At the age of 19 I left home and travelled across Europe and the Middle East. During this time I wrote a diary which, I confess, omitted detail, partly because I did not have time or space to expand on the basic details, and partly because I was uncertain whether my parents might read it. I wrote this following piece to start to address this shortfall. It covers just a few days in my travels, but it contains considerably more detail. I hope to expand a bit more in other items.
19th
April 1971
45 years ago on 19th April 1971 I was staying in the Youth
Hostel in Cairo. I had arrived there the day before from Aswan where
I and a few others of various nations whom I had met in the Youth
Hostel in Luxor had been seeing some of the sights of the Aswan area.
In my case these included a trip on a Felucca with a boatman guide
and an American called Craig. Because we were too lazy to plan, we
were unable to visit Abu Simbel, but did see the wonders of
Kitchener's island, The Aga Khan's tomb and Elephantine Island, all
of which I would recommend to anyone who has the courage and
wherewithal to travel to Nubia in Southern Egypt.
I noted in my diary that “While on the trip our boatman said that
he could get a trip and a guide to the High Dam for LE5 [5 Egyptian
Lire], so Ole and Craig said they would share the cost. After the
trip we bought train tickets and waited in the hostel for their
guide. He never turned up, so we caught the train to Cairo, a 16
hour journey. We got a compartment to ourselves and slept
uncomfortably and fitfully.” I read this now with a sense of
wonder that I, a young man of barely 20, could have simply booked a
16 hour train journey from one end of Egypt to the other. I assume
that the journey itself was uneventful as I have not noted anything
that I considered noteworthy even though Egyptian trains were an
interesting form of transport at that time, free travel being
available on the roof.
So on 19th April I find myself in Cairo having travelled
south and back north by rail and in so doing become part of an
impromptu band of fellow travellers. At some point it must have been
decided that we should go on a trip to Giza to ride camels to the
Step Pyramid at Saqqara as I note in my diary that “We all
(everybody that was in Luxor) got up and headed off towards Giza to
ride camels out to Zaccara. Hired the camels and set off.” 45
years ago, the area around the pyramids was largely undeveloped, so
we would have caught the number 8 bus to Giza, crossed the road and
started negotiating for a number of camels to take us to Saqqara.
None of us had any real idea of how far Saqqara was and had no
experience of camels, but it seemed like a good idea at the time;
after all Lawrence had done it. What could go wrong?
The first thing you have to do is mount the beast. This is not as
simple as hooking your foot into a stirrup and throwing your leg over
the beast's back. Firstly the camel's back is not flat. It has a
lump in the middle which makes casually throwing your leg over a very
difficult proposition. Secondly, to cater for the idiosyncrasies of
the camel's back, a strange saddle with wooden horns front and back
is perched on the hump. The natives sit on this saddle as if born to
it, then cross their legs over the camel's neck, casually holding the
reins in one hand. A few clicks of the tongue and gentle prods with
a stick and the animal does exactly what they want it to. The
unwitting tourist does not, of course, know camel language. The
first thing to learn is the noise that gets the camel to kneel down
so that you have at least a fighting chance of getting on his back.
To do this one makes a strange guttural noise in the back of the
throat similar to the noise one would make if preparing to
expectorate. With luck the camel will respond to this by kneeling
down on its front legs and then lowering its hind quarters to the
ground. More often than not, the camel merely repeats the same noise
adopts a haughty demeanour and looks the other way. Picture the
scene: a bunch of long haired hippy types stood around the pyramids,
each with a disdainful camel on the end of a rein, all appearing to
be about to expectorate being treated with naught but contempt by
their charges.
We were all rescued by the camels' handlers who with practised ease
used the correct “word” and the camels (still looking superior)
lay down to allow us to mount them. We tourists were allowed
stirrups to assist us in staying on these unwieldy creatures, so it
was a relatively easy matter to grab the front horn of the saddle,
reach up to place a foot in a stirrup and swing the free leg over the
saddle. A further command from the handlers to camels and they rose
to their feet in the reverse order to the method of descent, i.e.
rear legs first and then front legs. By some fluke all of us
tourists managed to stay in the saddle by hanging on as we were
tipped forward at an unsustainable angle before being flung back onto
an almost level position a considerable distance from the ground.
Now mounted, the rest was relatively simple, a sharp dig in the
camel's ribs with the heels made it go forward, more digs made it go
faster, and a tug on the reins made it slow down – or at least that
was the principle. In truth, the camels generally followed the
handlers who were, curiously I thought, mounted on horses, so our
mounts were simply indulging our fantasy of being in control. From
time to time they rebelled against our pretence of control by
wandering off on their own to nibble at somebody's carefully tended
hedge, or, much more concerning, by heading aggressively off towards
a tethered water buffalo. It seems that these huge beasts are
terrified of camels and the camels know it and love to wind them up.
Fortunately for all concerned the handlers were aware of the risks
and managed to head off the camels before the buffalo became to
agitated.
Once we reached the open desert we had managed to achieve a degree of
control over our mounts and started to race them over the sand. This
was great fun as there is an awful lot of sand in the Sahara and once
one has got used to the strange undulating action of the camels, the
speed is very exciting and feels bizarrely safe, after all what is
the worst that is likely to happen? You might fall off and land on
the biggest sand pit in Africa. This illusion was unfortunately
shattered by Ole, a very tall Norwegian sat astride a suitably huge
camel. At the end of one of one of the races which Ole and his camel
had easily won, his camel decided that enough was enough and started
to buck up and down, reaching alarming heights with all four hooves
off the sand. On the fourth such buck, Ole and the camel parted
company, Ole continued to rise as the camel descended. As Newton
taught us, what goes up must come down, and sure enough Ole came down
and discovered that the desert sand was not as soft as it seems.
By this time we were far from any human habitation and Ole began an
angry negotiation with the handler and swapped his camel for the
handler's horse. The rest of the three hour journey to Saqqara was
uneventful, and to be honest, I remember little of the Step Pyramid
except that it was somewhat less impressive than the Great Pyramid at
Giza. Similarly, I remember little of the three hour return journey,
so I assume it too was uneventful. We had by then become pretty
competent at camel riding, and had even mostly managed the lying down
command to allow us to mount and dismount.
We returned to the hostel very tired and sore and there wasn't one of
us that wasn't aching in just about every conceivable place the
following day.
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