Postcards from Cairo

We are coming to Durham, England

2011-10-27T12:03:00.002+11:00

For those who saw the stunning exhibition of needle turned appliqué made by Egyptian men in Birmingham at the Festival of Quilts - and for those who didn't - please note!

I am bringing an exhibition of Egyptian Tentmaker work to Durham in the north of England.

The address of the Egyptian Tentmakers' Exhibition is: Kenworthy Hall, St Mary's College, is: St Mary's College, Elvet Hill Road, DURHAM, DH1 3EQ
Reception: 0191-334-5719

The Exhibition in Kenworthy Hall would be open to the Public:

Friday November 11th from 10 am to 4 pm
Saturday 12 November from 10 am to 6 pm
Sunday 13 November from 10 am to 6 pm
Monday 14th November from 10 am to 6 pm

I am giving a talk - I think on Monday night if you want to come to that.

We have so many enquiries that I suspect we might sell out quickly - so come early if you can.

And please - tell your friends or networks!

I have a brand new shiny website!

2011-10-19T22:30:00.002+11:00

I am so thrilled with it.

I have been asked to put a calendar of my teaching year on it - but I am sorry - I am not going to do that. I found last time I did it that many people tried to book they saw as 'free time' which was time allocated for family functions, or just for making quilts. Because they were often annoyed when I refused I have decided that I simply will not do a calendar - but I am very good about answering contacts if you want to ask me when I am in your area, or when I am teaching a particular class.

Let me know if you like it please.

You can read my blog from the new website.

the link is here - just open the site and if you want to check the blog - click on Postcards.

Thank you Kate Andrews.

Talisman - off to Houston

2011-09-06T09:10:00.004+10:00

I have just finished a new piece of work.

The making process has had to squeeze into a ridiculously limited number of days at home since early April. My good friend Lisa Walton won the Jewel Pearce Patterson Scholarship at Houston last year. She had contacted a group of us when the news was released and set up class times for us to learn some of the new skills she acquired and to make a quilt for her to take back to Houston for an exhibition this year.

I have really been remiss in my blogging. I tried some time back and simply could not work out how to put a photo exactly where I wanted it in the text - and my Flickr site had changed the way the 'share' system worked. I have just worked it out.

These photos are tiny. I am posting 'as-I-did-it' images from my mobile phone - done before I went to Europe.

I have been fascinated for a long time by small objects carried as protections or for good luck. Superstition is such a strong part of most people - especially when things are going wrong or when someone you love is ill. Growing up in New Guinea we often saw an image of a hand printed onto a wall or sign or rock. It meant Tabu - do not pass. There it was not a protection but in the Middle East - and I have lived a lot in the Middle East - it is the hand of Fatima, a powerful ward against the jealous eye. It tends to be most used there when things are going well. If you are newly married and happy, get a wonderful job, and then find out that your wife is having a baby and it is a boy - then you start to wear a hamza. A lot of Arab jewellery is based on amulets and talismen.

Prints from a great silkscreen Lisa made for me from my drawings!

Some attempts at free motion embroidery.

This was serious fun - emulating handprints on a wall without the actual blood.

Putting it together

Simple quilting.

I was not happy with the large light area on the right side with the stitched hands on it. Even though I wanted it to look rather haphazardly put together I felt that it seemed to be falling off the edge. I was also worried that the 'grubby wall' part with the large handprints (mine) was too pristine. I liked the quote from Sheila Payne's book, and had used it like a reference and in rough handwriting like a scribbled note, but I felt it was too dominant so I wanted to grey it down a bit. I brought out acrylics and a square sponge wedge brush and wiped paint over parts that bothered me. It looks charcoal but has ultramarine and silver mixed in for glint and an edge of colour.

I am happy with it now. I added the strong text at the bottom in my own writing, and painted it over, then spent the last two days facing and finishing it and adding a label.

A Trip to the Desert

2011-08-27T09:08:00.004+10:00

I have new work that I can put up since it has been well and truly launched.

The group I work with - tACTile - makes a new exhibition every two years. This year it is called Elements and was devised by Beth Miller and Helen Gray.

Each artist was to take one or more of the elements - earth, air, fire and water, and make a body of work to fill a four metre wall in any way we chose. Our collaborative this time was intended to be a sketchbook entry. A perspex piece at the top was to sandwich images we had used as inspiration, and below it we would hang sample pieces in fabrics as we played with ideas.

Frankly - the collaborative did not work. The 'jigsaws' were intended to slot together as a single piece with separate parts hanging below. Not only was the jigsaw reluctant to fit now that the perspex had sandwiched boards and images between them, but the images really did not work together. Strong ones killed the others and dominated and we could not change the order of the pieces because that had been decided from the beginning with the allocation of a unique jigsaw headpiece. We decided to hang each beside the main body of that artist's work. In retrospect it was a good decision and most people at our ANCA Gallery exhibition spent more time looking at the small ones than they did at the big ones.

Mine is based on an extraordinary trip that I have now done twice a drive to Gilf Kebir and Jebel Uweinat in the far south west of Egypt, just nudging into Sudan and Libya.

This is the blurb I wrote for the exhibition press releases, somewhat expanded.

Earth, Air and a Memory of Water

For the theme of Elements I decided to work with a recent trip across the Great Western Desert – the Sahara. We drove from the oasis of Bahariya in the Western Desert of Egypt to the Gilf Kebir – a plateau the size of Belgium at the junction of Libya, Sudan and Egypt. The trip took sixteen days, five 4 wheel drive vehicles, and we had to carry all petrol, water, and food on the cars. We saw no other car driving in the desert in that time, and the only people were desert police in one distant post. The desert almost became a living thing, the main player on the trip and the element of earth seemed to dominate.

I thought of this body of work as a series on earth – with the changing landscape and colours as we drove across it. Then I realised that the sky was a continual backdrop, so I thought of the series as Earth and Sky. Then I realised each item I used in the lowest panel has a memory of water.

I roughed out a plan for each piece on a scrap of fabric and used that as my first scrapbook piece.

Each piece has:
1. The sky as the top panel.
2. A charcoal drawing of the desert below, showing the colours on the day that we drove across it. I wanted this and the sky to have a sense of a Victorian-style heroic vista.
3. A grid of crosses to relate to the maps we followed and the way that we continually compared what we saw to what we knew – contextualising what we saw to fit a western construct. Also - I like to include an element of traditional patchwork in my work.
4. A low section which represents the earth we walked on and the things we found on it. The marks of previous peoples were on rock walls or on the ground. I wanted viewers to have to bend to see what was there – as we did.

I. The Water Mountain. The codes used by ancient Egyptians for water caches the horizontal zigzag is carved into rock walls with pharaonic symbols. The ground is littered with pieces of ochre - the reason that the ancient Egyptians ventured so far into a hostile environment. There are also pieces of ostrich eggs for the making of egg tempura. 76.5 cm x 163.5 cm

II. Ammonite Fields - fossil ammonites, sponges and coral – remnants of a great sea, long retreated. We drove over ammonites for a whole day while clouds changed the light continually and there were even a few drops of rain. 77 cm x 160 cm

III. Abu Bellas - two water vessels, part of another water cache left by Pharaonic Egypt to enable them push further into the desert in search of ochres for painting. Beautiful fine carvings on rock walls nearby looked almost African with their big-skirted bottoms and breasts. We were the first to find these - they have not been recorded by other expeditions.

IV. Acheulean Hand Axes - an Achulean hand axe from a site where there were many in a concentrated tool scatter – proof that in the days when they were abandoned thousands of years before the coming of the pharaohs - there was enough water to sustain life. 77 cm x 161.5

I have recently returned from Birmingham with the fabulous Egyptian Tentmakers - and I am writing up a report of that. Watch this space.

Wednesday morning - Silver

2011-03-14T06:40:00.002+11:00

On Wednesday I loaded myself with the gifts I had brought with me for little Jenny, my friend Mohamed’s daughter from Tentmaker’s Street. I have a delightful granddaughter named after me with the slightly more modern Jenna instead of Jennifer. The only other baby I know was named after me is this one – a little girl born just after I left Egypt so I have only seen her on return visits. She is now almost three so I packed things like a fairy dress with Velcro wings to attach, and lots of pink summer clothes, and a pile of things for her new little brother Yasin. Wings are not easy to carry in a suitcase.

Then I realised that I wanted to see my other good friend – also Mohamed – who makes silver in the Khan El Khalili. His name is Mohamed Khalil and he used to be a designer for Azza Fahmy – a very well known Egyptian designer who makes beautiful but extremely expensive jewellery with old Bedouin style. They parted ways, but he still makes the most gorgeous pieces – clean lines, interesting ideas, lots of talisman pieces and a lot of beautiful Arabic text, and he mixes gold and silver and I have always loved that.

He has a shop in a rather elegant renovated building in the centre of the Khan el Khalili but absolutely no-one goes there. The business that has grown and become one of the great secrets of Cairo is up two flights of stairs in a building that looks like a crack house. The stairs are dark and filthy, and there may not actually be rats but it looks as if there should be. I am always reluctant to put my hand on the stair rails, but the stairs are long and steep so usually by the last half flight I have a hand on a very greasy rail and arrive slightly short of breathe. Cats often sleek and slink their way up with me winding around my feet – there is always a ginger or tabby spotted cat that seems to think you might be carrying food – and they are no cleaner than the stairs.

I did not take photos on this visit – but this is Mohamed and his assistant Heba on a previous trip, and a piece that I bought from him last time.

When you emerge from the stairwell you are looking straight into the main workshop. It is a small space with perhaps 8 men working on wooden tables. I once emerged on the landing to find Mohamed holding a glowing crucible in tongs and carefully pouring molten gold into moulds. You could see nothing of the gold except the incredibly red hot heat of it as it poured from the equally red hot crucible and it trailed red and oranges as it went into the mould. He was wearing thongs.

Just around the corner is where the real action takes place. It is a tiny office space with room for two desks, a filing cabinet and chest of drawers and a few chairs. The definition of happiness for me is to be able to rummage in these – plastic boxes like the ones I use for storing food are stuffed tightly with treasures. Each time I come the selections are different. This time I selected a beautiful chain with discs of silver and amethysts, long and distinctive. He had made another King Farouk piece – I bought one previously. This is a ceremonial piece he copied from an old photograph of King Farouk who wore it pinned and draped across a suit. Mohamed made it easier to wear by putting the three chains and their discs on another chain. I still find it one of my most special pieces.

I added more to my pile. A clenched hand holding a selection of talisman items which can be worn as a pendant, a bracelet with three parallel chains held together with a key, a padlock, and a disc with Arabic, a simple pendant with a deep red carnelian in a Bedouin setting, and another bracelet, gold and silver, with a long graceful pendant drop with gold Arabic on silver, and a small collection of talisman pieces. I realise that I love bracelets as you can see them when you are wearing them. These dangly ones make me feel pretty – but they are not easy to wear when using a sewing machine or computer.

I have to work out again how to share photos from Flickr - they have changed their systems and I find the new one almost incomprehensible. When I work out how to do it I will add images for you.

I had enjoyed the cup of sweet tea with mint with Mohamed in relative peace as several ladies came and went – but then a group of three very noisy ladies arrived and stated picking up pieces I had selected. Mohamed whisked them out of the way, and rather than finish in a hurry I asked him to put them aside for me and I would call back. He is always quiet around 6.30 in the evening.

Then I headed across the Khan El Khalili, over the road, and threaded my way through a very crowded Al Ghouria and into the Tentmakers’ Street.

Afternoon - the Tentmaker's Street

2011-03-09T09:50:00.006+11:00

I checked into the Grand Hyatt. I have never actually stayed in this hotel though it has been the scene of some of my higher points in Cairo. I met Richard Gere here and went with him and fourteen others on a Nile dinner cruise and that is still the bar against which all other great experiences are measured.

My dear friend, Tarek Mousa of Egypt and Beyond, had accepted that I was not charging a fee for my services on the Textile Tour as I knew that he was running it at a loss because of my cancellation of the Egypt section. I had asked him to book an inexpensive hotel on Zamalek - I usually do the cheap and clean version of hotels as I rarely do more than sleep there. He had - as a thank you - put me into a seriously swish room looking right up the Nile to Zamalek.

I think I was one of about half a dozen people in the hotel. Certainly I was outnumbered by staff.

I checked in, changed, and headed out again.

I had let Ibrahim go - that was stupid in retrospect as I now had to face the line of cabs skulking just above the security check area with its beautiful long haired explosives-trained German Shepherd and slightly long haired, dark eyed, sleek, tall, uniformed in 'deep v-necked black with boots' handler - equally beautiful.

I asked the first cab how much it would cost me to get to Bab Al Qalk - which is the most likely place a cabbie would know and almost at the Tentmaker's Street. It should be about 15 - 20 pounds Egyptian. Admittedly this is next to nothing - about $4 - and I have sometimes realised to my shame that I argue about the extra dollar many try to add in. The first one tried for 60 pounds and I almost recoiled n shock. I tried the second - difficult with the first one shouting as he chased me down the hill, "OK, WHAT DO YOU WANT TO PAY? I DO IT FOR $45? I DO IT FOR $30!!! BY METER? OK?"

The second cabbie seeing the absolute failure of the first to attract my custom, agreed to just use his meter.

He swept onto the Corniche. Immediately I realised that there was going to be a problem as he 'accidentally' missed the exit which is straight ahead from the Grand Hyatt's drive and this meant a very long detour - which would nicely jack up the meter. It did. For those who know Cairo - we even - with me protesting - shot past the aqueduct and were halfway to Ma'adi before we found somewhere to turn. He kept muttering 'Mamnour' for 'forbidden',though I saw plenty of others making the forbidden turns.

We had wondered if Cairo cabs would find a way to cheat on the meters and now I had my answer - they did!

Finally I was dropped off near the Tentmaker's Street and walked up to Bab Zuweilah. I have worried so much about my friends there that I almost had a lump in my throat to be going back. Rather than walk straight in so they would see me coming if they were peering down the street as they often are I walked around a small detour that would drop me into the street about a quarter of the way in so I had a chance of surprising them. No-one knew that I was actually coming. The only person I had told other than Tarek who made the bookings was Ibrahim as he was meeting me at the airport.

I was recently brought face to face with the fact that I really love Egypt. Someone commented that 'they' (meaning Egyptians) 'could all have been blown up for all he cared,' and I was absolutely rocked with hurt as I have so many very much loved friends there. To my terrible embarrassment I was in tears in the middle of a conversation where I was dong my best to be professional. I realised that when an Egyptian makes you his friend - or her friend - all the walls come straight down. You know that no matter how poor they are, if you were ever in trouble they would do absolutely anything for you. Friendships in other places never capitulate in the same way - there is always something held back. Egyptians give friendship at a level that really involves a lot of love.

As I rounded the corner towards the Street I saw at the junction ahead of me, Tarek Fattoh. I have no idea why he was there - no-one just stands in this corner - but his face absolutely lit up as he recognised me. Next minute I was being hugged and kissed - that is unusual for a male Egyptian but flattering. We walked together to see Hossam El Farouk and Tarek held my arm as if I were a tender flower. I could never be called that.

Both Tarek and Hossam are coming to Birmingham to the Festival of Quilts with an exhibition of their work so I made the trip in order to make sure they understood what I needed them to do.

As we walked we met other old friends - it was a slow process through the first third of the street.

Hossam immediately ordered kakedeh - hibiscus tea - for me as he knows how much I like it. On my final farewell call into the street he had produced a giant bag of dried kakedeh flowers for me to take home and I had to tell him that I would not be able to get it through Australian Customs. It arrived, hot and slightly spicy, tasting like a rich strong plum juice, sweetened a little and with a dash of cinnamon and cloves. It is one of the tastes of Egypt for me. The two men sat with huge smiles on their faces as we talked - and it was a delight just to be there with them, with dust stirring from the street and people walking past, an occasional skinny cat curling around our ankles, sunlight dappling the ground in thin shafts coming through the old roofing over the Khan, the background lilt of Arabic from others in shops around us and even (turned right down) a very long and strange speech from Gaddafi on a flickering television right in the shop.

I moved on and talked to lots of other friends - Hani, Hossam Hashem, Rug Mohamed, Ayman who came to Australia. I drank a lot more tea, and kakedeh and a coffee just for a change. I had decided not to leave too late as nights are not as safe as they used to be - and walked down the street to find a cab at 6.00pm in the growing dark.

I found a cab, and told the driver we would use the meter but I would pay extra for a direct drive home without extra distance and even more if I was not frightened. He laughed - but it was a good drive and cost considerably less, even with a double tip, than the cab did this morning. My always pitiful Arabic is coming back - I even impressed myself.

Back at the hotel I washed the grime of Cairo off. I am always amazed that even after a thorough soap and water wash there is still more black grime to come off on white hotel towels. I flipped through the book of possible restaurants in the hotel and decided on Indian. Then I realised that I wanted to ring friends who just happened to be the British Ambassador and his wife.

I rang, talked to my friend, and was immediately asked to dinner. They inherited our wonderful and charming chef, Ahmed. They suggested I bring my passport and they would warn the gate that I was coming.

The house was just down the road - behind a high concrete wall is one of the truly stunning old mansions of the colonial period which used to hover over the Nile but lost some of its grounds when the Corniche road was pushed through. I walked down the Corniche, cut through the lane beside the Kempinski Hotel, and realised that there might be a problem. There was a road block, boom gate and many soldiers backed up by four tanks. This section also controlled several streets that led into the area and many people - well, four or five - were moving into those streets and obviously permitted to go through.

I talked to the officers, and told them I needed to get through as I was calling on a friend for dinner, and they permitted me into the next section. As I approached the house part though it got harder. There were another four tanks lined up beside their wall and another large and very strong concreted-in barrier across the road. A very small gap at one end had a soldier and machine gun and I went to talk to him.

I said I wanted to go to dinner.

He said "Ah, Tabouli?" He was not asking about the menu, but whether I was heading for a nearby well known restaurant. He indicated that I had to go back the way I had come, further along the corniche, and then up the next lane - and all with very expressive whirling of a machine gun muzzle.

I said, "No, at the British Ambassador's house." The shock that hit his face was almost comical. No elegant car, not driver, a nylon jacket over day clothes, no written invitation card, and obviously no warning from the gate - so no way was I going to get through.

"Mamnour," he said - forbidden. He had shot to attention and obviously really REALLY meant it. I stepped back a few paces and rang my friend. Thank goodness for a mobile phone.

Five minutes later he was full of apologies as I was beckoned to the gate and all was well. It did not worry my one iota. He was just doing his job and protecting my friends.

My friend had warned Ahmed that there was one extra for dinner and had told him that it was Jenny. He laughed politely, used to her teasing, and said "No Ma'am, Jenny is in Australia. She would not come at this time." She tried to insist that it was me and he just laughed.

As I was being served my gin and tonic by their butler I asked him to tell Ahmed in the kitchen that Jenny said hello. A few minutes later I saw Ahmed's curious face peering around the corner and then he lit up. I was hugged, kissed on both cheeks and his delight was absolutely heart warming.

We had a lovely and interesting meal - from a wonderful prawn curry from Kerala which was funny when I had decided on the Indian restaurant in the hotel - and then I walked back past eight tanks to the hotel. On the way on the Corniche I was handed a brochure for a new waterside night club and they tried to get me to promise to come next day with all the guests in the hotel.

I am not sure that the few guests in the hotel would have been enough to fill one table in a new nightclub!

Back to the Middle East - Tanks in Tahrir Square

2011-03-07T16:15:00.009+11:00

I have just returned from a marvelous trip to Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

I had a textile tour planned and had to cancel the Egypt part of it. I was so sad about that as I knew that many of those coming really wanted to meet my friends the Tentmakers in Cairo. We changed the trip to start as planned in Syria, and then to go on to Jordan instead of Egypt. I left my bookings as they were - flying into Damascus and out of Cairo three days after the tour, and just before we left, when Egypt was looking calm, I booked another flight - from Amman to Cairo.

We had been watching the news as Egypt erupted weeks earlier and seemed wild and frightening for a few days. Police were firing at and killing fellow Egyptians and the mosques seemed full of wounded. Foreigners were being regarded with suspicion. The Embassy was very busy moving people out. Then the police simply disappeared.

Many major gaols in the city had been breeched and all the prisoners escaped - or were they released? As one interviewee said,"Six gaols in one day? It is not logic." With no police presence people were warned that the thousands of released prisoners would be robbing houses to find money and food. Militias formed in every street in Cairo and many friends of mine bought guns. Every person I could contact by phone in this time - from middle class to somewhat lower - was just frightened - and tired after night after night of standing guard and barricading their streets. There were good sides too as many neighbours had time to chat in the long night watches and drank tea together.

Tanks trundled around the city and set up large army bases. The army seemed to simply sit and watch. Then the army announced that it would not fire at Egyptians.

At this point the demonstrations seemed to steady. There was almost a sigh of relief. Fridays remained high points with masses gathering after the mosque. Counter groups formed that were pro-Mubarak.

I decided not to take the group when I saw camels and horses with their riders in Tahrir Square. That was just weird. There is no way that the riders were from the pyramids as the announcers claimed. In the days that followed this was confirmed by others who worked in tourism and had never seen these riders before. They were a mounted 'rent-a-crowd', and the oddness of this after the mass gaol releases and the disappearance of the police was enough to make me cancel - regardless of how things might change.

They did change of course - and the 'Do Not Travel' travel advisory should have been enough to make me cancel anyway. There would be something infinitely tactless about an ex-Ambassador's wife deciding to lead a tour into a country against the advice of the embassy.

I want to jump the events of my tour in Syria and Jordan - though I will get to it in the next few days. I am still buzzing over seeing my friends in Egypt most recently.

I had to go to talk to the Tentmakers. I have been able to set up two exhibitions for them later in the year. One is at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham in England - and it is huge and brilliant and one of my favourite shows. The other will be at the University of Durham which has a large Middle East Politics section.

My funding for Birmingham might fall short and I needed to talk to the men about this and find out if there was any way they could raise some funds if necessary. I can talk to them easily face to face. Their English is just not good enough to manage with a phone and Skype is not an option for people without laptops and easy internet access. I was in the area and travel to Cairo meant a ticket that cost about $300. If I had to come from Australia again when things were totally stable it might have been eight times that.

I had decided that if things were still bad I would simply book into an airport hotel and let the tentmakers come to me during the day.

Ibrahim picked me up at the airport.

Within five minutes we had passed six tanks on the airport road. Ibrahim told me about the days of fear, the worry that they all have now. He talked about the fact that he was not sure that they would be better off. He said that Mubarak kept the country stable and calm and he had subsidised bread, petrol and other basics so poor people had a chance of surviving on their incomes. "Sometimes", he said, "you need a strong father who does what you need and not what you want and that is the problem with a democracy - that leaders are afraid to lose an election if they do what you need."

We came past the City of the Dead and I asked after my friends there. Ibrahim pointed out that there were police on a lot of the entrances - "Because perhaps people were afraid that the convicts had gone there to hide."

We came past the Khan and there were a couple of tanks on the road near the Muslim University.

We hooked up over the flyover and I was able to look down on Medan Ataba. This is the main shopping area - a huge market that threads through many alleys and streets. It is always so packed that I used to say that you could lift both feet and keep moving. In the open area we could see from the flyover it is always a seething mass of people around small tables of underwear, socks, and shoes.

