I had forgotten the dry, gritty, smell of it. The colour was as I had remembered and hoped it still would be and so was the feel underfoot. But the air in Egypt was suddenly specific to my senses and I inhaled great lung-fulls of it as we stepped out of the Cairo airport that warm evening.

Carrie and I had missed our flight from Paris because of a stupid time-setting problem with my watch and were turned away at the gate 20 minutes prior to scheduled departure. We could then only imagine the confusion and disappointment our absence on the arriving flight in Cairo would entail with my sister. She was coming to the airport there to meet us specifically. We could only arrive the next evening instead and make our own way to the Pension Roma in mid-town Cairo not far from the Nile (but a helluva long ways from the Nile Hilton, so to speak).

We were well-encumbered by our baggage: a backpack each, a good sized camera bag each, I with a tripod and I think we had a bag specifically for film. Those were the days before the world had gone fully digital, but the transition was practically on the world’s doorstep. I had brought my old Graflex 4×5 camera, a press-view camera and had brought 40 sheets of a particular Polaroid black and white negative film ‘ yes, film from Polaroid. It produced a paper print as Polaroids do, but also a B&W negative of exceptional range and beauty. The trick with this special film (called Type 55), is that it required a special ‘fixing’ bath after ‘pulling’ the ‘roid and then a soaking in another solution to prevent watermarks from appearing on the film as it dried. I had taken this kit to Guatemala five years earlier and had a lot of fun with it. Here in Egypt, I hoped to lug it to Karnak and Luxor when our journey took us there. Carrie brought her Hasselblad as well and shot some beautiful images with it. These cameras were in addition to our 35mm gear. All in all, we intended to take a picture or two home with us.

We did, indeed, meet with my sister and she showed us around her archeological site on the Giza Plateau and we met some very nice people (she is a combination dirt and desk Egyptologist – meaning she digs in the field and also produces papers as an academic). However, this story is about something else that happened on that trip, something that turned into a life-changing event for us. It happened in Karnak about a week later. We had made our way up there by overnight train without event really (‘up’ is such odd nomenclature, because Karnak is south of Cairo, but the area is called Upper Egypt). This stood in stark contrast to the same trip I’d made in 1992 when I’d cleverly saved some Falafels from dinner the night before to eat on the train in the morning. As a result, I spent most of that train journey in one of the more disgusting washrooms I have ever seen trying to have a BM while standing because everything was too filthy to touch and the train was rocking all over the place. I spent my first visit to Luxor vomiting all over the ground as hotel touts tried their damndest to get myself and two travelling companions to go to their hotel.

But we arrived in good shape in March of 2000 and set off to find the hotel that sounded best from our guidebook. There was something very large in my camera bag that Carrie did not know about and I wanted her to see it when we got to Luxor. But the time was not yet right just then.

We spent three or four days exploring the ruins at Luxor and Karnak and the Valley of the Kings and Deir Al Medinet across the Nile. We would each have our gear with us and would split up for an hour or so at a time, re-uniting here and there to share what we’d seen or drag the other to a choice location. As well as the sand-smell of Egypt, I had forgotten the quiet and flittery sound of birds wreathing the columns in the Great Hypostyle Hall in Karnak, and I wandered amongst them as so many have before me in utter awe and abandonment. The columns rose up and flared out like palms at the top, supporting huge lintels for several millennia now. We would arrive each day at the sites as early as we could – usually before 8 am. This allowed for fewer tourists, fewer touts selling crappy souvenirs, and a much greater feel for light. Once the sun had risen fully, the light became flat and banal and shadows deeper and blacker. We had colour slide film as well as B&W film and the first time we went to Karnak I lugged that damn Graflex and tripod. I became apoplectic when the site guards insisted my tripod was a video tripod and wanted to charge me the video cost of US$60/day. Despite my proving that I had no video equipment, they insisted that this was the tripod’s purpose. I felt like banging heads together and just marching on in. Bloody idiots! I kept thinking. I was stubborn enough that I bargained them down to half that cost, but still was severely put out and off my photograph game (so to speak) for the day. I did take some adequate pictures in the end with the 4×5 that day, but not what I had felt in me at the day’s outset. I have a lovely one of Carrie close up, sitting at the bottom of one of the great pillars in the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, chin on hand (her hand decorated with henna from a shop we stopped into the previous day – a beauty shop run by Arab Christians).

