by Levison Wood
‘I want every one of your names! Right now.’ Taking a pen out of my pocket, I helped myself to a piece of paper from the desk and shoved it in front of the major. ‘If I’m not treated with some respect, I’ll have the lot of you sacked. I’ve been sitting here being interrogated for two hours. I demand to be released.’
The bald man forced a grin. ‘Sit down, friend. We are not interrogating you – we’re just doing our jobs . . .’
He might have been grinning but, in his eyes, I could see disappointment. This man’s bluff had been called, and he was backing down; now his family wouldn’t get my cameras, memory cards and satellite phone after all.
‘If what you’re saying is true,’ the major began, ‘you’ll be happy to show us your photographs.’
A sudden thought struck me: the camera the major was picking up was loaded with the pictures I’d taken of the Aswan High Dam as we came into port. Taking pictures of strategic assets was not a good idea in a country like Egypt. I reached out to snatch it back, my mind scrambling for something to say.
‘Fine! You can see everything. I’ve nothing to hide. Let me show you . . .’
Quickly, I flicked through the pictures and opened them again at the start of the memory card. Here, rather than pictures of the Aswan High Dam, were endless images of camels, lizards and the sand dunes of the Nubian Desert. I was back to being a hapless tourist – if I couldn’t fight my way out of this, I would have to bore them into letting me go.
‘So this is Gordon,’ I said. ‘He’s eight years old. You can tell by his teeth.’ I held the picture still for a good ten seconds before clicking to the right. ‘And this is a goose. You’ll notice it’s a male from its size, rather than the black colouring around the tops of the wings – which is actually identical in both sexes. Did you know they can fly over five thousand miles as part of their migration? And . . . you see the boulders in the desert? Formed from millions of years of freeze–thaw conditions that create an onion skin effect on the granite . . .’
I could see his eyes rolling back in his head.
‘Okay, enough!’ He forced a smile again. ‘You may take your things.’
Careful not to show my relief, I packed up my bag and stormed out of the office. Outside, once I was clear of customs, I stopped to take breath. Aswan stretched out before me, my first stop on the final leg of this voyage. Before setting off, I checked my bag: camera, memory cards, satellite phone, all still intact. The only thing missing was the envelope of cash. That was still hidden in the major’s back pocket.
You win some, you lose some, I thought, relieved to have finally broken through.
But this wasn’t the last time I would get ripped off in Egypt – and five hundred Sudanese pounds was the least of it.
‘For you, I’ll do a special price,’ said the man at the end of the telephone. ‘Thirty-four thousand dollars.’
My jaw hit the ground.
The man on the line was called Tarek El-Mahdy. I’d been put in touch with him by Moez, and his words came back to me now: ‘He’s probably one of the few men in that country you can trust. But that said, he’s Egyptian, Lev – he’ll want cash, and lots of it.’
With over three million kilometres of off-road travel under his belt, Tarek was the go-to man in Egypt. He ran a tourism outfit called Dabuka, taking wealthy clients on 4×4 safaris into the desert. Many of his punters were rich Americans and Princes from the Gulf, and he knew how to get things done. What I needed were the security clearances to leave Aswan and all the support the security would need, transport, food and safe accomodation, to continue the expedition – and it seemed they didn’t come cheap.
‘Anything is possible,’ he said in broken English, ‘but it takes money. And it’ll take at least twenty-one days to get the necessary permissions. Whatever you do, Lev, don’t try and leave Aswan. Believe me when I tell you – you are under house arrest. Well, I mean, hotel arrest . . .’ He laughed at his own joke.
After escaping the border police, I had checked into the Mövenpick Hotel on Elephantine Island, a small island in the middle of the Nile, so named because of the elephantine boulders that form its banks – and because, long ago, it used to be an ivory trading station. The hotel looked like an airport control tower, a hideous incursion into the otherwise spectacular setting. I had been here for less than two days, but already I could feel the eyes of the Egyptian authorities on me. As I took a felucca across the river, I’d noticed I was being followed – and, as I checked in, the same man sat in the hotel lobby, pretending to read a newspaper as he kept his eyes on me. The next day, when I tried to leave the hotel, the manager himself asked me to join him for lunch. It was an odd request, but it wasn’t until he began a barrage of probing questions over the first course that I realised he was, in fact, a government agent, tasked to write a report on my movements. What Tarek was saying made me anxious: the prospect of not moving for three weeks made me want to be sick. This was the last place I wanted to be stuck.
