Showing posts by: funambulator@live.com
La Habana Vieja and Bishop Street: Old Havana Inside Out!
From our landing point in Havana, we made straight for our casa in the city. Tiny room (especially for two!), all round minimalism, minimal Inglés spoken by the staff, but it was right in the heart of La Habana Vieja, the old city. Two cross-streets (most of the ‘streets’ are hardly more than lane width!) away from our guesthouse is Calle Obispo (Bishop Street), a cobblestone pedestrian thoroughfare that runs through the heart of Old Havana – we made for this place pretty much as soon as we settled our belongings in the room.
Obispo connects Parque Central (near Havana’s main street Paseo de Martí, AKA Paseo del Prado) at one end with Plaza de Armas and the waterfront at the other. A big chunk of the activity, the vibe, happens on or around this street. A real assortment of shops, giftwares and numerous eateries to choose from. There are cafés and several banks/ATMs for your dinero necessities on Obispo. Obispo is the easiest spot to pick up a bargain souvenir or memento, the “el cheapo” place to buy artesano regalo items is the small undercover handicrafts market half-way up Obispo. 
To get an appreciation of the authentic cuisine of the working class, what the average Habanero eats, Varíedades Obispo (Obispo Varieties shop) is the place to visit…come here to experience eating like the assembled masses do on a permanently limited budget – simple but fresh, basic, no-frills comida and dirt cheap! Just a few shops down from Varíedades is one Obispo’s two farmacias, Drogueria Johnson. Everything about the Johnson Drugstore looks historic, from the name sombrely and impressively engraved on the stone facade outside to the types of pharmacy lines inside. It seems like a relic from 1950s La Habana that somehow survived the Revolution! The shop tends to resemble a museum in some ways – and yet it still operates daily as a pharmacy service. A novel experience for anyone who can’t remember the pharmacies of the fifties.
Obispo Street’s not a great place to hover round in if you are ochlophobic✱ – in this busy thoroughfare crowd mingling is more or less unavoidable! Busy it may be but bustling it is not! People tend to stroll up and down Obispo at a very relaxed pace, taking in the sights, sounds and smells. Obispo is certainly an odoriferous experience…the smell of fresh churros being made by vendors is a lingering olfactory delight, the ubiquitous presence of stray dogs in the street and their random “calling card” deposits however is a more malodorous experience.
On our last day in Havana there was a colourful street carnival happening right along Obispo – performers on stilts wearing vivid, silky garments and flowing robes were winding their way in a slow procession down the narrow thoroughfare as the crowds swelled around them, dancing, constant pulsating musical rhythms, everything seemed quite spontaneous and of course the locals were right into it!
Keep heading east on Calle Obispo, past the Cuban band with its musicians all decked out in white, and you’ll reach the tree-lined Plaza de Armas, an ideal spot to get away from the full-on tourist overload of Obispo. With seating all around the square it’s easy to find a calm, quiet spot shaded by large trees overhead and be surrounded by the presence of nice greenery. After you’ve rested a bit, there’s history on all sides of the plaza to see – as you enter the plaza you pass a elegant white, mansion-like building, Casa de Gobnierno y Palacio de Municipal. Capitanes Generales Palace, as it is also known, is now a museum with a grand courtyard, but at the time of the Spanish-American War (1898) this was the American Government’s administrative headquarters for the four years the US was in control of the island of Cuba. You can pick up a souvenir “Revolutionary green” military cap with obligatory red star from the hawkers constantly circling round the square – it will cost you 2-3 CUC more if you want one with the iconic image of “El Che” (Guevara) as well!.
To the immediate north of Plaza de Armas is Havana’s historic colonial bastion fort, the Castillo de la Real Fuerza (lit. “Castle of Royal Force”) complete with watchtower, moat and thick limestone walls…the fortress was built to defend against unwelcome 16th century privateers and buccaneers. Its location looks strategically sound to me, looking straight down the bay towards the open sea, but I read somewhere, in the ‘Rough Planet’ guide I think it was, that the powers-that-be in colonial times weren’t all that thrilled about where it was located (it should have been right on the water’s edge apparently) and this led to the Castillo being decommissioned earlier than intended. Since it’s military function ceased, it has been variously used as for archives and conservation, as a library, and is now the National Maritime Museum. Interestingly, the info sign on the fort entrance gate near the rusty old cannons is in two languages – Spanish and Braille!
