So I spent a week staying in my $10 AU a night hotel room in Dahab... in a strange way it was the cosiest hotel room I had stayed in on this trip, with a good fan, cosy bed and smooth cotton sheets... lots of character, embedded in this little tourist resort run by "Jimmy", who was like an Egyptian "Ali G", whose high fives left me with sore palms!
Dahab and the surrounding area is very well set up for backpackers and the like, with all the restaurants and accomodation is right on the water. The best snorkeling I experienced in the area was straight out from some of the main restaurants.
And the vibe is authentically relaxed there, even though it is on the verge of being too busy for its sake!
The quality of the sun is interesting there - there is this golden quality to it. You can see in my photos, the quality of the light is very clear.
I did go out to coloured canyon with a tour group (and I vowed to avoid doing tours ever again!), which was good to get out there a bit into the desert and visited Sharm el-Sheikh... a much bigger and more impersonal resort which was strangely fascinating... but I didn't climb Mt Sinai in the end! (maybe one day, but I am not in a hurry)
After Dahab, I spent two days in Cairo and I was really bracing myself for this place, with 10 million people and the worst air pollution in the world... but I really enjoyed my brief stay there.
I stayed at the Windsor Hotel, which is an old British officers club, turned into a hotel which was kind of quaint.
I spent an afternoon at the Egyptian Museum which was worthwhile. I got the clear impression the Egyptians were much more advanced as a civilisation than we give them credit for.
So this present culture had three thousand years of that culture behind it and that is something you can really see. People have this backbone of pride and understanding of who they are, which I found to be similar in Peru, who have the Inca's as their ancestors.
People here are often so poor and just barely scratching out a living... a lot of things you see around look like they are from 1971. But the people maintain an inner vibrancy and humour and are often quite happy.
Cairo is a very vital place... and I felt strangely quite at home there, like it was an old friend. It is strange, because I thought I would hate it with all the dirtyness, noise and overcrowding... but I didn't and thought that it was a very unique and alive and strangely civil.
People had told me over the years that I had past lives in Egypt in the upper echelons of that culture and I didn't really think much of it... but the way I seemed to click in with people and what is going on here, that made sense to me.
I visited the Pyramids at Giza of course, and like a lot of these things... only when you go and see them do you really understand them. Funny, I was there walking around the pyramids mostly alone. You just get this impression that they are actually so solid inside with these bricks too and the images we see only really convey the surface.
But I don't feel any particular "energy" at Giza (and I'd consider myeslf pretty sensitive to such things)... what I did feel is that the pyramids influenced all of Egypt, in a way it affects all the the land in a wide radius energetically, and also in an archetypal way and also it did give the people a sense of pride, that they largely came from a people's persistent enough to build these things!
I think if I went back to Egypt, I would spend time on the Nile... and get off the obvious beaten track there more. I felt it was largely a very "sane" place.
The cars in Cairo are something else... and not really possible to explain what the traffic is like until you have experienced it.
Watching the couples walk on the street in my taxi back from the pyramids was something else... the women would wear different coloured head covering and the mean usually jeans. And most of the time, they would not be all that attractive, but the way they were animated to each other and looking in each others eyes, was not sentimental, just very animated and with so much character of what man and woman is... so much humour and understanding.
All the time in Egypt I had these experiences in people who communicated an honest and true sense of "namaste", (I honour the divine within you), just walking in the street, men (mostly men) would just look at me with this still and bright recognition, with such an edge of humour to it.
Compare this to any western country and you just have these stone wall people who are afraid, who seem unable to reach this inner place in which they are able to "expend" the energy to recognise someone - a "stranger" even.
So all the Egyptians I felt quite sociable towards, which is rare for me and I would go out of my way to talk with them and make jokes and so on. They are often very quick and witty, but in a very innocent and playful, and quite sophisticated way. Not this duelistic and rather shallow "brit wit" which seems to pervade the speakers of the english language.