‘How do you get to thirty-four thousand?’ I asked.
‘Well, you’ll need an escort and a guide. Turbo will be perfect for that.’
‘Who’s Turbo?’
‘He’s a great desert guide and driver. You’ll love him. He’s brilliant with cars.’
He bloody better be for that price, I thought.
‘Then there’s all your food and water. No alcoholic drinks included! And the vehicle. You’ll need a support vehicle, plus fuel, taxes – and, of course, money.’
‘Fine, I get that but I’ve never had a support vehicle before. I’ve never had a driver . . .’
‘Well, this is Egypt. You must do things the official way.’
‘But thirty-four thousand . . .’
He cut me off. ‘Well, it’s up to you. No negotiation. I’m half-German, not some trinket seller in the market. You can stay in Aswan if you like, but I can guarantee you’ll never leave.’
He was right, of course. Since the last revolution, which saw another general take charge, Egypt had grown bored of its brief democracy and reverted to being a police state, only this one seemed more controlling, even more paranoid, than the last. Tourists, Moez had told me, are officially not allowed to wander outside of certain ‘permitted zones’ – those being Aswan, Luxor, Cairo, Alexandria, and the Red Sea resorts. No independent travel was allowed outside those areas without special permission and a security escort.
I listened intently to this mystery fixer on the end of the phone. I had battled my way through many things on this expedition, but agreeing to this – all because of Egypt’s totalitarian regime – was not what I’d expected.
Wearily, I mumbled my assent and hung up. That sort of money would not only break the bank, but it would max out my credit, bring a tear to the eye of my sponsors and bring into question the entire ethics of the expedition. But if I didn’t pay then the past seven months of walking, and several years of planning, would be a complete waste of time. There’d be no film, no book, and no money to give to the charities I’d wanted to support. In effect, it was pay or give up.
The next day, I decided to upgrade to the Old Cataract Hotel. If I was going to spend three weeks under virtual house arrest, it may as well be somewhere nice.
Three weeks later, I was going stir crazy.
I’d been trying to stay sane by sessions in the gym, swimming in the pool, and keeping abreast of the ever-changing political upheavals in the country I was now in. Now I sat on the terrace at the Old Cataract Hotel: waiting, just waiting. I hadn’t heard anything from Tarik, or Turbo, in more than a week, and I was beginning to wonder where all of my money had gone. Waiters in quaint black waistcoats and red fezzes scuttled along the opulent corridors and, outside, the fierce sun scorched the banks of the Nile. The hotel pool was still and the sun loungers glistened, unused. On the terrace, breakfast tables sat empty – yet all the places had been laid, in the vain hope that somebody would take a seat. Hamed, the chef, appeared forlornly out of the kitchen to se
e if there was anyone to cook for.
‘Mr Wood,’ he said with a forged smile. ‘Just you again?’
‘Just me, I’m afraid.’
It had been the same ever since I’d arrived. The tourists didn’t come to Egypt any more. Egypt has had a history of violence against tourists before, mostly perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalists – during the 1990s, a spate of attacks saw trains blown up, foreigners kidnapped and shot, all culminating in the 1997 Luxor Massacre, in which fifty-seven German and Japanese tourists were disembowelled on the steps of the Hatshepsut Temple of the Valley of the Kings – but, until recently, things had been good. Aswan and Luxor were money-making machines. Feluccas and cruise ships filled every inch of the Egyptian Nile. It was the Arab Spring that had changed all that. In March 2011, the Egyptians took to the streets and forced President Mubarak into leaving office. Chaos reigned supreme, even despite Egypt having its first-ever democratic elections. Somehow, the Muslim Brotherhood – an organisation founded to resist British colonialism, and given to fundamentalism – came to power with the clumsy Mohammed Morsi at its head. Tourists stayed away and, for two years, there were shifts in power, political defections and more protests. In 2013, a second revolution occurred. Some prefer to call it a coup, as the former army commander Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ousted Morsi in what was effectively a military overthrow of an elected government. But the arrival of Sisi and the arrest of anyone with Muslim Brotherhood credentials had done little to instil confidence in the beleaguered tourist industry. Just four years ago, there had been hundreds of boats serving tourists out on the Nile, but now they were all mothballed, moored up, four or five abreast, on the banks of the river with only skeleton crews to keep them afloat. Shops were boarded up or left empty; now nobody sold trinkets and you’d struggle to find a plastic pyramid even if you wanted one. Tour guides fluent in ten languages were sweeping the streets or driving taxis, or otherwise sat idle in the coffee shops lamenting the good old days. As far as I could tell, all of them seemed to regret the revolution – the first one, at least – and blamed it on the ignorance of youth.