If you hang round the Plaza long enough you are better than an “even money” bet to meet, without any effort on your part, young local women keen to make your acquaintance…they are very friendly and if you converse with them for any amount of time, you’ll discover that a surprising number of them, by coincidence, are professional dancers currently in a hiatus period work-wise. Their sociability and amiability will often extend to an abiding interest in knowing the location of your casa! Prudence and a cautionary approach is strongly recommended to visiting single tourists.
If you have managed to escape the attentions of the convivial ladies doing their utmost to supplement their meagre monthly wages, take a right at Plaza de Armas and head down Oficios, you’ll soon be at San Francisco Plaza, a large, open square bereft of shade facing the Cruise Ship Terminal (Terminal Sierra Maestra). As you enter the plaza the first item of interest immediately to your left is a modernist sculpture directly in front of the formidable looking Lonja del Comercio commercial building. This relatively recently added (2012) French-created, bronze sculpture (aptly named ‘In Conversation’) catches the eye of most visitors. I like the way the piece plays with the space of the two figures, leaving your imagination to fill in the gaps – both the physical gaps of space and what the two engrossed in dialogue might be conversing about…its an intriguing and compelling piece of public art!
Also, worthy of a peek on the opposite side of the Plaza, astride the archaic Convento de la San Francisco, is a much older, representational sculpture, a statue of the celebrated and loveable Havana vagrant ‘Cabellero de Paris’. Visitors line up here for the chance to take a ‘selfie’ with an arm round the bronze shoulder of one of the “favourite sons” of old Havana. Pedestrians tend to slowly circle around the square, taking in the sights, the buildings, the sculptures and statues, the famous fountain, the busy ferry terminal. Never far away from the wandering tourists are the souvenir hawkers, especially visible here are the ambling cigar-sellers peddling the trademark product synonymous with everything Cuban. From San Francisco Plaza head west for a sight of Plaza Vieja with its central fountain and colourful collection of arched colonial buildings in pastel blues and yellows. From here, take any street to the right and you’ll end up you back in Obispo and tourism central.
Obispo – looking toward Plaza de Armas ◮
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✱ someone with an extreme fear or dislike of crowds
Wall’s End: The Great Wall, Laolongtou, Hushan/Bakjak and the Goguryeo Question
The “Long Wall” – the world’s most famous, most myth-engendering bulwark
China’s most distinctive and enduring icon is the Great Wall of China, it is of course also sui generis as the world’s Great Wall. The Wall, Chángchéng 長城 – or as sometimes described Wan-li Ch’ang-ch’eng 萬里長城 (10,000-mile Long Wall✱), is incontrovertibly one of the wonders of both the ancient and modern worlds. Starting in the west in Gansu Province at Jiayuguan Pass, the wall(s) meander east over mountains and through passes to they reach the sea in the country’s east (a journey of over 21 thousand km). The oldest sections of the Wall date from the Warring States era (circa 214 BCE). 
Laolongtou ⍗
Shanhaiguan and ‘Old Dragon’s Head’
If we follow the extravagating course of the wall east from the Badaling section (near Beijing) for about 300 kilometres, we’ll come to Shanhaiguan (literally “mountain – sea – pass”) in Liaoning Province, one of the Great Wall’s major passes (acclaimed as “the first pass under Heaven”). This section continues to Laolongtou (‘Old Dragon’s Head‘⊟), where the wall enters the sea (Gulf of Bohai) and spectacularly and abruptly terminates! The wall at Shanhaiguan and Laolongtou snaking as it does between mountains on one side and water on the other, has been strategically important to the Chinese Empire eastern defences since the 1600s.
