africa blog: February 2019

11 HOURS TO CAIRO - Jan 2019

it's easy to get to Cairo...you hop on a plane and go there. that is, if you really want to go...and in my case, i wasn't so sure. last May during my month in Italy i went to Cyprus to visit Hatem who runs a broadcast training school and BTS, a production company. We discussed offering an intensive version of my Hollywood Acting Master Class in Jordan. then it was Egypt.

The time was coming for me to go teach said class in Alexandria, on the Med, and i was having cold feet. this COTW was definitely keen for the adventure, but teaching acting in a foreign language through an interpreter had me worried. Arabic would be a challenge for sure.

the other challenge was EgyptAir only flies to Cairo every other night from Joburg. the train to Alex left on a Thursday and the training started Friday...double 4-hour sessions for four days. so i could either land Thursday morning at 5am and catch a 9am train for the 2.5 hour train ride to Alexandria and be exhausted starting Friday, or land Tuesday morning at 5am and take a day or two to recoup in Cairo and then catch the train. better idea.

Tuesday won. i landed at 5am and by 6am i had bought my $25 entry Visa at the one bank stall that was open at arrivals, and found my point person, Maged, out of the terminal on the curb. His broken English was better than my zero-Arabic, although my neighbor Ray in Stanford had taught me to say Salam Alaikum for hello or "Peace be upon you."

i was now in "The Arab Republic of Egypt". i never expected the culture shock that was to follow. Egypt is third world. for some reason i expected more first world, more like South Africa.

i left kenya in June 2014 and only now did i realize i had not been back to the third world since then. it was disconcerting. rubble and litter and general disarray, plus in Cairo you are taxed for a empty plot of land, but not taxed if you commence building a structure, so there are heaps of unfinished tattered structures everywhere. and the roads were good at best and terrible at most.

potholes, ditches, ruts, and if there were traffic lanes they were ignored. horns are used to tell the guy ahead of you "i'm right here" so there is constant hooting for communication sake. and the taxis were so old you weren't quite sure you were going to make your destination. and with a population of roughly 22 million, Cairo is bursting at its seams. Egypt overall is 100 million now. Holy camel ride!

But hang on a minute, i thought Cairo was "The Jewel of The Nile"! oh snap, that was that ill-advised sequel to 'Romancing The Stone', back when danny de vito was bigger than Arnold. but still, Cairo was the hub of charm and panache in the '20s, '30s '40s and '50s when "fezzes" flourished. before the great fire of 1952. and the revolt.

we all know London is 'The Square Mile', Beirut is 'the Paris of the Middle East', Venice is 'the Queen of the Adriatic', and Cape Town is 'the Mother City'. and Cairo is 'The City of a Thousand Minarets' due to all its mosques. i guess watching The English Patient all those times led me to believe Cairo was more mystical and mysterious, but maybe that was from all the cheats they shot in Morocco.

to be fair, it's hard for any city to be parked on the edge of the Sahara desert and be dirt & dust-free. but the litter is a common third world issue of locals not caring or perhaps not educated enough to care. and what of the deferred maintenance to roads and infrastructure? sadly, usually a strong sign of corruption, another trend throughout Africa and even South Africa.

in any case, after the initial culture shock, i found Cairo captivating. and if you're borderline ADD like i am, Cairo has plenty of stimuli and it is definitely a night city. it was winter in January, but summer is Texas-hot and shops and foodstands stay open til 3 or 4am and folks sleep til noon. it's a late night place. even in winter, plenty going on at night. and the traffic is nonstop...although mornings are best in terms of fewer cars on the roads.

before i left stanford, a good friend warned me the "great pyramids" were not that great, and to not be disappointed. i wasn't. to me the pyramids were simply ah-mazing. magical indeed. spellbinding. looming over you with all their secrets of when and how they were built in 2500 B.C.

mind-blowing. before the wheel. in a nutshell, the first one or "great pyramid of Kheops" is made of 2.5 million limestone cubes weighing 2-15 tons each and built in just 30 years. impossible... if cut and brought from a quarry and moved into place.

i just found this online and i think it makes the most sense...

"...imagine vast teams of Egyptian workers carving the stones, hauling them to the site of the pyramid and hoisting them up until each one was placed in its exact position. But, how could this have been done?

The Great Pyramid of Kheops is comprised of about 2.5 million blocks, most weigh two tons and could have been hauled by no less than sixty men. But some weigh up to seventy tons and these are to be found, not at the base of the pyramid, but some forty meters high.

Since the ancient Egyptians did not yet have the wheel, they would have needed more than two thousand men to haul each block.

How could this pyramid have been erected in the 20-year reign of Pharaoh Kheops? To accomplish the task, at least 400 blocks per day would have had to be put in position as from the first day of the pharaoh’s accession to the throne.

Hundreds of thousands of men would have been working simultaneously – squeezed shoulder to shoulder in the space of a single block in a modern city. But this would not been feasible. In such conditions the men would not have been able to budge.

How could the Ancient Egyptians have cut these stones, which are extremely hard, with only the most primitive of tools?. At best they would have been able to use copper saws, and copper is a softish metal, incapable of hewing the hard limestone blocks from which the early pyramids are constructed.

How was it possible to transport the large stones when the wheel had not yet been invented and there were no pulleys to hoist them into the air?
If the stones were carved, as most people believe, where are the fragments of broken stone left over?

Limestone frequently splits on being cut. 5 million tons of limestone blocks must have produced millions of broken blocks and fragments. Yet, not a trace of them has ever been found.

How could a civilization without hard metals have carved the millions of blocks of the Great Pyramid to ten different and exactly-calculated lengths in order to set them in patterns throughout the whole structure to eliminate the formation of vertical joints?

