Ghadames

I have a follow-up story for the taxi in the last (long long ago) blog.

It doesn't make it any better really. In fact, in a way it makes it worse. 'Haifa?' which is what I thought he was saying was actually 'khaifa?' which means 'scared?' in Arabic. I was, but kept telling him in Arabic, "No, I am Australian". He was obviously frightening me on purpose, and kept laughing his head off. It was an odd sort of misunderstanding, but I am sure that the outcome would have been no better if I had understood him. I now choose very old taxi drivers.

Now - let's leave him behind as I have infinitely better things to talk about.

Sometime in 1993 I was at art school. I had gone back to University as a mature age student and one of the very first sessions introduced us to the idea of keeping and maintaining a visual diary. I found I really enjoyed this. One of my early entries was a drawing in coloured pencils which I actually spent a lot of time over as I was enchanted by the photograph I was working from. It was a lift straight out of a book, and I had no idea where it came from, but it was a curving whitewashed alleyway dark and secretive under a curved roof with what I assumed were high gutters on either side.

Fast forward to our first visit to Libya early this year. I found a photographer in the Old Medina, and went through folio after folio of wonderful large photographs. He was a nice man, educated and well spoken. His English sounded close to perfect, though he insisted that his Italian was better. I bought a collection of portraits of Tuareg people, but lusted after another group of photographs. They were of strange enclosed rooms with organically curved and tilted walls and decorated with cross hatched designs in scarlet and bright colours. When I asked where they were taken he told me it was Ghadames.

I had rushed straight to the guide book to look it up when I returned to the hotel as we had three more days and I thought perhaps I could get there. Not a hope. It was way out in the Western desert, nuzzling the border of Algeria.

I mentioned it to Bob - well, several times if I am honest, and we planned a trip there at some stage.

With Sam we went to Ghadames. We called at several other places on the way, and they will have to wait for a future entry (which means I haven't yet sorted them into sets in Flickr).

This is a town which is four thousand years old. It is no longer lived in, but hte poeple still own their own homes in the old town and some apparently stay there occasionally in the heat of Summer when the desert shimmers with temperatures up to 50 degrees Celcius. From outside the old town you see nothing but the wall and date palms, and though the drive had been wonderful I pushed down a flicker of disappointment as we drove into town in the stillness of evening. It was a small and ordinary town, flat and apparently unrewarding.

We called next morning at the Museum, an old fort now converted to hold the story of the town. One of the few truly unique things Ghadames could offer to a caravan trader was its embroidered slippers. There is only one man left making these, and his wife embroiders the uppers.

The old town is made of mud brick, sun dried, not baked, and sealed with gypsum - brown for the mortar and structure and white used as a whitewash to plaster and seal walls and surfaces.

You step into cool caverns which twist and turn away from you, with secret alleys sending shafts of light across your path. Down the sides of the alleys are long benches which curve to the shapes of many of the walls, somehow still holding ghosts of the old men who would sit here to talk. It is a view of crazy log cabin blocks in high contrast, as you will see from the photographs. Ten minutes into the town we turned a corner and there was my drawing. I had the colours wrong. I had tried to colour it in subtle rainbows, like an Impressionist painting. It was simpler, warmer and cooler both at once, but undoubtably the same view. What I had seen as gutters were benches along the wall, dipped and smoothed by many rears over thousands of years. The colours drifted from a mud-tinted umber, pale and cool but deeply shadowed in the corners. the whitewash shadowed blue and grey, but lit to pure white where light shafted from a high narrow rectangle cut in the ceiling.

Remember that if you click on the photograph it will open to show you a whole set of photographs that illustrate this paragraph - and so on through the blog. this saves blog space and is simpler for me, flying on my very own new blog-fairy wings.

Beyond the town are the gardens, and beyond the gardens a high encircling wall. The gardens are full of date palms, and below these were vegetable gardens and pens for goats and sheep and chickens. Horses were never kept in the enclosed area, and only donkeys were used to carry goods, never carts. Many gardens are still in use, and dates are still harvested. Sadly the amazing watering system which kept the town alive is now dry and no longer used, so the gardens no longer grow vegetables. A unique clock kept track of each allocation of irrigation, and each neighbour was told when he could divert the flow of water from his neighbours's garden to his own. As each timing was called a handful of chaff was sprinkled on the water at the source, the landowner would go to his farm, and could not take the water until the chaff appeared.

From the rooves of the town you look over the women's world. They were able to move from house to house at roof level, by a system of paths, like acrobats, never touching the ground and invisible to those below.

