So there I was at the pyramids – after the red sea – with an intention of going to the desert and a note from a friend about the Siwa Oasis. So I was off to the Siwa Oasis – when you don’t know where you are going any road will take you there. I took a ten-hour bus trip from Alexandria (a powerful city by the sea) to the Siwa Oasis which is on the Western border of Egypt and close to Colonel Gadaffi’s house. No one spoke English on the way there. Yes I did have a fantasy about fundamentalists of some kind or another coming to the Oasis and beheading all of the English-speaking tourists on the bus ride. I was uncomfortable without my language – it was not so much about communicating because I did not feel the need to talk to others. I have done tons of talking in the past and it has never done me that much good. It was more about the unknown.
When I arrived at the Oasis at night, I could speak again.
I had only heard about an Oasis in storybooks. They are true (the stories that is) – an island of palm trees, date fields, olive plantations, salt water lakes, dusty roads, mud huts, and pools of water that spring from the ground – magic, wise and audacious – a place delivering life in an ocean of sand. The Oasis served major caravan routes between the Nile Valley, central Africa, and the Mediterranean coast from times too long ago to contemplate, till the 1900’s, when T Ford decided he would invent something a little less environmentally friendly, and smelly. The highway is perfect delivering you right onto the doorstep of the Oasis, where the roads turn a little less perfect. The Siwa Oasis was the home of the Oracle of Amun (Amun is ancient Egypt’s answer to God) – the oracle consulted by Alexander the Great. If you manage to conquer the world before your 34th birthday, you can imagine that you don’t take advice from the ordinary.
You might think that the Oasis is still left in the dark ages, but that is not the case, the donkey carts share the dirt roads with pimp my ride style motorbikes. The mud huts are mostly broken down, with brick and plaster starting to mingle. Dates and olives grown in the fields are sold alongside M&M’s, cokes, rice crispies and coca cola. The people are the same though – clam, wise, relaxed, with time on their hands – when you don’t need much it seems time is given to you as a reward. People sit in the Oasis. They sit and talk for hours in the early morning, the mid afternoon, and well into the evening. There isn’t much anger in the Oasis – no reason to be angry I suppose. The main square was about the size of a quarter of a rugby field and is full of fires roasting chicken, a couple of convenience stores, men smoking shisha pipes (and drinking tea), dusty restaurants, butcheries selling open meat, donkeys getting beaten as if they are truly beasts of burden, lost geese, young kids selling cell phone vouchers from behind wooden desks packed with money, and chickens being beheaded (not openly but you can see the fear in their eyes). You don’t see women at all, and when you do they are decorated from head to toe in black robes – sometimes just a little glimpse of an ankle, or a slitty eye is enough to inspire fantasy. I did not get the chance for a derobing – I don’t think that kind of behaviour would have been taken lightly, so I left myself with imagination, fantasy, and the safety of my room. Four times a day the speakers from the mosques decorated around the Oasis call the people to prayer – and on Friday afternoon a voice shouted angrily. I am not sure what it was saying but I hoped it had nothing to do with killing the infidel. It didn’t seem so because everywhere I went I was met with kindness, and interest, and tea, and a half broken English.
