March 19

March 19, Friday. From Cairo to

We spent the night in Cosmopolitan Hotel in downtown Cairo. It's a delightful old Art Deco building, crammed into a side street off Kasr el-Nil, one of the main drags of downtown Cairo. I'd slept fitfully because of the noise -- some happy dude whistling for hours outside my door, a couple in another room fighting in voices just too muffled to identify the nature of the quarrel (or the language in which it was conducted); elephants upstairs moved to rearrange their luggage in the early hours of the morning. At breakfast I ran into Roger Bagnall of Columbia University and his wife Whitney, now excavating in Dakhla; small world.

After breakfast we wait for Amgad and the car. He's supposed to arrive at 8, but he's a bit late; the four of us, Eph, Jimmy, Zoe, and I, mill aimlessly around the lobby of the Cosmopolitan. Suddenly Amgad arrives, we hustle outside and meet Hamada, our driver to become our friend, load up the Toyota 4x4, and head out through the crazy morning traffic in Cairo, toward the road to Bahariya.

Once we pass out of the sprawl of Cairo -- reaching out into the desert as burgeoning subdivisions for the rich and endless necropoleis for the dead -- the road to Bahariya enters a flat, empty landscape, brownish-red, almost lacking in relief, completely devoid of vegetation. We follow a railroad that runs almost as far as Bahariya, to a huge deposit of iron ore, which is mined, crushed, and shipped in rail cars to the smelters near Cairo. (These trains haunted us later.)

After a while we cut off the road, cross the railroad tracks, and head into the desert. After an hour or so, the country began to break up, and we came to our first stop, the Wadi el-Sunt, "Valley of the Acacias" -- named after a few scrawny trees growing in a slight depression.

We gather dead, fallen branches as firewood, and pile back into the car. Our route now begins to descend in a serious way. We creep down 10 m high embankments onto plateaus, one after another. The process reveals increasingly complex, wind-carved topography, and takes us finally into our first destination, the Valley of the Whales, the newest national park in Egypt. By US standards of "national park" there's almost nothing here -- a couple of signs explaining the sights in Arabic and English, and little fences to keep visitors off the fossils. But the sights are pretty impressive -- skeletons of Balisosaurus, an Eocene ancestor of modern whales, lying right on the surface of the ground, and weird formations carved out of the rocks by the scouring power of wind and sand. We see other tourists here -- three or four cars like ours, full of French families (I hear the kids talking), who seem as eager as us to put desert between us. Amgad speculates that they have come up out of the Fayum, which lies not far off to the west, for the day -- a typical day trip for visitors there. We picnic for lunch in the shadow of a bizarre, butte-like feature, rills of dried mud frozen in their race down like chocolate frosting on a bunt cake. Hamada uses the firewood gathered at Wadi el-Sunt to make tea while we relax, shoeless, on a carpet spread on the desert sand, dining on white cheese, tuna, and pita. This will be the pattern for the rest of our trip, almost without exception -- delicious lunches capped with tea (often flavored with fresh mint) eaten under the desert sun, in the shade of some strange rock or inviting palm, in a landscape of exquisite beauty.

An hour or more of driving bring us back to the road, and we continue on toward Bahariya.There's hardly even a place to stop on the way, except the lonely pile of cinderblocks called "The Little Cafeteria," which we do not venture to enter. (Our scruples will vanish two weeks later.)

Back in the car we finish the drive to our first destination, the Bahariya Oasis. The road enters from the northeast, though a gap in the escarpment. We stop for a view and photos, then down into the oasis and our hotel, the International Hot Springs Hotel.

That evening, we headed off through the narrow streets of Bawiti, up a little street, and stopped outside the Bedouin Village Camp.They can provide desert trips and other amenities (you can email them, of course), but we were there to hear Bedouin music. The performer was Abd El Sadiq with his little band. The performance was held in a round building, with a concrete socle on which rested date palm uprights with date branches as walling; above, a date branch ceiling. Rugs covered the sand floor; as alwasy, off went the shoes when we entered. A smoky fire burned in a pit in the center. The performers sat off to one side of the circle, and the audience -- a nice mixture of locals and tourists (but not too many of the latter) gathered round on the rugs, leaning on big old date palm trunks laid around the circle as bolsters.

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