the sink. I often found myself reaching underneath and finger-tightening the fixing screws. We didn’t encounter running hot water until we reached Eveline and Charles’s hotel. I tried to spend as much time as I could with Kumari and Abey trading stories of fixing up old houses and bringing up two daughters. Abey described the mix of the SriLankan population: a majority of Buddhists, ten percent Hindus left over from English imported labor, and a smaller fraction of Muslims and Christians. The Tamils grew out of the Hindu fraction and a militant wing has caused a lot of trouble until brutal suppression by the government has rendered the country reasonably stable. Kandy is an important city in the central mountain region. It's economy benefits largely from the tea plantations begun by the English and now entirely owned by SriLankan interests. Muslims, it was explained, were more acquisitive, more forceful business people and would be found in the cities. They were different, they wore hats. When it came time to visit the city of Kandy, we walked down the hill and caught the “government” bus to downtown.

  I recognized something in Kandy we hadn’t seen for a while. Sidewalks.  And more-or-less western style shops. Kandy is apparently prosperous enough to afford sidewalks and they were surprisingly welcome to me. Maybe it’s because I fall down a lot after wearing progressive bi-focal eyeglasses. In a couple of days I would miss a step and fall in front of an audience, skinning my shin. Luckily I didn’t fall down in Kandy.

  Kandy is famous for the huge Buddhist palace, the Palace of the Tooth. The tooth is a relic found after the Buddha's funeral pyre had cooled. It is capable of miracles, and it has been usurped as the symbol of royalty for thousands of years. The temple built to house it sprawls along the shore of Kandy's lake, and like all buddhist temples, painted bright white and brilliantly lit. It's entrance is graced by a large park and protected by a reflecting moat. One joins the “foreign” ticket que to enter, first paying an unusually large amount, followed by a somewhat lesser amount to safely leave ones shoes. Only Caroline and I felt it worthwhile. We followed the mixed throng of white-robbed faithful and curious tourists. Our que slowed and compressed until it became necessary to push with real, competitive determination. Two drummers, amplified to a painful level, tapped a somber beat, highlighted by occasional bangs, repeated hypnotically and joined occasionally by a recording of monotone, reedy chanting. Firmly sandwiched between strangers (Caroline and I mercifully separated), we inched along and up some steps until, suddenly, we gained a small window giving an incomplete, internal view to a ridiculously ornate golden, inverted cone maybe three feet high and ten feet away. Passed this, the pressure eased and we were able to escape and wander to admire

offerings

the architecture, people, and lesser relics; disoriented by the amplified nasal horn chant and drum bangs. We left with the gift of a small CD, hopefully a recording to hypnotize myself with later.

temple museum

    Now it was time to find something to eat. Alex and Caroline leading us again past respectable looking places with printed menus to sidewalk vendors with butane tanks and open burners (and no sinks!). We bought a plate of chopped and chillied tortillas leaving me yearning for simple dahl and rice. At the end of the sidewalk stood the Muslim Hotel with its open restaurant on the ground floor, a bank of stainless cafeteria chafing bins displayed threatening ponds of dark curries. Muslims eat beef and this appealed to Dominic. They also serve dahl and rice which appealed to me, and within a sort of glass phone booth at the entry point someone was slapping dough into a hot steel surface which appealed to the kottu eaters. We sat at a marble table in a lofty, noisy room and got no service at all. A white bearded fellow was doing the best he could with a full room and every so often a dish of something was slid onto our table as he passed. Thomasina reminded us to eat with our right hands until a few damp spoons arrived. Over in the back corner one was encouraged to use the public sink. Near the end of the meal, stiff paper place mats arrived which others appeared to be using as napkins. I was mesmerized by a neighbor eating alone who spent a long time tearing his tortillas to bits and building a small hill. He then dipped each bit into whatever curry was in front of

him. It all looked so appetizing I copied his method from then on, being careful not to bring my left hand near my mouth.