Don’t ask me what I did each day. I don’t recall – most of the time I was thinking. I read one or two books. I meditated tons until my leg started to go numb. Some things are meant for very supple people. Everyday, I watched the sun rise and set over the desert – impossibly beautiful – that great eye coming into view, and disappearing as the world turns. I am not sure if I am the only one who actually thinks about the sun, something with us almost everyday and I have not come up with any kind of worthwhile scientific explanation for it or its creation. It just is – so we wear sunglasses. I swam in a spring, bubbling from the ground in which Cleopatra (I would have given her one) and Mark Anthony or Julius Caesar (depending on which one was in town) swam. The water was perfect – healing my skin. The mosquitoes were hell. In an Oasis you learn life lessons from almost everything. One from mosquito’s bites: the more you scratch a bite the more it itches, and all the other bites on your body itch. If you leave them alone, you no longer notice the itch. It might be worthwhile to apply the same logic to things that bother you – things that you cannot fix. The men wore long robes of white, and white under-trousers, dirty from the dust. I tried to fit in. I bought the local clothes, and sat on the side of the road drinking tea. I smoked shisha pipes. It was nice for me to have time, on my own, no expectations from anyone, or myself. I felt a freedom that I have not felt for some time. It is amazing how little time any of us have to really contemplate life – we seem to have found many distractions to help us waste the time until we die. That is what the desert makes you do (contemplate), particularly if you are alone – and more particularly if you are alone for a month or two in the desert. I thought about fear. Where does it come from? What drives it? Is it imagination or experience? Is it real or is it something that we need to keep us safe. I thought about the meaning of the sun, moon, and the earth. These three things revolving around ourselves everyday, impossible for us to explain – where they come from? What part of humanity do they actually drive? What is this God of ours that we have been so caught up with? What is it that we are all doing to this earth and ourselves? For me it does not seem that people are getting happier out there – it kind of seems they are getting sadder – but filling that empty part of themselves with alcohol and anti depressants rather than sunsets. There was no alcohol in the Oasis. It seemed better for it – the loud red people were few. It is the place of the intrepid traveller. There was alcohol in the desert camp that I stayed in after the Oasis – it was home brewed from figs. It was a ripper – believe me.
The children were beautiful in the Oasis. They walked and ran around the streets. They beat the donkeys. If you walked past them and gave them a fright they would run away squealing – a little afraid of the infidel. I picked olives from the garden of a man – a garden being a small patch of ground somewhere on the outskirts of the Oasis, with about ten olive trees in it, and a couple of dates in the middle. He looked at it proudly with me, ‘this is my garden,’ he said, as if it was Eden. ‘It’s all I have he told me.’ I suppose it was quite easy for me to say it is all one needs. The Palm Trees Hotel was not Miami (for R35 a night you can’t ask for much). My back got stronger – the mattress not that thick, the pillow hard, and the communal toilet not flushable most of the time. Yes there were logs left behind – mostly a big girl from Peru – a three flush shitter. I ate the same evening meal of half a chicken, tahina, salad (which is cucumber and tomato) and Pita bread. I was fasting during the day – my own version of getting back to the earth – so the evening meal and the tea that I had on the town square at sunset were a big treat for me. Never before have I enjoyed a meal as much as I did there. I tasted every bite. Even now sitting in Thailand I have forgotten what it is like to actually taste the food – to feel every little piece of it as it went down my neck into my stomach – to actually chew. It is a crazy thing in a way – food that is – it gives us energy and life. We cover most of it with pesticides and steroids. You would have thought if we were so advanced we would no longer need food, but we do, a constant reminder that without the natural world – those other creatures and plants inhabiting this earth – we would die. I don’t want to seem morose, but you notice that a place like the Siwa Oasis has everything that a community intent on self-sufficient living needs – fresh water (it bubbles from the earth), crops that grow (fruit, vegetables etc), meat (dates are a good source of food for cows), beautiful places to bathe and sit and reflect – a place where alchemists once lived, but the corporation has made its way there – the Chinese with their motorbikes – the western manufacturers with their products and plastic – the cell phone companies with their communication airwaves. Capitalism has influenced the Oasis. It is dirty as a result, plastic, cartons of sweets, cans of sprite and all of that jazz (I would include smoked out cigarettes, but cigarettes are important). I ignore that other dirt – greed. I wonder what a place like Siwa would have been like in a world if humanities progress had been in thought or imagination rather than in stuff. I imagined what it would have been like to ride a camel across the desert, camping under the open stars, watching the sun rise, and arriving at the Siwa Oasis after eight or nine days (depending on the balls of your camel) – to meet open fires and the smell of chicken’s roasting, the sound of men talking and smoking shisha pipes, and drinking Turkish coffee. You can’t stop progress, but maybe sometimes it would be nice if you could, and you could hold onto the natural integrity of a place of life in the middle of the desert, where the Oracle of Amun once told the future. Some things have not changed though – in Siwa when you sit alone on top of one of the tiny little mountains looking out at the setting sun, over the green of the palm trees, the blue of the salt water lake, and into the desert beyond, for one second if you remove all other thought from your head, if you can put away the sound of the donkeys, or the cars, or the little bustle generated from the city as it prepares for night, if you are just with you, you can actually feel the earth move, and that my friends is the most deliciously scary sensation.
