Seasons on the Move

Cairo – January 27

Yara came by the hotel in the morning and we drove out to Wadi Degla to shoot the ending to the film. Ash came with us serving as both the love interest in the film as well as the location guide. Fog hung among the desert hills, giving the place an ominous feel. Yara nailed all of her scenes and Ash led us to great spots.

After finishing in the desert, we stopped for lunch in Maadi before returing to the hotel to finish the film outright. I lost a lot of daylight and had some more minor camera problems, but we got the film in the can. When the last roll of film finished, Fab and I vowed never again to shoot without more production support. I believe in succeeding against all odds, but this project was turning out to be a cosmic joke.  

Cairo – January 26

Another day in Cairo with nothing to do. In the morning, I had a shouting match with Fed Ex and Egyptian customs when they overcharged on the two cameras Craig had sent me from Canada. I lost the argument. Still, I had the cameras and was ready to shoot the remainder of the film the following day.

In the afternoon, I went down to the university bookstore to see if a copy of the Ethiopian guidebook had arrived. It hadn’t, but the manager told me that it would be in the next day, something I would have to see to believe.

Cairo – January 25

Fab and I went to Zamelek, a neighborhood situated on an islet in the Nile, to do some shopping. A Colombian guy we met the night before, Felipe, decided to join us. Fab and I wanted to pick up some cheap Egyptian movie memorabilia from a store we had found during our first stay in Cairo. Felipe just wanted to come along for the ride and relieve himself of the burden of having to always speak English.

Felipe had just returned from Tanzania. He told us about his climb to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro as well as his five day safari. Being a budget traveler, Felipe broke the bank in Tanzania, but said it was well worth the money spent. Fab and I felt our stomachs drop when we heard how much he had paid. Maybe going to Tanzania was not such a good idea after all.

 We spent the night in the lounge area of the hotel watching “Charlie’s Angels” and drinking beer. Andy, a man from Scotland, told about his upcoming bicycle trip down through Africa. He planned to bike from Egypt, through Sudan, down through Kenya and Tanzania, before making his way through Mozambique to South Africa. Given the situation in Kenya, he was trying to figure out another route, something that everyone in the room agreed was a good idea.

Cairo – January 24

Fab and I bummed around the hotel, trying our best to avoid Caroline, a nutty seventy year old British woman with a shock of white hair and the build of a scrawny, wet cat. According to Ash, Caroline comes to Cairo every year to spend six months. During the day, she sings vocal arpeggios in her room and rocks back and forth by herself in the corner of the lounge area. When not frigthening everybody else, she pesters the staff with questions like, “Mohammed? What is the Arabic word for gahhhden?” Once, I saw inside her room and noticed that she had covered the walls with random clipping from fashion magazines.

After the sun went down, Fab and I sat around with Hannah and mocked the bad movies on television. The worst of them all was a Charlie / Martin Sheen starrer directed by, of all people, Bret Micheals of eighties hair metal fame. We all wondered what had gone through the minds of the Sheens. Did they lose a bet? Did Charlie agree to the film during an all-night coke fueled bender? No matter what the reason, it couldn’t have been good enough to participate in dross like this.

Cairo – January 23

After much debate and hand wringing, Fab and I decided to drop Kenya from our list of destinations. Fab had spoke with our friend Nadeem the day before and he informed her that his father was going to have to shut down his camp and that he figured the country was headed for civil war. We decided that we would fly to Tanzania instead.

We went down to the Ethiopian Airlines office and booked our tickets. We were set to fly from Cairo to Addis Ababa on the 28th of January and then to Mt. Kilimanjaro on the 16th of February. We figured that Tanzania was good option because we could still go on a safari, although for a much higher price than in Kenya, and see the mountain as an added bonus. Suddenly, I had visions of drinking whisky, smoking cigars and hunting Kudu. Maybe we wouldn’t get to see Nadeem, but at least I could fulfill my Hemingway fantasy, except for the hunting part.

Cairo – January 22

Fab and I fell into a deep funk. A day of depression. The ups and downs of the day before had taken their toll. The film was proving to be a total hassle. We couldn’t get a break. Well, we got plenty of breaks but they just happened to take place inside the camera. At least I had Craig. The guy has bailed me out of more situations than I care to admit. Without his support, I doubted whether or not the completion of the film could have been possible.  

Cairo – January 20

My film had arrived while we were down in Upper Egypt. My friend Sahar had agreed to receive the film so I went to meet her for coffee and pick up the film. We exchanged a few pleasantries and then I returned downtown to the hotel. If all went well, we could have the film completed over the course of the next few days.

Later in the day, Fab and I went to meet Yara, the lead actress in our film. We met her at a different coffee shop and talked about the project. She was willing to shoot immediately, but needed to get it done before she began production on another film later in the week. This was good news for Fab and I because we had decided to fly to Ethiopia on the weekend.

At night, Fab and I paid a visit to the hospital so Fab could get some tests done. For the past month, she had been having problems with her stomach. Upon inspection, the doctor figured that she had a parasite living in her gut, a little parting gift from India.

Cairo – January 19 

We got into Cairo at 4am, well ahead of the scheduled arrival time. Outside the station, we tried to hire a cab to take us to our hotel.

“Welcome to Cairo! Where you from?”

“Midan Talaat Harb, seven pounds.”

“You stay hotel? First time Cairo?”

“No, not first time. Seven pounds, Midan Talaat Harb.”

“Not seven pounds, twenty five pounds. Good price.”

“Not good price. Seven pounds. I know how much it costs.”

“Okay, twenty pounds. We go now.”

Fab and I were both too tired to play this game. We walked past the taxi drivers parked outside the station and headed for the street.

“Okay, okay. Seven pounds, we go now.”

Funny how a little indifference can change a cab driver’s mind.

When we got to the hotel, they had a room waiting for us. Fab and I immediately jumped under the covers and slept until noon. We spent the rest of the day lazing about in the lounge area with the newly arrived guests. There was Willie; a portly Scotsman that looked like Bam Bam Bigelow, Hannah; a sarcastic girl from Vancouver, and Lance; a British guy trying way too hard to channel his inner Hugh Jackman.

At night, the group of us from the afternoon sat around and drank a few beers with Ash, the owner of the hotel. He told us some horror stories from the hotel, one of which involved a Canadian soldier on leave from Afghanistan. To make a long story short, the soldier had checked into the hotel, been quiet at first and then started drinking heavily. After the third day of his bender, the soldier lost his mind and tried to snap the neck of a teenage Colombian guy staying at the hotel. Why? Ash couldn’t say. The soldier then went beserk, Ash locked him in a bathroom, the soldier smashed the window and poured booze all over the next door mosque. Naturally, this angered more than a few people and soon the hotel was full with angry devout Muslims. The soldier, still locked in the bathroom, then tried to jump out the window. Ash unlocked the door, hit the man with a pipe and then hog tied him, dragged him into a bedroom and called the Canadian embassy. Five hours later, the place was full with Canadian officials and military commanders. Not surprisingly, the Egyptain police wanted to take the soldier, something that Ash admitted would have ”literally scarred him forever”.  

Luxor – January 18

In the morning we went out to the Valley of the Kings to take a look at the wealth of tombs located at the site. We had a different guide in the morning, actually we had had a different guide every morning. We also had more of the same shifting of cars, people and general disorganization.

By the time we got to the Valley of the Kings, our guide told us we only had 45 minutes to view the tombs. Fab and I disobeyed and took an hour and a half. In our minds, we had waited a long time to see the site and weren’t going to be forced to rush by a guide that wanted to finish his day early. We also knew that our guide had scheduled a stop at an alabaster factory (re: shop) and we wanted nothing to do with that.

Displeased with our guide, we decided to tour the site on our own. Our ticket allowed us entrance to three tombs so we visited Tutmoses III, Ramses III and Ramses IV, all of which were packed with senior citizens from different nationalities. The tombs were hot inside and painted in fading colours. Although the two Ramses were more important historically, I though the Tutmoses tomb was the best, aside from the annoying baksheesh men passing out make shift fans made from small pieces of cardboard.

The next stop was at the Temple of Hatshepsut, XVII Dynasty – 175 BC. In 1998, 58 tourists we gunned down at the temple when members of the Muslim Brotherhood came down out the surrounding hills wielding Kalishnikovs. While we were there, the place was crawling with armed security guards. The setting of the temple was great, but there wasn’t too much to see there. The more places Fab and I visited, the more we wished we had taken a primer course on Egyptology.

Next stop was the Valley of the Queens. Pretty much the same layout as the Valley of the Kings, but not as impressive. There were only three tombs open for viewing, none of which compared to the Valley of the Kings. There were also less tourists there which meant that the baksheesh men couldn’t afford to leave us alone. In one of the tombs, a man followed us without saying a word and then asked for a tip once we left. Uh, no.

After a brief lunch, we went to see Karnak Temple. The place was huge. Upon arriving, our guide turned to Fab and I and said in front of the whole group, “I know you two don’t want to be part of my tour so you can leave now. Just try and meet us back here in two hours.”

Karnak Temple has numerous pylons, courtyards and chambers. There were also 134 giant pillars, all intricately carved, which served no apparent purpose, but were neat to look at nonetheless. I’m not sure I would do the place justice by trying to describe it more. There was so much to see there that its almost pointless to try.

We bid farewell to Thomas and Julian soon after dark and then went to the train station. More confusion with our tickets and more hassle with the baksheesh men. I’ve never been to a country where more people want tips for doing nothing than the men around the historical sites in Egypt. Stressing, to say the least.