We walked the town with our guide Mahmoud - who remembers growing up there before the population was enticed away with the lure of running water in their kitchens and toilets that flushed - or if they didn't actually flush, were inside the house and not in a central area. He took us to a traditional house for lunch. Because all the houses are still owned and private property most were not open. This one is allowed to be opened and is sometimes used to serve lunch to lucky families like us.

There are three levels to a Ghadarmes house. A low entrance level, storage and a formal reception space, then a much higher and wider space upstairs for the families living space and the main lounging areas, then a roof which was the location for kitchens, summer sleeping, and the women's domain.

The walls inside were superb. Every space was decorated, sometimes with smaller and dainty patterns, sometimes with patterns which jostled and pushed against each other. There is not a lot of light in these homes. Without glass for windows, and with cold desert nights in Winter and roasting days in Summer, openings were kept minimal. The wall decorations were set with many mirrors. They were disconcerting as they tended to reflect the patterns of the wall opposite, creating odd glitches in the patterning like skyscrapers seen in curved car windows. As I took photographs I kept seeing myself. There were also hundreds of brass or bronze bowls mounted on the wall, curved side out. I found this puzzling, though it was much more attractive as a storage system than the odd wooden trees we sometimes keep mugs on. These were not used as eating bowls though, they were just decoration to reflect more light.

We sat on the floor surrounded by rugs and cushions and skins of endangered animals, and ate wonderful soup and couscous (the African influence is strong so far to the west in Libya) and then drank tea poured over peanuts. We were replete and weary - a bad combination.

In the afternoon nothing happens in Ghadames. The streets were quieter than Canberra on Christmas Day. Everything closed for the siesta hour - or three.

In the evening we drove out to see a Tuareg camp and to watch the sun set over the sand dunes - but that is another blog.

Taxis and Walking the City of the Dead

I have been away from this blog for so long that it feels almost impossible to try to catch up.

We have travelled to the area in the south known as Upper Egypt - which seems to confuse everyone. It was such a brilliant trip, and each day was so big and so monumental in what I saw and did that the task of writing it was daunting. Unusually I had very little access to email. Many of the hotels we stayed in had only a button to push to dial out on the phone and that made it impossible to rig the phone cord to connect my computer.

Then we arrived home to find that in the process of house painting we had lost our internet conection - and because we have a networked pair of computers and the monitor on one had fried itself the day or so before we left it was almost impossible to work out what was wrong.

So - we now have a new monitor, but life is still hectic. Tomorrow we leave for Libya for a week, part setting up the quilt show and part holiday.

I went for another walk in the City of the Dead and the Dyers' Khan yesterday with good friends, and took a stack of photos with a new and better camera!

So - this is a visually rich, text poor blog - but remember it is my first time organising images without the assistance of my lovely blog fairy!

Spinners in the City of the Dead

i just had another worrying taxi driver - and this time I thought I might end up dead. For some reason he had it fixed in his mind that I was Israeli, and kept asking if I was from Haifa. He drove faster and faster, and more and more crazily, until he hit someone and I managed to get out. I do not understand my bad luck with cabs - I have more trouble with them than anyone else in the embassy.

Back from travel

I have just had a very busy four days in Kuala Lumpur. Before that I had a friend staying with me - which always means that I am very busy. We managed to fit in a lot of sightseeing. It is really a viscious circle. So much to write about, and no time to write it.

However, I am home. For three days. My son, Sam (of Sam's Grand Tour on my links - which you could read to see the same day from another viewpoint)is here now until sometime in either January or February. This means that in a way I am going to be very busy again - and that I won't have a lot of time. I am however, going to try to keep up the blog.

In Malaysia I was employed by Bernina to teach four days of workshops. It was all run in the JW Marriot Hotel which was also where I stayed - and I hardly left it in four days.

The biggest decisions I had to make were along the lines of whether to have Roti Canai or Nasi Lemak for breakfast, and whether to have my red papaya with lime before or after the savoury dish. There was one morning in particular. I sat with a group of good friends - Thais and Singaporeans there for the conference. I listened to the musical chatter as I dipped my perfectly cooked, flaky but stretchy, roti canai into the curry of the day - a sublime blend of red spices, lemon grass, coconut milk with just the perfect amount of chili. As the delectable flavours rolled across my palate they started playing "Near, far, wherever you are" over the sound system. Now I am no fan of this song. But, just at that moment with rain slanting into the swimming pool, and a perfect twenty-six degrees, with tropical trees over the pool and my body warming from the throat down as I ate my breakfast, I had one of those moments of near perfect happiness.

Looking back, I think that it was a yearning quality of that song which I usually see as utter kitsch, that was suddenly so appropriate. I was surrounded by the scents of Asia - all the best with none of the monsoon drains and rotting food cooking oil and durian that are so often mixed into the blend. Life without the other side of it would be pretty thin for a longer period - but just for a few seconds it was just great.