What did I find in the Oasis: moments of clarity when everything about who I was and how I wanted to live my life were perfectly formed, like a great rock band – the crowd moving to every sound; and moments of head banging fear when I realised that I did not know anything about myself or about this earth, and that I probably would not know, or could not know because if you do know, if you do find the answers, maybe in some way this life becomes irrelevant; I found magic moments of belief – the only counter to fear; I made sense of the trilogy – the sun, moon, and the earth, but that my friend’s is a long story and one for another time; I found need; I found hope; I found understanding through a little friend of magic. I realised that understanding is all that we really need in this world – understanding and a side order of belief in the goodness of your fellow man; I realised that judgement is a poor excuse for insecurity. You can never really understand another’s journey. Emotions are easy in words but difficult in explanations – they mean so many different things to different people. Who is anyone to believe they know better than anyone else; I found beautiful moments about letting go the past – apologising as best that I could – sending light and love to those beaten by it – forgiving myself – and sensing that the time was right for some kind of attempt at being me. It is difficult enough to find happiness in yourself, but you will never find it through another; I found that look in my eyes again.
It was a perfect imperfect time. At times I thought I was going mad. At times it was bliss. It is a strange thing opening the doors to life – once you open it – once you leave fear behind you start noticing things that you never really noticed before. You try not to let new fear replace the old fear for fear is a strong thing. In the end if you are brave enough you are not looking for the sharks you are looking across the valleys of green through the brown sand of the desert into the stars beyond. I only dreamt about it – still a long way to go on the living it. When you start seeing it that way – there is only beauty – and an amazing sense that maybe it might be nice to put away the walls of fear for a while – and see what it is actually like in the stars. Sure we don’t understand that place out there – it scares us – we all crave security – but maybe if we moved our perspective a little humanity might start getting bigger in life rather than number.
Mohammed - Desert Chef
After a month of fasting, meditating, and trying to destroy fear I went off to a paradise desert camp if you call a long drop, with a left hand wiping policy (chef too), a tent in the sand, and a pool of algae water as a shower, a paradise. I do. I forgot about time there. Butterflies flew around me all day. I lived with the workers of the camp, mostly used as a one-night stop over for tourists. They did not seem to understand me most of the time – why should they be any different. I painted a picture there – it is attached – it is about something close to me now. I learnt something about the present. It is all we know, the past just a piece of information and the future so significantly uncertain at the moment that it makes no sense living there. I walked out into the desert each day, sometimes the whole day, just enjoying the feeling of my feet and gravity and the sand. I ate lamb on skewers cooked round a fire. You come across weird things in the desert: fossils – apparently the desert was once the bottom of the sea; and strange rocks – black in colour. “They say it was a meteor,” Fami my guide told me. I drank tea about eight times a day, mint tea, with sugar, mixed delicately from glass to glass – just two sips. There was no power in the desert camp. The only light a candle and the fire. I slept in the clothes that I wore the next day. “Eat. Eat.” I was told. “Good. Good.” I was told. “Woman. Woman.” 9 o’clock. The food was good – I ate – the women never arrived. We ate with our hands, pita bread, roasted vegetables, rice, sometimes chicken off the table, tahina. There was no rubbish at the desert camp. All plastic being burnt or used, all tins being burnt or used, or buried. No M&M’s – just sugar that came from sugar cane. I ate so much sugar cane the one-day that I spent the whole next day with my left hand in action. It could have been something to do with the water that I was not used to as well. Ever try having a groaning bad stomach in a long drop, with a left hand washing policy. You do feel a little bit tougher than the city boy that you arrived as – after that day is through. Everything is taken seriously by the desert people – eating – drinking – smoking – laughing, and singing – even sitting. Most of the time I just sat. At night, in the desert the heavens are your wallpaper – the imagination of the moon speaks to you. At night we would sing (well I would hum), the drums would be beaten, the fire would distract, and we would drink more tea, and talk and laugh. Those were spiritual moments for me, the fire, the beating of the drums and the chanting of people from the desert – miracles and marvels that pass my understanding. ‘We are all just little grains of sand’, someone once told me. From the desert camp you could walk out into the desert and not come back – it is that deep. It is that rich. If you want to find some sense of peace, or some sense of terror – if you are searching – head out to the desert – and do it on your own. It makes life in a city look a little unreal.