As a country, Egypt is very poor and economically, there doesn't seem to be much hope for them as a whole, as there is almost 80 million people there, with 20% of their GDP coming from tourism. And as a country to go to as a tourist, I think it has more to offer than most other countries and so I would highly recommend to anyone as a destination of exploration.
After flying out of Cairo, I had a quick overnight stopover in Barcelona, before taking my flight to Australia. It was so obvious how the people in Barcelona were so much more divorced from each other, so much more focussed on bourgeois persuits of the superficial. The inner sensation of the city, as I walked through it to my friends apartment in the old city - was this stoney narrowness, where flow was not permitted, nor so much celebrated in big and small ways! And Barcelona is one of the more lively European cities I know of.
Coming back to Australia, this organic perception of the narrowness and shallowness of western life was amplified. I felt in my time in the middle east, I had come to an understanding of certain types of human balance and integration.
I felt my interactions with people in Australia to be somewhat cardboard cut-out... and I felt myself without the same traction and co-ordination I found in the middle east.
Australia is a much sicker culture than it thinks it is... a penetrating and also flimsy arrogance pervades and masks a deep insecurity and also primordial fear few seem interested in addressing.
I found myself becoming narrowed in these routines of excuse... disabled... whereas, in the middle east... I think, there is more of a culture of saying what you mean and meaning what you say. Coming back, I suddenly feel muted and even not as supported in what I have to say.
Maybe I just miss being a movie star....(!)
Last night, I have dreams of Syria... the spirit of that country still communicating to me.
I feel like saying "I Believe in Australia" like Bashar says he believes in Syria...
At least, in this country we are well established in the material paradigm, and actually have a chance to address ourselves in a whole way, unbound by tradition, in an often very livable climate.
But complacency and a lack of real effort really shits me... in other countries, where life is typically more difficult in different ways - you really have to try harder. We are lucky in that we really don't have to try in the same way. At times, it seems as if everything is given to us on a plate and what are we really doing with that?
I.e. all the elements are there to make a truly better life and instead we continue to follow the painfully anal bottom line and follow the global herd, and fail to strike out and create the truly new and fresh culture we could.
All this, while surburbia becomes more and more terrible and the inner city becomes ever more conceited and self satisfied in this false material glee - and the true landscape is abandoned and left to bland monoculture.
In Australia, there often seems to be quite of lack any higher sincerity and focus, everything is muffled and meated through the rumbles of the pack... the guffaws of the gossiping pack and their rickety admonitions, and baselined reductions - the easy and cowardly way of facing life.
But at least it is a sane place, in many ways, places like Egypt are not sane, tied down to grinding traditions and poverty.
I see Australia as being the only hope for the world. They used to call America the world's "only and last hope" but this gormless behemoth seems incapable of any real change at the moment, gripped by its own senselessness, ignorance and again - insecurity and arrogance.
If we are to move forward globally, I feel it is importance to come naked, in deep humility, while the orientation that many want is separation from the masses, they want to be above the others, in a specialness you can pay for, when they are a billionaire, then not having to take responsibility for life and simply exploit their environment for their own ends and fears and insecurities.
And this is the obvious error of capitalism, that the apothoasis of life comes from things you can buy when you are the successful billionaire. This is the carrot on the stick driving so many people, and it is so clearly an empty illusion. And yet, sadly, without that carrot, many are unmotivated and not able to motivate themselves in any way beyond this flimsy story of self aggrandisement.
I read a little story in an English magazine in Syria which stayed with me, even though I had heard the story in other variations and so a little bit trite!
The rich local businessman on the dock sees a local fisherman, lying in his medium sized boat in the sun with his arms behind his head, relaxing and catching some sun on a beautiful day. The businessman stirs the fisherman and says "why aren't you out there catching fish?"
The fisherman says that he has already been fishing today.
The businessman said, "You know, if you had a bigger boat, you would be able to catch more fish, and then perhaps even buy a fleet of boats and make enough money to really enjoy life!"
"What do you think I am doing now?" said the fisherman.
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