Hushan Great Wall
The setting that greets visitors to Laolongtou Wall end-point (Estuary Stone) looks like a most appropriate setting for the eastern terminus of the Great Wall. The reality is however that the Great Wall/s are not a continuous linear structure, they are actually characterised by numerous gaps in the sections…and where the ‘Old Dragon’s Head’ ceases at the sea is one more break in the line, albeit a dramatically evocative one! Before 1989 the conventional wisdom was that Laolongtou was the most easterly point in the Walls, but in that year Chinese archaeologists excavated 600m of a hitherto undiscovered section of the Great Wall 540km east of Laolongtou. The Hushan Wall (extending over a mountain, Hushan or Tiger Mountain) lies just north of China’s eastern border city, Dandong (which eyeballs North Korea just across the Yalu River). In 2009 the Chinese government, based on Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) research, recognised the wall as the most eastern point of the Great Wall (and ie, the end-point). Beijing’s classifying of the wall (so close to the Korean border) as Chinese contradicted the North Korean view that the wall was originally Korean (the Bakjak Fortress) and provoked a hostile North Korean reaction. [‘Hushan Great Wall’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
PostScript: Dandong discovery reignites the Goguryeo controversy The Dandong wall conflict reignited the controversy over the Goguryeo Kingdom that previously had inflamed tensions between the two countries. Background: the historic Goguryeo Kingdom (1st century BC to 7th century AD) encompassed an area comprising all but the tip of the Korean peninsula and a portion of both Russian and Chinese Manchuria. Both Koreas view the historic Goguryeo Kingdom as having been the ‘proto-Korea’ state. The Chinese perspective (which the Koreas label as revisionism) is that Goguryeo was only ever a vassal state of the ‘Middle Kingdom’, moreover one occupied largely by Tungusic people, an ethnic minority of China. The wall kerfuffle fed into this controversy, stirring up feelings of nationalism on both sides, the fallout being that Sino-Korean relations took a nosedive. Mutual distrust lingers over the matter…fears of irredentist claims on each other’s territory, and for PRC the perennial bogeyman of the spectre of Korean reunification. [‘Goguryeo controversies’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
(Source: Man, ‘The Great Wall)
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✱ chéng in Chinese can also mean city or city wall…or more aptly to describe China’s wonder building – walls in the plural, John Man, The Great Wall (2009)
⊟ so-called because the structure’s end part (above the sea) is thought to resemble a dragon (long) resting its head (tou) on the ground
❂ the Chinese media going so far as to tag the kingdom as ‘China’s Goguryeo’ (Zhongguo Gaogouli) [Korea and China’s Clashing Histories’, (Yong Kwon), The Diplomat, 11-Jul-2014, www.thediplomat.com]
Queen Hatshepsut’s Wondrous Showcase Valley Temple stained by Tragedy
Our visit to the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, AKA the Deir el-Bahri (“Northern Monastery”) was the highlight of the visit to Luxor, a happy wrap to a long day mostly spent peering into a raft of dark, underground Egyptian burial tombs in the nearby Valley of the Kings. 
From the Queen’s monastery entrance gate near the West Bank of the Nile we were ferried out to the site in “people-movers”, open transit E-vehicles. This sublime gem of a temple stands out from the others for several reasons! First of all – the fun-sounding name, we were informed by Bakr that it is correctly pronounced “Hat-cheap-suit” which is a pretty good memory device to resort to, but the quipsters in our tour party were quick to translate it into “Hot n’chicken-soup” or even more absurdly “Hot-chip’n’soup”! (in the dusty air and baking heat of the Valley, lunch was never far from our minds!). It was special too because remarkably Queen Hatshepsut was only one of two female pharaohs in Ancient Egyptian history (d.1458 BCE, 18th Dynasty). 
The first, Sobekneferu (d.1802 BCE, 12th Dynasty) was a more shadowy figure and a much less substantive ruler. Hatshepsut first ascended the imperial throne as co-regent with her half-brother but assumed full pharaonic powers after his death. Her reign was notable for its building projects, especially around Thebes (her crowning glory this memorial temple, Deir el-Bahri, built in Western Thebes) and for extending the kingdom’s trading links possibly as far as Punt (Eritrea) in the Horn of Africa. 