It was empty. It was a real shock to see this - the stalls were there and were stacked with the usual goods, but there were no people at all. When I exclaimed Ibrahim pointed out that people were really afraid. There was not much money coming from anywhere, and if they had money they were afraid to spend it, and if they didn't have any they could not spend it. "You can always manage a few more weeks without new clothes," he said, and I was struck by the truth of this. Of all the things I saw in this first day it was Medan Ataba that was the thing that made it clear that everything was not yet normal.

We threaded through the streets of downtown Cairo and Ibrahim announced that he wanted to show me what was happening in Tahrir Square. I had a moment of trepidation but I trust Ibrahim. Bob had asked me to use drivers I knew as much as possible as he also trusted Ibrahim and Mohamed.

Imagine a huge open area the size of a large football stadium. It has at least six streets that lead into it. Most had tanks, a sultry greyed yellow, like desert sand, squatting like large toads in the corners. In each one soldier was visible standing in the opening often laughing and chatting to people. There is a grassed area in the centre with a low wall around it - like a very large centre of a roundabout. It was so full of people that I could not even see if there was still grass. It had tents and stalls - so many food stalls selling boiled chick peas, khoshary, toasted newspaper cones of the seeds that Egyptians love to eat, roasted sweet potato stalls with black sugary trails bubbling out of the tiny ovens, and whole sweet potatoes keeping hot on racks around the oven. I saw dozens of small children on their father's shoulders.

Sellers moved through the traffic - weaving through tightly packed cars and offering flags, balloons, bubble blowers, long ribbons of Egyptian flags - anything you can imagine that looked festive and cheerful. All the kerbs were newly painted in crisp if somewhat blurry black and white. The square sparkled - another shock in a city that was never known for its civic pride or cleanliness.

On one side road traffic was blocked off as a demonstration moved through chanting loudly - and the demonstrators looked about 14 and were almost all male. They were, according to Ibrahim, asking for better high schools.

The museum is a rich reddish terracotta, a festive colour, and looked quite shocking with the building behind it working as a jet black backdrop - the multi storey headquarters of the leading party which was burnt in the first days of demonstrations. That was the elephant in the room - a stark reminder of violence.

There were no police in an area that was always thick with police. Traffic was being controlled by demonstrators and civilians. Two had whistles on strips of ribbon in the colours of the flag. One was doing a good imitation of the style of an Italian policeman - with his arms twirling in the air. The crowd were joyful and noisy and though it took ages to get through the square it was so entertaining that I really did not mind. At one stage I passed out 5 pounds to a young man with the striped ribbons draped on his arm to buy one and got five instead of one ribbon plus change - I kept them knowing the family would enjoy them.

Ibrahim delivered me to the hotel. It is hard to believe that the pages you have just waded through take me only to noon on my first day. I planned to visit my dear tentmakers in the afternoon so - more later!

Do you want to come to Syria and Egypt with me?

2010-09-21T14:30:00.005+10:00

We have set dates and costed the Syria and Egypt tour for next year. It will start on the 18th February next year. This time we have given the 'on the ground' costing and you have to book separately to get there and back - but Nick and the lovely team at Impulse can organise that for you.

It does not include a Nile Cruise but people usually go on and add this option in - it is a lovely thing to do but there is not enough that is textile-related to justify me joining you on that (which would mean that you would be paying for me). Those who go are accompanied by a lovely Egyptian Guide.

I love this trip. I lived for three and a half years in Syria and four and a half years in Egypt. You would not find many expert guides who know and love both countries so well.

The big advantage of a textile tour is not so much that you see textiles - but that you move off the standard tourist routes. Of course we see the Krak de Chevaliers

and Palmyra

and the old city of Damascus in Syria,

and the Pyramids (Saqqara as well as Giza)

and the Egyptian Museum in Egypt - but we also move off into areas where locals live and work and we get to know the country better with the insight this gives us.

You know that the group will all have something in common - most are not young and wanting to go to nightclubs in the evenings. Partners who come usually find that they love it - we have better opportunities for really wonderful photography than most tours offer.

We might walk in mud on some days - but always stay in good hotels, so there is a relief in walking into something comfortable and familiar.

I love to take people in to the best textile sites in the beautiful Old City of Damascus in Syria,

and to the Tentmakers' Street

and the Dyers' Khan in old Cairo,

and to Wissa Wassef - a truly stunning and joyful tapestry school - the best of all Egypt's long term projects.

If enough are interested we could add a few informal days earlier in the north of Syria to see Aleppo, the Dead Cities,

the beehive houses,

and Heike Webber's embroidery project - Anat

- but that will depend on interest. It would simply be with me and a hired car and driver and not part of the formal tour.

Please contact Nick at Impulse - address right at the very top of this post. I wish I could remember how to put that link into Impulse tours!

So many layouts....

2010-09-19T08:56:00.003+10:00

I am dithering over another sample for Houston. For quite a while I have added to these blocks from time to time. I always demonstrate the technique in these hot colours, and the blocks have built up.

The class is called Shimmering Triangles, and you make very quick triangle sets, turn them into one of a dozen possible blocks that shimmer, and then place the blocks in the colour order you choose.

Any block that emulates, even vaguely, a half square triangle, can be placed in any of the log cabin layouts. for days I have been turning and changing blocks downstairs and trying to work out how I might sew this piece together. I will not quilt it as tops are lighter to carry - but I would like to stitch it before I go.

So here are the choices.

The simple, all pointing the same way, option.

I was turning alternate rows and while it is not my favourite, I thought the hooks looked quite interesting.

This is the log cabin layout usually called Barn Raising.

Zigzags - I am leaning this way at the moment.

Alternating light/dark squares on point. I have another sample in this setting, with a different block so do not think I will use it - but I do like this look.

Another possibility - Zigzags with an occasional square.

There is one other option. I have not tried it yet but I will try the zigzags with some huge flower blocks tucked in here and there - they are also oranges and reds. You will have to wait for this one as I am off to teach a class!

Please tell me if you have a favourite.

Houston Class

2010-09-04T11:06:00.004+10:00

I have a class that I will teach at Houston called Free Motion Quilting with a Starter Scrap". It is a bit of a mouthful but it means what it says.

I supply the 'scraps' in the class as a kit, and people bring cut pieces to go around it. They make a little quilt.

We have a practice session with patterns that I demonstrate on small spare quilt sandwiches. Then - they work on their pieces, going around the main shapes in their centres, and finishing flowers (or other things) where they have been cut off.

We extend the images by making more in other areas, and I teach simple ways to think through that, then pack in filler patterns (taught in the morning session) around them.

I am posting images of the sort of piece this makes, and a few details. I have been greatly honoured to have been invited to be Bernina's artist of the year in Australia. That means that I demonstrate whatever I choose to do at shows all over Australia. I chose free motion quilting on the idea of a 'starter scrap' as many traditional quilters say that they cannot think where to start with free motion quilting - and most traditional quilts have little pieces of prints which have been cut.

These are little ones that I have done as demonstrations in the shows, and Bernina has no problems with the idea of me selling them. I bring them to Houston for sale. I have no idea what I might charge for these as they are so far away from my usual work - but I have flights and accommodation to pay for so I am keen to sell them. I have about fifteen pieces, plus some small quilts in the same style. Any suggestions? Please?

I have discovered that my very favourite thread is back - Mettler's Silk Finish (which is pure cotton) and there are so many stunning colours - so look at the little jewels I can make with these. It is lovely thread, soft and supple and it forms very firm stitches - and it does not coil off the reel like some cotton threads.

This is one of the three little quilts - simple pieces of Kaffe Fasset fabrics with a frame, and then put together as strippy quilts. These are what I think of as Lucky Dip quilts - I plan only to finish where images are cut off - and the rest is up to what people in the shows ask me to demonstrate for them. I like the fact that the quilts can look good with minimal planning. I show only four or five main patterns, all easy to teach and people can make them without drawing in advance.

It is faced not bound - and I am starting to realise that I love the look of a facing - it is so clean and modern.

Sorry about the horrible photographs. I have a good design wall but cannot get far enough away from it for good photographs without moving a very large table - so they look distorted. All are nicely square - I promise.

My Moo Cards

2010-09-04T10:58:00.002+10:00

One little bit of extravagance that is a regular indulgence is a regular purchase of Moo cards. I love these business cards. They are delicious to handle - firm card with a matt plastic coating to give a soft satiny sheen. It looks very professional to have your own images of work on your cards and my quilts are often strongly coloured. I offer a fan of cards and suggest anyone who has asked for a card choose one. That offers just a bit of insight into the person who asked.

At different times I have used different types of images. For promoting my textile tours I have had cards printed with photographs from Egypt, Syria and India, and if I am doing a talk on textiles in Egypt - those are the cards I take to show off that tour.

I sprawled a few on my Syrian table cloth. They could be better photographs - but you will get the idea!

Playing with waste scraps

2010-06-06T21:20:00.004+10:00

I have not blogged for so long that I am really embarrassed. The worst of it is that I have had a spectacular year with some truly amazing trips but have been so busy I have not blogged any of it. However - I have just had a bit of fun with fabric and thought it might be a good one to lead me back to blogging.

The challenge for my local quilt show this year is Go Green.

I know - they will probably get fifty green small quilts. Each has to be 50 cm x 70 cm. I know there are options on thinking about how to reduce waste, use of power - any environmental issue in fact.

I had a day up my sleeve, and I felt like a bit of mindless playing.

I decided to make use of a small bag of fabric pieces from dyed scraps - actually scraps from scraps. I have no idea why I did not throw these out years ago but they have been drifting around and now and again I consider chucking them - and do not quite do it. There were mostly very small pieces but a few positive/negative images left over from contemporary techniques class I used to run.

I always set a few personal rules on any project. I decided that I had to pick up a piece from the scrap box and sew it to something green.

Then I had to join those pieces together and keep doing so until I could cut a few little blocks from the piece.

Some of the scraps had already been sewed together but I treated these as one. I used a range of different green hand dyed fabrics as my filler fabrics. I opted for straight line piecing and just cut the bits of green off with scissors at the machine.

Because the first piece I took from the ironing board to the cutting mat divided neatly into four pieces that were 3 1/2 x 4" I decided that would do as my size. If I ever repeated this exercise I would cut the pieces square as then I could turn them around.

If a piece was missing a corner I just sewed a bit on. If a bit was left over I sewed it to something green. If a colour was too strong and dominant I cut the block in half through that section and joined them to other bits.

I found a couple of pieces that were like little trees, in pink and greens, and set them in too.

I have now finished and quilted it and here it is.

It was enjoyable, no fuss, easy and very light hearted as an exercise - and you could use any colour as your fillers.

Have fun.

Map for the Tentmakers of Cairo

2009-12-16T22:50:00.005+11:00

Finally I can really show people how to find the Tentmakers of Old Cairo. Or how to locate Khan Khayamiya, or Kayamiya - as they are all the same thing.

My son Sam made a wonderful map for those who wish to walk. Or for those who wish to get a taxi to Either Khan El Khalili, or from Bab El Khalk (or Bab el Qalk as the pronunciation is the same). Taxis know both of those locations.

You will see Bab Zuweilah marked on the map and it looks like this.

This is the single most wonderful street to visit in Cairo to let visitors get the feel of the modern city, and of the incredible humour and kindness of Egyptians. You will not be pushed to buy and can visit, drink tea or kakadeh, and chat, and watch a wonderfully interesting world go by.

They do not make tents so much nowadays - but the work that they make now is derived from from the colourful appliquéd linings of tents of the old days, when the tentmakers (or Khayamiya in Arabic) made brilliant linings, ceilings and covered screens for the streets. They are still used:

as screens in the desert to provide essential windbreaks for cooking, eating and sleeping,

and at weddings and henna parties like this amazing one in a Cairo street.

And funerals like the one in the City of the Dead in Cairo,

and any celebration that needs to look like a celebration.

The street is beautiful. It was built in 1647 for shoemakers, but now is the domain of the men who make beautiful hand appliqué.

These are a few pieces to get you inspired.

A piece of calligraphy, from the Koran to be hung on a wall.

This is a very traditional piece here, and with traditional colours.

You can see a Flickr photoset of all of the images I took for one exhibition.

If you really feel like browsing through a LOT of photos of all sorts of things and have a few hours to spare the link to all my organised sets is here. Syria, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Italy and India - and lots more.

But please remember - if you know someone visiting Cairo, print off the map for them, and tell them to take a cab to:

either Khan El Khalili and start from the street opposite the green bridge on the OTHER side from the Khan,

Or

To take a cab to Bab El Khalk where you will walk up the road from the police station to Bab Zuweilah and the Tentmakers Street.

The latter is my pick as there are wonderful things to see on this street. But that is another blog.

Tell them to go without a guide. Guides demand a commission form the men for bringing tourists - and the price will go up a lot.

Say hello from me.

India and the "Untouchable" Village

2009-12-05T15:24:00.006+11:00

I do know that the term is not currently considered appropriate. I could say something, like "the people previously known as untouchables, or Dalits - or whatever. The mere fact that there is a new term for the same group still implies a social status.

This village, near Udaipur, gave me the most joyous experience of my trip. I am being selfish in not giving its name as I would hate to see hundreds of tourists visiting there, and it would change the way the people relate to tourists. We were the first visitors since I was there in May. It is made of 'found' materials, except for some roofing tiles - stones and mud and mud brick and mud plaster.

In May I took a lot of photographs. It was late afternoon and the light was almost silvery, even though it was Summer. We had a few sweets for children but we hardly got out of the car and most of my photographs were taken through the car window. However, we had met some of the people on the road and photographed them with their animals. I had a big pile of prints to hand back, and I had asked the group to keep shampoos and toiletries from hotels for the women of the village.

It was cooler in November, and we made it our first stop of the day.

I think it is easier to simply add photographs and let those tell the stories.

Mr Sheik from Thomas Cook was our guide and can be contacted through Thomas Cook Udaipur if readers wish.

If you want to join me one day in India - you are very welcome.

This was just one morning of a very rich and wonderful day.

Check details on my website for the itinerary - though there may be changes from year to year. You can contact Stephanie or Nina at Impulse Travel in Sydney, Australia, and we work with Namish Sharma at Thomas Cook (TCI) in Delhi, India. If we have enough people we run the tour!

Anish Kapoor and Watching the Watchers

2009-12-05T14:27:00.005+11:00

I was lucky enough, courtesy of my lovely husband, to have a week in London recently - and I was not even working. He had a meeting, some points in his Frequent Flyer account, and a lovely hotel on the edge of Sloane Square.

I used the time blissfully wandering London, and saw some wonderful exhibitions - the British museum, the V&A and its Maharajah exhibition, The National Gallery, and I went to see Anish Kapoor's huge solo exhibition in the Royal Academy.

I am not going to try to write a review for Anish Kapoor as these things are done by people far more proficient than I am.

I want to talk about just one element - ‘Svayambh’ (meaning ‘auto-generated’). The language is Sanskrit - which is like using a Latin title as the language is a dead language even in India.

A huge block - 20 tons - of red wax moves slowly through three galleries on a straight track. It moves very slowly, but the movement is easily visible and it takes about two hours to move from one end of its track to the other. It is shaped like a large loaf of bread with a curved top, as this is the shape of the arched entrances that it pushes through.

I watched it come through the final room at one end, over about twenty minutes as it reached the end, packing lumps of previously dropped wax against the end of the track and the wall, then reversing to start the slow slide back. Clumps stuck as it moved away, and seemed to creep after it, dropping off slowly to leave big lumps on the track. Small pools formed in the dips, wet and oily. A guard told me that the wax was mixed with Vaseline to make it softer and sticky.

It was inexorable - the original irresistible object. As it dragged through the beautiful arches between different rooms it left thick traces dragged against the marble arches, and lumps sheered off on the fronts and backs of the arches. The object was shaped by the arches - and it moved like a huge and very slow paintbrush, dragging softly, wetly, against the entrances and leaving its colour and sludge behind.

I went to the far room and just sat for about one and a half hours. It was still a long way away. People would walk in straight to the red track, with the detritus of previous visits piled against the wall and its small sludgy pools gleaming in the pure whiteness of that beautiful gallery. The ceiling's beautiful plasterwork is gilded and the floor is parquetry - the feeling of the space is pristine and the globs of oily sticky wax feel like a violation.

People would step straight over the very insignificant white narrow wooden strip which paralleled the track and peer down the track to see how far away the monumental block of wax was, to estimate how long it might take to arrive.

When I first walked in I had done the same.

I sat to watch people, more that the work.

Some stood for a while and talked. Older women often looked appalled at what they saw as a terrible mess.

There was a woman leaning against the wall. Her arms were folded tightly against her body, and her mouth was turned down and sullen. She had long brown hair. She did not seem to be in uniform and it wasn't until she started growling at people for stepping over the white line that I realised she was a guard.

I cannot believe that Anish Kapoor ever meant his audience to be harassed - but I watched in amazement as what might have been interesting and pleasant became very much otherwise for many of the audience that morning.

British audiences are polite and usually moved instantly and apologised when growled at. Some did not actually realise at first that she was speaking to them and looked guilty as they jumped back. She almost verbally attacked a woman who took a call on her mobile - despite the fact that at that stage I was the only other person in the room. One woman asked a question about the art work and she snapped "I do not know because I am not an artist".

Right on the hour the guard changed. The new guard was younger, polite, and tended to keep reiterating "Please keep behind the white line, Sir, please keep behind the white line." She was in uniform, her security tag was clear and visible (no folded arms and resentful body language here). It was a gentler harassment - like being on the platform as the train approaches on the Tube. It almost turned into insistent background noise and as more and more people came in she was often ignored.

On the next hour the guard was a young man. The wax was now in the next room so it was clearly closer to arriving, and more and more people were walking in to check on it. He was young, and positioned himself in the space between the white line and the track, leaning against the end wall so he could sight straight down the forbidden space. He seemed not to be worried by people stepping in to look. I talked to him and he told me about the Vaseline in the wax to make it malleable, about the latex they had used to protect the white paint and arches and which would peel away later, and that he had no real problem with people looking as long as he felt there was no immediate danger. If people looked as if they would touch the wax he would stop them - usually on grounds that it was sticky and hard to remove.

People asked about the work and he answered and asked them questions to elicit what they thought about it. He pulled people in, made them interested and involved, and he used the paintbrush analogy.

I realised that I had seen three very different experiences, just because of the guard. I wondered briefly if that was actually an intention of the work - but I am sure it was not. I think it was just different interpretation of a gallery's need to keep its clientele safe from twenty tons of moving wax.

Other exhibits forced us to weave through a crowding of work, taking quite careful movements to prevent physical contact.

I am sure Anish Kapoor would have preferred the third guard.

India

2009-11-08T00:02:00.002+11:00

I am in India again. All around us the rhythms of the country lilt and rock, in a gentle swinging rhythm that is soft and sweet, like rolling in honey.

There is an amazing sense of contrasts - hot and spicy, rich and earthy foods and smooth and delicate sugary and densely milky desserts. The dryness and earth colours of Rajasthan with the odd butterfly brightness of the women in fantastic saris – raspberry and fuchsia and cyclamen and saffron and chartreuse and ochre and orange – all wrapped and edged with gold. Desert and thorn trees, and a moving dusty cloud which shifts to reveal herds of creamy horned cattle, tall lean men in white dhotis and tunics and deep crimson turbans as herds are moved south in a desperate attempt to dodge the drought.

We visited a tiny village near Udaipur where people who used to be called untouchables have built their houses in found stone and thatching. Their lives are probably poor and bleak, dependent on what they can grow but we were greeted with glee and a sense of welcome. I had taken photographs in May and delivered them to those who recognized themselves. The contrast between that tiny village in the beautiful hilly area where they nestled with the rich and extraordinarily beautiful lake city of Udaipur with its three white palaces and three man made lakes was humbling.

We have watched block printing with long padded tables lined with cotton which goes through three processes before it is even put on the table. We watched block printing, resist printing with mud and straw, dye dipping in natural colours and indigo vats with their oily green slick on the surface. Some fabrics went through eight processes and still sold for less per metre than a cappuccino in Canberra.

We visited a home where the family was tying tiny rhythmic points into silks to dye it – and we tried popping those tiny knots off the dyed fabric to reveal little white squares with colour in the centres. The fabrics made this way were beautiful and incredibly time-enriched, and they held the rippling shapes of the tying so they hug shoulders and curve over bodies.

We visited the tiny walled town of Patan to see Patong weaving – double ikat, mind-bogglingly complicated. On the way we went across a bridge over a long and dry river bed – to see a river of people pouring downstream, climbing over the edges of the bridge and down the banks to join a huge and brightly coloured crowd in the far distance. It was a cattle market and explained the large herds of lean and bony cattle we had been seeing all morning, steadily plodding towards the same destination.

We are now in Chennai and have arrived with the second monsoon – which is devastating for me as we have booked beautiful resorts for the next four days. I had imagined quiet relaxing hours on beaches after sightseeing. I had planned to visit dyeing workshops –which will not be dyeing in the torrential rain. I had hoped that they would see the French colony of Pondicherry in sunshine with the sea washing against the city walls, and the ashram full of flowers and their sun-warm scent.

Instead every road is a river, brown and fast flowing- to somewhere else. People are staying home, and those on the streets look dark and somber in heavy wet-weather plastics. Men move around with trousers rolled to their knees, or just give up and wade calf-deep in the water. Cars move slowly with a wake like a battle ship which rocks the water heavily against the tiny shops that edge Pondicherry Market – which – oddly enough – is in Chennai.

I looked to BBC weather for reassurance and hope – but it predicts heavy rain for the next five days. Our plans may have to change - but it looks as if we might have time to go to tailors to have fabrics turned to clothes, and to post offices to relieve impossibly heavy suitcases. It is a country used to resilience and change, and we can take our cues from the Indians.

All will be well as India is never ever boring.

Sand Storm over the White Desert

2009-08-17T23:09:00.009+10:00

I would hate everyone to think that a lack of posts means inertia. What it means is that life is just too busy for writing of any sort.

I have been making a big quilt. I thought I would take you a little through my making process to show you how badly I veer off course in case it helps others who do the same.

One of my absolute favourite places in Egypt was the Western Desert - and especially the White Desert. It was relatively easy to get to - five hours drive from Cairo to the oasis of Bahariya, then we piled into the car of our guide who drove us another hour and a half to the desert. It was also pretty easy to organise for visitors. A phone call or email to Peter Wirth, the owner of the International Hot Springs Hotel, and a car would be sent to Cairo to collect anyone and bring them down. This meant I did not actually have to own a car to get there.

I probably went about thirty times over our four years. We would drive though the Black Desert to get there - passing huge black basalt lumps nestled into ochre sand. It was an extraordinary sense of distance and peace to swirl through sand, crawl over gibbers, and bump over rock, and all in an open four wheel drive with a large Bedouin at the wheel.

Our favourite guide was Magdy Badrmany. He became a good friend. His English was good so anyone could be sent with him, he was a quiet and careful driver, he could cook a feast over a gas jet or a small tended fire, and he would take you on a tour of the night sky - unbelievable littered with constellations and strewn with stars. Many nights I chose to sleep out of the tent so I could watch falling stars arcing overhead and fading into the edges of the sky.

Once in the desert you enter a soft white world.