Again this evening the same thing happened. We have just had a magical day looking at pyramids. First Giza, with the great pyramids and the Sphinx, then the Stepped pyramid at Sakkara with my favourite tomb of Mereruka. Then Dashour, where we drove the desert track around the back of the Red Pyramid, and across the sand to the Bent Pyramid. It was a wonderful day, and Sam loved it. I really enjoy the Pyramids - but Giza is often shark territory - full of tricksters and people selling postcards who use every shade of emotional blackmail to force you to give them money. Today it was actually not too bad.

We were a bit late arriving at Dashour. The site closed at four and we had only half an hour. By the time we had circled out to show Sam the bent Pyramid there was not much time left. Sam and Bob did a quick walk to look at some major features, while I chatted to our driver and some of the desert police. Last time one proposed to me - I think - but then it might have been to Kate. Perhaps he was willing to take both of us.

My fiance didn't seem to be there - but two wonderful white camels were. Both are called Antonio - as are most of the camels around tourist sites.

As the men returned to the car one of the desert police encouraged Sam and I to stroke his camel. I stepped under its arched neck at one point and it leant slobbery lips and far-from-delicate breath towards me.

"One kiss is OK," said the driver. "Two and you have to get married."

It was a great line and we all left laughing.

We stopped at the Red Pyramid again and Sam and Bob rocketted up the steps to the entrance, determined to try to get in. Just as the reached the top the door was closed. A few pounds can fix most things in Egypt - but it was just four o'clock, and it was closing time. We watched as Bob and Sam seemed to settle to wait. Since it was a long time till the next opening time I was a bit surprised. I was not intending to sit in the car until 9.00 am next morning. Other tourists had joined them by this time.

One of the tourist police wandered over to talk to our driver and explained that the big boss had ordered the guard to close the entrance. "He is the boss, and he has a gun!" However - telephone calls were being made.

Sure enough, about ten minutes later, slowly and with a sense of drama, the door swung open. The small group disappeared inside and I settled back to watch the sunset over the edge of the Red Pyramid. About ten minutes passed and the group of police at the bottom were getting restless. They were, by this time, very late leaving, and one called up something I couldn't follow to the guard at the entrance.

There was a gale of laughter, and my driver explained that one of them had asked the guard to "Lock the door and leave them and come down. They will not go away any where and can come back out in the morning."

It was, of course, a joke, and I laughed as much as the others but explained that my husband would not want to stay that long.

Five minutes later they were back.

On the drive home, birds were silhouetted against the scarlet and gold sunset as flock after flock - cattle egrets and ibis and small cranes headed for their roosts. Long treks of people were on foot along the canal, and donkey after donkey dragged carts or carried people home. The small patchworked fields were brilliantly emerald, and sodden with canal water. The whole world seemed gently misted and in the lovely light you could forget that the mist was smog and about the equivalent of a pack-a-day habit! We passed oxen and carts, and where the carrots had been weeks ago were now towers of cauliflowers - firm and white and very enticing to a group who had somehow forgotten lunch. We stopped and bought a huge one, complete with a long stem, for about thirty cents.

Once again, life seemed very very good!

Carrots and Kate

I hardly ever mention names on this blog – that was a decision at a point where I was showing around a guest whose name I wanted to keep confidential. However – I make an exception for names like Richard Gere and Kate. While Kate is not as well known as Richard Gere she is already on my website and blog as my web designer, and she is my blog fairy. She arrives tonight – and I love having visitors.

It is interesting how much more cheerful my house is with new staff members chatting in the kitchen, and visitors to move around town with.

We have been eating a lot of carrots lately. They are in season and everywhere. I think they stay in season a long time as I remember buying them from street stalls in February when I first arrived. Visiting Sakkara with another lot of friends recently we stopped near one of the stands selling them. We had, by then, passed dozens.

It is a prolific and generous time near the growing band of soil that skirts the canals from the Nile.

A trip to Sakkara is the best possible way to see the difference the water makes. You drive along a road with water on one side in a canal – sometimes lined, but mostly not! The canals are the sort of water that you pray you don’t fall into – foul and greenish, sluggish and with all sort s of floating nameless and unidentifiable stuff. On either side of the canal are date palms and market gardens – richly verdant. Even the weeds look strong and healthily and emerald green. It is a time when ripe dates are festooning the trees in over-the-top effusion. They hang like huge Christmas baubles in bunches held out from the sides of the tree on long golden-orange stems. Some are yellow dates, and some ripen to a dark red. They are tart and astringent and crunchy at this stage, and though they are sold everywhere I don’t like them much. I prefer the next stage – where they start to go dark brown and sticky – and wettish inside. At this stage they are what we call ‘fresh’ dates in Australia.

