Next morning was better and we woke up nice and happy after 26 hours of sleep, which was real handy because I was now wide awake and couldn’t sleep on the bus without air conditioning through the Sahara desert in midday at the end of summer.
It probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway because the driver was a huge fan of the Egyptian cat screeching and had the “music” cranked up.
Egyptians, especially in Ramadan, have an endearing habit of loving the sounds of the animal kingdom. First a big fat Egyptian gets his recording tape player (to ensure as much treble as possible and absolutely no bass) then he gazes around at his ‘instruments’, several boxes of various animals (cats, parrots, dogs, hyena’s, nazguls), twiddles his fingers, scratches the blackboard with his nails for a sound check and inevitably grabs a cat by the paws and proceeds to bite said cat on the toe.
Obviously the cat squeals but this process is much more complicated than just a simple cat toe biting exercise. To get some variety and some sort of beat, he pokes the cat in the eye with a carefully hand crafted stick in time to the music in his head, which is not necessarily to any sort of natural rhythm.
Being the master he is, he is not content with just this and looks to his hyena and selects his special hyena poking stick (because hyenas are obviously dangerous and you cant just go and pick one up and bite it on the ear.) and carefully places it between the hyena’s nostrils and to get it angry throws the cat in as well.
The parrot is next and gets its feathers plucked with a pair of feather picking pliers.
The sounds so carefully recorded on the tape recorder are then sold by the sweaty fat Egyptian man and sells out around the Middle East as a great hit. He can then upgrade his animals and so the loss of cat is of not much consequence and besides there are millions of the little things crawling around the streets and they are easy to find. The new donkeys and mosquito’s he can purchase now will also be a great addition for his no doubt huge follow up tape.
Needless to say the noise produced to a western ear is the most hideously wrong thing you can imagine. Like when you are sick and you can’t imagine being well again and when you are well and have lots of energy you cant imagine anyone wanting to sit around and be sick. Or like when you are in the middle of the Sahara desert in a superheating bus you cant imagine being in a winter in Siberia. Anyway this was the same and with cats being in season this year, the main noise polluter was the cats.
After one hour of this torturous noise your mind starts to wander, cats eh? I’ve seen cats before, bright blue cats with furry hair and green is good, water dripping on my forehead Chinese water torture. Chinese have dragons and bamboo with funny bears, you think I am crazy, I’ll give you crazy! Blah gobble gook, giggle, dribbly, whoops! I can be real crazy, arghh, the flies are attacking. Cats in a cradle with a silver label and it all starts to make sense.
Three hours later it turns messy and you start to hiss, psst, spit, meow scratch randomly and in a rare moment of clarity you realise you have deliverance in the form of a iPod and some god given earphones. Quickly the noise turns to Muse and the cats start pounding on the earphones. Muse wins barely with the cats coming in occasionally for a reminder that they don’t give up so easily and sanity slowly begins to return.
Hannah had music on as well but the cats were obviously getting to her because she was positively glaring. So to be nice and cheer her up I would nudge her and point at various interesting piles of sand, or a nice inanimate rock or a piece of stone mixed with a sand dune. The madness had got to her though and she was un-helpable because she didn’t seem to be cheered by my helpful nudging and pointing. I mean that sand hill wasn’t exactly like the last 66,000 passed in the last 3 hours.
Eventually the noise stopped after about 5hr and 59minutes into our 6hr trip and we gratefully got off the hell bus.
Little kids tried to get us to go with them but I didn’t trust them and their little fingers. Fingers for getting into places didn’t belong, like my wallet, so I told the 6 year old to shove off and walked my way to my hostel. As chance had it, it ended up being his hostel as well.
“Get in the car we driver you there.” The 6 year olds chauffer said.
The boy and the car looked a little shifty so I refused.
“Its free.” He said trying to tempt me into taking his clearly dodgy offer.
“Nothing is free for an Egyptian.” I replied instead.
So I walked a bit longer in the Saharian heat and saw that Hannah was clearly struggling so I conceded defeat and gave myself up to the little 6 year olds scam of a free lift. Surprisingly the little 6 year old boy was on the level and it was free. I guessed he was too young to be a thief, liar, cheat just yet.
