Until this past weekend, there honestly hadn’t been much to report. Class has been more intense, and my grade temporarily gained top priority – it’s what happens when you’re getting a single mark for 12 credits that apply directly to your GPA. I supposed I could have written about the dynamic of a classroom taught by Egyptian professors or something else academically and culturally related, but I’d gotten so sick of class that I actually began reading for leisure again to feel like I can understand a language without putting my mind through a gauntlet of vaguely familiar-looking scribbles that go from right to left. It’s funny what happens when you stay in a foreign country long enough.
With my grade in the clear, I headed off to Siwa Oasis this past Wednesday. Siwa is Egypt’s most prominent oasis, west of the Qattara Depression and on the edge of the Sahara Desert’s Great Sand Sea near the Libyan border. It is in this small town that Alexander the Great consulted the oracle of Jupiter Ammon, who declared him a god and effectively paved the path for his conquering Egypt. It has played significant roles in Egyptian culture and trade age after age and up to this day retains much of its proud heritage.
Three other program-mates and I boarded a night bus in Alexandria around 10 PM for the eight-hour trip, and upon arrival around 6:30 AM we headed to our hotel to check in. Coined a “communist housing block” by our guide book, Arous al-Waha Hotel (“Bride of the Oasis Hotel”) is a very tidy, orderly place, although there is no air-conditioning and the floors twist like something out of a surrealist painting. Little did we know that the only thing we would end up using would be our showers the next morning.
We unpacked while listening to cocks crow, exactly as they do in old cartoons, and immediately headed out into town. As we sat along the dusty main road at 7:30 AM, leafing through the guidebook for something to do at that time of day, a taxi driver by the name of Asman pulled up and offered to give us a tour of the area. And off we went to our first destination, Gebel al-Mawta (“Mountain of the Dead”).
Quite the liberal use of the word “mountain,” as Gebel al-Mawta is now just a large hill where people of Ptolemaic and Roman times were buried. Siwans also hid here during World War II when the Italians bombed the town, but as far as it concerned us, it was mostly just a honeycombed hill upon which we took in our first of many incredible views of the oasis and desert. Like much of Egyptian antiquity, little of it has been preserved, leaving the mountain a semblence of what it once may have been.
Our second destination was the famous temple of the Oracle at Siwa. What a surreal experience it was to explore the maze of ruins, imagining Alexander the Great walking up the same steps, seeking the second most powerful oracle in the entire Mediterranean region beside the Oracle at Delphi. Standing in the temple chambers, which are composed of a fusion of stone and petrified wood, I imagined what sort of mysterious, fantastical rituals and encounters took place on that rocky soil.
From here, Asman drove us to a secluded island on the oasis, where there is a secluded spring. Flying through forests of palms and the oasis waters, we reached our destination: maybe six meters in diameter, filled with natural oasis spring water that allows one to see straight to the bottom (10 meters), every inch of Fatnas Spring’s stone well was lined with smooth algae and glistened pristinely. We took a dip, and it was by far the cleanest, most refreshing water in which I have ever been. Asman picked dates for us off the palms and even climbed one – it must have been 12 meters high – and dove into the well. After relaxing and having a lunch of bread, cheese, jam, and dried apricots by the beach, we wrapped up our first tour of the day just past noon.
Asman dropped us off at another hotel (the much more competent-looking Palm Trees Hotel) to book a tour into the Great Sand Sea. We ended up making reservations to stay in the desert overnight, and returned to our hotel to take a nap and prepare for the tour. After napping and buying souvenirs at a local shop (I bought a Siwan sword), we returned to Palm Trees, where we threw our gear in the back of a rather questionable-looking four-wheeler and took off for the desert.