I came to from my daydream to see a man standing in the hotel lobby, dressed in a pair of surfer’s shorts, a trendy T-shirt and flip-flops.
‘Mahmoud Ezzeldin at your service!’ he declared. Then, when I only looked at him oddly, he said, ‘Mr Wood? It is me – Turbo!’
I rubbed my eyes. The man I’d been waiting for, all this time, was the most unlikely Egyptian I’d ever encountered. Thirty years old, with fiery red hair and a hybrid American-English accent, he looked more like a tourist than I did.
‘We’re set,’ he announced, striding over to grasp my hand. ‘Everything’s in order, chap. You ready to rock Lake Nasser?’
The truth was I wasn’t at all. Perhaps it was the three weeks of enforced indolence, or perhaps it was the memory of how bleak and inhospitable it had looked from the deck of the ferry, but I’d almost hoped I wouldn’t get permission to walk around the lake and could just continue my journey north from Aswan. The last place I wanted to go, after Sudan, was back into the desert – and backwards, at that. But it seemed Turbo, and his boss Tarik, had secured permission.
‘Thirty-four grand didn’t go to waste, then?’
Turbo smiled. ‘Nope! It’s all good.’ I knew what that smile meant: it had taken every penny to pay my minders, guides and expenses; and he had had to move heaven and earth to get the police, army, security service, Ministries of Information, Tourism, Antiquities and Borders on side. Wearily, I stood up.
‘That’s the spirit, Mr Wood. We leave this afternoon!’
It took four hours, rattling along the lonely desert highway in a 4×4, to reach the border, stopping only to present our papers to bewildered policemen at isolated checkpoints. As we followed the lake’s western bank, the bleak desert stretching out on our right, I decided it was time to get to know Turbo. Once this journey began there were still a thousand miles between me and the delta, and I didn’t want to walk them in silence.
‘I have to ask. Why do they call you Turbo?’
‘I like cars,’ he said, plainly. ‘Especially classic cars. I organise rallies in the desert and meetings for classic car owners. Oh,’ he added, ‘and people think I’m a bit hyperactive.’
Whoever those people were, they weren’t wrong. We drove on, Turbo bouncing behind the wheel – and I found my mind straying. Was Turbo a government agent, reporting on me like the hotel manager had done? There was only one way to find out. I decided to ask.
‘Me?’ he balked. ‘An agent of this corrupt, Third World government? You must be joking! I can’t stand them. Police, army, politicians – it’s one big racket here. No, Mr Wood, I’m a Bedouin. We don’t do jobs.’ He flashed me a smile. ‘What, never seen a ginger Bedouin before? I was an architect for a while, but I couldn’t stand the thought of sitting in offices or wearing a hard hat. I’d much rather be out in the desert. Look . . .’ And here he slowed the car to a crawl, the blue waters glittering outside. ‘I know you don’t want me tagging along, but it’s the only way, trust me. Nobody has ever walked around Lake Nasser – foreigner or Egyptian. You should feel privileged. You can’t imagine the bullshit I’ve had to go through to get the permission. You see, these government officials are so stupid, they don’t realise how ridiculous it is to prevent tourists exploring. Anyway, you’ll barely see me. I’ll keep a good distance and just meet you at a prearranged rendezvous where we can camp . . .’
‘You mean – you’re not walking?’
‘Walking?’ Turbo laughed. ‘Why walk when I have a car? I’ll go on ahead, warn you about police checkpoints, book you into guesthouses. I’ll carry the supplies. I even have a cool box for soft drinks. Feel, there, under your seat . . .’
I reached down, and produced an ice cold can of soda, sparkling with frost.
‘It doesn’t feel . . . right,’ I admitted. ‘It isn’t in the spirit of the expedition.’