There is a silvery light at dawn that touches and paints the edges of the amazing calcium carbonate formations with hints of mauve and pink, and long long shadows that reach across the sand like stretching fingers. It was the bottom of an old sea, and here and there are fossil evidence, fragile curled shells emerging from the chalk.

As it was rich in iron and crystallised iron pyrite, like smoothly polished jet, emerges also, in long fingers, or curled around fossils, or as desert flowers, perfect crystals in matte black that nestle with short spikes into your hands. In our first year I picked up many. At the end of our posting I brought back most, full of shame as I had seen areas denuded of treasures, many of which were abandoned by their collectors at service stations in Bahariya.

By lunch time the light is stark and hard, the pure white dazzles and the shadows of the stones are inky and blue and pool tightly below each formation. Our guides would tuck in tight in the meagre shade, while their particular tourists, like mad dogs and Englishmen, would roam for photos.

A sand storm meant that I would wrap my camera tightly and not use it so I do not have those photos. At first it is an equal lifting of gold sand and white fine dust. As soon as the wind has moved on the sand settles, but in the white desert the dust stays in the air for days, so fine and light that it is like a thin fog.

In this light the sun is softened and you start to see the soft cramy bieges that tint the chalk, warming the formations. The sand can seem peach, the hint of coral even spreading into greyer areas where the iron stones gather.

Night tints the horizon with soft pinks, until it blazes into a vast and unsettling sunset, and leaves even the whitest shapes as dark and forbidding silhouettes.

For the White Desert Quilt I planned to make I had thought of making a series of quilts. I wanted a sense of its vastness, the huge wrap-around horizon, ridged and beautiful with far distant forms, like bent old men talking. I thought of starting the first with dawn light, then through the day with the changes of light until the final pieces was the deep blues of the lit-by-starlight desert. It would have been a total of about eight metres - at least. I also wanted it to feel vast and overpowering, and to include Magdy as his presence is intrinsic, large, quiet but with a real streak of fun and a boyish humour. That whole idea had to go as I would never be able to show it anywhere.

I started to pull images together that would feed the idea I wanted to work with. I collated images of particular well known formations, mushrooms, the chicken and the egg, the rabbit. I pulled up images of Magdy. Working with someone you know well is complex as it has to be perfect - to feel like that person - or in my mind the quilt cannot work.

I considered some of the animal life of the area - fennec foxes and camels - but decided it felt kitsch.

I had been mulling over it for sometime. I wanted to combine piecing and pictures, but the area and the tribes have no real patterning that is part of their history. I decided to use the kaleidoscope block as a swirling sky of sandstorm and the other side to be blue - so I could play with neutrals and the tinting of cream and colour in the same quilt.

Then - someone pointed out that the entries for Canberra Quilters - my local guild - were due that Friday. Talk about panic!

I drew what I had planned. Sort of. I sketched an idea of the colours that would be in it, and the patterning of the sky on a sheet of kaleidoscope blocks. It was too short in height and too wide in length, but I sent in an entry that looked a bit like this.

I was embarrassed, but added a note that I would have no problem with being rejected. I also had three months to make the work and it felt a long way away at the time. They did not reject me, but I kept in touch to assure organisers that things were moving on the quilt.

I spent a month on a swirling sky - that was too busy, too strongly coloured, too tightly controlled - too everything really.

I wasted that month as I junked the whole thing. More simplicity was called for. I was out at our small airport and saw a poster enticing people into a career in the army. On the helmet was a swirl of dust kicked up by a helicopter - and it was exactly the sort of movement I remembered from 'my' sandstorm.

I opted for squares on point.

Now I was truly under pressure.

I elongated the view I had originally drawn of his body, combining several images in one composite to have the wind flipping his felted and braided vest. I worked on the background, and even that had to be radically simplified. The view was pulled in tighter and closer and I had lost some of the sense of awe-inspiring distance I had wanted, so had to push it a bit further away.

I made Magdy's body and then his face, though it felt odd to be pushing a hot iron over his face as it started to feel like him.

The top

I stitched everything down, and put a lot more information into his face with stitching.

I started quilting with two weeks to go. I had intended to be clever, and include imagery of many things in the area in the quilting. In the end I calmed it down, adding only a few fossils in the border at the bottom. It is a simple place, and I risked losing the sense of peace - and the sense of place - that I felt in the quilt if I added too much that was distracting.

I entered it as 'not for judging' but the committee pointed out that I could be judged for my category without being judged for best of show - and that sounded good. I won last year and am content with that. You never think you will win - or I do not - by the time the work is finished I am sick of it and it seems dull and boring.

I won my category. The final pictures are withheld as I want to enter the piece in others shows - possibly overseas. Some consider a personal blog a publication of sorts - so I am sorry - but wait a few more months.

This will give a better idea of its size.

It fits absolutely in my current series of Egyptians that I admire for their calm acceptance of the life they are given, and their absolute competence in their chosen work. I did not name this one after Magdy as I am finding that people do not remember the men's names and cannot name the quilts - so it is Sandstorm over the White Desert. His name is written in a strip at the bottom.

And small bit of private glee - it has been accepted into Houston!

New Work - Hot Water - Dead Sea

2009-07-10T09:52:00.005+10:00

I have been working on a big piece which I cannot really show on my blog as I am hoping it will be exhibited - if I finish it in time.

However - I recently made a smaller quilt for an exhibition in New Zealand on climate change - called A Change in the Weather. Mine is:

Hot Water - Dead Sea
$ 1600
150 cm x 50 cm

At the waters of the sea increase in temperature the sea will become more acid. Corals and molluscs will be unable to form shells and the reefs will die. For a while at least, coelenterates like jelly fish will fill the seas.

Cotton fabric, wool mix batting, layered appliqué, piecing.

I do not often post things for sale - in fact I do not often even try to sell work as it is easier for me to sell classes and talks if I actually own most of it myself. I am a slow worker too. I seem to spend as much time thinking about the pieces as I do working on them.

The crosses are inserted in the piecing like a memorial for the dead coral reef.

The Taj Mahal

2009-06-23T23:01:00.003+10:00

The sun was low in the sky as we arrived at the Taj Mahal. We came directly from the Red Fort of Agra, and I had been overwhelmed by it. I was worrying that the Taj could not live up to that mellow redness and the overwhelming patterning.

We entered through a red archway amazingly reminiscent of the Red Fort. I guess that was hardly surprising when they were only about half a mile apart.

And there it was - framed in the entrance.

I have a quilt in my mind that I will make one day. It is an image of the bits of the Mona Lisa that you can see when standing on your toes in the Louvre for that split second - and almost completely blocked by other people's heads. For just a moment here I thought that seeing the Taj Mahal could have a lot in common with seeing the Mona Lisa.

We had a very clever guide who took us to the best places for photographs.

Framed in an archway and then through the trees - both were beautiful and as I was rushed from one point to another for compulsory photographs something of the peace and stillness of the building was creeping across the lawns at me. It seems to hover almost weightless above the water.

As I took the final 'guide-directed image' I realised that the scale of it was quite different to what I had expected. From a distance the people seemed to disappear. The building really is not that big, but you can hardly see the crowds. There was an odd feeling of walking into a stage set. There is a petrol station on the way here from Delhi which has copied the Taj (with white paint and concrete instead of marble) and I kept thinking that this just was not real.

I expected people to be still and quiet and reverential - it is, after all a tomb. It was built out of a huge love and standing and looking at it put a lump in my throat.

The people however, were running around and posing for photographs, and calling to each other. The women have the advantage over men here. It is amazing that the peacock came from India and the male is so spectacular, the female so quietly dull. Here the women in their saris are glorious, and the men - well - they seem to wear western dress most of the time - even jeans in 37 degree heat.

Looking along the colonnade on the entrance - one lady had just re-arranged her hair, and on a narrow bench in front of us a young woman in a soldier's uniform was apparently examining the ear of another young soldier. A young recently married couple were posing for photographs in beautiful costumes. I requested a photo but they refused. The young brides wear a traditional heavy set of bracelets for up to six months so it is obvious who is recently married. They looked wonderful. She wore richly embroidered and layered turquoise and jade, and was bejewelled with gold. He was elegant in a long tunic with a high collar and tight trousers in deep textured cream silk, with the pearly lustre of a really luxurious fabric.

I realised that the most wonderful thing about having the pool in front of the building is not that it reflects, but because it provides a location where absolutely no-one can stand in front of you - hence the number of really perfect photos of the Taj.

The patterning is stunning on the building itself - these are finely carved floral reliefs with exquisite inlay set into the marble above.

I was moved by the building but I have always liked people better.

At this stage of the day I knew exactly why this lady had taken off her shoes. I would have sat with her but knew she would be able to get up again more easily than I would.

The crowds were slowly clearing as the sun set as this is when the building closes. The view across the river was unbelievably still and silver as a mirror.

And as the sun dipped and the sky turned gold this little pavilion in the corner looked perfect against the sky. It seemed the perfect place to leave the day - with a sunset.

Agra Fort

2009-06-06T22:17:00.006+10:00

We drove from Delhi to Agra. For me this was fascinating. The traffic felt much like Cairo's - cars weave and slice into different lanes with no warning and there were frequently up to seven lanes in areas marked for four. Unlike Cairo there were a lot more animals. In Cairo you get an occasional donkey cart. In India it was donkey carts, carts drawn by horses, even some carts drawn by cows. Then as we left Delhi there were even large carts pulled by camels - and I had never seen that before.

There was a constant stream of interesting things to see - our maximum number of people on a motor bike was five but I actually think that was beaten by the man who had a small goat in his arms, two more wedged at his feet on his scooter, and one tied behind. Truck after truck passed filled with groups of women in gorgeous saris - and they seemed to travel quite often with a sari pulled across their faces - I am not sure if that was modesty or sun protection. Fair skin is highly valued in this country.

We planned to see Agra Fort in the afternoon and as we were earlier than we expected and trying to fit more into our time than my tour will (we had eleven days to do what they will do in eighteen) we decided to see Agra Fort and then to go straight over to the Taj Mahal.

Our hotel was gorgeous, very much a relic of the British occupation.

We settled our gear, ate and went straight to Agra Fort.

I knew it would be red. I had seen a similar red sandstone building in Delhi and been a bit disappointed that we would not actually look at it but I had been assured that Agra was better.

I had never realised how red it would be. The sandstone from a distance was a dark terracotta, pinkish where the sun hit it. But once across the drawbridge and inside the fort the high red walls towered above our heads and wrapped us in warmth. It is rich and dark and curiously soft and comforting - like being wrapped in soft rich velvet. It is so easy on the eyes - like looking at smooth suede. It is a seductive colour and as we walked into the long ramp that took us up to the main door I was shivery with excitement.

The main entrance was magnificently inlaid - and I warn anyone not into patterning that you had better stop reading right now. This post will have a lot of patterning.

The only warning Bob had given me as I left was that I was not to pat monkeys. Well - he went on to add "or dogs, or cats or any animal." Monkeys were everywhere.

We were told that these platforms - which were well above our heads - were for passengers to load onto elephants, and that the howdah would reach to this level.

I did not expect to be moved by gardens in India but the original formal patchwork layouts with sandstone edges were unexpected, and they are beautifully maintained.

Every door was different. Every surface had patterns somewhere. I was intrigued and starting to take so many photographs that I worried that I might not have enough left for the Taj Mahal.
which was just across the way.

If all of this does not have quilters reaching for their pencils I will be surprised.

I mentioned a tour in the last post. I will be leading a tour to India in October. It is a time when it is cool. You can watch this blog for the next few weeks as I attempt to blog the things I saw, and if you are interested in coming please contact me. If you click on my website link there is an email link on that. It is a textile oriented tour, but there are things in India that should not be missed and we will see a lot of these as well. It is a small group - I take sixteen to twenty.

I did not expect to be drawn to this country - and I was. Come with me and see why.

Textile Tripping through Brilliant India

2009-06-04T18:41:00.006+10:00

I have been to India.

It is the most incredible country. I had not realised how superb the colours could possibly be - but women wear such amazing combinations. Hot raspberry with rich chartreuse, emerald and scarlet, turquoise with jade and ultramarine, they move like brilliant butterflies through the streets of the cities, walking the roads of the countryside, and even packed into the backs of trucks.

I could not have expected the beauty of old buildings. I knew about the Taj Mahal but had no idea that only across a bend in the river, The Agra Fort is just as stunning - different and rich and beautiful - and flickering between inlaid marbles and the incredible dark red sandstone.

Textiles were breathtaking and there will be separate postings about some of the things we saw.

I had expected dirt and filth and did not really see this at all. Perhaps it is just that I was comparing to Cairo but it did not seem more than crowded and a bit untidy.

I had expected wonderful food and it was absolutely superb.

I had expected some level of disorganisation simply because I think of India as a third world country and it was a stupid assumption. Instead it was superbly organised and we were tenderly handed from one Thomas Cook organiser to another. Guides were excellent and sophisticated and urbane.

I had expected heat - and it was unbelievably hot. At times the air shimmered with heat. In the north it was still bearable but we went through gallons of water. In the South it was a steam bath.

However - the tour we will take there will go in October when it will be like a Sydney Summer. When you see cheap trips to India be very suspicious and check the dates - they are probably making use of low rates in the hot season or during monsoon - both impossible. One is just hot, the other very hot and wet as well.

Enough talk. I thought I would post some photographs of two locations where we looked at Dhurrie factories being made. These were not the sort of tidied-up-for-tourism places I had expected. In some ways both were poor and in poor villages. I had thought there would be more in the way of bright cotton dhurries of the sort sold in Australian rug shops - but instead there was a huge range of different rugs.

The images that follow were taken in two different locations - one a factory on the road to Agra, and one in the village that sprawled below Fatepur Sikri - a deserted city that creeps across the hills. We will only go to one location on the tour as time will not allow both - but I thought you might enjoy the pictures.

The rag fields - dyed fabrics are stretched out to dry and then piled in great heaps. Most were cotton t-shirting.

That is it for now.

Sometimes I think I should have simply called this a photography tour. It is almost impossible to take a bad photo in India - and by now you can see why I was raving.

Namaste.

As Promised - New Finished Work

2009-03-10T19:46:00.003+11:00

There are three stories and I am going to tell them - bear with me as the quilts are only intended to be the tip of the iceberg, a memento.

Collections
Jenny Bowker

My pieces for Collections started as work based on the things I own, and in these quilts I have featured things from Egypt.

I love my cluttered home, and every object has a story. Each is a starting point- it evokes a memory of people or places, maybe one specific time, or a long period of multiple visits. As I made the work it became important to include some of the people I loved in the city
of Cairo.

Hassan and the Glass

Hassan blows glass in a tiny room in the centre of a square opposite the Qaitbey Mosque in the City of the Dead in Cairo.

The room is overwhelmingly hot, even in Winter, and shelves around the room are packed with bright treasures. Colours are so vivid that they seem to trap the fire inside the glass. I went there often and each time I would buy some small pieces.

I wanted some sense of the ordered ranks of jewel-like glass in its silhouetted shapes, and the incredible heat of the room and that Hassan continually worked with. I worried that the quilt was too rigid as I started the racks of glass, but it seemed to improve as I started free-cutting elements of fire.

I noticed that as he started to work with the molten glass, he focussed and became intent. I wanted that concentration and I wanted his face to be really strong.

Ittayer - The Friday Market in the City of the Dead

Ittayer has a junk stall in the City of the Dead. It is not tidy - it
is grotty and cluttered and he rarely has things I actually wanted to
buy. He has a wonderful welcoming smile. I have a collection of old
keys, and a few locks, and hamzas - the hand-shaped protection against
the Jealous Eye.

I do not actually have an image of his stall - but I am using bits and pieces from many places.

He has a marvelous relaxed smile and a joyous attitude yet he lives in one of the hardest places in Cairo.

He usually sells metals and I have found some treasures over the years.

Abu Ali and the Gilded Chairs

Abu Ali is usually strikingly dressed in black and white in the area
where he carves and sells chairs.

He is guaranteed a living as this is one thing even the most wealthy Egyptians will spend money on. The chairs are gilded and covered in elaborate fabrics, silks and satins and flocked velvets. It is so strange to walk in the tiny overcrowded streets of the furniture areas and see, among the dirt, these chair frames gilded and glowing.

On this day I had arrived to bring him some photographs and found that
he was not well. The escort I gathered in asking for him took me to
his window and I handed up the photos. He was moved and thrilled to
get them, and this is when I took this photograph.

Now you know what I have been doing for the last few months. I have been missing Egypt and have been working my fingers off trying to re-create some elements in my house.

I decided to blog these when I realised that none can really be competitive in the States. All are committed to the Collections for two years of travel. By then they are just too old for Houston and many large shows in the US.

So - you might as well see them.

Thanks from Alice

2009-03-09T17:34:00.002+11:00

Alice has sent me a letter to put up for everyone. At the last count she had about 120 parcels. I will let her tell you.

This is her letter.

To Jenny and Scquilters and Friends,

We are presently renting a two bedroom house in Buxton (our own home having been destroyed by fire). The second bedroom is bursting at the seams with quilting fabrics and quilting accoutrements, everything from pins and needles to cutting boards, coffee cups and crayons. The room is overflowing, my heart is soothed and delighted by your kindness and notes of comfort and both Jan and I are overwhelmed by the gifts and your outpouring of care and concern.

Jan is still taking delivery of the parcels, and very kindly records each giver's name and gifts. I feel quite unable to reply to each so I am hoping all the girls in America, New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, and England who have sent parcels will read this and know my thanks are plentiful and sincere.

My next task (when I finish unpacking) is to find a venue and invite interested quilters to come and partake of these gifts. We are hoping to be given space at the Marysville Golf Course, the clubhouse has been converted to a centre for community reconstruction.

Today I will send to "The Triangle News" a news item coving the story of your generosity hoping it will reach all the quilters and 'would-be' quilters in this area so devastated by the fires.

With much love and gratitude to Jenny and all who responded so warmly.

Alice, Buxton.

Alice and thanks, and a new piece

2009-02-28T07:19:00.002+11:00

Alice has so far received a massive EIGHTY parcels. She is utterly blown away by your kindness and all the notes - you are just extraordinary people.

Thank you.

I have news too. I put an entry into the Bernina Friends competition for an 830 - and the CEO of Bernina International, Mr Claude Dreyer, has bought it before the judging.

I am so thrilled.

Below is the blurb,and some images.

You can make Anything on a Bernina - or Anywhere, or Anyone.

This is Mohamed Sa'ad in Cairo, Egypt. He is the caretaker of the
Mosque where he used to do the call to prayer as a muezzin. His voice
wore out and the
mosque is under repair and so he lives here with his wife and
daughter. The door behind him is stunning - dark wood and ornate
bronze and silver.

I wanted to make something special for Bernina as I owe them an
enormous debt of gratitude for help and support over the years. They
have lent me machines in locations all over the world - they have
flown me to classes all over the world. They even delivered a machine
to a hospital hostel for me when my daughter was badly burnt and I had
a quilting deadline.

I wanted something in my style as requested - and that was hard as my
style is pictorial and representational. I wanted something to
fascinate and hold people's gaze, and to pull them in for a closer
look. I wanted something with a different technique - the sort of
technique that might make people wonder how it was done. The 8 as a
theme was a problem and I am aware that I have not made this a theme
in the way that others will - but the stone walls have red numbers on
them for the buildings and though the mosque did not have a number -
it does now!

The quilt is made with cottons, some commercial and a few hand dyed,
the batting is Matilda's Own Wool Mix Batting, I used Mettler and
Signature threads, and silver foiled jersey.

Jenny Bowker

Firestorm in Victoria

2009-02-12T10:54:00.002+11:00

I have just been on the phone.

First - I need to give a bit of background story. A very long time ago my mother remarried. I was grown and married, and so were my new stepfather's children, but our families met from time to time and I am fond of my step brothers and sisters.

Alice and her husband moved to a delightful wooded area in the hills of Buxton in Victoria. I am not giving their full names - Alice is proud and would not like to feel as if she was being given charity.

They set up fire systems, and as fires moved towards them they were ready to stay with their house to fight for it. It was the advice of a neighbour - a man who had a lot of bushfire experience - which made them move. He had cleared fields around his house where Alice and her husband had lots of tall trees - and he said they should get out as they would not have a hope of saving it.

They threw a few things into the car and headed for Marysville.

Now all Australians know that that town no longer exists. All but fifteen houses burnt to the ground. There are terrible and terrifying stories of bodies found and perhaps 100 people died there.

Alice and her husband realised that the town was unsafe - it was being evacuated - and drove just ahead of the fire to Alexandra to the next evacuation point.

It was days before they could get back to Buxton to see if they had a house - and everything was gone. Their tool shed is there so they have garden tools and a lawnmower - but no garden and no lawn.

Alice had started quilting quite recently - and the beautiful blue quilt she was making for her daughter has gone.

They have been offered some temporary accommodation and I am going to send her a machine I can spare at the moment, a rotary cutter and a ruler and mat. What she needs most is activity. I know how calming and fulfilling quilting can be - so I want to try to replace her fabrics so she can work on a quilt.

She was working in all shades of blues and pastels. My idea was to ask if my readers could spare a piece of fabric from their stashes to send it to her.

I would not post something like this without permission so I spoke to Jan, her sister in law and my other step-sister who is in contact with her.

Alice was thrilled with the idea. She does not want to feel like a charity so I am not asking for goods or clothes - only fabric and perhaps some quilt magazines with patterns. Her idea is that if she gets the offered house in Buxton she will start a group for the women there - and if she has some fabric she can share this with others. This means that all colours will be very welcome. I was really touched that she would immediately think of a way to share whatever might be sent.

At the moment she does not have an address so Jan is offering to receive packets for her and will take them to her as soon as she has a place to live.

The address is:

For Alice,
c/o Jan Stinear,
76 Prince Street,
Mornington,
Victoria 3931
Australia

Please be generous and send her a fat quarter or a nice piece of fabric - I love the idea of a phoenix quilt group, rising from the ashes.

A'tayer and the stall in the Friday Market of the City of the Dead, Cairo

2009-01-18T23:53:00.002+11:00

I am quilting A'tayer. Almost done too - it takes additional time since I keep stopping to add the images in metal foiled jersey - that is really fun!

It is a biggish quilt - 1.3 metres across, and 2 metres long. Here are some teasers.

A'tayer's face.

Showing the gold hamzas beside him on one side...

And the weird Islamic Staff thing on the other - Sam owns this object.

More metal bits - did I say that A'tayer sells old metal junk - some collectable and some just junk Now and again however there is an absolute gem of an item!

This should just keep you hanging in until I can put up some finished quilts.

Working working working ...

2009-01-04T12:49:00.002+11:00

The stars are aligned, and my studio is crowded but effective. I have made three men in the last few weeks. I am not showing the full quilts till they are exhibited but thought I would let you glimpse the men who are starring in them! You have seen Hassan the Glassblower, but I am putting him in again for comparison.

I just need two more clear months - but the quilts have to be finished on the 23rd January and that is why you are not hearing from me at the moment.

Attayer in the Friday Market at the City of the Dead

And an 'in-progress' image of the quilt top (which is now finished and pinned)

And last - Mohamed, who makes carved and gilded furniture in the streets behind Al Atabah

And hang in until the end of January and I will put all of them up! Quilted and finished.

At the moment only Hassan is at that point.

Happy New Year everyone.