That afternoon we took an off road trip around the Oasis which was quite fun, so we decided on doing a desert safari with them as well the next day and night.
“Its 600 for the car, divided by how many people go.”
“So 4 people, so 150 each”
“Yep”
The two others being a Chinese lady, her Bedouin husband and child. Yes a very weird mix that’s for sure.
That night we paid and then next morning we found there was another 3 people but no he wasn’t going to give us the extra 100 back. I got real furious but it did nothing. I had let my guard down a second by trusting him, a foolish thing you should do to any Egyptian, and had paid him the night before.
It was about then that I decided to walk around backwards so they couldn’t sneak up on me, those lying sneaking cheating bastards, even the little fingered boys.
Yes he was right once but that was the thing they did to make you trust them. I knew soon he would play more tricks on me to rob me of my money. The women as well were becoming suspicious, the fact that I had seen not a single one is Egypt was all too suspicious, they must have been somewhere sneaking around suspiciously, up to no good. They probably didn’t show themselves because they were hiding something really bad. It’s the ones you cant see that you have to watch out for. That is besides the ones that you do see.
I mean even the kids all looked suspicious. All that kicking around in the dirt, they must have been up to something. No-one can be that interested in dirt. Yes, very suspicious were the children.
That wasn’t including the babies. They were always looking around with big eyes being silent, no doubt planning and scheming, watching and waiting to strike. Those big beady eyes must have been up to something. I was on to them all though and from now on I would be ready.
Hannah kept telling me to walk forwards but by then even she was looking suspicious so I was keeping one eye on her as well, just to be on the safe side.
Later that night at dinner I was feeling a little sick in the stomach which didn’t help matters, and then the Bedouin started talking to me.
“I am from Petra.”
“Oh we have been there, its beautiful.”
“Yes, so beautiful, so was my donkey.”
“Mmm”
“So beautiful, Do you know I speak 3 languages.”
“That’s nice”
“My donkey was good.”
“Mmm”
“I went to China with my wife and I learnt Chinese so quickly.”
“Mmm” it seemed the appropriate response.
“I had a donkey I bought for 220JD and I took it home and it bit my nephews face, so I went back and said You didn’t tell me it was an angry donkey. Give me my money back! and he did.”
“That’s nice.”
Hannah whispered to me, “This guy is so random”
I whispered back, “He sure loves his donkeys.”
Donkey man continued, “I was 6 and had a donkey and it was so beautiful.”
Once again calling for the appropriate response, “Mmm”
“I am good with camels as well.”
Time to mix it up a bit, “Uh huh”
“I sold my donkey and bought a motorcycle and it broke down and I had no donkey.” At which stage he started cracking up with laughter, “and everyone said why did you sell your donkey!? So for a long time I had to walk because I had no donkey.”
I laughed nervously.
“So I bought another donkey, so beautiful.”
“Uh huh.” I had started on this new response and decided to stick with it.
“Do you have camels in Australia?”
“About 600 million wild ones, they have to shoot them because they are like a plague in places.”
At this stage he looked a little confused, “Too many camels did you say?”
“Yes”
“Why don’t you use them?”
“We have cars and motorcycles and planes and helicopters.”
“Camels are much better, like my donkey, so beautiful.”
“Uh huh, I guess we don’t have much use for them.”
It sent him into deep thought for a while which kept him silent which was good for my now headache.
Five minutes later he started again, “I was in Petra as a kid and some Scottish people were staying in my cave and I came home and she had my blanket and she said she needed it and I was cold so I went to another cave with bare feet and said to everyone I have no blanket and they said OK and so I went back and I got my blanket and everyone said you got your blanket back and I said, Yes”
“Wow” I said but more to the fact that he had told me this story.
I then had the extreme pleasure of listening to how he walked up some steps and walked 3 days once and rode some donkeys and camels and cooked some bread and gave some to a tourist for some cigarettes. Also lots more tales with even less point like, “I was going to walk to the Red Sea once, but didn’t.”
At about this stage I started reading my book and left him to poor Hannah who learnt he started smoking at 7 (seriously) and didn’t like it but kept smoking anyway.
Suddenly I was hit with a thought about 6 hours later, “So what is your name?”