In the contemporary images, statues and sculptures of Hatshepsut✱, she is depicted (on her own orders) as a man, eg, the free-standing colonnade sculptures of the Queen in her showcase Thebes temple show her with a manly build and a characteristic pharaoh’s beard and attire. Lastly there is its peerless aesthetic appeal. Most of the other mortuary houses in Luxor’s valley look drab and unprepossessing by comparison. The temple is magnificently set in a natural valley against a towering backdrop of massive craggy mountains. Though upward of 3,500 years old in some ways it looks strangely modern with its ramps, two-tired terraces and the simplicity of clean, white, sharp lines of the colonnades and facade…the simplicity of the building and the way it blends into the landscape reminds me a bit of the architecture of Chicago’s Prairie School. Hatshepsut’s pet name for the temple was Djeser Djeseru (“splendour of Splendours”), in the ancient era the elegant simplicity of Deir el-Bahri was enhanced by a number of aesthetic features and elements that haven’t survived to the present day (eg, an avenue of sphinxes, fountains, lines of myrrh trees from the land of Punt) [The Rough Guide to Egypt (2007 Ed.)]. 
The distressing, tragic contemporary association with this sublimely beautiful monument is that it was here that 58 international tourists as well as four Egyptians were massacred by terrorists in 1997, a further 26 visitors or more were injured in the onslaught (the worst-ever terrorist atrocity involving tourists in Egypt). The terrorist group, suspected to be a splinter arm of al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya (Egyptian Sunni Islamist organisation)✥ entered the complex in the guise of security guards, trapping the victims inside the temple and setting on them with knives and guns. The murderers later fled and committed suicide in the surrounding hills. The largest proportion (>60%) of the murdered tourists came from Switzerland (later on Swiss intelligence ‘determined’ that Osama Bin Laden had bankrolled the operation). A direct consequent of the Luxor massacre was both a beefing up of tourist security and a drop in Egypt’s tourist numbers. Subsequent terrorist attacks elsewhere within the country has ensured the maintenance of high levels of security by the Egyptian authorities to this day.
_______________________________________________________________ ✱ the statues of Hatshepsut that survive that is, many at the temple were predictably decimated by later male pharaohs in a chauvinist attempt to erase her from the annals of Egypt’s pharaonic ‘pantheon’ ✥ although this charge has continued to be denied by al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya itself
By Boat to Philae, Visiting an Ancient Egyptian ‘Treasure Island’
The island containing the Temple of Philae and other significant, associated monuments from antiquity is a definite starter on the list of essential things to see when in the Nubian region of Egypt. So, after the tour guide had taken us to the Aswan High Dam to get a sighter from the bridge of the vast reservoirs of water, we made for the island✱. 
The temple and other monuments we were going to see were originally on Philae island, but by the 1960s the Egyptian government, concerned at the harmful effect the periodical flooding of the island was having on the monuments and its archaeological relics (a by-product of the Aswan Low Dam), decided to relocate them to a more optimal place – mirroring the story with the Abu Simbel Tow Temples and the Aswan High Dam. The nearby island of Aglika was chosen as the new site and in a logistics exercise that consumed virtually all the seventies, Philae’s temples and monuments “island-hopped” to Aglika. 
There was some inexplicable delay (becoming quite the norm) when we got to the wharf in getting a boat to ferry us to the new island. One of the random fellow passengers on the boat ride was perhaps the most exotic ‘apparition’ we had encountered in all our time in Egypt. I say ‘apparition’ because although she was real, so oddly and eccentrically was she decked out in extravagant garb and paraphernalia, she was totally out-of-place with everyone else in the sweltering heat of the day. The image that occurred to me when I saw her was of a kind of Egyptian “Mary Poppins”. She was covered from head to foot in multi-layers of gaily coloured clothing, fancy “Sunday-best” gloves, etc, the whole kit! Yes and of course the obligatory umbrella as well! She also looked like she could seamlessly slot into the cast of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, no problems. We were all melting in the oppressive tropical heat in our thin cotton T-shirts, shorts and sandals, so I can’t imagine how she was feeling it. As it transpired, ‘Maryam’ Poppins had an eccentric personality to match her flamboyant attire. She tried to blame us for the boat’s delay and then wanted to use us as money-changers. I couldn’t quite fathom what exactly the proverbial bee in her over-veiled bonnet was! 