Just a glimpse

2008-10-16T23:34:00.002+11:00

For those who think I might never post again - or quilt again - I am giving you a glimpse of something I am working on at the moment.

It is probably enough to tell you that it is based on glass blowers who work in the City of the Dead in Cairo and the gentleman working hot glass is my friend Hassan. I have so much of this glass - hundreds and hundreds of pieces.

And an out-of-focus image (I am not going to let you see it properly till it is finished!) of the top as it is now. There may be more beyond the turquoise edge, and of course the qulting will make it much more interesting.

Another one in the series is under way and I like it much better.

Kidnapping at Gilf Kebir

2008-09-30T19:39:00.003+10:00

I have been watching the news, night after night, almost from the edge of my chair. Late last year I had the great good fortune and privilege to do a trip to Gilf Kebir. Then a week or so ago confusing news started to filter through. There were sixteen tourists kidnapped at Aswan. They were about to go into the desert. Then it was at a nearby oasis. Then the news said they had left Dahkla Oasis and gone into a distant area and Bob leant over my shoulder when I found that one on the internet and said "It sounds like Gilf Kebir."

He was right. I agonised in case the drivers and guides and guard were people I knew. I agonised because I could visualise the locations and the raw haunting beauty of Kharkur Tul and felt that it was like a murder in a cathedral - a violation of something special. I worried about the lack of information and the sheer impossibility of contact within any reasonable amount of time. I was so afraid that the captors might start shooting and would see the Egyptians as expendable. I worried that the only news anyone had for a long time was via one satellite phone - and what if that stopped working. When would they run out of food and water - especially water.

I am really at a loss to say why I felt this so personally.

I am now worrying that the Egyptians will simply ban trips to the region and I want Bob to get there - we had been planning to do this in 2010.

But the end is good. Like the beginning it is all mixed up and confused. Were there 35 kidnappers? Did most of them end up dead? Was there the first skirmish with the Sudanese army and was that actually the only one? Had the hostages already effectively been dumped when they were found and rescued?

I guess those things do not matter. I have stunning and amazing memories of sweeping sand dunes, high cliffs of sandstone and great granite tors, full sized acacias shaped like bonsai, areas of sand so red that it almost shimmered with intensity, scatters of stone tools and amazing cave art. Forget the Cave of the Swimmers - that is almost entirely a fiction from The English Patient and the small rock shelter of that name is nothing like the huge crevice that was shown in the movie. However, there were shelters and caves there with art so immaculate, fresh and beautiful that I will carry it for the rest of my life.

I will do more about the textile tour. In a few days.

Maybe.

Day 2 textile tour - Ma'aloula and the Krak de Chevaliers

2008-09-11T15:15:00.003+10:00

This is a day spent outside Damascus. We go first to Maalula - a small Christian town in the foothills of the Anti-Lebanon Ranges, about one and a half hours from Damascus. High in the hills is a ridge of huge rock - it looks like the rim on a piecrust from a distance, but as you approach it get bigger and bigger until you realise that these are HUGE rocks.

The road threads through them.

On the top of the mountain is a very early Church. It has been dated to before the Nicene committee of 325 AD banned rims on altars in Christian churches - and there are rims on the altars. The towns of Maaula and Sidnaya still speak Aramaic - which was the language of Christ. I am not deeply religious though I love the mythology of Christianity. They will say the Lord's prayer for those who are interested in Aramaic - it is interesting to hear it in such an early language. The town nestles into the hills and rocks, and there is a lovely walk down through a small wadi where snow melt has cut a way to the town form the church on top of the hill.

The area is also pocked with rock cut tombs or cells of early Byzantine monasteries.

I must confess here that last year we did not get to Maalula. It was snowing as we turned off the highway and the road into the hills was too steep and slippery for the bus. This year, I hope it will be fine. We will be visiting one month later - which should also give us the beginnings of spring flowers at the Krak de Chevaliers. No promises - it all depends on the weather - but I will have my fingers crossed.

Another hour takes us to the Krak De Chevaliers which sits on top of a high hill overlooking the green fields of fertile Syria. It has to be the best of all the world's Crusader Castles. The best of Syria is that you can wander and explore here - there is no barbed wire, and few closed areas. It is just superb.

I have so many photos - but I want twenty people to come and I am so afraid that if I give you too much you will feel as if you have done the trip already.

Here endeth Day 2, weary and sleepy as the bus returns to Damascus.

Touring for Textiles - Syria and Egypt

2008-09-11T09:13:00.005+10:00

Last year I ran a textile tour of Egypt and Syria. I absolutely loved it. This year we reverse the order. We start with Syria, which is the higher-energy end, and end with a lazy luxury Nile Cruise.

We leave from Sydney on 12th March (Americans are a day behind and need to leave earlier to meet up with us), and leave Cairo for Sydney again on the 27th March. Those who live in countries other than Australia can also join us but need to get themselves to Damascus, then to Egypt.

I love both these countries. For those who are sitting there equating Damascus with terrorism - it is one of the safest countries in the world for a tourist to travel in. The people are charming and friendly, the culture rich, the food delicious and interesting and you do not get the requests for money that are the bane of tourism sites in Egypt and many other parts of the world. Better still - it is in many ways a unique destination for anyone interested in textiles. It is so rich and fantastic, yet still so cheap compared to the western world. This is definitely a tour for an empty suitcase.

I thought I would take you step by step through our itinerary - with photos taken on the same tour this year.

Oh - and if you are interested the tour is being organised by the best in Australia - Impulse Travel - and by my dear friend Tarek Mousa at the Middle Eastern end. You can email Nina for a brochure, and pricing. We will not take more than twenty so it will be small as tours go - and of course husbands are welcome - we do all the usual tourist things as well as textiles.

nina@impulsetravel.com.au

Finalist - Australian Federation of Travel Agents
"Best Suburban Leisure Travel Agency"
"Best Corporate Travel Agency "

So make a cup of coffee and settle down for a read!

14th March

Damascus is an ancient City. It claims to be the oldest city in the world that has been consistently lived in. Most of our time will be spent in the old walled city, and today we walk in through the fruit and vegetable markets. It is a gentle way to start, and a feast for the eyes in any ways. We will stop from time to time to taste - fresh halva thick with pistachios, buttery knaffe, with its white cheese based and 'shredded wheat' pastry, soaked in syrup, hot from the pan and strewed with pistachios, pastries and hot bread from the bakery.

Fruit, sliced and whole

Draped pastry for sweets in the sweetshop - strange and elastic and already cooked - this is rolled around a thick and creamy filling, then sliced, with the ends dipped in fresh sliced pistachios, and the whole stack served slathered in rose water-scented syrup.

The finished product

Drying the bread before taking it home (damp bread goes mouldy and does not keep), and blood oranges

Alleys and locals

Cheeses and pickles

Meat and Bread

And quinces, often served here as a sweet after dinner, slow cooked and syrupy and gleaming ruby-coloured from the pot

After the markets we walk through Hamidyeh and visist three shops known for their textile speiciality - Faisal's for old fabrics and cloth and costumes, Stephan's for hand loomed Damascus silk - did you ever wonder where the name of Damask comes from - it is from this silk, and the form of its weaving. Damasq is actually the local name for the city of Damascus. No explanations here - just look and wish you were there!

And then to Omayed Mosque, built on the site of a Roman Temple, which the became a Christian Church before being a mosque. There is a Christian shrine inside, said to contain John the Baptist's Head.

The patterns are pure heaven for a patchworker

Mosaics, images of a Byzantine Damascus

Then on to lunch and to explore the women's souq.

The women's souq is packed with frills, furbelows and buttons and bows, and beads and trims, and laces and feathers and costume jewellery, and wedding finery and wigs.

It is dark in the covered walkways, and shops glow with invitation, in jewel colours.

I have been posting photos to Flickr (my blog-share site) and cutting and pasting and writing since two hours or more ago - and we have not even finished Day 1!

But - has that whetted your appetite?

More to come.

Flowers in the Desert, Syria

2008-08-27T09:41:00.006+10:00

My other favourite country is Syria. I have raved about it from time to time and struggle with the bad press it seems to have through the western world. It is safe, friendly, easy to travel in, and comparatively cheap.

Bob also worked in Syria while we lived in Egypt and I went often, with friends, and just because I wanted to show it to people I know would love it.

On a drive from Aleppo to Palmyra we had a police escort - no, not because it is dangerous but because they chose to honour my husband.

At one point in a long stretch of gravelly and not-very-interesting desert we flashed past a patch of pure gold on the side of the road. I was up and twisting in my seat to try to see what it was.
"Stop!"

"Jen, we can't just stop - we have a chase car on our tail!" He was right - any attempt to pull up in a hurry would probably have embedded the following police car well into the rear of ours.

By the time we got to this point what I had seen was miles away behind us and I was not even sure I would find it again.

"It was bright yellow and I think it was a flower."

Now all of us started to search. Bob was keen to try to find it for me and reassuring. "If there was one there will be more!"

Well, if there were more they were keeping out of sight.

We arrived in Palmyra and forgot all about it. No sign of flowers of the sort I had seen, but Palmyra is so beautiful that it really didn't matter. It was freezing. Syria gets frequent snow and while that was unlikely this far out it had been known to happen. There are hills around the city, but it is an oasis in a slight depression, and the hills simply seemed to serve as wind tunnels. The sky was silver grey, the gravel and earth pale copper, and the ruins a shade or two darker - all a mid-tone landscape.

Syria has a huge advantage for the tourist over Rome and other countries that have Roman Cities. They do not lock them up. You can walk the city at one in the morning if you choose. I took my last textile tour our for a drink in the ruins in the moonlight. There was something completely magical about sitting in the moonshadow of a temple, with a bottle of Baileys on a broken column and the moon rising over the Citadel above the city. I had tried for champagne, but duty free did not stock it!

I just cheated and used the top two photos from a different visit - sometimes I just looked and did not actually photograph - I have so many shots and somehow icy cold days with flat light are not inviting. I would have to remove my gloves to use my SLR and it was about 4 degrees with a huge wind-chill factor. The following shots were taken on the day I am talking about!

We left Palmyra around eleven am (we had stayed the night and prowled in the morning). At the halfway point on the road from Palmyra to Damascus there are a series of coffee shops. They are charming - stone built, with accompanying beehive houses for the owners. They were built by two cousins, and the best are Baghdad Cafe 66 and Baghdad Cafe 55. Did I mention the same Highway goes from Damascus to Baghdad?

This is Baghdad Cafe 66. Not the cafe itself, but the houses nearby.

Now the country of Syria is divided on which of these two cafes is better. We have always stopped at Baghdad Cafe 66 and I really like the men who run it. It probably does not hurt that both are very good looking, and that they frequently sit and play the Rebaba - a strangely tuneless drone instrument made of almost anything that can provide an echo box and a shaft to hold a couple of strings. It is definitely done to work the picturesque.

Imagine a stone building with rough plastered white walls. Inside it is gloomy and benches surround the small room. There is a counter with fossils they have picked up in the desert, flints, odd and interesting rocks and crystals, and a board of cheap bright jewellery. The air smells of coffee and the sugary smell of Arab tea - and Kerosene - especially in winter as a kerosene heater sits beside the bench. An arm sticks out of it and a drip forms there every second, then falls through the air to disappear into the innards of the heater to warm the room very effectively. It radiates shimmering heat and people tend to huddle near the heater to drink their tea.

The benches around the walls are covered with rough sheepskins, white patched with sand and chocolate colours in the way of local sheep. There are more skins on the walls as one way these men earn some extra money is by making maps of Syria on the leather side of home-tanned sheepskins. There are only two small windows and they are thickly glassed with somewhat dusty glass. It does not let in a lot of light, but enough of a beam that falls beautifully - to caress the side of the players dark face, shadowed in his red and white kaffieh, then slant across the slim dark hands that caress the rebaba.

We have, over the years, got to know the brothers who live and work here. I truly admire the fact that someone had the wisdom not just to make a small hut that can serve tea to tourists, but to make it charming, and to eak out a living with gleanings from the nearby fossil-loaded hills. I have rarely seen anyone one enter without buying - and their prices are low and enticing. They have personal charm too. We once arrived, all had tea, and chatted, and used their toilets - and left. We were almost forty kilometres away before we realised we had not paid for the tea. We phoned to apologise and they were delightful, and said we were very welcome as their guests any time. On a subsequent visit we paid - more than double, and arrived with a box of sweets as a 'sorry' present. Other drivers with tourist buses arrive with supplies for them - bread and sugar and tea - as they are two hours from the nearest shop. We have fallen into the same habit - making sure we pick up a gift of fruit or biscuits before we leave Damascus or Palmyra.

The other thing they have done is to set up three toilets behind their cafe. These are squat toilets, but they have a plentiful water supply and are always spotlessly clean. This is truly a formula to ensure success in the world of Syrian tourism.

I walked out the back to the use their facilities and saw something I have only seen once before in the Middle East.

They were milking the sheep.

They tie the sheep in a long double line, looping the same length of rope around one neck, then another, and alternating directions of head to tail! It makes interesting photography.

We left, and I was very tickled about the milking! I had once, In Ramallah in Palestine, made the mistake of confessing that while Australia does have countless millions of sheep, we rarely milk them. "Why not?" demanded the very authoritative lady in charge of my hostel. "I muttered a tame "they would not like it and they are wild". Australian sheep tend to see a farmer to lose their tails and sometimes testicles, to be drenched and dipped, and to be shorn once a year. All are unpleasant. The last time they see a farmer is the most unpleasant of all as we usually breed for meat.

"You must train them" she said. I pointed out that a farmer might have three thousand sheep and she was appalled at the waste of all that milk - in fact she immediately told me what the yield would be if half the flock could be assumed to be female. "You must take some bedouin from here - they will train them for you," she said.

In the midst of the sort of smugness that comes from seeing something you have been looking for for a long time, there was another fast flash of gold beside the road. Bob saw it first and was so pleased to have found it for me. We had left the chase car in Palmyra - and gleefully reversed to see what it was.

In the sparse and unfriendly gravel, pushing aside great chunks of concrete-like clay, were spears of pure gold. No leaves, just flowers, and incredibly beautiful. In an area of almost zero rainfall who knows how long their roots must lie dormant.

There were two small clusters - some just emerging, other well into full flower.

It was a stunning end to a day.

The Thinker Near the Blue Mosque

2008-08-27T00:00:00.003+10:00

I loved Cairo. I loved living there and I miss it terribly. There are some things that bring it back in a second - I heard a snatch of a song by Amr Diab the other day was was instantly and suddenly homesick for a city that was only temporarily my home. For a second I was almost disoriented and could sense a rush of that dead summer heat, and the discomfort of an uncooled cab in a traffic jam.

The problem with living in other countries is that the whole idea of belonging somewhere becomes blurred. I know I am Australian and I always knew that the stay in Egypt was finite. At the same time I was seduced by the city - the enormous unweildy bulk of people, the struggles they have just to scrape a living and the usual dignity with which they do it. I feel torn sometimes, never again quite the person I was before I lived there, and yet Australian friends are sometimes a bit affronted when the work I make at the moment is hovering somewhere around the Middle East.

That is my whinge for the day.

I have been sorting photos. I have enough to ensure that I will never run out of topics to write about.

In our last few weeks we walked a lot in Old Islamic Cairo. If you go to Bab Zuweilah and keep walking instead of turning in to the Tentmakers' Street, you will eventually get to the Blue Mosque. It is a beautiful mosque and will be the subject of another blog. I was trialing a new camera with a really marvelous 10x optical zoom - a sneaky camera with a twisting and turning lens so you can seem to be looking in another direction, as you take photos. It is not perfect in other ways - but great for candid portraits.

I am still not sure how I feel about the ethics of taking people who are unaware that they are being photographed. I know in America it would be not permitted. In Australia as long as you are in a public place people do not own their own images and you do not have to ask them to sign releases to use their images. I know in Egypt there are few personal rights.

I was photographing some of the marvelous and deteriorating architecture of the Blue Mosque and over one arch I saw a movement. I focused the lens, and took this.

Then this. He sat above the street and opposite the Mosque, though it is hard to get an effect of how far away he was. His head turned as he smoked and watched the constant stream of people and taffic in the street below.

I moved closer, met his eyes and raised my eyeborws for permission to take the images. He nodded, watched me for a little while then lost interest. It was hardly a balcony - more the roof of the shop below with a rigged sunscreen. Behind him was a huge advertising poster.

I was fascinated by the juxtapoistion of the image on the screen and with him, and the more I look at it the more he looks like the man in the image. Is it just that they are both fair Egyptians? Is it my imagination?

It does not really matter. I just find that now and again his image comes back and floats around my head for a while.

I gave him his photographs before I left and he was obviously happy to have them.

Tassels and Braids

2008-08-12T10:16:00.004+10:00

A great deal has happened since I last posted. I am in Canberra, Australia and settling back into my home. We arrived to find our children had looked after our house impeccably while we were away. We bought too much in Cairo and my house seems to have shrunk - so it has been a struggle to get it all in. In fact, getting it all in has taken about the last six weeks.

I had thought of closing this blog, and reopening somewhere else as a textile blog. I am not ready to do this yet. I have been going through some of the thousands of photographs in my files, and when I was busiest, I did not post. In fact, when I was busiest I was doing the most interesting things.

So - we will stroll a little through some Egyptian sites that were not effectively reported.

In the area of Cairo between Mohamed Ali Street and Port Said Street is an area of carved and gilded furniture. I had walked this area many times - it is fascinating to watch the stages in the making of these chairs. Many of the frames are brought in fully carved from Damietta, or Damyut as the locals often call it. They are stacked in the streets, in marvelous teetering piles and many degrees of intricacy. More about them in another blog.

It was on about my third visit there that I focused on a spinning wheel sitting outside a tiny shop - only about the size of a western toilet. I was puzzling over the thread stand near the wheel which looked full of silks - though was probably full of rayons and polyesters.

I photographed the wheel and tools, then a man walked out and sat down.

As I watched he started to spin a bi-coloured cord in maroon and cream.

His tools were laid out beside him and I love these iron scissors they all use. They are obviously sharp and I have collected a few pairs.

The spools for the wheel sat in a plastic bin.

I walked over, and looked through the door of the shop to see that it was packed tightly with tassels.

The walls were festooned. Great thick ropes of cords and tassels hung from every surface.

In the tiny room the sounds from the street were muffled by the thick insulation of foot-deep rayons. Then I realised I was hearing a rythmic clacketing from behind the wall. There was another tiny door in a side wall, and I had to turn sideways to squeeze through. Inside were about a dozen looms - some wide, some tiny, and there were long expanses of silky fringe hanging from hooks, obviously waiting to be trimmed.

All the men were weaving braids for use in upholstering chairs and couches. It was so logical to have them in this place where the streets were filled with people churning out chairs. We were fascinated by some of the loom weights - old bricks, bottles of water, old metal printing frames, rocks in a plastic bag - anything that was easy to find and which would add weight to the loom.

One man just knotted braided cords on to tassels to make huge majestic curtain loops. I know there is another name for thiese but it escapes me!

Trimming tassels

Outside in the street I suddenly started to see lots of other textile activity. Two young boys were spinning cords in a long stretch of a street, using a power drill with a hook instead of the usual drill bit. I did not photograph that - it was difficult as they moved to keep up with the cord as it spun and shortened.

Another pair had a more static set up. This is the boy on one end.

And this is on the other end.

And now a tantaliser! Next time I will show you some chairs, and this is just a taste.

Two wonderful drivers

2008-06-26T18:17:00.005+10:00

I have often talked about two young men who become my regular drivers while I was in Cairo.

Cairo black and white taxis can be an education. The traffic is chaotic and driving skills are actually very good - but sometimes terrifying. Some of my funniest stories came from bad taxi experiences - but that does not mean that they were funny while they were happening.

Ibrahim and Mohamed became dear and close friends. I could not pick between them on excellence. The only way I could decide whose name to put first was simple - I met Ibrahim a few months before Mohamed.

Ibrahim

Mohamed

Both have marvelous English. Both know all the places I love to go. Both will take you to places you will never ever see on the main tourist routes. I will, in the next few weeks, write up the TEN BEST THINGS TO DO IN EGYPT. Watch for this!

In the meantime - both Ibrahim and Mohamed read and write in English and have email addresses. If you are planning a Nile Cruise or a tour make sure you arrive a few days early. Book one of these marvelous drivers, put yourself in their hands, and just enjoy what they show you. You will very quickly realise why they became two of my best friends in Egypt.

I also loved being able to ask them to look after friends - they also did airport pickups - it is SO nice to know that someone is waiting for you with a name on a board instead of having to fight through the taxi touts. Best of all - if I had some pretty young blonde in her teens or early twenties I knew with either of these two that she would be safe and cossetted. She would also have fun as they are both young and entertaining - but scrupulously careful.

Both have 'private' cars - which means that they are not black-and-white taxis and can go to places like Alexandria and the White Desert. It also means they have airconditioning - absolutely essential in Egypt's summers. There is not greater misery than sitting in a black and white cab with the back window jammed closed or missing a winder - and just baking in traffic jams. Both own newish cars which are always clean and cared for. Bth actually have two cars - but where Mohamed's second car is an elderly but immaculate old Mercedes often driven by his brother Ahmed, Ibrahim's is a black and white cab which his brother Hussein uses.

Both cost more than a black and white cab hailed from the street. However, neither will ever try to rip you off. Ibrahim drives me crazy as he will NEVER name a price in typical Egyptian fashion. Mohamed will discuss prices, but like Ibrahim, becomes less comfortable with this as he gets to know you. Usually I estimate about 50 pounds Egyptian for an hour - about ten dollars US an hour. This might change on a drive to Alexandria or somewhere along way away - but for me it is infinitely better value than being hot, cheated, hit on or terrified!

Their contact details:

Ibrahim Taha
+20105238780 if ringing from outside Egypt, or 0105238780 in in Egypt.

Having the number also means you can ring him when you are inside the airport and he is outside! Or - email him before you come on:
"Ibrahim taha" <elgazab@gmail.com>

Mohamed Abd El Maksoud
+20105628666 if ringing from outside Egypt - or 0105628666 if calling from inside Egypt.
Email is: "moh mks" <moh_mks@hotmail.com>

Good luck - and please use them and say hello from me. I miss them both TERRIBLY.

Photographs

2008-05-27T17:23:00.003+10:00

I have spent the last few days sorting and organising the many photographs that have built up around the house. I have been doing the same with my images on the computer.

Our big computer is now packed along with the scanner and printer. I am using my laptop. It has one of those low and set-down keyboards - it looks sophisticated but with any length on my finger nails at all I skitter all over the place so I have somehow never come to terms with using it!

I have been taking the photographs out to the areas where I took them and attempting to find the people I photographed.

One old man - who was elegant in black and white when I took the original shots - was not in the gold furniture area when I went there. The usual mob was starting to form, people crowding around to see if I had them in the pile in my hand. Sometimes I get plaintive requests for missing pictures - "Don't you remember? I was sitting on a motorbike behind the chairs you were looking at and it was about seven months ago - or maybe it was after the Eid as I was eating meat the night before..."

Most of what I had was distributed and we started to move - somehow I was being herded, like one bemused sheep in a very large group of sheep dogs. Down an alley we went, and through an archway, and down another alley I had never even realised existed. The children tend to run in circles around the group so we stopped and started as they got in the way -just like the way one of the cats weaves around my ankles as I walk in the garden.