Desert Friend
I do have a confession to make. My brother made me take a satellite phone with me when he heard I was going to the desert. He thought that maybe I would get lost there. I am not sure whether it is a bigger indictment on me, and my journey, or on progress, but there was only one time in the desert that I was without cell phone reception. I tried hard mind you, to get to that place, but it seems the cellular phone companies are a little smarter than me. The time I was without reach the battery on the satellite phone was dead. ‘Fuck!’ was all I said – I then laughed.
After the desert, I travelled to Luxor through the lands of ancient Egyptian land, saw the Temple of Karnak, which is one of the most spectacular places I have seen – I can tell you one thing – it was not built by any man that we know. I took in the treasures of Tutankhamen, and the tombs of the most important kings of ancient Egypt in the Valley of the Kings. I ended Egypt back at the pyramids.
The first time I saw the pyramids was in a big bus with a whole lot of tourists, and a whole lot of noise. I went back to the pyramids on the last day, and saw them on the back of a camel (finally) – with a guide who told me stories about the people who made them – and managed to meditate and give thanks in one of the tombs next to the pyramids. That is not on the usual trip. It was a perfect end to a perfect move through Egypt. It seemed that for the ten or so who were buried in the three main pyramids and the couple of smaller ones, preparing for death was as important as life. They sensed the afterlife in a different manner. Maybe there were less people – maybe they knew something different.
I changed in Egypt – whatever that means. I saw something in my eyes that I had not seen before. The thing about finding yourself is that it is momentary – it is hanging onto you that is the hard part. It is easy on your own in the desert with no expectations and no others – no love or hate – just a moment in time and the beauty of the natural earth. Maybe it is right – that we should all live that way – but I don’t think it makes sense. It is combining yourself and your own sense of freedom with a world that is around you that is difficult. I had a rugby coach who used to say, do the basics right and the result looks after itself – somehow I think when we meet our end we are all going to look the fool in one way, or another. We seem to get a little too lost in that afterlife thing, that security thing, that future thing – and we seem to miss out on ourselves. I think that is the start. All you can really do is be you. Finding out who that is with all the modern world distractions is not impossible, but is difficult. I don’t mean to sound prescriptive but maybe a few more of us need to sit a while in the desert, watch the sun rise and set, watch the moon rise and set, and contemplate what it actually means to be yourself in a universe so vast. It makes anything we could possibly do in this life seem hauntingly small. It makes you realise there is something else out there, something stronger, larger, something that created us all. If I look around the modern world – it seems to me that we might not be giving enough credibility to our creation. I think sometimes we might get a little too caught up in this world that we created – with its finances, its billboards, its big screen tv’s, its skyscrapers, and forgot about the magic that exists outside of it – a magic that allowed us to put a man on the moon. It might be worthwhile to go back a little in order to go forward. Maybe we might all need a little less in the way of things, and a little more in the way of time, and maybe not too much time for too much time has the unpredictability of lunacy attached to it – don’t go chasing the wind the great book says. I like what U2 has to say, for me ‘we are going to go crazy if we don’t go crazy.’
Keep the peace – go a little crazy – and don’t hurt yourself or the ones that you love.
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June 24, 2010 
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