As the boat neared the island the vision was an enchanting one, the central complex of buildings seemed to be growing out of the lush green band of trees and bushes which surround it! It was easy to spot the distinctive twin pylons of the Temple of Isis. Philae was one of the strongholds for the cult of worshipping the all-empowering Egyptian goddess. 
Once you set foot on the island you find its full of fascinating monuments and artefacts which reveal a rich and varied history and an assortment of diverse cultural influences. The earliest religious structures reach back to the 4th century BCE and the Pharaonic era. Others date to the Ptolemaic Kingdom (Alexander the Great’s Graeco-Egyptian successors from Ptolemy I up to Cleopatra). A number of the buildings still extant were erected under the aegis and command of Roman emperors, eg, the Kiosk of Trajan (above). Even the early century Byzantine rulers have left an imprint on Philae as did the Coptic Christians. 
Most impressive of all perhaps is the forecourt of the main temple with its splendid colonnaded, the courtyard is an irenic atmosphere-evoking space. Also calming and softening the setting was the afternoon sunlight filtering in between the temple’s columns and reflecting on the still waters of the river in the background. The temple’s stand-out for me remains the striking reliefs of Egyptian deities (especially) on the Second Pylon (above), sharply defined sculptures which have been exceptionally well-preserved (or restored) bearing in mind that the temple walls had been half-submerged for considerable periods when it was still located on the vulnerable Philae island. 
In addition to the Temple of Isis and the Kiosk of Trajan, the island contains five lesser temples, two Roman gates, the Portico of (Emperor) Augustus and the Pavilion or Vestibule of (Pharaoh) Nactanebo I. The site’s various buildings are rich in the representation of pictographic narratives…the trained eye of Egyptologist Biko drew our attention to other, unauthorised markings on the monuments – various graffiti inscriptions is left by past visitors from the Roman epoch through to the Napoleonic period…which is visual confirmation – if we needed it – that graffiti has been around for just about forever (‘How Old is Graffiti?‘, www.wonderopolis.org). 
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✱ 8.8km south of Aswan as the Nubian Corvus flies!
Monumental Abu Simbel: A Desert Gem on the Tropic of Cancer
The stock standard, organised tour of Egypt offered by x-plus one number of tour operators and agents typically has an itinerary which comprises Cairo, Gaza Pyramids, Saqqara, a Nile cruise, Luxor and the Valley of the Kings (and maybe Queens), and Karnak, maybe Aswan if you’re lucky and Alexandria, less likely to be included. Sinai doesn’t score a guernsey and the Temples of Abu Simbel, way down in the Nubian south close to the border with Sudan, is often only available as a cost add-on option. But worth it…if you were permitted to visit just one archaeological site in Egypt, Abu Simbel should be the one!
The trip south to Upper Nile
We left bustling, teeming Cairo and journeyed to the Giza Railway Station preceded by a short stop at the Canadian Youth Hostel for a refresher/change of clothes. There was no rush as it turned out, we twiddled our thumbs while the overnight train to Aswan waited dormant on the platform for two hours before it departed. Egyptian Railways’ so-called Abela “Sleeping Train” was on the whole relatively comfortable, but it took a torturous 13½ hours to get to Aswan, and although we had our own separate (small) compartments I got very little sleep in the night in the noisy, overcrowded carriage with the jerky motion of the train. The on-board toilets were a bit dire and the railway staff gave us something cold and rubbery to eat…though they were very polite about it. As least we fared better than the other half of our tour group, their (following) ER train broke down on route in the heat for five hours, standing still, no air con!
⇩ Tourist stalls outside entrance to Abu Simbel site
The next morning we had to rise and leave our Aswan hotel just after 3am to drive to Abu Simbel. It was a four-hour drive to the site and we needed to get there early enough to be in and out before the severe heat of the day hit. Our bus together with several other tour buses travelled through the desert in a convoy escorted by armed soldiers in the front and rear vehicles (a corollary of the spike in terrorist attacks on Egyptian tourist sites in recent years). We arrived at the AS monument complex at around 7am.