At one point during the day we met up toward the rear of the Karnak complex, near two pillars attributed to the reign of Tutankamun. One pillar flowed into a lotus at the top and the other became a papyrus frond, each a symbol of Upper or Lower Egypt; the median being the series of Nile cataracts that separate the two. We wended our way along a wall outside the Hypostyle Hall and turned right to see a freestanding box of a structure, near the wall. It was a single enclosed room with a normal doorway, but a ceiling inside perhaps twenty feet up. There wasn’t that much to see inside other than an earthen floor and some bas-relief carvings on the walls. While Carrie’s back was turned, inspecting the walls, I withdrew the small box I’d been carrying for the past week. This was the ‘large’ object I referred to earlier and while small, it carried great weight for me and so many hopes and dreams. I placed it on a short wall jutting into the room from the entrance to the structure. Within a few seconds, Carrie had turned around and noticed the small blue box on the wall and flung her eyes up to me in surprise. Just at that moment, a slew of Germans poured into the room and we were obliged to step back away from each other as they all piled in clutching tour books and shuffling attentively after the guide. Carrie and I regarded each other shyly and with surreptitious smiles and looks. I pawed the ground with my toe and felt my face grow redder by the second. The guide droned on and on about the significance of the room – in German – and I remember being impressed by his voice. How authentic he sounded! After an eternity, the Germans filed out and Carrie started to speak. I jumped in and asked her if she’d marry me. She immediately replied Yes, followed by How come you’re not on your knee? I dropped like a rock but she hoisted me up and we embraced. Stepping back out of the room, the sun was blinding. We winced in the light to get our bearings, feeling heady and so in love. The Germans, it turned out, were just outside and the guide was droning on further. I caught him as they were leaving to ask the name of the building. The Chapel of Hatshepsut he replied, somewhat annoyed, and hurried off after his charges. The Chapel of Hatshepsut. I knew then that I would remember that location for the rest of my life. Perhaps we’ll go back one day and I will propose again to Carrie, but on bended knee this time.

It was an easy crossing. The border guards barely looked at our hard-won visas and waved us through into Syria.

It wasn’t that much different from North Jordan on the other side of the border. Scrub, sand, cinderblock buildings, the odd brown tent pitched at angel against the wind (did I mention sand?). There was a small bus waiting and we climbed on after learning it was Damascus-bound. We waited for a few more passengers to collect from the border crossing and then the bus rattled off spewing black out of the tailpipe. It must have been an uneventful ride into the capital, as I think I feel asleep.

The arrival at the Damascus drop-off point downtown was on an elevated concrete area overlooking a large plaza in the middle of town. Opposite us were large buildings perhaps 30 storeys in height, several with enormous multi-storey drapes with Bachir Al Assad’s image on them. His father had recently died and the son had come to power. He looked like a weakling, surprised by the events that overtook him. His weedy moustache did nothing to improve his visage and his gaunt stance made him slope forward slightly like Lurch from The Addams Family. Hardly the despotic Syrian hard-ass his father was, he seemed unlikely to grow into the position. But grow into it he would over the coming years, and take up the reins of state terrorism-as-policy. But that’s another rant.

We located a philatelist to look for some stamps for my father back home ‘ the first thing you should do in Damascus, really. It happened to be quite close to our drop-off spot and we spent a happy hour or so looking through stamp books. Next was a money-changer, followed by late lunch/early supper. The place we were to stay the first night in-country was nice enough. Barely a small room really with a sink and bathroom down the hall. However, they did have an in-house restaurant that overlooked a small conflation of three streets, which provided lots to look at while we ordered. The dishes were more geared toward larger groups and so we settled on just two dishes and pops. I ordered a simple baaba ganouj, and when it came saw that it had a thin black swirl of bean curd wound through its centre. I swabbed a hunk of bread through it and took it in. I was flooded with the most sensuous, smoky flavour I had ever experienced. It was instantly remindful of campfires as a boy, spices from the far east, and a wholesomeness good food always brings to the pallete. I remember that taste still.

We were bound, on that trip, for the Aramaic town of Maaloula. It lay nestled in some sharp rises coming up out of the desert near the Syrian ridge overlooking the Bekaa valley in The Lebanon. Aramaic is a language, a long disused language actually, surviving only peripherally in one or two towns such as Maaloula anywhere in the world. Old enough linguistically, to be believed the language Christ spoke. I looked forward very much to hearing it. It would be like hearing the dead speak, I thought.