At the edges of the canals and in the plantations huge areas had been laid out with dates to dry in the sun. The colours and stages had been separated and so it was a patchwork quilt – but huge squares in gold and orange and red and every shade of brown. Even the stems they are picked from are not wasted. They are laid out on the roads so cars will run over them, crushing and softening them so they can be turned into brooms.

I digress. We stopped at a stand selling carrots. They have everything still attached, though the roots are washed clean of soil. They gleam bright orange against their green lacy tops, and when you buy them the tops are fed immediately to the donkey which is sometimes still harnessed to the cart, sometimes hobbled nearby.

Last time I bought carrots here I paid about 7 pounds for a kilo. This is a bit less than $1.80 Australian.

My new driver insisted that he would get a better price than I would so I handed him ten pounds. How many did I want? “Oh,” I said, “Just get what that will buy.”

I got five kilos of new carrots. We have had them as vegetables and with salads. We have hardly dented them with only two of us here most of the time. This period with the holiday for the Eid I had decided to make carrot halva. I love the stuff. I grew up with this and my sister and I called it Carrot Oooahhh. While I knew my father was born in India I did not realise that this was an Indian food until I saw it in the window of an Indian restaurant in Malaysia about twenty five years ago and that was a moment of epiphany!

I made some – enough I thought for two nights of deserts – and Bob loved it and scoffed the lot. It is wonderful wintry food – warm and comforting like the best milk puddings, but with the aromatic quality of the best of ‘ethnic’ food. It is served warm in our house, and the version I make is wetter than I ate as a child, and requires a spoon rather than fingers. It has the fragrance of cardamom and cinnamon, the crunch of fresh almonds, the occasional succulence of a golden plumped and spiced sultana – heavenly.

Just because I know I am going to be asked otherwise – here is the recipe. I make it by guesswork really and don’t measure – but I am doing my best.

Grate four large carrots or six medium ones. Put the carrot in a saucepan so it comes about a third of the way up and just cover with water. Not too much, as it has to boil away. Add a heaped teaspoon of cinnamon and the whole black seeds from four pods of cardamom. Simmer until the carrot is tender and the water has almost gone.

While this is happening soak half a cup of whole almonds in boiling water and squeeze them out of their skins. Take the stems off a third of a cup (or more to taste if you like) sultanas (golden raisins for Americans). Rough chop the almonds.

Yes – I know you can buy almonds already shredded and sultanas without stems in Australia – I am just trying to show you that this is more work here and you are all spoiled.

When there is only about half a centimetre of water in the bottom of the carrot pan when you pull the carrot aside add about 25 grams of butter – a lump anyway. Add two tablespoons (English measurements) of powdered full cream milk. You want to have it taste as if you have done a long slow simmer in milk and have condensed it right down – without having to stir it for an hour and have it keep catching on the bottom. This is a cheat but it is a great one. Also add about a tablespoon and a half of sugar (taste and add it in bits to get it the way you like it) and stir well, stirring it as it continues to cook till there is just a smidgeon of free liquid. Toss in the almonds and sultanas and cook for a few more minutes. Add a little cream just to smooth it a bit. No-one said this was a low calorie dish.

And just in case I managed to confuse everyone – a tablespoon in Australia is twice the size it is in America. If you are reading this in the States, double all the tablespoons for yourself.

Let it cool a bit before serving and it thickens slightly. It is even better next day if you can make any last that long. You can even pretend it is good for you – after all – it is almost all vegetable and that MUST be good. This is one vegetable that most children love.

Eid El Fitr

I have not disappeared from the planet. I have not even been flat out with official functions. In fact, in hunting for excuses for not doing the blog I realise that there aren’t any.

We spent the weekend up in Agami with good friends, and lounged around the pool and read – and I even did a bit of painting for the first time in ages. I have been swimming a little lately. At leat – not what I call swimming, but treading water in the deep end while pushing weights around with hands, and floats around with your feet. It is supposed to be exercise, and maybe it is – I have had a few aches in muscles I didn’t realise were there. However, it feels about as much exercise as lying on your back on a bed. Worse – we talk and laugh the whole time so time goes in a flash.

I have to confess though that I didn’t swim at Agami. I put on my swimsuit and bounded – well – staggered – down the steps in the morning. I walked to the ladder. I stepped onto it and down two rungs. I hesitated. I was, by now, up to my knees. It was cold. My feet were cold. I couldn’t really feel my toes. I went down one more rung and chickened out on grounds that I was there to relax and icy water wasn’t relaxing. I got out again and had a shower!