Leaving the car park and side-stepping through the souvenir wallahs trying to steer us towards their goods stalls, we walked along a curved access road down a slight incline. As we rounded a corner, we get our first sighting of what we had come to see. Superimposed on the cliff face of a mountain were two sets of monumental carved figures, it is an amazing spectacle that greets you, the sheer scale is jaw-dropping, breathtaking…no superlatives you can think of seem adequate at the moment. The first wonder you come to are a set of four colossal (20m high) statues representing Rameses II, the famous pharaoh of the New Kingdom (19th Dynasty), seated on his throne. The four❈ monumental figures are set in rock relief, a niche carved out of the mountain wall. Behind the tetrad of Rameses’ is a temple dedicated to the pharaoh. Further along the mountain is a companion monument to Rameses’ consort, the Temple of Queen Nefertari. One hundred metres to the right of Rameses’ monument, also built on an extended arm of the artificial hill, is the smaller Temple of (the Goddess Hathor and) Queen Nefertari. In front of the temple is a frieze comprising large sculptures of figures (Rameses and Nefertari who unusually was rendered to be of equal height to the pharaoh).
⇧ Queen Neferari MonumentMoving the monuments – the engineering marvel of a miracle Almost as fascinating as the Abu Simbel monuments themselves is the back story of how they were forgotten, lost, re-found and then moved. Engulfed by shifting sands and lost for millennia, the temples were discovered by a Swiss orientalist, Johann-Ludwig Burckhardt, in 1813. And there they sat until the Aswan High Dam project of the 1960s…the rising levels of the Nile and the creation of Lake Nasser meant that the Abu Simbel monuments would be submerged in the river. A UN-funded salvage operation (coordinated by Swedish company Impreglio) used engineers and archaeologists from around the world and Egyptian labour⌀ to rescue the 3,200 year-old-monuments and re-position them slightly further south on higher ground that is back a bit from the rushing waters of the Nile.
How to move enormous solid objects of such colossal weight and density was the challenge facing the team. The ingenious solution was to cut the statues into manageable (up to 20-ton) blocks (some sections so delicate that handsaws had to be used) that could be then transported to the temples’ new home and there carefully reassembled. For this to succeed required absolute mathematical precision, patience and a long time…but it worked and the statues were rejoined remarkably without recourse to glue or any form of adhesive substance [‘1964-1968 Rescuing Rameses II’, Amanda Uren, http://mashable.com]
Inside the temples
Concrete domes and arched doorways were integrated into the construction of the artificial hills to create the two temples in the new location. Inside are treasury rooms, sculptures and numerous wall and column decorations in honour of Egypt’s most long-lived pharaoh. Photography within the Greater and Lesser Temples is not permitted, but packets of postcards depicting pictures of the interior treasures and of the 1960s relocation project can be purchased at the site.
We spent two hours exploring Abu Simbel but could have stayed longer, Biko however was quick to hurry us back to our mini-bus with his now familiar cry of yalla-beena! The temple site was becoming people top-heavy with new tourist buses arriving every hour, we knew that we needed to make tracks in the desert – especially if we were to avoid, as much as we could, having to travel in full tropical sun. We left happy and content that we had witnessed one of the best ancient complexes we would see. So many of Egypt’s archaeological monuments are magnificent, but very few of them can be said to match the rarefied atmosphere of Abu Simbel Tow Temples.
A note on nomenclature: The traditional speculation is that the name Abu Simbel derives from the name of the Nubian boy who guided Burckhardt (and later Italian explorer Giovanni Belzoni) to the location of the lost treasure temples…regardless of this claims’ merits it should be noted that Abu Simbel literally means “Father (Abu) of the Ear of Corn”.