But first, the covered souk (or Market) of Damascus. Long fabled, the souk had been in-place beside the Grand Mosque since antiquity. Lawrence had written about having lunch there in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and Waugh had sampled its Turkish delight in the ’20s. There had been some diplomatic squabble long ago (1960s?) and Syria had opted to deny tourist passports to British citizens. We were the envy of the archeologists at the British Institute in ‘Amman later when we said where we’d been. The borders opened once again to Brits shortly after our trip. My companion had mentioned an ice cream place in the souk where several generations of Damascenes had made the stuff by hand and pulled portions for customers from great barrels. I became fixated and felt driven to find this place and sample the flavours. So we set off and eventually found the winding alleys that made the market. It was, indeed, covered (as many in the Levant are not) by cotton sheeting far above our heads ‘ perhaps 4 storeys or so with the bordering buildings opening their windows out onto the throngs on the streets below. Very medieval it was, with light streaming through edges in the fabric above, boring down through the musty air, creating long shafts of bright light. People flashed brilliantly for a second and then vanished into darkness when passing through these beams: flash, dark, flash, dark. I was mesmerized. There were the usual textile stalls and cheap clothing places, but not far in we came upon what we were sure was the place.

I ordered a vanilla pistachio, the first barrel I saw. The fellow across the counter pulled out an odd instrument. It had a worn wooden handle with a flat blade branching out from two sides. The blade flattened out and the branches met in the middle making a sort of rectangle with the handle on one end. He sprinkled some very green pistachio nuts across the surface of the vanilla and then struck into the ice cream and pulled it towards him. The ice cream curled up and around in a circular fashion and he took this curl and placed on a plate. I had ordered two scoops and he repeated this procedure with the second. Now, as many will know, eating ice cream in the developing world is never a good idea due to possible contagion lingering in the cooled substance. Eating handmade ice cream is foolhardy. But oh that pistachio looked good and I threw caution to the wind. It was, of course, delicious and the pistachio nuts stuck in my teeth for hours ‘ something I have never minded in the least.

The next day we caught another small bus to Maaloula and arrived midday. There were Christian symbols throughout the town; an enclave really, because the high ridges of rock very closely guarded the town, even from the sun when at any angle but directly above. There was a large crucifix painted onto a flat wall of rock above the main street leading sharply up into town. It was perhaps sixty feet up the rock and maybe 20 feet long on the nave. Huge. We inspected a very old church dating from the turn of the first millennium and then, prize of prizes, stoked ourselves with a very cold beer from a canopied terrace above the church. It was somewhat thick, almost mead-like and had a slight sweetness to it. Perfect for a hot day’s walking and hiking.

We needed to return to Damascus for the evening and strode down out of town back to the main road leading south and east. We hadn’t a ride organized and hoped to find a station or staging area for transport. Slightly alarmed to find none, and it approaching 4pm, we felt our only option was to attempt then to hitchhike. And within a few minutes of the familiar hitchhiker stance known the world over, a minivan pulled over ahead of us and crunched to a stop on the gravel. Approaching the vehicle we saw that it already had a number of people in it. Perhaps there was a bus staging area after all and we had missed it? We squeezed into the minivan, my companion over to the far side next to some women and I next to the sliding door and a jovial fellow beaming at everyone.

The driver was singing and clearly enjoying himself as he sashayed between the lines on the road, softly but clearly singing a little ditty. A woman joined in, and then the smiley guy next to me, and soon all were bouncing off each others’ shoulders as voices were raised in song. A national tune, a folk song? No, the driver called back over his shoulder in broken English, We have come from a wedding! They’d picked us up simply because they’d been in a good mood. How refreshing to have that happen. I could not imagine my own culture allowing for happy people to happily pick up strangers and happily carry on with them in their midst. How repressive Canadian society seemed at that point. Suddenly, I noticed the driver was fiddling around in his seat as he drove, the van careening around in the lane. He feet came up and planted themselves on the steering wheel and his hands fished out a short recorder from his pockets. He began to play a melody and drive with his feet. He even stuck his left arm out the window as he drove to show off further. My companion and I were aghast, but soon laughing with the rest of the company. Not to be outdone, I slid open the window next to me and pulled out my yo-yo and stuck my arm out as well. It was difficult, and my yo-yo wonked off the side of the van a few times, but I did manage a couple of inside loops and even one around-the-world. There were shouts of hurrah for both of us and we were soon back in Damascus and clapping one another on the back.

As a denouement, we were detained at the Jordanian border for what were declared insufficient multiple entry visas. We were clear that we had obtained them in Canada and were very stubborn about it. We sat in the office of the commandant for two hours, as he grew increasingly bored of us, asking the same questions over and again not really interested in the replies anymore. We were eventually released and passed through back into Jordan. I remember it felt good to be back, like our home for some silly reason. I had only spent a couple of months there that year and the previous one; hardly enough to even warrant the idea of living there. But home it felt and to ‘Amman we returned.