We stopped under a green shutter and they started to call.

These are the images I had for him.

One boy went racing off to find the door on the other side, but the rest took up almost a chant. A very bewildered face appeared at the window. I had two pictures for him. One had been taken by the man who had headed for the door around the back,and one was now tossed up to the window.He was in sleeping clothes, a white galabeyieh and he looked a little tousled and obviously had not felt well enough to face the day.

I loved the look on his face when he saw the photos - and my three shots in quick succession tell the story!

Bits and pieces

2008-05-16T16:50:00.007+10:00

I walked today down Bab El Qalk, and in towards Bab Zuweilah. This is the area where the Tentmakers work.

I was taking my time. Every walk at the moment has the weight and importance of a 'last time'.

An elderly man shuffled past, moving fast. His tracksuit drooped about his spindly thighs and hips, slung low enough to be dangerous. It was threadbare in places, with patches of beige showing through - which I hope was his underwear. The legs were too long and had frayed to a long and daggy fringe.

Across his bottom was one word.

JUICY.

.........................................

There is a white horse on the same walk. He (undoubtedly) is always parked in the same place, beside a man with a big fruit stand. He is a beautiful horse - in good condition, firmly muscled and rounded, and pulls a cart that is a patchwork of pattern and paint - bright triangled in red and white and black and green and yellow. Every day as I pass he is turned in his traces, untethered, and his fodder is piled high and bright green on the surface of the cart he pulls. He is always eating, and he never seems to try to wander away.

.........................................

We went out last night to a coffee shop with a singer. I love this place - and there will soon be a whole blog on it. Last night though, I was fascinated by the singer. The sound system must have been set to maximum echo - so the blasting words rang into the room long after he lowered the microphone from his mouth. "Habiby" - which roughly translates as 'my darling' and is the mainstay of all Arabic songs as far I I can see - became 'Hab b b biby y y by by by".

I realised how useful this was as he saw that we were there and rushed over to greet Ibrahim.
He was in the middle of a series of 'habibys' and one long note was sung straight into Ibrahim's ear as the singer wrapped the microphone around Ibrahim's neck to make sure the audience missed nothing. He lowered it with time to greet us with a few words before the last throbbing notes died away, and then took it up again. It is obviously useful to have echoes long enough to have twenty second conversations between them!

Farewell to my spinners

2008-05-16T02:37:00.004+10:00

I went with my son Sam, to the Friday markets in the City of the Dead a few weeks back. It is a marvelous place - though unbelievably grungy. If you have watched the blog you will have seen several references to it. I took the usual photographs of lots of people. I love the way the faces of the older ones have so much history written into them. On the whole I have found people are happy to be photographed. Now and again I want a pose that the person is holding and take one without their knowledge with my "sneaky camera". Do not worry - I have never ever been abused for it when I take a photo back, though I occasionally worry about the ethics of it.

I went to the City of the Dead again yesterday.

I had a pile of photos to hand out. This is something I do often - copy images to CD, print them off at one of the local cheap photoshops, then take them back to the area where I took them where I hand them out. People are usually delighted and it means that the next time I want photographs of people they rarely refuse. I have almost been mobbed in some places by people hoping I have images for them.

One of the men I photographed with Sam on our first visit there was an elderly man in a long white galabeyiah. He had a marvelously bushy beard, and the beard was dyed bright scarlet-orange with henna. I have since found it can be of religious significance - at the time it was simply a wonderful splash of colour. My request for a photograph led to some catcalling from the men around him, but he smiled, composed himself on his chair with his hands on his knees, and I took four shots in quick succession - two close and two further back. At one point he turned his head to answer a friend's comment - rude, guessing from the laugh on his face - and the shot is side-on but really amused.

I had two of the four printed to give to him - both the more formal versions.

The following week Sam and I went back. I have been dithering for a long time about purchasing an old door. I cannot possibly claim to need it - but I wanted it. Bob had said that he didn't mind as long as I did something with it in Canberra. I had reluctantly come to the conclusion that it was just a silly 'want' but the day before I packed I realised that I might forever regret not buying one while I had the opportunity.

The doors are wonderful. They have that faded and streaked and worn look that can show the past seven coats of paint in wear and scratches on their surface. Palimpsest is a popular element in art and somehow these doors are art forms of their own. Some are carved, some have insets of wrought iron work - curved or art deco. The colours are marvelous - greens and blues and purples, and the occasional one which is just wood turned silver and umber with use and wear, with the oil from a thousand hands soaked into areas where people reach to push it open, or to turn a key. Some come complete with knockers shaped like a softly curled hand holding a ball, feminine fingers forever frozen, and often painted in the same colour as the door. I suspect sometimes, knowing Egyptian painters, because it was just too much trouble to go around the knocker with the paint. Like old men's faces, their history is written in their surfaces.

Opposite my lovely man with the red beard was the best stall for doors and it was in the process of going through the doors that I had spotted him.

We could not see him there so I approached a boy sitting in his rather sad and tatty stall. There were old bits of washing machines, lumps of unidentifiable metal, cardboard boxes flattened down but decidedly tired, and a smashed typewriter - so smashed that it looked as if it had been thrown through a third floor office window in a rage.

I showed the boy the photographs and his face froze, and he shot to his feet. He was muttering about the Sheik - and I realised that one of the men the week before had also called him a sheik. It started to dawn on me from the shock in his face that something was wrong. Then others started to crowd around including a neighbour from the drink stall opposite. I caught the word 'dead' in Arabic.

He had been hit by a boy on a motorbike only a few days after I had taken his photograph, and he had died.

By this stage a fair-sized crowd was gathering. I was still trying to control the photographs, but others were snatching at them, l0ooking, and handing them back. A tall girl in full black, headscarf and long sleeves and dress and coat, pushed through to the front of the crowd. She took one photograph then held it at full arms' length behind her - like a child refusing to return a toy to its rightful owner. Her face - I can only call it stricken!

I kept picking up odd words in the flood of Arabic - like "his daughter" and "no photos". As I realised that she wanted the photo for the family - and had no intention of giving it back anyway - I nodded and she shot away.

I was still numbly clutching the other photograph - but the neighbour from the drink stand begged and I gave it to him.

There was a group of Americans in the small and narrow 'door' shop and no hope that we could fit. Sam and I moved on. Looking back now I realise that I was utterly - quite out of proportion - shocked. I do not think I could have made a decision on a door even if we had been able to go there.

This was the second time in one week that I had tried to return a photograph and found the subject had died. Earlier in the same week I had visited the spinners with a friend and a set of shots taken around February - in a muddy and wet period in Winter. We had not found the men I hoped would be working, and in looking further afield had stopped and talked to a spinner I did not know who was working with his young son.I took some photographs, and they were in the pile I was sorting while talking to Ragab and Ali - two spinners who have become good friends. They had had a similar reaction, grabbing at the photos in shock. I had sent four good images, full face, off to the subject's home with assurances that they would be so welcome - "they will be shocked, and it will make them sad, but they did not have photographs of him except from his wedding."

Two in a week. Egypt has changed me in some ways. It is a country rife with superstition. It threads through the religion, and is interwoven through the folk lore, some beliefs are pharaonic, and some the most modern of conspiracy theories. The same lovely friend who had decried the sacrifice of a hedgehog to save a sister with cancer had calmly arranged to kill a sheep four weeks later when his taxi kept breaking down, despite the money he spent on repairs.

Perhaps I did not really believe that I had caused the deaths - that would be pushing too far when I have always believed myself without superstition - but as we walked away through the mud of the city of the dead, with a small crowd still following us entreating us to bring more photographs, I felt - guilty.

Two days ago I went back to the City of the Dead with Ibrahim again. It was time to say goodbye to my lovely spinners, Ragab and Ali, and to old Hamed, keeper of fifty three tombs, with the face like a kindly walnut.

We sat in a circle in one of the tombs, on chairs borrowed from homes nearby, and in the cool shade of the rooms. Outside Hamed's carefully tended pots of plants were in spring flower - and they had handed me a rose and a 'ful' a fragrant gardenia-like flower. The spinners had told us that the family of the dead spinner were happy to have my photographs, and in a lull in general conversation I mentioned my worry that I might be blamed if people realised that two that I had photographed recently had both died within the following week.

He explained seriously and carefully that every person's birth is a set and recorded date, and every death is the same. There is nothing that can be done to avoid death on that date, and nothing that can be done to die on a different day- as if it is not your time you will not die. I think it is the sort of fatalism that helps them to cope with the concept to death, and certainly there is a sense of closing the door and moving on.

He pulled others into the conversation and they reassured me - obviously amused that I should think I could have the power to change something so thoroughly controlled by God.

There is a story (in the Middle East there is always a story). Ali is walking in the Cairo market and he sees Death, who looks straight at him. He turns in panic and runs to his master's home.

"Master, I have seen Death in the market, and he was looking for me. I must leave and hide."

The master decided to send Ali to relative in Aleppo, in Syria. He put him on a plane that afternoon. Then because the shopping had been forgotten he went late to the market.

He saw Death, but was unafraid, as he felt it was not his time, so he approached him.

"My servant Ali was very surprised to see you in the market here in Cairo this morning."

Death said, "I was very surprised to see Ali here too. I have an appointment to meet him in Aleppo in only four hours."

After fizzy orange with Hamed we walked to Ali's home. He is probably seventy. His face is think and lined but full of laughter. He had a dark ring around his head, as if he has been wearing a hat with black dye that ran into his skin. His hands and arms are stained indigo from the dark silks he has been spinning. He has four teeth, but they are crooked and catty-cornered, like stained old pegs left in the earth for seventy years too long. He wears an old white business shirt, with a double sided razor blade attached to his collar for cutting his threads. Years of loping up and down long alleys beside the threads on his loom have left him as lean as a piece of dried sinew, lanky and fit, despite his age. I have never heard him use even one word of English.

He stopped in the doorway as we slipped off our shoes, and took my right hand in both of his.

"I love you," he said, and tears filled his eyes.

I had a lump in my throat I could hardly speak through.

I love this country, and my Egyptian friends.

Farewells and photos and the best of drivers

2008-05-01T01:39:00.004+10:00

I am on a slow sad series of 'last days'.

I have been putting off blogging. I have been so busy and so scatterbrained. I have taken cameras full of photographs and keep thinking I must send them to Flickr to start the process of putting them on the blog.

But I have just decided that if I do that you will get nothing, as I will never do it.

We drove through a shadowed street yesterday and a ray of light slanting between tall dark trees and buildings picked up the brilliance of a tumble of oranges in the cart of an orange seller. In a fragment of light and time it gilded the faces of three ladies in black and the orange seller himself. I will always wonder if he wore a deep blue galabeyiah because he knew it would look spectacular against the colour of his cartful of fruit.

We stopped in the City of the Dead. Poor Ibrahim patiently stopped and reversed, and parked and stopped again while waiting for photographs. All those images I have seen flash past while driving - and I have thought "One day I will get out and photograph that" - well, today was that one day.

We stopped first at a point where you suddenly see a huge panorama of the City of the Dead looking back towards the Citadel and the low squat dome and fine minarets of the Mohamed Ali Mosque. It is breathtaking. Long low walls, lots of yellow ochre, warm terracotta, pale bleached green domes in the marvelous blue-green of tombs and the sacred sites of Islam, concrete and mud brick and every shade of grey and dust, and an occasional brilliant yellow. There are sculptured domes and white domes and green domes and domes just like the best of old jelly moulds. There are crenellations against the sky. There are tombstones - long and narrow and also gold and green and white.

Then a funeral went past and a short hoot from Ibrahim warned us to fold down the cameras and show respect to the truck with its simply draped body, and the following trucks of mourners. Women in black turned sober suffering faces towards us and I realised that no matter how much I think I know and love this city there will always be things I can never be a part of.

I visited my lovely spinners - Regab and Ali and Sayed, and Regab's son Khaled who has now taken over Regab's own old wheel while Regab struggles with a new and ungainly one in dark green. I love the way their faces light when they see us. It feels as if they have become freinds regardless of a common language and time to know them. Old Hamed who tends fifty three tombs showed his keys to the friends who were with me on this trip. His face is enchanting - it is full of life, vivid and bright and fun, but so lined and he is small and thin in repose.

We drove from the areas I know into some I do not know and walked a little. We found a wonderful tomb, fret-worked and painted in strong colours and patterns inside. Apparently it is the tomb of the family of a famous footballer. The caretaker wore a spotless and obviously newly laundered white galabeyiah. He had two teeth, on on each side of the front of his mouth, and must have been seventy. He was entertaining Ibrahim with stories of his travels when he was young.

"I have visas in my passport that you woudl not believe" translated Ibrahim. "I was in France when I was thirty five. I wish I had never left." We all laughed, the caretaker included. It was so silent in his area. There were no famous mosques, no people moving around carrying bread, not even enough plants to have birdsong. The long narrow streets stretched off into the distance. Harsh sunlight lit the golden walls of his tomb and cast black shadows inside, making the paintwork dark and indistinct. The streets were just packed earth, and the earth seemed to colour the walls around. Doors studded the long walls, each leading to another tomb with its packed earth floor, or grey concrete, with its few potted plants and small tidy room for mourners. It was hard to see it and imagine the green fields of France as he obviously did so often.

"Why are you sorry to have left France?" I asked and in fact as it left my lips it felt like the stupid question of the year.

"In France I could eat - how we ate and ate," - and what a silencer that was. Ibrahim made a quick comment about pretty French girls and we all laughed again.

As we walked away I commented to Ibrahim that I was saddened by his comment. Ibrahim said that he thought in many ways it was a true thing to say, but there was no doubt that he could eat something in Egypt. Perhaps, thought Ibrahim, he remembered most that he was young in France, and that all good memories came with youth.

It was a comment that struck so true that I felt silenced again. A crow flew overhead and perched on the minaret of a small mosque. A women in black appeared on a long cross street, and though she was walking quickly it seemed to take a long time for her to reach and pass us. I wanted a photograph but was caught between lethargy, indecision and tact. There was a strange echo between the appearance of the tall slim and quite beautiful woman and the arrival of the crow. She was not actually all in black, as the scarf that bound her head was edged in glittering beads in blues and greens. As she left the bird left his place on the minaret.

And last - all the pretty little horses. We had rounded a corner just after the panorama and the funeral. Against a blank concrete wall was some children's play equipment. We were stopped at first by the gaudy netting that enclosed a trampoline. It was rainbowed, and so the tomb behind it took on a magical misty 'lit in colour' look. Opposite and against a curved wall was a skipper - like a metal rubbish skip, or a scoop from a bulldozer. It was full of horses. They were obviously from a merry-go-round, brightly painted. Their long bodies arched and leapt, and in places the paint was completely gone, so the wood looked as old and worn and polished as driftwood. They were bright and gaudy, and quite incongruous against the City of the Dead.

Then I realised how appropriate they were. They were for the young and the living .. all through this area people live and work. Some are just poor and have found the area suitable for housing, some service the tombs and the necessary services for the dead. Some just sell food, or spin in the long alleys, or use the areas as they are quiet and cheap. The Cairo City of the Dead is also a city for the living, and even the children are not forgotten. I tried to buy a horse - and I am ashamed of that now - but it suddenly seemed so strong a symbol of life going on regardless of death.

This is a pragmatic country.

2008-04-01T17:44:00.001+11:00

I have had many asking about how to buy stitcheries in Cairo. If you ring Amal on 25898364 or 25882484 - the Association of Upper Egypt for Education and Development headquarters they have a lot of embroideries left but will send them back as unsold soon. Amal has lovely English. Ring quickly - I almost bought a stack more - but Bob was with me urging caution!

I think they would alwys be able to teel you where they can be bought.
I am in Spain and life is good.

The Stitcheries of Akmeem

2008-03-26T03:36:00.002+11:00

I have been so busy - and away too - over the last few months. No apologies really, but I am sad about so much that I have not blogged including my textile tour of Egypt and Syria.

Now another textile related subject - the enchanting embroideries of Akmeem. Women are beingtaught some basic stitching and let go with threads and fabric to stitch what they see in these areas to make a little extra money for the household. The work is beautiful, bright and colourful, and full of fascinating glimpses into life in Upper Egypt (which always confuses me as it is south!).

Water Carriers by Eqbal Tewfic

The Lake by Naanaa Adib

The Pigeonhouse by Naanaa Adib

Summer Holidays by Awatef Sabet
I love the obvious observation of the way people appear when swimming in this one - bits and pieces just appear above the water.

My Life in the House by Sanaa Sabet
My favourite - and the smallest.

Taxis and Tea

2008-02-07T09:06:00.000+11:00

My beautiful daughter left tonight. I am feeling decidedly flat and a bit miserable.

We have had an unbelievably hectic week.

The household is shrinking fast. From eleven - actually no - one expected guest did not come so we had ten in the house - and now we are down to only four. Our house guests are aging now as the young ones leave and older ones replace them. It has just been delightful having our young ones here - Sam and Tabbi and my grandson Michael were all here through Christmas and Tabbi has just left.

More than two hundred were at the house Sunday night for a huge Australia Week launch.We have had the the Archaeology conference - Corroboree - and a museum party for the launch of the co-ordinating exhibition tonight. With my other hat on I also walked the board and friends and some staff of the American University of Cairo through Tentmakers to talk to them about the art and its makers.

Yesterday we had a visit to Sakkara for the archaeologists to see what Professor Naguib Kanawaty has been doing in Mereruka's tomb. More on that later. It means I saw the burial chamber again - a wonderful low point!! Then we hosted a dinner with a celebrity Aussie chef out at the Intercontinental at City Stars.

We had a function today at the house - a wine tasting for one hundred - in the evening.

Busy busy week!

This morning Tabbi and I took a taxi to my dentist - the last visit for a while - and as we got in the taxi pulled out then asked if we wanted tea. It turned out that he had a mug of tea held between his knees and was happy for us to swig from it. We managed to resist. I think the last thing I would want between my knees in Cairo traffic is a cup of boiling water!

Friday Markets

2008-02-03T19:54:00.000+11:00

In Cairo, in the City of the Dead, there are markets. On Fridays they are huge - long streets packed with structures patchworked from bits and pieces and all manner of goods laid out for sale. Some have bits of everything, but most specialise.

Some items are just bizarre. In the poorest area of all - between the railway lines - there are bags of things like hotel soaps - somewhat used - and very badly ragged toothbrushes, crusted urinals and disposable dental mirrors. These are objects that I cannot imagine ever wanting to buy. In the better areas are cages of cats, birds - budgies and parrots, overcrowded but looking pretty healthy, and the odder items, like snakes, hedgehogs, birds of prey and hoopoes - I just wanted to buy them and open the cages as I love these beautiful birds.

I have just realised that I could go on and on describing but it is better perhaps to just let you look - through two pairs of eyes. I went with my daughter Tabbi - and she is a brilliant photographer. She is better than I am so I am both proud and daunted looking at her work. Even better - she has a little camera that I lust after - a bendy twisty thing that takes images from unexpected sides and has a 10 X optical zoom - so she can take lots of portraits of people who do not realise they are being taken. While I deplore the sneakiness of this with very politically correct sensitivity I also envy the capability and the images she collects.

So - walk the Friday markets with us! Lots of photos - so be warned - but it is so hard to edit these out.

Fish - smoked and alive

Fish - sunlit and backlit

My leaping horse - and Tabbi's

One shop - two great objects - I loved the old chair with its splitting textile and gleaming gold, and the beautiful bronze lady was being used as an incense holder.

Tabbi's shoe man and a sales table complete with palm tree

Tabbi's portrait - and mine

Old typewriter - with Arabic keyboard including a single key for "God is Great"

A wonderful Circassian face, my image, then Tabbi's

His Master's Voice - mine then Tabbi's

Old machines, probably almost rusted solid, with carved marble

Old photos on a stunning wall

Same shop as the last two - the marvelous orange and blue shot from Tabbi - how did I miss that one?

Tabbi's angel - and to think I didn't bother as I didn't like it!

Rugs and the man who made them

Mannequins - Tabs, then mine

Screens and Vespa parts

shower heads and computer parts

Brushes

Hanging objects

Plates and cutlery

It is always the people that light up the City of the Dead for me - we have so many marvelous portraits. These two are mine.

And Tabbi's

Tabbi's

Tabbi's then mine (without 10x optical zoom)

Mine, then Tabbi's

Two Tabbi shots

Gas bottles and bikes

Toilets and grilles

Doors, mine then Tabbi's

Iron in the sky

Loved the kitchen sinks and the amazing thirties look of the lush mannequin

Chandelier for sale in front, open tomb behind

Chandelier specialty shop - which has bags and bags of crystal jewels

Bikes and Turkish tombstones

Tabbi's

Tabbi's

Tabbi's

Tabbi's

I thought the last shot was just spectacular. The morning left me with an sense of how hard life must be for Egyptians at the lower end of the social scale - and the huge gap between those at the top and those at the bottom. The faces though, show acceptance of what life gives them - and this is for me an overwhelming factor in Egypt - that whatever is in the bag is accepted without rancor or complaint.

I loved my morning. I almost apologise for the huge flood of photographs - but they were so wonderful. You cannot take a bad photo in Cairo.

Day Nine and Wadi Sura

2008-01-27T00:33:00.000+11:00

We woke early and packed the camp. We are getting better at this. I was cold and had not slept well - so was quite content to hear that we had a day with a lot of driving.

I have been enchanted with my traveling companions. Marita and Jean-Daniel are a delight and talk about as much as I would want, but not all the time. Both have excellent and fluent English - and their French, which they use when together is so clear that I follow it easily if I bother to concentrate. We have discussed everything - both are thinkers and sharply intelligent and humorous. They even forgive my occasional Aussie crudeness when comments just slip out.

We had come to this side of Gilf Kebir so fast yesterday - approaching from the desert and running up the edge so I really did not have time to take it in. Leaving today we are hugging close to the high escarpments and can see the amazing stacked sandstone formations.

Occasionally I took a shot straight through the windscreen from the backseat. I like the juxtaposition of Hani's strong hands, the rear view mirror, and the view in front. The small dot low in the middle is the lead car.

We pulled in to see the Swimmers' Cave. This was featured in the movie The English Patient - and I loved the movie. I had always been enchanted by that cave - the deep slit that the shepherd edged into, down and around tight bends, with his flaming torch lighting stunning paintings on the walls. I thought the swimming figures beautiful and it was such an odd combination, swimmers in the middle of the desert. It implied a long time passing from then till now, and since 'now' cannot be shifted 'then' must be a very long time ago - a time when the climate was completely different, not just wet enough to sustain people but wet enough to swim.

I had been warned. Heide had mentioned that it was a shame that people had damaged it, wetting the images - which might not have seen water for centuries - for better photos. Darkening seemed to imply that some had used oil. Apparently some images were actually missing.

The cave was the greatest disappointment of the trip. For a start, the film lied. It was a shallow, low, shelter - curved and only slightly overhung like the other caves we have seen. There were no deep slits to climb through, no suggestion of darkness that might need a torch. I almost did not believe they had the right place. The paintings copied from these walls that now decorate the stunning foyer in the International Hot Springs Hotel in Bahariya are a great advance on anything left here - and in a way will remain the memorial for the Cave of the Swimmers.

Worse - there is hardly anything left. The way the rock has formed left it cracked and flaky - though hard enough to last for centuries - as long as no-one tries to lever pieces off with tyre irons. It looks as if that has happened here again and again. It was devastating to see it and I wanted to avert my eyes and cry. There are great light scars in the wall of the rock, and shattered edges of figures swimming now into nowhere.

And a view of the cave.

I have no idea what might be done to protect other caves from similar damage. While tourism to these areas is difficult, it is also sought after by those who want to join an increasing movement to go to places others have not been. Tourism does marvelous things to increase awareness of what is of value on this earth of ours, but it also allows people to access things that are so precious and fragile. Our guides were wonderful. Mahmoud spoke with passion about guides 'from Cairo' who turn a blind eye to damage done - but he sees the existence of things like the caves which are the treasures of Gilf Kebir as essential to his continuing tours. The flower stones of the White Desert are disappearing (and I have some in a bowl in my lounge room, and each time I go back now I take a handful home). The silica glass which was formed over a huge area of Egyptian Desert in one extraordinary meteor strike, which shattered into shards which were worn silken and pitted by wind and sand, to glow like greenish and golden translucent jewels on the sands of the Great Sand Sea - most has been collected by tourists. I saw whole big monuments built in this natural glass in Tripoli, the capital city of Libya.

I am now so afraid for places like the fairly recently found Fugini Cave - so stunning and haunting and beautiful. Special places in isolated areas afford unusual opportunities for plunder as there is unlikely to be an interruption. I would hate to see tourism banned as I found my whole trip so magical and it would be churlish to assume that all other tourists are worse than I am.

We left the cave, all a bit quiet and distressed.

Next stop was a camp used by the British - called the British Camp - funny about that! We had hooked out towards the desert (and Libya) again and the stacks of sandstone looked designed to be pigeon houses, pitted and worn and sculptured.

The sky was deep ultramarine, and the sun was impossible to avoid with shadows sitting like tight puddles under the rocks. Stones in this area are like jewels - not silica glass, but softly translucent, white like thinned milk, cool apricot and cream colours, all etched by sand and wind so that if you lift them from the firmed-down gravel which embeds them they spread wider and rougher below the ground level, and are smooth and polished above. You hold them in you hand like eggs, and the polished side lets you look into the stones, the dull side below stops you seeing your own palm straight through them.

We did not stay long - all of us needed toilet stops and we had bolted for varying degrees of cover. There was one track through the rocks and it is surprisingly hard to get away from twelve people all demanding a space of their own while pretending to search for pretty pebbles.

Now we swung south again. We ran parallel and fast through red sand with the Gilf in the distance. Further away the sand is firmer and less likely to trap Alberto's car. Fingers of the soft stuff work like speed humps and are surprisingly hard to see in mid-day sun with no shadows.

It is amazingly beautiful.

Now the real fun starts. We were to cross the Gilf at the Aqaba Pass and this meant we had to climb to the top of the Gilf. I had asked rather tentatively about this. I was told it used to be very difficult but now the sand had filled the rocky places it was not so bad, but very soft.

We went up, and up, and up, sand dune after sand dune. I lost count of how often we had to run back - not me actually if I am honest - but the other drivers and Mohamed the Captain - to dig out Alberto from soft sand. Going up with only two wheel drive was so difficult - lose speed even a little - and it was very steep and inevitable - and the back wheels simply drove the front wheels into the sand, then dug themselves in.

I wish I had photos but it was impossible to hold on and use an SLR from the back seat with images that were even half way reasonable.

At the top the world flattened out. The plateau was rimmed with black ridges and high black peaks, but the sand between shifted and drifted in the keening wind that swept across it and swung at the cars, snatching especially at the higher and heavily laden kitchen car. It felt uneasily as if we were driving on a treadmill that just moved under the wheels so we went nowhere, and the scenery hardly changed.

Up one side, and down the other.

We dropped only one more dune.

We threaded our way down through the sand, and came to a high ridge with a long sand slope below and wave after wave the Great Sand Sea stretched out pale red and gold before us.

We swung around to face one of the most amazing views I will ever see. Without a wide angle lens I can give you only one direction, but it wrapped almost around us. The sand glowed golden as the sun when down, and ridges dropped and seemed to change shape as shadows shifted and sharpened - from the softest wash of grey-lilac to mauve to red-violet and finally deep grapey purples. The light cooled on the sand as the heat sank from the air and the cold slammed down on us.

I did not put up a tent. I was so enthralled by the colours that I refused to take my eyes off the sand dunes, even when my friend Mohamed, and then Mahmoud, came up to tentatively offer to help.

I put my tent straight on the sand, to sleep near the men around the campfire. I had mentioned that I had my Ipod and could put on some music to play through the car speakers if people wanted. I had hardly used it. I had brought it as an isolating device if there should be people who want ed to talk all the time - but the whole group has been delightful and talking has been a pleasure. Even more, the places have demanded silence to fall between the gaps left by voices, so the stillness can feed in and around us and the silence is so total that it almost leaves you straining to hear anything at all. Heide had asked about Abba, and I assured her that I had an eclectic collection which did indeed include Abba.

We ate, then I put on music. I had decided that Abba did not entirely suit the place, and instead chose the sound track of 1492, The Conquest of Paradise by Vangelis. It is currently almost my favourite piece of music. The choral voices - only men, floated out across the sand and the whole group fell into unusual silence until the whole CD was over. "That," said Jean-Daniel. "was absolutely beautiful - what was it."

Then we put on Abba and some danced. It was a lovely night, cold and icy but so utterly still and beautiful. The moon was out over the sand and you could almost read by it, even though it was not the full moon we had had earlier in the trip.

The men cosseted me. I know they had been so concerned about the coughing. Now Mohamed, the driver of the kitchen car set up my bed. I had dropped the mattress and rolled out my sleeping bag and the tiny feather cushion filler I was using as a pillow. Mohammed lifted the pillow, folded a camel blanket to a thick ridge and put it underneath - which both extended the length of the mattress and lifted my head higher. Another camel blanket was carefully folded around the whole bed. I drifted straight off to sleep with not one cough. As I sank into that warm and comfortable state that knows you are awake but could not be bothered moving I felt Mohamed beside me stand and move around the circle to check all of us. One after another he adjusted our blankets, Mahmoud's had shifted sideways, and he tucked it in. The captain's had slid back and he pulled it up over his shoulder. I was aware of gentle hands adjusting the heavy rug around my shoulders and weighting the sides with sand so it could not move. Nor could I, but then I didn't really want to.

I slept like a log and did not use a tent again.

Flights to Road to California

2008-01-26T08:01:00.000+11:00

I have just been teaching at Road to California. I loved it - the best combination of good organisation, nice and happy students, and I shared a room with Gloria Loughman who is probably my favourite Aussie tutor.

However - I flew there. I have decided that I really do not like long flights. On the whole I endure them, but this seemed much worse than usual.

It all started so badly that I should have realised. I had made bookings about six months ago and had noticed, and groaned over, the eight hour standover in Frankfurt. That seems worse when the flights are so long anyway.

Driving through traffic in central Cairo one day with four people in the car and in a traffic jam which was not stationary enough to be quiet, but slow enough to have everyone leaning on horns, I had a call from my travel agent. She pointed out that I had eight hours in Frankfurt and would I like her to find a flight with less time to wait? Yes, I would. Well, she had. However - with eardrum-blasting sound levels combined with her strong Egyptian accent and the fact that the more I said I could not hear her, the more she shouted and the more my phone buzzed - I just could not work out most of what she was saying. I said that if I had less time at Frankfort I was happy for her to change the flights, and would trust her judgment.

Dumb. I went off to Houston having made arrangements to have the ticket to California issued while I was away. I came back from Houston, and dropped the ticket into the ticket drawer and went off on my long desert trip. Yes, I know I still have the Great Sand Sea crossing to write up.

I came back from the desert trip and my younger children arrived with my eldest grandson. I went on a Nile Cruise. I returned three days before Christmas and when the fuss and flurry and turkey was all over and my young ones departed to the White Desert I took time to glance at my tickets.

There was the first leg - Cairo to Frankfurt. Then the second Frankfurt to Los Angeles. The connection was now so tight that it looked worrying and I muttered that another half hour might have been a bit better. Then I flicked over the page to look for the bit that took me from Los Angeles to Ontario.

It wasn't there. They had changed my flight all right - and changed the destination. With only two weeks to go to a major teaching booking and a huge conference in a small satellite city - I had no way to get to the conference.

Finally the agency found me flights - but now I had to route through San Francisco to get there, and through Denver to get home. Worse - the tight Frankfurt connection was now at critical point - one minor holdup and I simply would not get the flight.

I finally received the new tickets only the day before I left.

I had asked them to book seats for me for the flights - I like aisle seats near the front of the plane - especially with tight connecting flights. On the first flight I was near the back of the plane - though not in the final seat this time. Last time that I sat there they ran out of food. I could survive without, but the meals punctuate boredom and I was annoyed. Then they had to give me duck from the first class menu and I forgave them.

We hovered over Frankfurt - and it was very bumpy. Then the pilot announced that there were very heavy headwinds and we were being put into a holding pattern. This was a matter for panic. Then I realised that my ticket actually had us landing an hour later and it was not as bad as it looked as the agency had not allowed for the time change to Germany and I had an extra hour. Then we circled for half an hour and finally landed. We taxied to our parking space - out on the outskirts of the terminal. The bus was late. I was still on the plane a long way from the terminal when my plane was supposed to be boarding. I was arriving at the terminal when it was supposed to take off.

German security is very very thorough. I had to get a train to the new terminal area. then go through security. In Australia when in queues they keep calling for passengers who are booked on flights about to leave - and you jump to the front of the queue. In Germany they tell you if they let you through everyone will want to go. I had seen that my plane was still there but flashing a final call notice and I was only four gates away when I was in the security line - but stuck totally with all the unrelenting hopelessness of a Cairo Traffic jam but note of the kindness.

We made it. Seven passengers sprinted almost neck and neck through the terminal and lunged for the gate - and they let us on with everyone else seated and tapping watches and looking daggers at us. The headwind that had slowed us on landing had also stopped us from taking off.

However - now I was in the front bulkhead row. Good legroom perhaps - especially since I had managed to talk the woman who was occupying my seat to let me have it back. I should have left her to it. The sweet little eighteen month old angel sitting on her mother's lap beside me changed within seconds to a wailing and kicking virago. Then I realised that she did not have a seat - and I was facing a twelve hour flight beside a bad tempered toddler, and a couple of very indulgent women - one the toddler's mother, and one her grandmother. They were Algerian. Before we even took off they were telling me to sit somewhere else. I had been told the plane was full and said so. "No it isn't," said the older woman. "I know as I sell their tickets".

Don't you hate it when people flatly contradict you when you are sure you are right. She immediately called over a hostess to complain that the baby woudl need the seat I was in and could I be shifted. I wasn't arguing much - I had been royally pummeled by the baby already and we had not even taken off - and her shriek was piercing. The hostess pointed out that the baby could not have a seat if it had not been paid for. She also said the flight was almost completely full.

Then the meowing started - behind us. We took off. The meowing continued. I have actually never been on a flight with a cat in the cabin. It was in a cat carrier and it had a paid for seat! However they said the carrier could not actually be on the seat - it was just a way to make sure that it was in a cabin. Four men nearby complained to the hostess and she pointed out that the seat was paid for but she woudl move the girl and cat to another location if she could find one.

It was at about this stage that the smells started. The baby contributed part of it with a nappy that obviously needed changing. Her mother had given her a bag of very sticky strong-smelling fruity sweets and she was sucking one, clutching another and my sleeve intermittently.

Then a frightened and distressed cat fouled her cat cage.

I managed to find another seat by pointing out to a hostess that the food tray in my seat was not folding out and I was very very uncomfortable. Finally I was wedged in a centre seat at the back of the plane but it was blissfully quiet - except that the ladies beside me looked daggers at me for daring to intrude on the empty space between them that they had counted on.

We arrived over San Francisco. There were a few dark hills coming out of a pure white sea. San Francisco was fogged in. We went into holding pattern again. With a dreadful sense of deja vu I watched my watch as we circled and my connecting plane should have been loading. I had also realised that it was unlikely my luggage would catch up with me.

We landed and I was last off the plane - they had stashed my bag when we were last on and it was not where I had been told it was.

I still cannot believe it - but the fog that delayed us so long had also delayed all flights taking off and they were HOURS behind. I sat for three hours. By then I was feeling better about even the possibility that my luggage might make it.

We loaded into the final flight - on United. We took off and I was feeling good - not even as tired as I had expected to be. As the seat belt light went off the hostess moved forward and started to set up the drinks trolley. She was gorgeous. Very tall - at least 5' 11''. She was very long legged, with the stunning body and marvelous strut of many African Americans. She secured the coffee pot on top and came forward. I was in the front row. She stopped beside me and asked what I would like. I said Ginger Ale - we cannot get this in Egypt.

Without saying a word she took the trolley back. She removed the coffee from the top and lashed it back into place. I was utterly bewildered. What had I done to have her move away when I placed my order? Then she reached into a drawer. She pulled out a pair of surgical gloves and slowly and deliberately pulled them on.

There is something terribly ominous about surgical gloves. She looked as if she was about to perform a very unpleasant medical examination. She moved slowly down the aisle to about two seats behind me and now I could see the problem. A couple were both vomiting into their airsickness bags. We had only just taken off. She removed the bags, replaced them with clean ones, removed the gloves and washed, and then set up the trolley again and brought me a ginger ale.

My luggage did make it - but it was a memorable trip.

New Year in Cairo

2008-01-02T00:33:00.000+11:00

Each evening when the sun has dipped and the sky has dimmed something magical happens to Cairo. The dirt and the dust disappears. The ugliness of tatty gingery buildings, litter laden streets, dingy battered cars, and forests of daisy-like satellite dishes on top of the flat roofs all vanishes. What is left is pools of yellow light gilding the buildings, bright neon lighting the sky and the black surface of the Nile reflects each light a dozen times in its ripples, and young couples, shoulder to shoulder - but rarely more - line the bridges and whisper dreams to each other.

At night the whole city dreams. There are still car horns but somehow the sound becomes more festive. The mosque minarets are lit with grass-and-emerald green lights, and spires all over the city point elegant green fingers to the sky. There is not one star. The sky becomes a dusky red-purple as the perpetual Cairo smog reflects the lights of the city that throbs below.

I sat last night in a window on the 20th floor overlooking the narrow edge of the Nile that wraps around the back of the island I live on. It is called Gezira and literally this is Island. They call our suburb Zamalek. Suburbs here seem to alternate grotty with elegant, defined mostly by the width of the streets. Narrow is grotty, wide boulevards are elegant - no matter how many lines of cars force themselves along the marked lanes.

The Nile wraps around Gezira, two thirds on one side and one third on the other, and I was looking over the narrow strip. It is like a back entrance compared to the front one - less loved, without the grace element of feluccas drifting slowly under sail, lined by somewhat seedy 'houseboats' used as clubs and restaurants and places for wedding parties. Occasionally one of the little motor boats loved by Egyptians for happy Thursday night parties drifted through - hot pink, lime, scarlet and lemon neons flashing, and music blasting so loudly that remnants reached even the heights of the twentieth floor, to break through shouted conversations with thin thready drifts of Arabic music.

A friend had volunteered a party for New Year's Eve and I was able to hog a seat in the window and withdraw a little from festivities. Our youngest daughter fitted in beautifully and I loved watching her mixing and chatting, and her bubble of a laugh gurgling through the other party sounds. Most of the group was young. I had several glasses of punch which I assumed - rather stupidly considering that it was a party for New Year's Eve in a Western house - that the punch contained nothing more lethal than fruit juice and tea. By the time I had had three glasses of it I was starting to realise that there may have been something more - as the initial glass of Moet and Chandon champagne was not enough to account for the fact that I was somewhat blurred and concentrating carefully on what I said.

So - I sat in the window and mulled over the year that has just passed and how much I love this city - and how sad I will be to leave. We were looking down on the Fish Gardens - a park area not lit at night so it made a large black pool beneath the apartment block. Then the Nile. Then the busy and crowded streets of Aguza, and the high rise of Mohandiseen and Dokki behind. It has been such a privilege to live in a city like this - large and unwieldy and complicated and not always well behaved. I have had such joy here and probably equal frustration. I often think knowing the time I have is finite is easier as I know the annoyances are temporary and that the pleasures the same - so I make the most of the best things, and let the bad slide past to the keeper.

The best this year was undoubtedly my trip to Gilf Kebir and Jebel Uweinat - and I promise I will finish the write-up in the next few days. The worst was coming in to my kitchen to find my dear chef profoundly distressed by the fact that he had collected his mother from her home to bring her to spend the evening with his family, and they both walked straight into an honour killing and saw the whole thing in terrible detail. His hands shook as he recounted what he had seen, and how the brother and father who had killed the young woman had just sat down beside her body and lit cigarettes until the police came to take them away. His mother had fainted against him, and he could not carry her away so was pinned there to watch, and it had all happened so fast that the group nearby had been too horrified to move until it was over.

I still feel my own horror and our chef's frustration and he still occasionally talks about the murder - but his grief is all for the mother who lost her daughter, her son, and her husband all in one moment.

Happy New Year to all those out there who read this blog. I feel sometimes that I talk to my friends when I write this, and yet most of you I have never met and might never meet. I started this to tell friends and family of my life here without having to mail out dozens of emails and risk missing people. This way my family and friends can choose to see what is happening, or not. Sometimes it feels almost as if I am dropping stones in a deep well, as it is an odd way to communicate - strangely one sided and quiet as I know there are a lot more readers than there are comments. Then I travel somewhere, and find that there is someone in a group who reads my blog - and I come back with a new burst of energy!

Happy New Year. I hope for all of you and for all my dearly loved family and friends that the year will bring the best of what you hope for, and that the problems will be easily solved.

Day 8, Wadi Farag again and Fugini Cave

2007-12-28T21:58:00.000+11:00

We left early on Day 8 to drive back to Gilf Kebir - the last few days we have been in Jebel Uweinat. Today was to be a fast run to Wadi Sura and the Fugini Cave. We have been very very close to Sudan and had to be careful on our return not to edge into Libya. We stopped for a photo at the border sign - and it does say Sudan.

We found a small collection of Sudanese shoes - they are scattered around the Wadi Farag area as people-smugglers pack cars tightly with people to drive them illegally into Egypt. We passed one as we drove - and there were so many people inside it was just a solid mass of nervous smiles and lighter eyes. Sometimes extras can buy a place standing on the back - and if they fall off they are not always missed or picked up. Our guide told us he had buried three or four bodies over the years (twenty) that he has been visiting the Gilf. First he would see a small bag of possessions discarded by an exhausted walker, then one shoe, then another, then further on he would find the body.

The shoes were sad and endearing. They are all leather, and hand stitched and quite beautiful objects, curled and warped by sand and sun. They are small too - far too small for me even if they had not turned into convoluted sculptures and I could, like Cinderella, have tried them on.

I had started to pick them up but Hani was obviously not happy about possibly dead Sudanese shoes in the car so I put them back - and just took one - quietly.

The collection

We passed a couple of old vehicles left to the wind and sand - a truck and a car.

Alberto was stuck only once today and chose a place that was beautiful - with firm sand covered with pebbles sand-blasted to a jeweled brilliance, clear and sparking and translucent. They were irresistible and we picked up a pocketful each.

We again crossed Wadi Farag - further towards Libya this time. It was clear and bright and all the colours washed to the palest of water colours. Yes, I know I have sand on my sensor - it is also refusing to move like the tree in my last posting.

This time we approached Gilf Kebir on its other side - the western edge. I was almost photo-weary - and a back seat is not conducive to a lot of spectacular shots through the windows. I have taken a few that I think of as 'windscreen' shots and will show them occasionally - but the attempt to compromise between the dark of the interior of the car, and the excessive lightness outside the car is not kind to either. There were long lines of hills and ridges and occasionally a pure white edge of cliff or hill.

We set up camp as the sun was dropping, gilding the tops of the hills around us. We were at Fugini Cave high on the West of Gilf Kebir and could see that there was a small group of people up at the cave so we wanted to wait till they had gone, but had our fingers crossed that there would still be light enough to see the paintings on the walls.

The Cave is high on a slope of sand - but with enough rocks at the side to help do the climb. Dear kind Mahmoud said he would help me get up without slipping and led the way, insisting I put my hands on his shoulders to balance in the very steep bits. I felt as if I just might drive him into the ground - he is a small man and I am not small at all. In fact, it was reminiscent of the spike and the mallet in my tree posting.

One of the things that has been a disappointment - darn Hollywood - has been my mental image of the Cave of the Swimmers, thanks to the movie The English Patient. In that the cave was deep and full of clefts, and both the Bedouin who found it and the hero and heroine slid through gaps looking in awe at the paintings. I had expected the Fugini Cave to be like this as it is in the same stretch of hills of Gilf Kebir. In truth, it is a curve of shallow rock shelter with images covering the walls and ceiling. You can see it at the top of the photograph - and the sand fills it to the level you can see. My immediate assumption - since the sand seems to cut off some images - is that the images go down much much further and have been covered. However - they don't. The sand still sits pretty much where it did when the paintings were made.

Our resident geologist pointed out that the flat area at the base of the hill was probably a lake, and the cave would be an ideal place to watch for game.

Mahmoud in Fugini Cave

Unknown French tourist in typical cave photography pose! I like the fact that you can see the start of the curve of the cave roof.

The imagery in this cave was really different from Jebel Uweinat. There were almost no images of cows, or anything that implied husbandry. There were family images, and some animals, but mostly it was people. Even the animals seemed odd and different - the large image in the centre of this seems to be like a lion, but it could be headless. There were many images like this, some with a head, some clearly headless, and some that seemed to be eating a man - in one only his legs are left.

This is a typical section of wall - see the lion image at the bottom.

And a detail of the same image - note the fine yellow grid.

Etiolated shapes of people, and an over-painted strong white image with a long neck - but not a giraffe.

Yvonne thought this image showed the lake below the cave, animals and a family - maybe even with a pregnant wife.

I thought this was a good example of the fact that imagery was added at different times. The stunted figures at the bottom are clearly a different batch of paint, and I love the way they are almost mirrored below the crack.

I am curious about what seems to be tassels or a swinging skirt in the upside down figures in the bottom right. I would welcome comments, as there are few images that suggest any sort of clothing here or in Jebel Uweinat.

Headless animals and swimmers?

Deep cut images at the left side wall of the cave.

The cave was strange and mystical in comparison to those in Jebel Uweinat - and I am itching to talk them over with someone who really knows what the images are likely to be.

I was coughing again - after being fine all day - when I climbed into my bed tonight and in desperation I dragged my bedding outside the tent. Since whatever was causing the cough was probably also right through my sleeping bag and mattress it was a bit of a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted! Mahmoud now brings me a hot lemon at night and I love it - both the lemon and the cosseting. I lay there for a while but coughed and felt I was not sleeping, so went to the car and climbed in without my sleeping bag, hoping to leave whatever allergen was getting me behind with the bedding. Ten minutes and I was frozen. I went back to the bag and shook and shook it - and while the cough got worse at first it seemed to ease a little.

However I watched one falling star after another until I had the light of the rising sun in my eyes - and I had obviously slept reasonably well.