Footnote: Remoteness of Abu Simbel – deep in the Nubian South, around 35–50km from the Sudanese border, Abu Simbel is literally in the middle of nowhere…the location of this monumental, eponymous structure was intended as the marker signifying the southern border of Rameses II’s empire
⇧ Night viewings of the spotlighted Rameses II monument are spectacular and popular
⊷⊷⊷⊶⊶⊶⊷⊷⊷⊶⊶⊶⊷⊷⊷⊶⊶⊶⊷⊷⊷⊶⊶⊶⊷⊷⊷⊶ ❈ the head and torso of one of the four Rameses lies at the feet of the statue – this was how Burckhardt found it in 1813, the fissure is thought to have been caused by an earthquake. Another point of difference within the foursome is that Rameses #4 (counting from left to right) is missing the pharaoh’s trademark shaving brush beard ⌀ the project used around 3,000 workers, cost $US42M in 1960s money and nearly five years to complete ⊡ during the project a perhaps surprising decision was made to not replace the detached head and torso of Rameses #2 in its original position, rather it was placed on the ground at the statue’s feet exactly as it was found when re-discovered in 1813
El Alamein: Wandering through the War Cemeteries and Ossuaries of Egypt’s Western Desert
The drive from Alexandria to El Alamein was a pretty tedious affair, the M40 is a dry, dusty, monotonously homogeneous-looking road. On the right we gleaned glimpses of the sea interspersed with long lines of newish looking seaside villas and resorts (many appear unoccupied), which contrasted with a vista of unremitting desert wasteland on the left. One hundred and six kilometres of hum-humdrum tedium in fact!
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/image-20.jpg”> Fortress-like German military cemetery, El Alamein[/
ref=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/image-21.jpg”> Italian Military Cemetery, El Alamein[/ca
f=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/image-22.jpg”> Interior of the Italian ossuary[/capt
Returning from the Italian mausoleum visit, we stopped briefly at the El Alamein Military Museum. We didn’t venture inside, hanging around only long enough to pick up some lunch and an unscheduled, solo hitchhiker from Israel on his way to Libya! Bakr, our Egyptian guide, clearly uncomfortable at the arrangement, didn’t much like our giving a lift to someone Jewish (and especially an Israeli!), in an aside to me he uttered a warning that he would be trouble. Bakr however insisted that it was my call, as I was the one hiring the transport for the excursion! I didn’t feel that this solitary 65-year-old retired Israeli tourist posed a threat to our liberty or security, so I had no objections to him tagging along with us.
The next stop was the vast Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery (CWGC) which was an even more affecting sight – over 7,300 soldiers and airmen from all corners of the then British Empire✱ are buried in symmetrical formations in the sandy clay (as with the Italian ossuary, around 820 of the dead remain unidentified). The Australian section of graves stretches over a quite sizeable part of the cemetery.
Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery ▼
The memorial building, sand-blond in colour and with lavish arches, is a fitting and respectful tribute to those who fell in the desert campaign. The cost of establishing and maintaining CWGC is met by contributions from the Commonwealth countries whose soldiers took part in that theatre of war, its lawns, groves and gardens are kept in immaculate shape by a dedicated staff of Egyptian groundsmen and gardeners. After the visit to the Commonwealth graves we returned to the war museum where we dropped off the Israeli guy. As we turned the vehicle into the road that took us back to Alexandria he was last seen on the M40 getting into in some fracas with an Egyptian guard over his travel papers.
Footnote: elsewhere at El Alamein, located separately, there are two other, tiny military cemeteries commemorating combatants on different sides who lost their lives in World War II – a Greek war memorial (its portal taking the form of an ancient Greek temple) and cemetery containing the remains of that nation’s soldiers who died in the two battles of El Alamein. There is another ossuary memorial to Libyan troops who fought for Fascist Italy in the campaign. Bakr didn’t mention either of these war cemeteries and I certainly didn’t spot them on our travels.
PostScript: as I wandered off the edges of the Commonwealth Military Cemetery Bakr was quick to remind me that the vast expanses of desert was full of unpleasant surprises in the shape of unexploded land mines. These still ‘live’ explosives, estimated to number many millions all over the Western Desert, were planted during the African campaign in WWII…a strong antidote to curb anyone’s wanderlust urges (even tourists’) if ever there was one!
Ξ‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒‒-‒‒-‒-‒‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-‒‒-Ξ ✱ a number of the Free French soldiers who fought with the British are also buried in the ground of the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery