My trip to Egypt

LAURI KUBUITSILE | Friday July 2, 2010 00:00

A writing friend had posted a link to a site about an international writers' residency in El Gouna on Facebook and, on a whim, I applied thinking I hadn't a chance since writers from all over the world would be applying. To my surprise, a few months later I got an email saying that I'd been chosen for the May 2010 group. All costs for the month would be covered if I could get myself there. The airfare round trip was about P6,000, going from Gaborone, via Johannesburg, to Cairo and then to Hurghada, the nearest international airport to El Gouna.   

I knew little about Egypt when I left, save for the fact that they have a powerful football team and a history of pharaohs that were laid to rest wrapped as mummies and buried in beautiful tombs.  In the end, I had a month to learn about this diverse country and it wasn't nearly enough.

The place the writers stayed was the town of  El Gouna, which is located north of Hurghada on the northern end of the Red Sea. El Gouna is a make believe place and quite unlike anywhere else in Egypt. It started 20 years ago when a wealthy Egyptian man, Samih Sawiris, chairman of Orascom Hotels & Development, decided he would like to get some land in the desert along the Red Sea and build a few villas for his family and friends. He did this and then suddenly everyone wanted a villa. And then some people wanted to stay only a few nights in El Gouna, so he built some hotels.

Then the workers needed accommodation, and their children needed schools. People needed places to worship so he built a Coptic church (the Egyptian Christians) and a mosque. And soon there was a proper town, with shops and a post office and a library and a few university branches.  It has a state of the art recycling programme and an organic farm, fish farm and winery.

Everything in El Gouna is owned by Orascom though the hotels are managed by big chains such as Movenpick and Club Med. As El Gouna grew, not all of the villas and hotels could be on the ocean, so they have dug artificial canals and lagoons so that every property has a water front. Because of this a lot of places within the town can be accessed by boat.

For the month of the writers' residency I stayed at the Egyptian five-star Steigenberger Hotel. El Gouna is an ideal tourist destination with an easy to use shuttle system that can get you around the town. There are lovely restaurants and an outdoor cinema. There are all sorts of things going on especially at the Marina where they have street performances and other entertainment. Since it is on the sea, it is a mecca for water sport lovers.

The Red Sea is one of the best places on earth for diving and snorkelling. I went out on a day's snorkelling trip. It cost 175 Egyptian pounds (P215). I organised and paid for the trip at the hotel. They picked me at our hotel with a shuttle boat which took me out into the ocean to a larger boat where I was joined by tourists from other hotels in El Gouna. When everyone had arrived, we headed out to the first coral reef which was about an hour and half out. Dolphins travelled with us for some distance, perhaps to remind us that the first place we would be snorkelling was called Dolphin House.

I had never snorkelled before but I can promise you I will definitely be doing it again. It was incredible! It is as if there is this whole hidden world under the surface of the water that I never knew about. A world of colourful mountains with valleys full of striped and neon fish in every shape and size imaginable. The coral is purple and bright blue and yellow and the fish are just as colourful. They swim around you unafraid. At our first stop, we swam with a huge sea turtle.

It is easy to snorkel. Even non-swimmers can do it by wearing a life jacket. The Red Sea is very salty and that helps to make you quite buoyant. One thing to keep in mind is that though you feel as if you are under water you are actually swimming on the surface. This means the back of you body is getting the hot Egyptian sun for hours.Please do as I say not how I did, wear sunscreen and keep applying it.

We were served lunch on the boat and then we were off to another snorkelling spot. In this place, the coral was quite high and not far from the surface of the water. The captain warned us that we should not touch or step on the coral as it takes more than 40 years for coral to recover from even one footprint.

Another day trip I took with a few of the writers was to Luxor. From El Gouna you head almost straight west to the Nile River a distance of about 300 km to reach Luxor. You travel through desert and then suddenly everything turns green as the canals from the Nile pour water into small tidy fields where all sorts of crops are grown.

Luxor is one of the main sites if you want to see ancient Egyptian ruins. This is where you can see the magnificent Karnak Temple, the Valley of the Kings, where the tombs of the pharaohs are located, and the beautiful temple Djeser-Djeseru, for the female pharaoh Hatshepsut.

We organised a tour from El Gouna. We paid 700 Egyptian pounds (P860)  each (we were four in total) and that covered the combi driving to Luxor and back, lunch at a five star hotel, entry to Valley of the Kings including three tombs, entry to Djeser-Djeseru and Karnak Temple and a very informed and enthusiastic tour guide, ours was called Maria.

Luxor is in the desert so it can be very hot. It was about 40C when we were there, but it can be much hotter. For me, the most interesting of the three sites was Djeser-Djeseru, mostly because shortly before I left for Egypt I had read Double Crown by South African author Marie Heese, which is a fictional account of Hatshepsut's reign.  It is astounding to look at Hatshepsut's temple, designed and built by her architect Senenmut, and realise it was built over 3,000 years ago. It is architecturally very different from any other Egyptian monument. It is built directly into the hill behind which is the Valley of the Kings.

Pharaoh Hatshepsut like her temple was an anomaly in many ways. She was initially a regent acting on behalf of her stepson. After three years, she declared herself king. She was pharaoh of both Upper and Lower Egypt for 20 peaceful and successful years.

During her reign she had many monuments built and when her image is on them she is shown as a man with a beard.  After her death, her stepson Thutmose the II became pharaoh. In an attempt to wipe Hatshepsut from history, he had images of her destroyed. The workers he instructed to carry out this task were not thorough though, so eventually Hatshepsut's legacy was restored.

In Luxor, for 100 Egyptian pounds (P125) you can take a short ride on the Nile River to cross from the west bank, where the Valley of Kings and Djeser-Djeseru  are located, to the east Bank where Karnak Temple is. The boat ride on the breezy Nile is a welcome relief after the heat of the Valley of the Kings.

There is so much to see and do in Luxor and like most places in Egypt more time is needed than a day trip to see everything. When I go back, I intend to spend a few days, at least, in Luxor. Also, I think it's wise to go armed with a bit of knowledge of the pharaonic time in Egypt. Since I knew quite a bit about Hatshepsut, I found everything I saw there concerning her more interesting. I found it difficult to keep all of the information straight about the other pharaohs since I was learning everything while there. Egypt has a written history going back to 3000 BC and a rich culture so there is plenty to learn.

Before leaving Egypt, I spent a day in Cairo with a friend to one of the other writers, an academic at the university, who turned out to be the best tour guide in the world. She took me and a two other writers around Old Cairo.

There she had organised permission for us to climb to the top of one of the oldest mosques up in the minaret.With an eagle's view, we looked out over the city of a thousand mosques and it was breathtaking, a site I will never forget.

There is something quite captivating about the ancient beauty of Cairo coming from Botswana where everything seems only built yesterday. There is a fantastical wild chaos about Cairo, where goats idle on top of sky scrapers and people jam every tiny space once the sun sets, where a chemist open at 4 am is the norm rather than the exception. If Batswana were under the impression that we may be the worst drivers in the world, have no fear, as Cairo drivers are far out in front of us. I was in the city for less than a few hours and saw my first car accident.Traffic rules seem to be more of a suggestion than laws to be followed.

When in Cairo I also went to the Egyptian Museum, home to some of the most important Egyptian artifacts including the contents of Tutankhamun's tomb including his coffin made of 110 kg of gold and his gold mask- both absolutely beautiful.

You can pay 100 Egyptian pounds to enter the special mummy room in the museum. This room contains the real, actual mummies of some of the pharaohs including Hatshepsut, Thutmose the II, and Ramses II among others.

It's a strange room. These are the real corpses of these pharaohs and somehow it seems wrong to be looking at them, but at the same time there is an eerie fascination.

The whole room gives you such a strange feeling. The mummies are unwrapped in places and you can see their hair or their fingernails. They are in glass cases and the room is very cold.

Egypt is a country that needs time to be discovered fully. The people are friendly and I never once felt unsafe except perhaps when trying to cross a street in Cairo. It is not that expensive and in some places such as Luxor or El Gouna, or the cheaper nearby town of Hurghada, you can rent an apartment from locals instead of staying in the quite costly hotels. I learned so much about this fascinating country and its history and can't wait to go back again.