Firewood at Karkur Tall

2007-12-28T21:32:00.000+11:00

I had promised to talk about the tree, so this is an 'aside'.

All over Karkur Tall are fallen acacia trees. They have died and dropped - and are great as firewood. I had noticed that our firewood supplies were almost gone but the guides seemed unworried. Now I realised why. On the day I was on my own and walking my 'gazelle' wadi, I was collected by Hani. On our way back he stopped by a fallen tree, got out of the car, and looped a nylon rope around it. It was not just big - It was HUGE! Easily twice as long as the car it lay there and refused to move while he carefully and gently tried to pull it from its position.

The situation was made more complicated by the fact that all the sand is this area was deep and soft and too much resistance from the tree - or too much pulling from the car - would mean that we would simply dig ourselves deeply into the sand. This tree proved recalcitrant (and I just had a moment of doubt about that word and looked it up in the Miriam-Webster online dictionary and it means 'stubbornly disobedient!) so we gave up and moved to another.

The next was a bit smaller and a long slim twisted trunk with several branches. The branches were broken off and tossed on the roof, and we tried again. It slid more easily and we were slowly and carefully underway - the trunk kept rotating as we pulled it and every so often the broken off branch would be on the bottom and dig in hard like an anchor. At this point the car stopped with a judder and the back wheels dug deeply into the sand. I learnt several words in Arabic that I suspect cannot be used in private company. Hani gave up again after digging the car out twice.

The third tree came easily.

Back at the camp Hani and Mohamed started to cut it up. The bark and all small branches were stripped off and burned - as they were covered in long sharp spines and Hani explained - with entertaining sign language - that we did not want spikes where people are barefooted. The tree seemed much bigger at camp and I was surprised to see that they did not have an axe - just a long wedge and a mallet. The wedge was propped into place and belted with the mallet and the tree obligingly split. This was repeated several times until they had several large but not impossible pieces of wood. The main trunk was left mostly in one piece, and that night the fire was lit and the tree pulled in place over it so that it was the centre that was burned through - and this was allowed to burn in a carefully dug pit through the night. This left us with a lot of charcoal which was carefully bagged, two large pieces of remaining trunk and a pile of split-off smaller wood.

It was interesting to watch the process from the beginning.

Day 7 Karkur Tal and the Caves

2007-12-07T08:01:00.000+11:00

We woke this morning to the delicious smell of freshly cooked bread. Last night Mahmoud mixed dough with his hands in a large plastic bowl and left it covered on top of the car overnight (because foxes like bread and we had lots of little white fennecs).

This morning he set up a system of an upturned plastic bowl on the sand, a folded plastic table cloth over the upturned bowl, flour in a thickish dredge, then a ball of dough. He used the inner cardboard roll from a finished roll of Glad Wrap as a rolling pin and carefully rolled out each piece of bread. The tree we collected yesterday was burning - hey I forgot that - that is story on its own! - and they put rocks to hold up a flat iron cooking plate over the fire. The plate was wiped several times with a wet cloth, then floured lightly in a sweep before the bread was dropped on. It is unleavened bread as they did not have yeast, but was still delicious. The mix was flour, water, salt and cardamom and the cardamom gave a delicate scent while it cooked.

Irene photographing the bread making with our tents in the background. I just looked at the photo trying to work out who was in the brown tent in the front left, and realised it was a rock!

I was interested to see that they rarely let the bread sit on what was an incredibly hot plate. They kept hold of one side and lifted and rolled it around so it would not scorch.

Have a look at a typical breakfast - there is sliced sweet orange, omelette with fresh green herbs, jams, sliced breakfast cake, two sorts of cream cheese, halva, Tang and cold Kakedeh, hot tea or coffee - a feast. There was something different offered every morning.

We were going today to the Belgian Wadi. That was Heide's name for it, and Mahmoud knew the place, but not that name. It is an easy walk but rough underfoot and I have, for the first time, dug out heavy shoes from under the seat of the car. I even have socks. I have hardly been anything but barefoot since we left.

Looking down the Belgian wadi - shoes definitely necessary!

And across a bit further down.

And the first piece of rock art as we got out of the car.

This tall rock with its platform in front looked like something special - and it was.

You can see the images above the platform here and I wonder if it could in some way have been a ceremonial place. The images were really beautiful and much larger than this sort of petroglyph usually is.

The following carvings were all on it and each animal is really big - possibly 50 to 80 cm high.

This looked to me as if it was marked out by a butcher into cuts of meat. I know that is silly - but it is so like a meat chart!

We walked on and I photographed a pretty flowering bush - all silvery with long white plumes of flowers. It is hard to believe that anything can grow here with no rainfall, and no recent water - not a drop of rain in this region in five years. However I believe the acacia can use dew and perhaps these plants can too.

This was the most spectacular rock shelter of the day. It was about twice as long as this - the photo is taken from a mid point looking in one direction, and you can see Heide with her flashes of pink well down. Most of the best work was on the ceiling, and this meant you had to crouch and look up. I am just going to roll out a string of images. Believe me - I have hundreds and am editing tightly.

I loved the crouching archer

I was fascinated in looking at this one on the computer to see how overlaid the images are. The white cattle look like earlier paintings and the red images just ignore them. Women are shown with large thighs and I find that very reassuring. The woman in the top seems to be carrying a calf. To me all these images looked like a group who husband their cattle - not like hunters, despite the bow and arrow images. If anyone has more knowledge please comment!

Not upside down - just looking across at the sky from under the roof of the shelter.

There were a lot of strange looking cows or animals with very shaggy fur around the rear like the one at the very top of this picture - I have no idea what they are?

This series looked interesting as it seemed to tell a story - mating of cattle (or perhaps a badly lost kangaroo?) and in the mating image there seems to be a with a cow with a very swollen udder (pregnant perhaps) below, perhaps some sort of assistance with the birth(?) then a cow that looks to me as if it has given birth and is cleaning its young.

Alberto was on his back in the dust taking photos. There was dust everywhere by then. I started to cough. And cough and cough. It was a very odd cough - breathless, and every few seconds and I realised it was an allergy to something. It felt like a band around my chest, tight and annoying, though not painful. I moved quickly out of the shelter area and into the middle of the wadi but continued to cough - absolutely non stop. I vomited. I struggled for air and realised that I was a very long way from any sort of assistance. In a distant sort of a way I noticed my nails were blue and realised that I was on my own and had to control the coughing somehow. I doubled over, kept very still and pushed away the need to cough as hard as I could while breathing as deeply as I could, and slowly I recovered. The attack had lasted about half an hour and was really frightening. I had not had anything like it for twenty years and no longer carry a puffer! I still do not know if it was something in the shelter or the pretty bush I had stopped to photograph.

I joined the others again and we went further down the wadi. It was so beautiful.

Here we scrambled up a 'mud bank' which is now rock from a long-ago flood to another cave - and a strongly different style of work.

The line of items all connected in the top corner fascinated me. I asked what others thought they were and was interested in Yvonne's theory. She believes these might have been household items pinned or tied to a line - baskets and fishtraps and so on.

I thought the long fine tail was beautifully drawn.

Hunting party with bows.

I was starting to cough again and realised sitting near Alberto (who had been rolling in the dust) was obviously not wise. I took a quick 'marker' photograph of the rock area opposite and then a shot down the wadi as well, intending to get out quickly.

In another area I had wondered if an image with legs spread and a blobbish figure below could be a woman in childbirth. Now I looked up as I scrambled back to the edge to leave and realised there was no doubt about this one - it was only tiny but the umbilical cord is clear. It was somehow very touching to see this recorded and I wonder if it was a specific birth or something optimistic or just a painting.

This shot gives an idea of the space available in this shelter - not a lot - and you can see Yvonne at the edge.

I left the others moving on to the end - not to see more paintings but to look at the view. I was still coughing intermittently and was feeling exhausted from it - most unlike me! I walked slowly back and met Mahmoud at the car with cold drinks, a fresh water spray to put a mist over our faces when we arrived back hot and sweaty, and chocolate hazelnut croissants in long-life packets.

We stopped on the way back to the camp to admire a lovely herd of giraffes.

And a detail.

A beautiful blue-headed lizard who moved like a chameleon.

Mahmoud, talking about another small group of paintings.

We went back for lunch and I sat next to Alberto and Yvonne and started coughing again! I moved to a rock further away and it stopped like magic.

I washed my hair. I had been starting to feel pretty grotty. I have thin oily hair and normally wash it daily. I had been pulling it back into a toweling covered hair tie and was finding that it stayed sticking out in a tight tail even after I took out the tie - it was thick with oil and sand. After lunch Mahmoud announced that there was extra water and we could have a bottle each to wash.

Somehow I managed to wash my hair with a litre of water, a cut off top of a water bottle to use as a scoop (with its lid on) and a small plastic box with I borrowed from Marita. I found the lathering was easy even though I was stingy in damping my hair. I had a box balance on a rock and within seconds of the first attempt to rinse I realised that this was not easy. I HAD to get all soap out of my hair. Most of the water seemed to have run into my t-shirt and not into the box. I carefully combed out the worst of the lather and managed to make the second rinse a bit more effective, then the third. My hair was clean and I used the rest of the water to soak and wash my feet. It looked pretty bad by the time I had finished with it but I felt so much cleaner. My feet changed colour - they had been so stained with red sand that they lightened when washed.

Actually I have been surprised that I have not felt too dirty. Sand is not like dirt - it brushes off cleanly and leaves only a little residue. It has been hot but it is surprising how clean you feel after using a handful of wet ones to 'shower' in a tent. I kept getting whiffs of what I thought was a nearby baby and realising it was me - but no-one was smelly or too distressed by dirt. Jean-Daniel had an impressive grey stubble and all our guides now had good black beards - except Mahmoud who shaved while waiting for us in the wadi this morning. Captain Mohamed shaved every day. Alberto had a beard before we left and it just got a bit longer.

I pulled my shoes into the tent - because of the foxes - before I went to sleep. Iwas fine. then I lay down and started coughing. I coughed all night. About an hour later Mahmoud brought me a hot lemon drink. I was so touched by that - he had said "Jenny? I am Mahmoud. I have lemon for you."

The coughing was not frightening as it had been in the wadi but it was unrelenting - all night. I had hardly any sleep but was too tired to think of moving. I realised later that whatever allergen I had reacted to was on the clothes I had stripped off in the tent (scattering it everywhere) and in the shoes I had carefully brought in. Worse - I was very aware that I was keeping everyone awake and Irene brought me drops with codeine in them that helped her. I was taking anything I could get my hands on.

NOT a good night and I was really exhausted next day - but the coughing stopped almost the moment I stepped out of the tent.

Day 6, Karkur Tal

2007-12-01T06:24:00.000+11:00

Today was decided as the day for the big walk. Mahmoud has found an area with unknown caves and paintings and it means a climb to the top of the plateau, followed by about six hours of steady walking, and a climb back down - the last he calls a 'hard' climb.

I have thought carefully about my almost sixty year old body and its faults and decided not to go. Some of the deciding not to go is also a knowledge of the things I like compared with those I do not like. Being high is a 'don't like'. This walk involves two different HIGH climbs - one up, one down. Heide has mentioned a group did it when it was hot and it was very bad. While this is November it is surprising warm in Karkur Tal - probably about 36 celcius - and I am aware that I would go through more water than we are supposed to be drinking.

I am also hankering for a chance to be alone and quiet - to paint, or perhaps to just explore on my own. The acacias are beautiful here. I am also feeling sad as it is the birthday of my lovely daughter Kim who was so badly burnt a year or so back, and I am missing her. It is also the birthday for my grand daughter Acacia and I cannot ring either.

So - I have pulled out of the BIG walk and will be dropped at the entrance to a Wadi by the very very quiet Hani (who has little English and laughs at my Arabic) and will set a time for him to collect me later.

Someone asked about our tents. These are the sleeping tents - we all put up our own, helping with each others' if necessary.

The rather more gorgeous coloured arrangement is the local style of 'tent' made in fabric with imitates tentmaker appliqué. this is our living quarters, and also where the men sleep if they need shelter. Sometimes they just pull sleeping bags around the fire.

Peter had been a bit concerned about putting me with a group who spoke another language as he said they had had some disasters from this. I decided that I would sit like a mouse in a corner if necessary to be able to do the trip.

Traveling with Marita and Jean Daniel in the car is an unmitigated delight. Both are clever and marvelous conversationalists - in English - though they tend to use French to each other. They both ask enough questions about the Middle East to make me feel clever that I know some of the answers. They laugh at my jokes. I badly want them to meet Bob as I know they would all get on so well, but that seems unlikely as they will go straight on to Sharm El Sheik for a long soak in the Red Sea.

Evenings around the table tend to be a bit more complicated.

Somehow wherever I sit becomes the line where the French speakers divide from the German speakers. On the whole Alberto and Yvonne sit with Marita and Jean Daniel and they all use French. This I can follow a bit - but it takes concentration and now and again it is easier to just drift out and sit quietly. Heide and Irene and Helena have been good friends for ages and speak German to each other. All are easy and uncomplicated companions.

I have taken to having my pen and diary at the table and when the conversation is incomprehensible I write instead - my theory is that it makes the others less likely to feel bad. I would rather they thought me rude than felt they should speak English. In fact one night Mahmoud suddenly said, "Where are you Jenny?" I came back immediately with "On the border between France and Germany." Everyone laughed, but I felt immediately bad in case they took it as a criticism.

On the whole it has been much less of a problem than I thought it would be as I know I have the option of asking questions and swinging the conversation to English whenever I wish.

A lot of the time I talk to the men as Mahmoud has excellent English and the other two a little, and last night I noticed that they were looking tired after the long day of driving. They were all preparing the vegetables so I walked over to the table which is the first thing they set up - two large thermoses with all the tea and coffee making things. I made the coffee -one coffee, one sugar that Mahmoud likes, and the tea that I know Mohamed likes with its three sugars and quietly put it beside them. As Hani joined them I asked if he wanted tea. He misunderstood and immediately walked to the table and asked how I wanted it. I pointed out that I was offering to make one for him and he was flabbergasted. He said something to the others and Mahmoud told me that no-one had ever offered something for him before. Now I am a bit concerned that I somehow stepped beyond the line - but it was a very Australian thing to do.

Dinner last night was lentil soup, followed by cauliflower fried with a spicy egg batter, and a platter of steamed vegetables - zucchini, carrots, potatoes. We have had a few vegetarian meals and I am really enjoying the food.

"My Wadi"

Anyway - I went off walking in a small wadi not far from the camp. My original idea was to walk the length of it and then settle and paint in time I had over. However, a gentle breeze was blowing, the temperature was fairly high, and in the wadi it was quite hot. Flies buzzed my face and neck. I had made the mistake of wearing my sandals because of the heat, and the grounds was heavily drifted with lumps of acacia branches - complete with long spear-like thorns. I was picking my way fairly carefully. There were no obvious tools and that was odd for an area that is heavily painted as people obviously were there.

As I walk I am able to think about the utter privilege of being able to do this trip. It is utterly, totally self indulgent. It is impossible for Bob to do this with me and he would have loved it so much. While in Egypt he is Ambassador. If he leaves his number two becomes Charge d'Affairs. If something goes badly wrong he would rush back. From New York this might take a day. From Karkur Tal it would take about five - four if we didn't get stuck too often. Worse - while he is in Egypt his number two is not Charge and her authority is that much more limited. Either way - it was impossible and I will be forever grateful that Bob pushed me to do this while I had a chance.

I saw a likely shelter high on one side of the wadi. It was an easy climb as the rock almost created terraces. I arrived at the shelter to find no graffiti or paintings, but a couple of well placed rocks and a marvelous view in both directions. I sat. The breeze tried to lift my hair (thick with oil and sand and unwashed now for five days) and gave up. I had a scarf firmly tied around most of it anyway. It was cooler high up and I decided to paint.

Halfway through the first painting I caught a flicker of movement from the corner of my eye. I looked up and saw something moving lightly between rocks. The others had talked of 'mouflon' in the area and I had seen their tracks in the wadi - but this looked too small. It was high on the other side of the wadi, and I sat very still and watched for some time. It seemed not much bigger than a large dog, but it didn't move like a dog.

It was a small gazelle. It was briefly and perfectly silhouetted against the sky and its head and lines were very clear. I was enchanted - it was light and very graceful. I watched for about half an hour till a group of three walkers came through the wadi (from a French group we had seen) and frightened it away.

I sat in the most perfect silence. I felt no need to go exploring and I just loved the place. It smelt of acacia honey and even the flies did not come this high.

Lunch on my return was ready though the others were not due back for some time. We had a great lunch though I had my doubts when I watched them start smashing the left over vegetables from the night before. However they fried cumin and coriander seeds briefly, broke up the bigger coriander seeds, and stirred it all through with a little chili and lemon and salt and pounded black peppercorns. It looked like baby food, but wedged into the pocket of rough local bread (flatbread) it tasted marvelous and I am going to copy this with the next leftovers at home.

The others came in late and exhausted and thirsty. There had been a glitch in their pickup arrangements but all is well and they are here.

They had a great day but the more they tell me about it the more glad I am that I stayed. The photos of their descent look terrifying.

Calming the fears

2007-11-30T22:06:00.000+11:00

A bit of a distraction while I introduce a 'fringe' character.

The Captain, Mohamed is becoming a good friend. I had talked to him on the first morning at Dakhla as were leaving. I introduced myself and chatted for a few minutes. I talked to him occasionally at the stops and lunch breaks. When told about his fears by Mahmoud I laughed with the others - for those who love the desert worries about scorpions, snakes, lions and djinns seem very funny. He says no-one want him to be there. In a way it is true - no-one really wants a military escort. They are there to keep you to the rules in a place where we do not really want rules. They can be terrible - we had one on another trip who did nothing but arrange his hair in the wing mirrors and watch us all work.

Jean Daniel has been a bit surprised at the Captain's lack of interest in the things we have seen. When we stop he sits with the men and talks but does not come and look. For an erudite and ever-curious mind like Jean Daniel's this is impossible to understand. However I often feel that in Egypt kids are taught not to be curious. School is a room of sixty kids and one teacher - a curious child is just not welcome. Learning is all by rote, not by understanding. The Captain helps with the packing and moving of items from the cars - he is much better than any other officer we have taken to the desert.

I have found that he has been on one other desert trip - a short one to the Great Sand Sea. He is a lawyer by training and has finished his first bar exams with one step - a residency - to go before he is fully qualified. His father died leaving him to support the family so he worked in an Italian restaurant through his university years. He has younger brothers and sisters who he adores, and a very dependent mother. He is engaged and showed me the photo of his loved fiancee (who he has never had even ten minutes alone with). He is just a boy from Giza with an utterly typical life story, and he is Mr Cool in the city. He has D &G jeans, large sunglasses that wrap half his face, dimples, and a beautiful smile.

I could reassure him and laugh away the fears of snakes and scorpions, but I was worried about the fear of djinns. Djinns are not like ghosts which were once people, they are malevolent and evil.

I called him aside after my finds on the crater floor and gave him a lovely piece in shiny yellow stone, polished by melt and by wind and sand. It was obviously part of a worked blade. I told him its history, and how old it possibly was. I said it had been in the desert a long time and it had power as an object as it was worked by men. I told him it would protect him from djinns if he kept it close through the day. He said he woudl keep it in his bag at night.

He has slept well ever since, and is quietly helpful and grateful. I saw him transfer it from his bag to his pocket one morning so I know he is trusting it. He helps me now with everything - hovers nearby, helps if I am putting up my tent and generally looks after me.

No - it is not a belief that I have - but I knew that it might calm him down.

Day 5

2007-11-29T06:26:00.000+11:00

Wadi Wassa, Shaw's Cave, Wadi Firag, Peter and Paul, Clayton's Crater and Karkur Tal

We rose early with a long day of travel and things to see ahead of us.

First stop was an old airport - marked out in empty drums of aviation fuel and even the name of the airport - Eight Bells - and the arrow to show the way to land had been done in old square drums. There were also food cans around - old enough as they were cans punctured on both sides of the top, not by one of those openers that makes a neat triangle, but by a jagged point. all markings were gone except those embossed into the tin, but I souvenired a can that could have been a small Campbell's soup can and it took me about an hour to shake out all the sand.

Arabic signatures and dates on the Aviation Benzene cans

From the airfield we drove to Mogharet el-Qantara, also known as Shaw's Cave.

It was a steep scramble, both up the dunes for the car, and up the dune and rubble for me. I struggle with climbs - especially in soft sand. I seem to step up one step and slide back for most of it. Friendly and helpful-looking rocks on the slope were deceitful as they sat quietly waiting till I put a foot on them, then slid down the slope like sleds. One venture on a rock had me doing sideways splits while desperately clutching my precious SLR camera. Yes, I do know that I already have dust on the sensor, but I did not want any more. This meant I could not give in and crawl, but had to stay more or less vertical.

Inside, above your head and high, are marvelous paintings. I knew we would see a lot, but these were the first. I was surprised by their elegance. Black, red ochre and white they look so new and fresh that I was amazed. There was nothing tentative about these, they were strong deliberate curves and shapes, and really beautiful.

The view from inside the cave, looking down. I could imagine someone watching for game from this vantage point.

From there we crossed Wadi Firag. This is huge - a wide and long Wadi that means 'spread' and where an early explorer (was it the Hungarian Almasy? I must check) lost his guide. I photographed it from the centre looking both ways. Unusually here there are deep and well worn tracks, and we did not veer so much a a foot out of them. It was hard to understand the logic of 's' bends slavishly followed when clear short cuts over firm sand were visible - but I guess if one person had survived that way another has reason to follow. However - there is a good reason for those deep tracks. There are land mines and not many willing to risk them with a change of route.

According to local folk lore several Germans were lost a few years back and no-one has tried another way since. It reminds me of the old joke - "If at first you don't succeed, sky diving is not for you!"

I almost cried though at the tools we were passing - big heavy tools more likely to be paleolithic than neolithic. I felt as if I was just sitting there quietly whimpering.

After the wadi we headed for Peter and Paul. These were pointed out as mountains, though I note that on the map it looks like the Peter and Paul Craters.

The area is marvelous. It looks as if a giant and demented bird has strewn the area with large dark and mis-shapen eggs. They are great granite tors and have the classic granite feature of an onion-skin layering that peels away. OK - I didn't know that - but Jean Daniel told me.

I used the site to photograph our guides and drivers - and the nice young captain, Mohamed.

Mahmoud, our guide and leader and extraordinary cook and organiser

Hani, our driver and a lovely guy, with a wicked sense of humour

Mohamed, who drove the kitchen car and helped with everything

Captain Mohamed, being a boy!

and more tors.

From here we swung briefly north again to a black rimmed Crater called the Clayton Craters. This was everything a crater should be - several crater systems inside a large double black rim. Unlike others we had seen this was volcanic, and the high basalt rims made with solid huge blocks of stone, rough and jagged. No obsidian - I looked - but there was quite a lot of flint and tools. Inside there were three obvious vents, each with some variations and differences in depth. It was surprisingly hot - about 37 degrees perhaps, but we walked right around the crater and climbed down the high ridge at the end.

A vent and an interesting rock surface

We ate lunch at the entrance of the crater. The puzzle of last night's far-too-much rice was answered - a great tuna and rice salad with chopped raw red onion, grated carrot, tomatoes, cucumbers, mayo and lots of spices. It had a real bite but tasted fantastic. We have been eating really well. The odour of overripe and rotting guava has gone now as we ate the last of it yesterday with the blackening bananas. the car was getting really pungent. It is surprising how good both were when chopped into a fruit salad with the dark jeweled seeds of four big pomegranates - just stunning. I do not think you could do it with the usual sort of banana, but oasis bananas seem to get black skins without going too soft inside - they can be utterly black and still firm and nice.

Drive-by volcanic dykes - sorry about the focus.

Volcanic dykes rimming the sand and the plateau of Jebel Uweinat

Briefly we lost our lead cars. We had a problem for a few minutes with the kitchen car and Hani turned back to find him. By the time we had him free of the sand the others had disappeared. there is no wind here, and we started to follow their tracks only to find that there were too many cars - clearly three in front of us - so somewhere we had picked up the wrong tracks. It is warmer this far south, and less humid too. Eventually they came back and found us but there was an annoying few minutes, and we all probably lost about half an hour.

We drove into Karkur Tal in the evening light. Mahmoud had planned one camp site, but Alberto could not get into it without four wheel drive, so we settled for an alternative. It is beautiful here, and very very different. There are trees, and insects, even flies. I had not realise d how little life we have seen. since we left the Water Mountain there has hardly been a bird. A few foxes and signs of gerbils, but that is all. Karkur Tal has fox tracks everywhere.

Driving into Karkur Tal

Acacia trees (how appropriate on Acacia and Kim's birthday!)

and the camp - with the kettle on and dinner cooking and the gentle spice of lentil soup scenting the air - warm and welcoming!

Day 4 Wind and Eight Bells

2007-11-29T01:36:00.000+11:00

Last night the wind scoured the camp. The tents flapped and whipped and it made sleeping difficult. I thought of just climbing out but it was cold and I would have had to sleep with the men in the three sided shelter, and hesitated in case it looked like an invitation. At my age and size and with four young men? Who am I kidding?

The site was spectacular. We had climbed a high dune and swung around so we were facing across peak after dark peak marching off across the desert and fading into velvety moonlight. The moon was only about a quarter, but cast good blue light. There were silvery scudding clouds and the mackerel sky was shimmering in one section of the sky. Those who had looked at my location as too exposed were right. I was too exposed. I had looked at theirs and thought "not level' and I was right too - it was really just a matter of choice. Only one tent managed the whole night - Jean Daniel and Marita had edged into a separate section at the top which was both level and moderately sheltered.

I crept out at about 1.00 am cursing the last hot khakadeh. It was enticing and delicious, but added to a hot anise tea, a half bottle of water and one of Alberto's beers earlier on it was perhaps not wise while camping in cold weather. I tied off the door ties which were frantically whacking against anything in reach, and tied one to the little front 'hood' which was acting like a noisy wind tunnel. I crawled back into a quieter tent, positioned myself in the bag and went to sleep. For about one hour.

Then the tent fell down. It was a simple tent - two vertical poles, centre front and centre back, and a 'roofline' pole horizontal pole on top of both. It was pinned in at the corners with spikes well pushed into unresisting soft sand with large rocks on each and guyed down well.

My head-end fell down. It cracked me on the head as it all slithered sideways, the spikes obviously lifted out and all of it wrapped around my head. With a bit of muttered cursing I managed to work out that only the head end had collapsed, so I reversed my position, clamped my feet over the lifting 'vertical' bar that was now horizontal and trying to flap in the wind, and went back to sleep, head downhill. It was a slightly propped burrow at this point. Through my weary fog I heard voices, and found in the morning that everyone's tent except Jean Daniel's and Marita's had also collapsed. Irene had chosen to stay sleeping in the chaos and a concerned Heide trying to find her in pitch dark had managed to find only her nose projecting from the flat but flapping debris.

Next morning was a bit slow moving with everyone weary. We drove for what is generally acknowledged to be the largest meteorite strike crater fields on earth - or at least the largest multi-crater field. On the Western desert map it is simply the Gilf Kebir Crater Field.

We had been told we would be there about midday and at ten Jean Daniel and I were speculating about the old lake beds - lots of little ones - that we seemed to be going through. The sand was getting redder so the areas were spectacular but we saw none of the high and half melted rims I might have expected for a crater field. We were wrong - we were in the crater fields.

The first one we stepped out into almost took my breathe away. I didn't actually take many photos as the first thing I saw on the ground was a lot of worked flint. I am a tool freak from Syria and Jordan days. The site itself was a greyish scatter of a lot of rock on sand, and a lot of the rock was obviously melted or fused - like conglomerate but obviously melted together.

Not only was there worked flint, but a few minutes later I picked up a lovely arrow head in worked glass. Dark and smoky with perfect edges, it glistened in my palm as it it were made yesterday. A group of the others were clustered around Yvonne, our geological and archaeological expert - some metres away. I called out "I have obsidian". "No, it's glass," said Yvonne. I had that vaguely 'back in your corner' feeling! In fact she was completely right - it was the result of a melting of sand or rock which turned to to glass - obsidian is a volcanic reaction that results in glass.

Within minutes I had about six good blades in glass, a few more obscure pieces, and a really nice piece of quartzite made into what I thought was just a first flake, till I realised it has been retouched all along a wide edge to make a semicircular scraper.

I was settling in for an hour or so - I could see more ahead but others had gone in a different direction, I was obviously in a napping area, and I was happy just working my way steadily along a line. Then the horn went as the 'back in the car' signal. I could have cried. I carefully took two good blades and the scraper and put the rest back - as we had all agreed we would do - but it hurt!

I got back in the car. Later it turned out that others had not seen tools and did not realise they were there. Many wished I had told them - and I had thought that they knew as Heide has done the trip before, as had Yvonne.

Vistas into the red desert

One end of the red crater

and the other end

Mohamed in a great t-shirt

Lunch was in another crater - wonderful, and red, and a much more classic shape with a black double rim and rich orange sand.

I took a few minutes out of the walking tour to paint it but I am matting with masking tape to keep the paintings small so they can be finished. I tried to paint in the Sugarloaf area and had not hope of finishing and it was just frustrating.

We ate a spectacular main dish of eggplant fast becoming my favourite lunch - fried in about a bucket of oil and smooshed a bit with pounded peppers and chilies and loads of garlic and tomato - a wonderful mix that was a good mopped with bread as eaten with the eggplant.

We crossed an area of sand dunes. We were now the lead car as Mahmoud had decided to drive us for a while.

Hani took taciturn to unexpected heights and had driven in seamless silence, Mahmoud filled us in with all sorts of interesting bits of information. Heide and Helena and Irene were with Hani and had taken third place. At one point we were bogged eight times in an area the size of a playing field. We had sand slides and digging equipment - and I did not see one man groan or look exasperated - though I was starting to feel it. We finally got out, then it was Alberto's turn.

We passed a truck abandoned during the war and now stripped to metal by sand. I knew just how it felt after last night.

In many ways is was a slow day. We camped just before Eight Bells, a site named by the British in the war for the eight hillocks that sat low, domed and squat on the desert floor like bells. It sat above the entrance of Wadi Wassa, the largest of the wadis. We ate a meat based dinner - it was very cold and for the first time I started to wonder about the wisdom of obeying my dear friend Peter and his 'only one small bag'. Everyone else had bags that would fit a small body and my warmest garment was a pair of dark charcoal First Class pyjamas my husband had scored once as the result of an upgrade! They were admittedly Givenchy and that rated an extra degree or two - but I was cold.

We were poised near the 700 metre mark and bed felt very good that night.

Day Three

2007-11-28T22:58:00.000+11:00

I was first up and packed with my tent rolled and stashed beside the car. I do not know why I am quicker - I am the only one not sharing at the moment but all my female traveling companions put on a full make up - foundation, eyeshadow, lipstick, mascara - the works - and to my Aussie thinking it seems crazy with no-one to admire it but our Bedouin companions and the desert wind. I will not complain though as it gains me precious time. I can wander and look at the rocks on the ground. I can take photographs.

Look at this morning's stunning sky.

I also made a couple of small paintings.

Driving in flat sandy desert is like driving on the edge of a pale plate into a pale sky. The whole world seems without features, pale cool beige with long honeyed dunes on the horizon and two thirds sky above. The driving is stunning and fast, but it becomes hard to focus on the sand, and our driver has a couple of cucumbers rolling around the dash board to refresh his eyes from time to time. Yesterday we only averaged 17k an hour. Today has to be better as we are already a day behind time and have barely started.

We come to a cairn on a hill. It is more elaborate and much bigger than most Bedouin built cairns and is from the fourth Pharaonic Dynasty - Um El Alam (which to my mind means mother of the ridge, or mother of the flag and neither makes much sense). There is another name which is simply landmark in Arabic, and this is what the cairn was built to be - a marker for a journey.

Apparently our lovely captain was so afraid of the desert last night - djinns and wind and things that went bump - that he woke Mahmoud five times to talk to him. At one stage Mahmoud realised that the Captain sat and talked with his eyes tightly shut. "Why are you talking to me with your eyes closed?" asked Mahmoud.

"So I cannot see the dark," said the captain. Mahmoud announced that his name was no longer Mahmoud and the captain was to forget that name and rolled over to sleep.

From here we keep traveling almost south to Sugar Loaf. It is beautiful. It was warm but not hot, and the wind lifted the sand and sighed softly through the crevices in the rock. It is an outcrop of softly coloured and contoured, wind-sculptured rocks in the desert. With such fantastic shelter it seems odd that there is no flint or tools - but I found nothing, not even a flake.

Let's just do this bit a string of photographs, and try to add the sound of music sighing through the caves.

We had lunch at Sugarloaf and drove almost directly west towards Gilf Kebir. I was starting to get a feeling for the immensity of the distance. We have been sitting on 120k most of the day and had barely crawled across the map.

First signs of Gilf Kebir

Next came the Red Lion Yardangs. apparently the name comes from Chinese as the first documented forms are in China. These are the vestiges of the floor of a large lake, mud that has packed down, then the water dried up, and the mud is wind-formed into lion-like shapes. All face the same way, on guard and couchant. Fine sand trails behind each lion, rippling like a golden wake. I miss my chow suddenly and intensely.

Their 'faces' vary, but all are simple. the light is now perfect with long interesting shadows from one angle at least, and we all bolt in different directions to try to find patches of rippled sand and yardangs without footprints. Sometimes it is a bit hard to be in the third car - especially when the fourth car is the Kitchen car, and the only passenger is the Captain.

As we belt further south, trying to make use of the last half hour of light the sun sinks below the mackerel sky. We set up camp near a smaller yardang field, fighting a desperate wind which wants to take our tents and hurl them across the Gilf. The nice young captain, and we are friends now, helps with my tent carefully asking me about the snakes and scorpions and I realise that the men have been teasing him. I assure him that I have never seen any in this area. I did not manage to mention that I have never been in this area, and profoundly hope that we see no snakes or scorpions in the next few days. I try to paint and fail utterly as the sky colours change faster than I can keep up with - and I end up with something far too brightly coloured. It is a good day, but we are all weary and glad to sleep early.

More later.

Day 2

2007-11-28T18:51:00.000+11:00

Dakhla, Djedefre's Water Mountain, Sugar Loaf, and the Red Lion Yardangs

We left later than intended. Loading always seems to take longer than intended.

Over the service station wall as we filled with the last diesel that would come from a bowser we could see a really spectacular mesa ringing the oasis.

Dahkla is an unexpectedly prosperous little town - unexpected at least after the comparative poverty of Bahariya with its nasty white stone 'brick' buildings overtaking the lovely old mud brick, and the abject dust and poverty of Farafra. The Oasis Hotel had been pretty - built up a hill with domes on the square accommodation blocks, and the lighting at night was entrancing - perhaps more so than the harsh light of day.

We traveled north, then swung off the road and out into the desert. We were hoping to find Djedefre's Water Mountain - a cache for supplies and water discovered by Carlo Bergman and published in 2003. It was ringed with mystery. A similar site - Abu Ballus pottery trail - had been found earlier as evidence that Pharaonic Egypt DID stray away from the Nile. Documentary evidence of large groups of men sent after pigments and something - imhet - which is not identified today - are interesting and backed up by the large caches of water jars in pottery on the Abu Ballus site. Unfortunately most of the pottery has since been destroyed, and the area turned into a desert rubbish site after many generations of less than scrupulous campers, and we have decided not to go there.

The Water mountain has the mystery of the recently discovered. Many people claim to have the correct GPS location for it, and Alberto Siliotti, writer of the Egyptian Pocket Guides and many marvelous maps, is with us as the trailing car and has a set of 'accurate' location notes. His wife Yvonne is a Geologist and has worked with Ancient Egyptian use of pigments - so an interesting companion.

We started driving over loose sharp gibbers. This is slow going. Moving fast might puncture tyres. The gibbers form a thick and crunchy crust like a cream brulee. Break through and you sink to the axles in soft sand.

It is an odd area. There are rings of sharp rock that stick up through the sand, and look, perhaps because of their regularity, man-made. They obviously are not as there are just too many, and they go on for far too long. Sometimes it is just the very tips of pointed rocks in small circles, at other times they are high, wide and effusive, with black slabs seeming to fall over each other in haste to get out of the ground. Photography is near impossible in the jerking lurching process, and with a late start, and a long way to travel, everyone is concerned about our slow progress.

Driving was hard and erratic. Soft sand stretches meant a need for speed, with occasional dragging sensations as one side of the car dropped into a softer stretch of sand and slewed us briefly sideways. Then abrupt slowing as we hit more sharp stone. Through all of it there is a remorseless wind blowing, spinning sand in fog-like waves against the sides of the car.

I am in a car with Jean Daniel and Marita. Marita is in the front as she is easily carsick, and I am wondering how long she can hold out in progress like this. They are delightful - Swiss, and the most delightful of possible companions, both erudite and intelligent and with that marvelous ability to converse on all topics with ease.

We have a poor quality photocopy of an image of the water mountain - but no-one pointed out that the desert, by this time, is littered with identical shapes.

As we move west long crackles of white chalk - or is it gypsum? - appear in the rock and threading through the layers. As the wind blew, and the two leading cars, Mahmoud's and Alberto's, kick up clouds of sand, the fine white powder hanging in the air long after the sand has settled, leaving the cars trailing long plumes like jets.

We all pull up in front of an obvious tomb of unknown age. Probably old as there has been little or no travel in this area - there is no water nearby and nowhere to travel from! It is a lonely grave, but very beautiful.

The tracks of the cars are deep here in soft sand, and layer in beige and white and honey and rose, and sometimes a clear buttery yellow.

We found the Water Mountain. Somehow I suspect many of us thought it would not happen. It was one dark squat hill among many, but marked very distinctly by a festive white archaeologist's tent - which I avoided in the photo. Note the clearly cut away area which creates the terrace halfway up! There were deep-cut caches too for water or water in vessels.

I loved the painting of Djedefre smiting his enemies - the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt seemed to spend a lot of time doing just that.

Cartouche and hieroglyphs

Alberto at the site on the terrace

Lunch was being prepared for us while we walked, and we came back to the cars to find tuna salad - rough chopped and crunchy with red onion and mayonnaise - and fresh brown bread, hard yellow cheese, tomato and cucumber in tahini, and a bit of the eggplant left from the day before. Guavas followed. The smell in the car seems to get stronger each day and I am starting to think I will be glad when we finish them.

As we leave the Water Mountain Alberto is stuck in the sand. That is no big deal. However, as we dig and push it becomes obvious that his four wheel drive was not working - the car can only operate in two wheel drive. This is potentially a problem as we venture into more difficult driving conditions.

Late in the evening as the sun is starting to drop and the light becoming richer and golden we reach the first sand dunes. Mahmoud as lead driver pulls onto the sharp crest at the top and sinks to his axles. He signals Alberto in - and Alberto does not even get to the top of the crest before sinking. One by one the other cars all line up - ours included - and all bogged in very deep soft sand.

There is a funny thing about sand dunes. Sitting in a car on top of them - and I have realised you always sit for a few seconds at the top - they look UNBELIEVABLY steep. They look as if the car will just roll end over end if you dare to drop the front wheels down onto that slope. Sitting there and looking at it I felt all my old fear of heights well up and choke me. I got out and walked down - there was no rush as it would take time to get the cars free.

From the bottom it was just a gentle slope - but I NEVER got over that moment of sheer terror at the top - and the clutch bars above the windows have been named the "O Shit! bars' for good reason.
We lost eggs with the first descent

So our nice young army officer, Mohamed, carried the rest, sliding down the slope.

We set up camp in the wind - a wind that fought our attempts to put up our tents. First the cars are pulled into a three-sides-of-a-square formation.

Then the frames and main shelters go up.

Dinner was vegetable soup followed by grilled chicken and rice with vermicelli.

Gilf Kebir and Jebel Uweinat - the Trip of a Lifetime

2007-11-27T21:57:00.000+11:00

Bear with me - there is so much to tell. I have done so many other things since I last wrote. I have taught in Bangkok in Thailand, stood on top of a mountain of ten million ounces of gold down near Marsa Alam at Sukari - the Centamin gold mine, been to teach at the mecca of quilters - Quilt Festival at Houston in Texas, and now I have done something I have been burning to do since I came to Egypt.

Gilf Kebir was made famous by the book and movie, The English Patient. In an opening scene a Bedouin wanders into a cave and is spellbound by the images on the walls. Later the hero takes the heroine there too, and it is here that she dies, surrounded by images of Swimmers. From the moment I realised that the Cave of the Swimmers existed, and was in Egypt, I have wanted to go there.

Now I have been. Of all the things I saw the only thing that was a real disappointment was the Cave of the Swimmers - but more later on that. Blame Hollywood for going for evocative imagery rather than the truth!

Day One

On 10th November a group of three Swiss, two Germans, and one Australian left the International Hot Springs Hotel to go to Gilf Kebir and Jebel Uweinat. With us went a guide, and two other drivers, and a young Captain from the Egyptian Army, and two Italians in their own vehicle. We faced fourteen days of travel, twelve in the desert with desert camps, not toilets or showers for twelve days. Wet Ones, I was quietly told, were the secret of desert hygiene. I stocked up in Houston - or rather, two friends bought them for me. We had agreed over Texas barbecue in Goodes that panti-liners might be good too, as we were only allowed one small bag each and a small rucksack for stuff that needed to be with us in the cars. I packed camera equipment, watercolours, in hope, and a small diary.

Meet Marita, Jean Daniel, Irene, Helena, Heide, Mahmoud, our guide, Peter and Miharu, the organisers from the Hot Spring International Hotel (who did not come) and me. Alberto and Yvonne must have been packing their car and will appear later.

From my diary.

Dipping into the first drop into the Bahariya Oasis we left the sun above us and while it still picked out the gilded tops of the mesas above us our world dropped into mauves and lilacs with the abruptness of diving underwater.

Diary.

In a car redolent with the heavy perfume of guava, the light freshness of orange rinds and the orange leaves which are crushed under the green gold fruit we left for Dakhla. The desert seems featureless and pale, washed clean and over-bleached. Shadows of the white wind-formed shapes in the desert are coppery on the sand dunes, and and indigo against the cobalt winter sky. Fingers of pale sand have crept across the road, and can be a jolt like an abrupt road hump if you hit them unexpectantly.

... mud domes, smokey taupe against the pale sky, and the sky afloat with black crows, seven then nine. 'Seven for a secret that will never be told', but I cannot remember nine.... The Farafra Oasis wraps more along the road that Bahariya with sudden stretches of vegetation, more vegetables and market gardens, and less dates. There are farmers with donkey carts, children with donkeys, farmers with hand carts - all type of carts, pulled by people or animals or other vehicles. There are bright ochre box-shaped houses with bright green doors tucked under eucalyptus so green and perfect that they could not possibly be growing in Australia where insects chew every second leaf.

There are men with guns, in galabeyiahs, and in police and army uniform. We pull up before the checkpoint and the drivers hand out the licences, IDs and permission slips for the desert.

There is a hitch. The drivers pull the cars to the shade of the trees and wander inside the small check point office. We are supposed to have our escorting officer, but have arranged to collect him in Dakhla and they do not like it.

Our driver, Hani, comes out and starts the car and whirls into the small and dusty township of Farafra. We are puzzled as the others have not joined us. He jumps from the car, moving from one shop to another. He is asking for something but shopkeepers are all shaking their heads. He drives the car further along and starts the same thing, We are puzzled but decide while he is hopping to climb out and buy cigarette lighters. None of us smoke but it seems that we need to carry a plastic bag for used toilet paper and wet ones (how basic can you get?), which we keep till the end of the day then burn. We have all agreed that a lighter would work better than matches in a breezy desert landscape.

While asking at one shop for our lighters Hani rushes past and says "I come back', then took off in a cloud of dust. This is really odd and we cannot work out what is going on. We stand uneasily at the side of the road and after about five minutes later he returns and the tale unfolds.

Mahmoud, our guide, has had his licence confiscated. In many countries this would mean an immediate halt to the expedition. Here, he pays 20 pounds Egyptian for a piece of paper to cover him for one week. In fact we will be in the desert for twelve days, but that is a problem for later.

The officer checking the paperwork had asked for tea. Mahmoud politely told him that we had some but that it was at the bottom of all the packing and he was sorry, but it was too hard to get it out. The officer said he was willing to wait while they unpacked. Mahmoud said he was not willing to unpack or to keep the group waiting. The officer said that he was willing to wait and that he could keep the group waiting anyway. Then the officer said it was a pity then that he had too much on top of his car. In fact - the other cars were all packed higher! Mahmoud made the mistake of pointing out three other vehicles that had just gone through the checkpoint with much higher loads.

It was at this point that Hani had rushed out saying he would find tea. The officer only gave him ten minutes and the town was three minutes drive away - and the town was, it seems, out of tea.

So - Mahmoud's licence was taken. Hani was muttering under his breathe as we left the oasis and I recognised 'sharmouta' - very rude in Arabic, and basically meaning slut! It is quite a popular name for female cats.

We had lunch under date palms somewhere past Farafra. The drivers flipped a striped rug out on the ground and set up thick sliced tomato - it is incredible in Egypt - with salty white cheese spread on it, and stuffed cabbage leaves with a spiced rice filling, small eggplants fried whole and split and spread with a pounded mix of peppers, both hot and the capsicum variety, and garlic, with lemon and oil and salt and pepper. With it we had rough brown oasis bread - it was a feast. It was followed by sliced guava which we also ate with the bread.

By the time we drove into Dakla it was night and dozens - hundreds probably - of donkeys were trip-trapping home. Loads varied - huge loads of fodder reached from one side of the road almost to another with cars squeezing past and a driver perched on top, and loads of wood caught against the oncoming headlights like a lattice of black lace. A trailer, badly loaded and driven, veered from side to side, effectively blocking the road. I once, in Africa, faced an angry male elephant with a similar sway, but he was facing us. Our driver squeezed past with some risk to both the trailer and our vehicle and got a rude sign from the driver - funny how those are almost universal. And Hani again shouted 'Sharmouta'.

We checked into the Oasis Hotel and Camp and it was the last night in a room, with a shower, or with a toilet. Dinner was in the restaurant of the hotel - with the small disadvantage that my legs were seen as a smorgasbord for about twenty hungry mosquitoes.

I washed my hair very well next morning knowing it was the last time for twelve days.