“You must pay police $100!”
My young driver had pulled off the road into the Wadi Al-Hitan and was waiting for the policeman who had gestured he needed to stay there. Why? because he had a foreigner on board. “You need to pay police - pay police - $100” he repeated. I threw my hands up in the ‘what for’ gesture and said “what for?”. “Why?”. He looked at me and smiled, checked behind him, gestured to me to put my seat belt on (even though it didn’t actually retract into its housing), then he put his foot down and floored it, right off the side of the sealed road and into the desert.
I swear he was doing 100km/hr on two wheels by the time we hit the first sand dune, a minute later.
I sat there thinking, jeepers, if he is going to drive like this all the way into Whale Valley (some 40 km away), I am going to throw up.
I looked back for police - “no police!” he exclaimed, laughing and smiling broadly. He fist pumped me - a universal gesture that required no translation. It was throw up or pay $100 USD to corrupt police who figured that because they could, they would. I liked my guy at the wheel already.
So we drove for about 15 kilometers off the official road, and soon caught up with another tour company and this side by side driving soon erupted into a full-on race to Whale Valley. Never mind us scared shitless passengers - you guys go right ahead and drive like rally drivers.
His name was Hamed. He told me he had no wife. I told him I had no wife either. He laughed.
I don’t think he actually understood - I found out later he did not read Arabic, but could recognise some word shapes, which is why one of the google translations came out sounding like a pick-up line;
“I very good man chicks, eat you”.
I had figured he was either desperate, or had no idea what he was telling google translator.
Turns out he was trying to tell me he would cook chicken later, by the lake and he was a very good cook and I could eat the food he would make me, for lunch. Phew.
Lost in translation.
I was able to exclaim “gamila” and “helwa” and also “tohfa” from time to time, to express my general awe in what I was seeing. He was suitably impressed. And what I was seeing, did leave me in awe.
Unusal shapes of element-hewn landscapes, in the Wadi Al-Hitan
Whale Valley
and its globally important fossils in the Western Desert of Egypt, provide dramatic evidence of one of the iconic stories of evolution: the emergence of whales as ocean-going mammals, from their previous life as land-based animals.
The World Heritage property is a strictly protected zone and is an exceptional global reference site because of the number, concentration, quality and accessibility of the evidence of the earliest whales, often in the form of complete skeletons, and the record of the environment that they lived in.
Wadi Al-Hitan is the most important site in the world to demonstrate one of the iconic changes that make up the record of life on Earth: the evolution of the whales. It portrays vividly their form and mode of life during their transition from land animals to a marine existence. I wandered around this large site which took about 1.5 hours, whilst Hamed and his racing rival caught up (literally) in the car park to exchange vegetables out of the back of Hamed’s four-wheel drive. I needed the walk after weeks of inactivity and was also grateful for the chance to be by myself. The area was drop-dead stunning - a stark barren landscape punctuated by bizarre rock formations of sandstone.
Stunning sandstone rock formations dot the Wadi Al-HItan and are a prominent feature of Whale Valley.
There is considerable evidence which indicates that the basin of Wadi Al-Hitan was submerged in water some 40 to 50 million years ago. At that time, the so-called Tethys Sea reached far south of the existing Mediterranean. The Tethys Sea is assumed to have retreated north and over the years deposited thick sediments of sandstone and limestone visible in rock formations in Wadi Al-Hitan.
Textures and contrast.
hamed drove back out of Whale valley the same way he drove in…
… like he stole something.
My next adventure was to the edge of Magic Lake where he would cook me a bedouin style lunch of chicken, traditional salad, bread and tea. The location involved driving up near vertical sand cliffs, and down massive sand dunes, to the edge of a picturesque lake that formed part of the greater oasis of the Fayoum area. He seated me on a colourful carpet that he extracted from the back of his vehicle, and told me to sit, while he coaxed a bag of charcoal remains into life, in order to cook foil wrapped chicken thighs. The wind was howling and sand blew everywhere including into the chicken and my eyes. Ah well … it adds grit.
At the moment the wind picked up, a solo ant the size of a bus ambled by my carpet dining room. I had seen some big ants in Australia, but this one took the prize for BLOODY big ants.
The lake was busy - a group of men were receiving some sort of teaching in Islam, to my right and to my left a family with three young children were blissed out listening to music and sheltering from the sand-blasting, while the children played at the waters edge. Bedouin kids raced by on skinny horses; random camel-towing men walked by in traditional garb (cell-phone in hand), a sole man in a boat heaved his way across from shore to shore ferrying people, battling against the fierce wind and begging children toting jewellery wandered from person to person.
Click in to see each image below:
The lake glistened and my chicken sizzled. I sat and watched as people sand-boarded down the impossible sand dunes, too afraid to get my camera out to capture this sight, due to the sand versus camera potential. The Fayoum Oasis area is seeing a rise in touristic visits due to its proximity to Wadi Al-Rayan and Wadi Al-Hitan; also for its picturesque villages and being home to the largest waterfall in Egypt (which by New Zealand standards was nothing spectacular but I could certainly see its potential for a night time capture under a milky way). The Fayoum (as it is known) is the only artificial oasis in Egypt, created not by water springing forth from the ground, but by a long canal, naturally formed by the flooding Nile, that dates from Biblical times, called ‘Joseph’s canal’. Apart from the tourism potential (particularly of 4-wheel desert adventures), life in the area remains relatively quiet. Egyptians travel here for weekend getaways from Cairo and seek out opportunities to relax close to the lakes. I could see the attraction. There is something ethereal and haunting about the barren landscape of deserts.
As I downed my delicious fresh organic chicken, full of juices and flavour, coupled with traditional bedouin salads, I was happy to watch the happenings around me.