Picture below taken with B&W infrared film:

Should it be a box or a bag? A box would be cumbersome, but be more protective against bangs and knocks. A bag would be easier and we could keep them and use them on the trip home, but be less protective. In the end we opted for bags. Bicycle bags from Royal Airlines came in about 15 mil thickness and seemed very tough indeed.

Gary and I decided to bicycle into the Sheraton in Toronto that morning where we would meet and take the bus out to the airport. We threw our bikes in the bus’ under-compartment and swung aboard. We had decided also to take only carry on luggage to Cuba. It had been a toss-up between panniers (two each, maybe three with one in front) and small backpacks. The latter won the toss-up and we sauntered onto the plane in our cycling shorts, t-shirts and two very full and round packs. How very odd to sit there among the holiday-makers in Hawaiian shirts and hear talk of swim-up bars when we knew we’d be sleeping on the beach and trying to find local food throughout the week ahead.

The airport in Holguin (whole-geen) was small and provincial, with the inside resembling a stable more than an international destination, but the openness was directly to our liking and advantage. We unloaded our bikes from the trolley as it trundled up on the tarmac side of the terminal and proceeded to customs. Without much more than a pursing of eyebrows, we were let through, much faster than the Hawaiian shirts to our delight. Stopping outside to put our pedals back on and right the handlebars, we set off in short order out to the road on into town. I immediately got a flat. We had each brought a spare tire (one), and I changed mine as the Hawaiian shirts passed us by in twos and fours in their taxis, gaping out the window at us as they passed. I had decided to use my spare right then and patch the first later on.

Probably the first thing we both noticed was that it was a bit more difficult riding with the rounded packs on our backs that anticipated. They tended to roll around from side to side, pivoting over the backbone in a most annoying way. But I thought I’d better get used to it and tried to get comfortable nonetheless. The heavier weight on the shoulders meant more weight on the palms as well. We had to watch it as this tended to make our hands go numb after riding for a while. We spent the first night in a place called El Bosque (el-Boss-kay – the Forest), on the edge of town and quite enjoyed the pool and warmth of the day. We tootled around on our bikes and marveled at the quantity of Communist propaganda that was just there, out in the open. Billboard for Che Guevara:
Modelo de hombre communista / Modelo de hombre revolucionario / Simbolo permanente e invincible (Model of a communist man / model of a revolutionary / A permanent and invincible Symbol). Sign above a department store:
Socialismo o Muerte (Socialism or Death). I liked the last one’s sentiment ‘ especially that it was above a department store, except for the Death part. Sheesh, that seemed a little extreme. I had thought Cubans were more laid back than that. We came across a catholic church under reconstruction, and walked into the shell interior. The floor was earthen and muddy in places. There were some pews over and to the right and we made out way there. I spied a lovely life-sized statue of an angel praying off in a corner with a single shaft of light coming down and striking her in the otherwise dimly lit building. I was thunderstruck and hastily took a photograph. There were some stairs behind a wall nearby and we wound our way up their circular path, pausing at one point to peer out a vertical window at the church’s bells above the nave, towering over the town. The stairs opened up into a small room at the top of the tower and we came across religious artifacts jumbled together haphazardly as they awaited restoration to various parts of the church. There was a great wheel from a bell structure, two angels in pretty rough shape, some wooden poles (what could they be use for?), and the like. I took some more photographs.

I had brought ten rolls of B&W infrared film with me, in addition to some Tri-X. BW infrared film is a very interesting emulsion. It’s been around a long time. Edward Steichen used it while in the Navy in WWII to photograph ships. It has the curious property for a BW film of being only sensitive to the far-red spectrum of light. That is, it could only ’see’ object illuminated (from within or without) at around 900 nm on the spectral scale. To accentuate this property, BW IR film is mainly used with a dark-red filter (Kodak 25A) over the lens. A coloured filter for BW film? Sure, because the red filter absorbs all other colours striking it (blue, green, whatever) and only passes red light. This renders anything emitting or reflecting IR light as almost over-exposed on the film and anything at the blue, or opposite, end of the spectrum as underexposed. The result? Blues go almost black (a deep blue sky for example), and greens become very dark as well, but clouds against a blue sky show brilliantly. Trees (and foliage in general) glow white with the IR they re-emit and reflect from the sun. It is a ghostly result, and startlingly beautiful. It even has some nice applications with non-IR subjects, such as great doors and angels in a certain Cuban church.