How could these joints between adjacent blocks be achieved so perfectly? The joints between millions of blocks, vertically and horizontally are not more that 2 mm wide. How were the blocks cut and leveled without motor-driven machinery or diamond drills?

The answer has at last been found, and it totally contradicts the stone-carving theories. The pyramids were cast in situ. Curiously enough, that explanation had been there always, waiting to be discovered by examining the mysterious stones from which the pyramids were built.

Since the early eighties, Prof. Joseph Davidovits is proposing that the pyramids and temples of Old Kingdom Egypt were constructed using agglomerated limestone, rather than quarried and hoisted blocks of natural limestone.

This type of fossil-shell limestone concrete would have been cast or packed into molds. Egyptian workmen went to outcrops of relatively soft limestone, disaggregated it with water, then mixed the muddy limestone (including the fossil-shells) with lime and tecto-alumino-silicate-forming materials (geosynthesis) such as kaolin clay, silt, and the Egyptian salt natron (sodium carbonate).

The limestone mud was carried up by the bucketful and then poured, packed or rammed into molds (made of wood, stone, clay or brick) placed on the pyramid sides. This re-agglomerated limestone, bonded by geochemical reaction (called geopolymer cement), thus hardened into resistant blocks."

voila. okay...so pyramid mystery solved. whew. that was easy. but they still are incredibly impressive. and the Sphinx (actually a Greek word/name) "a winged monster having a woman's head and a lion's body.

and yes i rode a camel. you kinda gotta to earn your Indiana Jones Explorer badge. so my first day i saw antiquity and was not disappointed. it was awesome. as my friend Job in Kenya reminded me, i "was lucky enough to see Egypt." how true. very lucky indeed.

the HAMC training went better than expected. the interpreter was an actress who "got it" and got me, so that went as well as it could. and the big surprise when it was all over is that i may continue the Level One grads in a Level Two course in May in Cairo and also do another Level One.

its funny as i had wanted to try my HAMC training in Dubai, and now somehow i'm in Cairo. close enough! like my brother says: "make art, teach art". that's what makes me happiest. and so it goes. i get to teach art in Cairo. pretty cool. i am blessed and lucky. COTW is back in action. and loving it.

also made some art with an old client, Geo by George shooting some "motion" for a bridal catalog shoot. check it out here:
https://youtu.be/kZn_B52QaH4

in other news i completed my Competent Crew Course at the Good Hope Sailing Academy and am ready now to take the Day Skipper course. then possibly the Coastal Skipper course.

i'm getting the travel bug and the boat idea keeps creeping back into the fresh thinking for 2019. need to let some things go...like the cottage in stanford...and get my sailing permits and then go boat shopping.

i'm sailing on a charter in July in Sardinia on a Bali 41' catamaran with a family i know, and i'm slowly heading out into deeper waters mentally so i can wind up my affairs in South Africa and go explore this amazing planet by sea.

and next week i'll be in the Grand Cayman Islands (below Cuba) visiting some dear friends.

now let's get to the photos! they are in no particular order...they just randomly find their place on this blog page.

cheerio!

ddm

teaching: "blah blah blah!"

my actors and the Sound students in Alexandria.

HAMC with on-camera training and playback

we went on location one day...daytime exterior.

with Christian

on location for the bridal shoot.
https://youtu.be/kZn_B52QaH4

potential cat i'm looking for, in drydock at RCYC.
Royal Cape Yacht Club.

cape town int'l airport. i love this airport. feels happy.

modern gangway.

lift.

red-eye night flight bliss.

from my air bnb in cairo.

due to some translation issues, i had dinner by myself in the basement
with some tepid pizza hut. hilarious. took me down a peg.

pretty typical cairo neighborhood.

the Nile river. comes up from Lake Victoria in Uganda. it's the
agricultural lifeline of Africa.

bridge over the Nile.

traffic chaos was fun.

dawn patrol at pyramids. camels are incredible. and tall!

got my hero shot by 8am. my work was done.

not many things "loom" over you. these do.

my trusty guide and new friend, Claude Marcos.

these cubes of limestone are massive, no matter what theory
you believe.

walking up to the entrance.

stairs to the inner tunnel climbing up.

inner tunnel. very tight!

next phase is more open inside the pyramid!

building on right holds the Pharoah's boat. only discovered
in 1956.

the camels added such an old world flavor.

pharoah's cedar planking boat...also from 2500 BC.

with Rheemah my personal Egyptologist.

it took 15 years to rebuild this thing.

stunning views at the panoramic turnout.

i will never forget this day. maybe the date, but not the day.
(the date was 23 jan 2019)

my "funny" camel wrangler made me pose for this.

what's up, Clyde?

old world. for me it was better than Israel.

the pyramids are in Giza on the edge of town. open desert on one side.

i had a grin on my face. they are stunning.

the Sphinx was covered in sand when it was discovered.

the Sphinx protects the pyramid plaza. they say it was sculpted
from one giant piece of limestone.

we had a coffee with this view. insane. also where they do the
nightly light show.

strike a pose.

should they restore it??

let's throw a donkey cart into the traffic mix.

my bus. any questions?

my driver for the day.

two out of thousand.

yes, lots of busses. and scooters.

stuffed pigeon was on the menu. here's the 'before' shot.

traffic at the famous square where the Egyptian Arab Spring
rally took place in Tahrir Square in 2011.

shame to see the old colonial Shepheard's hotel in disarray.
it was an icon back in the day with Out Of Africa's Denis Finch
Hatton...1920.
"Shepheard's Hotel was the leading hotel in Cairo and
one of the most celebrated hotels in the world from the
middle of the 19th century until it was burned down in 1952
in the Cairo Fire. Five years after the original hotel was
destroyed, a new one was built nearby and was named the
Shepheard Hotel.