Welcome to Siwa

Justin and I joined a Fulbright group trip to Siwa Oasis a few weekends ago.  It was WONDERFUL.  Siwa is one of my favorite places in Egypt, I think.  It’s extremely isolated – a paved road was only added in the early 1980s and before then it was a 524km (326 miles) dirt road for vehicles to bump along to the nearest town – or an 8 day camel caravan ride before then.  Siwa is only 50km (31 miles)  from the Libyan border, with the Great Sand Sea starting just west of Siwa and leading into Libya.

The people in Siwa speak Siwi until they enter school at age 6, a berber tongue.  According to some Siwans we chit chatted with, they all speak Siwi at home and amongst each other, but Arabic in schools and for trade.   They call themselves Bedouin when speaking in English but I’m not sure exactly what that means.

Siwa is very much an Oasis, with ground water just a few feet under the surfact, and lage lakes.  It’s amazing to see the line between lush olive and date trees, then the Great Sand Sea  — desert with NOTHING growing in it.

Siwa, despite it’s isolation, was dragged into World War II when the Europeans decided to fight their war in the North African desert.  The Siwans were forced, by this war that had NOTHING to do with them, to abandon their homes and move into Ptolemy era tombs for shelter -kicking the mummies out and moving their families in.

This area of North Africa is known to still be littered with mines. As is the Libyan border. Justin was reading about the Dakar rally, a  multiple day Paris to Dakar race through the desert which went through Egypt in 2003.  Although the path for the race was supposedly cleared of mines, one team still hit one. The north coast of Egypt is filled with resorts for rich Cairenes to escape to when the summer months are at their most terrible in Cairo – and each build requires demining before-hand.

Our entire trip was VERY COLD…way colder than we were expecting.

On our way, just two hours into our 9 hour drive to Siwa, we stopped by the El Alamein military museum within sight of the Medditteranean devoted to WWII era artifacts near the cemeteries of Europeans who died there.  It was a pretty lame/hysterical museum with horrible translations and wierd manequins acting out scenes of the war.  There’s a German, British and Italian cemetery.  Here’s a picture just outside the museum.

You can see a few tanks in there. British, Italian and German tanks/military trucks.

Here’s a picture, from a distance, of one of the El Alamein cemeteries.

We then headed through the desert to a cove near Mersa Matrouh, on the Meditteranean, where a tour guide the Fulbright office always hires, and his crew, cooked us lunch on Coleman stoves.  A pasta dish, fried chicken, and tomatoe/cucumber salad.

Representing ASU!

There were some strange military bunkers off in the distance past the coves.

You can see storm clouds in the distance.  Yes, STORM clouds.  It rained ALL the way between Mersa Matrouh and Siwa.  A hard, long rain.  We found out, it’s the kind of rain they only get once every 60 years or so.  It was the wierdest thing to drive through some of the deadest desert I’ve ever seen, with rain pouring down.  This is coming from a girl who grew up in the American Southwestern Sonora desert.  The Sonora desert is a lush rainforest compared to this desert.  Actually, the Sonora desert is a fascinatingly diverse desert with plant and animal species — I miss it!  This dead desert here in North African freaks me out sometimes.

The rain continued, lightly, on a desert safari we took into the Great Sand Sea.  AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME.  The four-wheel-drive truck drivers are super skilled, and more than once we were catching air and having our stomachs drop as we flew up and down sand dunes.

The rain slowed down as the day warmed up.

All of these deserts were under water millions of years ago.

Justin did a little sandboarding.

I did a little sand sledding

The wind was blowing stinging sand all day long -Ended up with sand in our ears, noses, eyes, mouth…

Here’s sunset with a sandstorm blowing in.

Justin trying to walk with the wind blowing crazily.

The day ended with dips in a natural hotspring amidst blowing sand.  The view from the hostspring with the desert in the distance.

Back in Siwa – it’s a very cool town.

The Shali Fortress is in the center of town.  Starting in 1200AD the Siwans all lived in this fortress, each family to a room – farming the lands outside of the fortress during the day but locking the gates at night.  The fortress is made from the salty mud of the area.  Salty because the water evaporates so quickly leaving most of the lakes highly salinized. In the 1950s large rains hit and the fortress, already large with too many stories and worn down, began to ‘melt’ and could no longer house the city.

Standing in the Shali Fortress – having climbed up the ‘melted’ ruins.

The lower edges of the Shali Fortress, where Siwans still live.

Donkey carts are THE way to get around in Siwa.  It was so strange for me to see little boys, no more than five or six, poking the donkey with the stick while his Mom or much older sister sat behind him all bundled up in the Siwa woman style of dress which covers their entire body and face.  We guessed pretty early on that gender roles strictly required only men to drive the donkey carts.  Even if that ‘man’ is a five year old boy.

I didn’t take any photos of the women, Siwans are particularly touchy about it, I don’t blame them. There are hardly women around in public anyways.

Just around the central part of Siwa town.

I love this doorway: I should ask someone or look it up all the words but I’m not in the mood so someone may need to comment on this post to correct me.  At a glance, this writing says along the lines of,  a section of the Koran “In the name of God, the Kind, the Merciful…” and then below it starts with “A thousand congratulations…”

Another spring Justin swam in (it was cold and I would’ve only felt comfortable wearing a shirt on top of my bathing suit so I just dipped my feet in)

We took a drive out to the abandoned village of Zaytoun.The village was abandoned in the 1950s, due to water shortage problems I think (although we were also told it was a plague?).  The village was built around an Ancient Egyptian temple, which was used as a kitchen.  There was great stuff still lying around the village and many of the roofs were just beginning to cave in.

I like bones.  It’s true. Ever since my summer archaeology internship in Boston which I spent analyzing animal bones — teeth specifically — yep. I might be just a tad wierd.  There is more than one picture of me like the below in different places with different bones.

The mosque – soo cool!

The olive grinding area to make olive oil.  Hence the name given the village: Zaytoun which means olive. The mechanism would’ve been pulled by donkeys.

We took donkey carts out to watch the sunset by the lake.  Our donkey cart driver was 15 year old Mohamed (I didn’t get a picture of him) who enjoyed practicing English that he learns at school.  He informed us that the fish in the lakes are crazy looking with big eyes – and that the government doesn’t let them fish.  And he also told us how the schools in Siwa are gender-seperated.  And we also compared Siwi words to Arabic words to English words.  He still goes to school but drives the tourists around in the evenings with the donkey cart.  He was beating the crap out of his donkey to make it go — kind of hard to watch — but we didn’t say anything.  Here we are on the donkey cart.

The boys/men driving the carts had brought drums along and sat in a circle singing and dancing and drumming to pass the time.  A few other young guys from town had ridden bikes out to the area by the lake where we were just to hang out and pass the time – so it seems they were all enjoying themselves while we tourists sat around and gaped at the lake and sunset in the middle of the desert.