‘These government officials don’t care about that! And it won’t only be me, Lev. There’ll be police escorts, when the police can be bothered. I’ll have to taxi a soldier or two. Look, don’t sweat it, because you don’t have a choice. And, besides, how is it any different from using a troop of poor camels to carry your gear?’
I was stumped for an answer. I supposed it wasn’t.
‘I’ll never be more than a few miles away,’ Turbo said. ‘That is, unless you want me to roll alongside you, as you walk?’
‘I think I’ll manage.’
‘Then it’s settled!’ Turbo beamed, and brought the car to a halt.
We had reached the Sudanese border, directly opposite the shore where Wadi Halfa sat. As I climbed out, into the implacable sun, I muttered, ‘It all seems rather ridiculous, Turbo.’
Already, he was swinging the car around to go back the way we had come. ‘Welcome to Egypt,’ he said drily, and disappeared into the north.
It was to take a week to reach the northernmost point of the lake and return to Aswan. On the first day, I passed the famed temples of Abu Simbel. Devoid of a single tourist, they looked all the more glorious, the great stone faces of ancient pharaohs gazing out over water and sand. Over three thousand years ago, the temples had been hewn from a mountainside by Pharaoh Ramesses II as a lasting monument to his Queen Nefertari – but, like everything in Egypt, they had been victims of the will of the government and the damming of the river. When the Aswan High Dam was built, submerging the desert to create the great lake – and driving tens of thousands of Nubians out of their homeland – the temples had been painstakingly moved to where they now stood, watching me tramp silently by.
Occasionally, I could see the tracks of cars out in the desert, the only sign that the shoreline wasn’t entirely uninhabited – but, as I navigated the cliffs, beaches and bays of the lake, I began to see a profusion of other life that was entirely unexpected. Fifty years ago, when this land was plundered to make the great lake, all kinds of life had been wiped out – but, acr
oss the generations, it had slowly returned. The Nubians might never come back to this part of their homeland, but trees and bushes had sprung from the desert beaches, small forests had grown up, and at night I could hear the scuttling of rattlesnakes and vipers, the rustling of rats and foxes. When I woke the first morning, to the glistening splendour of the lake and the pink hue of the desert, I could see the tracks of wolves who had come padding through my camp as I slept.
‘There’s talk of hyena, too,’ said Turbo, shaking his head. Lake Nasser was to be the only part of my Egyptian odyssey where the authorities would allow me to camp, and Turbo had joined me – only, like the Bedouin in Sudan, he refused to sleep too close to the water. ‘Because of the crocodiles,’ he said. ‘Big bastards. And scorpions. It’s the little ones you have to watch for. The small yellow fuckers can really ruin your day.’
‘That’s why the government doesn’t let tourists down here, is it? Because of the wildlife?’
‘Ha! The real reason the government doesn’t want people down here is because of the smuggling.’
‘Smuggling?’
‘It’s prime smuggling territory, coming over the border from Sudan.’
‘So, people don’t come here because the smugglers are dangerous?’
‘You’ve got it wrong, Lev. The government doesn’t want the smuggling to stop. It’s worth too much money to not let it happen. Look around you – all of this could be prime farmland. Instead, it’s wasted, so that the smugglers can bring in camels, guns and drugs from Africa . . .’
‘What do you mean, Africa? We’re in Africa . . .’
‘No, I mean Africa – the Africa over there. Egypt isn’t really Africa. We’re almost civilised here – not quite, but almost.’ He paused, changed tack. ‘Did you see the car tracks out in the desert?’
I remembered seeing them in the sand north of Abu Simbel.
‘That’s the smugglers,’ Turbo confirmed. ‘Usually Bedouin. Tribesmen from the Sinai or the coast, they do deals with their mates in Sudan and bring all sorts of shit this way. All the guns in Palestine, where do you think they come from? Hashish – yep, that too. And gold – there’s plenty of that in Sudan. Antiques from Kush, diamonds from South Africa.’ He paused. Where once he had been enjoying telling his tale, now he seemed solemn. ‘Those smugglers don’t mess around. If they see anyone, they’ll kill them, throw the body to the crocodiles and change the plates on their car. They can’t afford to stop the supply route, so if you see anyone in a 4×4 that’s not mine . . . well, hide.’