fresh mountain air

  The next day in Kandy, we rejoined the tourist trail. Over a mountain pass to the east sat a small town bragging a domestic elephant treatment center with a nationally subsidized botanical garden next door. The six of us, looking doubtfully at the confusing choice of buses, attracted the attention of a tour guide and his father's van. He quickly convinced us we would save no money on a round trip bus ticket for six vs. his very good value van, not to mention his deep experience and social connections. We expected a scenic drive in the mountains, but instead suffered an awful, nonstop, choking cruise through deep valleys lined with shabby, one room businesses stuck in a carbon monoxide inversion layer. Surviving this, we found ourselves paying to look at elephants unfit to slave

away in the logging camps, but cured enough to perform a few tricks for the foreigners. Next door at the essential oil farm, a talkative guide took us on a walk through a beautifully groomed forest with small bottles of extract at the base of selected plants. We were led under a palm frond shelter where a group of young, shy trainees quickly had our shirts off to practice the art of Ayurvedic massage therapy. I found it quite funny, maybe because I'm ticklish and horribly skeptical. Sufficiently softened, we then found ourselves subjected to a serious shake down in the gift shop which proved four times more expensive than the local markets. Safely delivered back in the chaos of Kandy, and satisfied with our true Sri Lankan experience, we ambled through the street markets and returned to our Muslim Hotel for supper.

   A backpacker’s website convinced Alex that one of our main goals in Sri Lanka must be the train from Kandy to Ella through tea plantation country. There was some agreement among train spotters on the internet that this was one of the most wonderful train rides anywhere.  Precise information on anything in SriLanka is never easy to nail down. Probably because nothing runs to schedule or description. It was suggested we try and reserve tickets for this train over the internet, but due to prevarication and an inability to agree on our touring schedule, we waited until we arrived in Kandy before trying to buy a train ticket. Which proved to be a month too late. Our public display of disappointment attracted the attention of a particularly clever van owner. “Blackie” began with Isolde,

Blackie's windshield

explaining the map of SriLanka and where we were and where we wanted to go. Then he picked away at me, working his way to Alex who clearly held all the cards. It took a bit of time and a bit of cagey diplomacy but he succeeded in proposing a plan to board the train at a halfway point in the mountains where he predicted many locals would get off. To get to this halfway point, he, of course, offered his van along with all his tourguide knowledge for a mere fortune, virtually guaranteeing success and Alex’s happiness. Unable to resist for lack of a better plan, and being pretty much fed up with Kandy, we accepted his offer. But not without negotiating a free pick-up from our guest house on the mountain. Six in the morning, there he was with his van waiting for us to finish packing and off we went for a long drive into the mountains.

  Honestly, it was a fairly spectacular ride. Most of it was an endless, switch back climb through gorgeously groomed tea plantations dating back to the British Empire. All the plantations are located at high elevations and all continue to be maintained in exquisite condition despite being owned entirely by SriLankans funded by SriLankan banking. The British names have been retained so Lipton still shows up on the signs. Blackie had a nearly new van with excellent, mild air-conditioning; and he drove well, stopping now and then to let us see the sights. Tea in Ceylon is not native but a creation of English business. In 1824, the first tea plant was brought to Ceylon from India as a botanical experiment. By 1870, coffee cultivation was wiped out by fungus, but in 1867 James Taylor
already began the rescue by starting the first tea plantation in Kandy. By 1972, the government nationalized the plantations and began strict control of cultivation. Today it is a $1.5 billion business employing millions including over 200,000 on the estates. According to Blackie, the pickers are third generation descendants of Indian Tamils first imported as cheap labor by the English to work the coffee plantations. Women do all the picking, men work in the processing sheds, and the jobs are hereditary. They pick a quota daily which they can exceed for more pay. It was impressive seeing them high on the steep slopes shouldering heavy bags either barefoot or with thin sandals. From the comfort of our van, I appreciated, with some feelings of guilt, the gorgeously manicured mountainsides, a stark contrast to the endless shanty shacks of roadside businesses that spoil SriLanka. Along with tea, the mountains provide an abundance of fresh vegetables that thrive in the cooler, pure air. It's agricultura intensivo requiring intricate terracing and complex water management, but the crops go year ‘round eventually finding their way to the messy markets in Dambulla. A nice contrast.