As Gary and I rode around Holguin, we were joined by a young fellow, a kid really, on his ten-speed. He rode a clunky sky-blue affair with a fender over the chainstays and a badly rusted gooseneck. There was Cyrillic writing on the fender ‘ a Russian ten-speed, who’d have thought? The kid was 16 and said he was on the Cuban national youth cycling team. We had no reason to doubt him and he seemed quite nice and even amiable. He was very proud of his lycra shorts and carefully pointed out that they said ‘Gar-ee Feesha‘ on them. He took us up to a mirador (look-out) so we could see the lay of the wide and shallow valley the town was in and then on down to an abandoned fun park. I was amazed by this park with weeds growing up between train rails, rust stains running down the sides of astral skycars leaning at angles above us, and melancholy swing-set seats sagging to the ground with infinite longing. I shot a lot of IR.

We went back to his grandmother’s house in town while he ran through the place shouting ABUELA! ABUELA! like she was utterly deaf. The old woman rolled out of one of the rooms and we sat in the back courtyard under some trees and had tea. I’m not sure about Gary, but I was starting to feel not a little conspicuous in my own lycra shorts and wished I had regular shorts instead, feeling a bit like a fat man in a speedo. The lad insisted we meet his fianc’ and we rode off to meet her ‘ I can’t now remember where that was. At a market was it? At any rate, she was very gentle and even genteel. She sat demurely on the back of the lad’s bike, side-saddle, and repeatedly admonished Gary and I to be ‘cuidado!’ or careful as we rode beside them on the way to their apartment. Their place was lightly decorated and had the obligatory portrait of Castro, but also one of Antonio Maceo (mah-say-o), the original liberator of Cuba from the Spaniards. The girl, 16 also, fussed in the kitchen and brought out some juices for us while we talked shop in the living room; about bicycles and specifically what bits off ours the lad might have. A bit taken aback, we said we needed all parts as we had the better part of a week ahead of us and further that the Cuban authorities at entry had taken quick inventory of our gear and would check to see if we were leaving any behind (true), and would tax us heavily if not (unknown, actually). He seemed very disappointed and we promised to send stuff to him from Canada on return, but he blew this off as wholly unlikely. Not, we thought, because we wouldn’t follow through but because it would all be stolen enroute to his address. He was very probably right. In the end, we did locate a shipper to Cuba and sent him a helmet, bell, pump and so on, on the chance they would get through anyway.

We slunk back to the hotel (there’d been a lot of riding that first full day), and crashed into bed in order to get up early to ride on to the coast and Guardalavaca.

It was our third night in Cuba that we slept under the stars, eventually wrapped in our bikes’ plastic bags because we had underestimated the warmth of Cuban nights in March. It was bloody cold and I don’t think either of us would have slept much anyway even if two drunks hadn’t come along and started scaring us out of our wits by asking how expensive all our gear was. We stood up in the cold and dark and tried to appear larger than we really were. They offered us rum, which we politely declined, and we started putting our stuff together all the while keeping an eye on them. They were silhouetted against the early morning sky and I knew I couldn’t have picked them out in a lineup if it had included giraffes. They appeared to give up after a time and sauntered off. Well, we thought, that wasn’t half as much fun as we had expected and a damn sight colder too. So being the wimps we confessed to being, we set out to find a hotel.

But there was a problem. We had chosen the lower, eastern end of Cuba solely because The Last Minute Club had had cheapo fares to Holguin. In fact, we might very well have gone to Mexico if The Last Minute Club had led our wallets in that direction. But we ended up in eastern Cuba and while sure, it would have been nice to see Havana, we then would have had to consort with lots of other plebes and a ton more Hawaiian shirts to boot. We consoled ourselves with this, as we progressed along the beach to the only resort in the area. It was closed to outsiders of course, and this included us. The difference in price between air only to Cuba and all-inclusive became brilliantly clear at this point and we looked at each other and went for a ride to think about what we would do.

Suddenly, not 100 metres from the resort, we came across four small cabanas. Woohoo! They were US$50 per night and while we had very limited cash, felt we really needed to bunk there for the remainder of our stay. We swung a deal with a maitre d’ at the resort for food and gave them US$20/day. This pretty much ate up our liquidity, so to speak, and the remaining days of the week slid into one another as we tootled around on country roads, examined the beach and picked up cassettes of local Cuban musicians.

The last event that Cuba had in store for us was an exit tax at the airport. Ulp. We had spent all our money, all of it, on food and accommodation. We needed $25 each to get on board the flight home! While we fretted and sweated about what to do and passengers shuffled past us in the line and got on the plane, an angel descended in the form of a young man who very graciously gave us the money. We discovered a few minutes later that we were seated beside him and we exchanged addresses with him promising to pay him back on return. I sincerely doubt he ever expected to see us again, but a few days later I showed up at Bell, where he worked, and handed over the cash (with a bottle of wine in addition as heartfelt thanks).