On Sunday and Monday I actually ran a class. Two good friends have wanted a class for some time. I was happy to do it, but they wanted to pay and I didn’t want them to. Worse – if I use my marvelous studio they can’t pay or I am using the house for private commercial purposes and it is government property and I would be into very murky waters. Finally we did it, and it was fun.

I have spent a lot of time up there in my eyrie lately. Recent visitors had pointed out that we have eagles slowly circling overhead and obviously living on the top of the tall apartments next door. I have also discovered that I have small dark brown furry animals in the garden. I think of them as stoats. They are almost otter-like in their movement, chocolate brown and densely furred, and they dart around the garden. From the roof I can see them often. Locals call them weasels, but I think they are shorter.

By the way – someone sent me a list of Steven Wright sayings – and one is very apt here. “Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked in the exhaust of jets.”

It was the last day of Ramadan yesterday. Well, at the time there did not seem to be 100% certainty, as with most Islamic holidays. However, most people seemed pretty sure that this would be it. It was a public holiday, as is today, the first day of the Eid El Fitr.

We went for a walk in the evening to see the last settings of public tables. They line up down public streets under the overpasses, tucked into alleyways, and clustered on footpaths. On each place setting is a bowl of yoghurt covered with a loaf (well, a round disc) of aish balady – the local bread, a salad in a plastic container, a few dates, as that is the traditional way to break a fast, and a glass of water. This food is always free, and often the people are poor, sometimes not, just dropping in for a free meal, or caught, like our drivers are sometimes, away from home.

I had never really taken photographs of this. I wanted snaps with people at the tables but found it curiously hard to point a camera at longs rows of the elderly and underfed of Cairo. I have a couple of poor photographs, and apologise for the quality. It is also time to break the fast when the light is low – and this is the worst time to take photographs with my digital camera. Worse still, in a few places where the light was adequate I received very definite “NO PHOTO” responses to my request to take photographs.

We were asked into a soup kitchen – literally. I was walking down a narrow dark lane, gauging the people most likely to allow a photo. I reluctantly decided against trying as it felt intrusive. People were clustered around a hole-in-a-wall window where they were being given dark pottery steaming bowls thick with vegetables and smelling very savoury. One man asked me if I wanted photos and took me off down an alley. Bob followed saying “Where are you going?” I replied that I was following a man who had indicated that I should go that way.

He took us into a tiny space, tiled, but far from spotless, where huge pots like laundry coppers were bubbling away, thick with broth, vegetables and chick peas.

You know, I absolutely love this tradition. There is something very sharing about long tables spread with free food. It is even better when most of the people sitting there are strangers to each other. They wait, and chat while they wait. Some – those who find the fasting most arduous, might have there heads in their hands, some are quietly praying. It has been cooler in the last few days, so people don’t have the headaches from dehydration that are almost standard in the hotter weather.

Before the call to prayer there is a stillness and waiting – an avid expectancy. At the call to prayer many reach for the water immediately. Some almost savour the anticipation by waiting a little longer. There is a sense of relief, a loosening of the control that has held them hungry and thirsty all day. Try a day without water sometime –or any drink. I often fast if we are invited for an Iftar. I have found that I can do without food easily enough, but not without drinks. The saliva in your mouth thickens to the point where it is hard to swallow. It is an unpleasant feeling, and makes me understand the number of people who spit in the street in Ramadan.

I also photographed some of the food shops on the 26th July - the main street of Zamalek. I love the way whole carcases hang from the rail above the butchers, with protection only on cut meat surfaces. The fish shop is always spectacular with fish arranged in different ways each time – like elaborate floral arrangements. It will be the last night of Ramadan lanterns too. The next three days are days when children will have new clothes, toys and sweets – and many adults too! There is feasting, and many families will meet to eat together.

I gave tips to my staff and some nice chocolates from a place on the corner.

I have new staff that I have not talked about. A cook called Ahmed Ali has started and I have decided that it is heaven not knowing what is for dinner. Because of Ramadan he has been leaving our food on plates and in the frig for us to reheat so he can have Iftar with his family. His hours might change a bit with the end of Ramadan so he can serve us sometimes, but the real delight is that he will do the canapés for guests, and the dinners – and that Bob will have meals waiting for him when I am away. No more getting up at five to do muffins for breakfast when we have official guests either.

I also have a driver, Ahmed Sayed, and that is going to make my life much easier. He has already distinguished himself with finding the foam core board from samples sent by lovely Aussie friends.

Life is pretty good.