This is one crazy bus ride from Hurghada to Cairo. We’ve run the coast of the Red Sea northward and just short of Suez have turned west for Cairo. The bus is like a nicer version of the Greyhound. Since we picked up a few passengers at a rest stop, it is completely full. The noise is pretty intense, with several young kids wailing from time to time (not a match for Erika but trending that way), the guy behind me gets a phone call every other minute, let’s the obnoxious ring tone go on for a while and then shouts into it for ten minutes, plus as an added bonus there’s a video system showing Arabic language tv programs in jumpy black and white, with an extremely loud speaker above each seat. The tv shows look like they are retreads from 70s US fare. The only one I can track at all involves a group of young ladies who sing in a band on stage and then transform into a sort of Charlies Angels group, helping a military or police official in a white uniform to solve crimes or ??? It’s enough to make you wish you were back on the flight from JFK to Cairo. Just kidding, it’s not quite that bad plus it will be over soon.
The Erika like concert is being provided by two really cute girls who have been wrestling with their mother since we left Hurghada. I would have thought they’d have fallen asleep by now but they are obviously supercharged by the bus ride. Both girls are clothed in pretty sundresses, one of which says on the front and back “Brooklyn Girl”. The other, dressed in purple and green, has been making goo goo eyes at Craig for about 100 kilometers. She’s standing up and turned around facing us. In front of the girls there’s a couple of babies, who have been very quiet so far…but were aren’t to Cairo yet. The little girls appear to be about two and three, have the biggest brown eyes and dark curly hair.
Driving along the Red Sea was pretty boring once we got out of the greater Hurghada metropolitan area. (Mainly a lot of sandy desert shoreline and then the water. A pipeline of some sort ran parallel to the road (maybe an oil line supporting off shore unloading?) and Craig watched the sections clicking by…they were all numbered.
We stopped at a great oasis after about 2 ½ hours. It was quite a commercial operation, much more interesting than the Kilometer 85 rest stop from Luxor. There was room out front to park a half dozen tour busses in the sandy lot. The structure consisted of a tent covered hall with seating for about 150 people. The tent was made of straw (in case of rain what do they do? No rain in the forecast!) To the left before you enter, there is a huge grilling oven. A man dressed in a white coat (like a formal butcher coat) was forming the ground meat for kabobs around long metal spikes. They looked like long fat lumpy hot dogs. I took his picture.
Walking into the tent there was a huge industrial sized mixer on the right. If I had such a mixer I could make bread for half of Knoxville. Moving further into the tent, seating with tables was to the left of the aisle. To the right was a tremendous Hookah bar. Craig posed in front of it but we monitored him closely and he did not partake. For those of you not up on your hookah, it is simply a huge water pipe. The tobacco burns in a small foil packet in a dish while the user sucks the smoke through the pipe, which draws the smoke through the water. I think it is less smoky for the surrounding folks than normal cigarette smoking, so I’m going to propose that Knoxville restaurants start requiring their patio smokers to use these things.
We first visited the WC. I know we’ve switched from tourist accommodations to the setup for normal folks because the WC featured squat toilets. For those of your who haven’t done Asia, squat toilets consist of…no toilet at all! It’s all done in porcelain, with a spot for your feet on either side of a hole. Instead of sitting you squat. Sort of like a backpacking experience.
After that bit of fun we visited the concessions section and got some beverages. I got a can of mango juice which was excellent, with little chunks of mango that were down smoothly. The waiter came over and explained in broke English that if we wanted food there was grilled chicken. I motioned to the big ten foot screen in the corner of the hall and asked him why the World Cup wasn’t on. It was a joke! He didn’t get the World Cup bit, so I went through the soccer/football/kicking with the feet routine and he got on. He shouted to his colleagues, they scurried around for a few minutes, rotated the big floor standing screen so it blocked the light flooding in from outside, swiveled the projector so it was shining a big trapezoid shaped image on the wall through a netting of little Christmas tree lights (obviously not used here for Christmas décor) and voila…we had the World Cup. Sadly it was not time yet for the US-Algeria match to start, but we got to listen to the commentators doing their in depth analysis…in Arabic, I assume. Then the showed the top ten goals of the World Cup thus far, and it was really cool. To see the World Cup coverage live, in the absolute middle of nowhere.
The downside of the rest stop is that it was full of flies, and the entire flock followed us into the bus. So for the rest of the journey to Cairo we were all swishing and swatting at flies. Especially Jacob who seems particularly bothered by them. As long as I’m not eating and as long as they stay out of my beverages, I can deal with flies. Last night at the fish restaurant when the flies would not leave us alone…that was bad.
We’re headed west toward Cairo and we no longer have the view of the Red Sea. We have a mile or two of sandy desert on either side of the bus. The desert transitions to ridges, which sometimes come right up to the edge of the road. There are no signs, no billboards, just tan colored desert.
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