To Dakhleh and Beyond: My First Week In Egypt

Salamu aleekum (Peace be with you; an Arabic greeting),

Aislinn Lowry here reporting live from the Dakhleh Oasis in the southwestern desert of Egypt. This has quite possibly been the most anticipated, joyful, nerve-racking, wonderful, and exhausting week of my college career (including finals week, which is saying a lot!). After much desperately frenzied packing, repacking, weighing, and redistributing of the very little luggage I was allowed to bring on this adventure, I began my semester on the 29th of December where I flew to JFK New York and spent an eager night awaiting the next day’s flight to Cairo and, more importantly, the introduction to my professors and fellow students with whom I was going to spend every waking minute for the next three months. To my great relief and gladness, it seemed as if we were all cut from the same cloth: passionate, driven, ambitious, adventurous, hopeful, and dedicated students of antiquity who were traveling to Egypt to NYU to discover or elucidate vocational passions and directions yet unknown. This experience, although it meant very different things to each of us, was certainly and undeniably tantamount to personal development and future pursuits both in academia and in life.

After successfully making our way through customs, security, and the usual chaos of the international terminal, we boarded the 6:30pm Egypt Air flight to Cairo where we spent an extremely uncomfortable evening of shifting, grumbling, unsatisfying sleep (or in my case lack thereof) flying across the Atlantic Ocean. We landed in Cairo at around noon Egypt time (8 hours later than the day than back at home) and made it out of the airport, visas and all pieces of baggage in hand, an hour or so later.

From there, we boarded a bus (a tight squeeze) and drove through the city to the very heart where our hotel, Happy City, stood. Let me just say, driving through Cairo is an experience in and of itself. In the city, there are stoplights, pointless nods toward traffic regulation that don’t bother functioning other than blinking yellow at the oncoming traffic as if to say, feel free to drive however you’d like, and if there are pedestrians in the way, ten points if you take them out!, but there are NO rules of the road, no speed limit, and no maneuver, no matter how dangerous or extreme, is out of the question. Lets just say every time I got on a bus or into a taxi, I took my life in my hands (so to speak) as the vehicle darted in and out of traffic barely missing the bumpers, headlights, side view mirrors, and passenger doors of the other cars. Also, we soon discovered that, due to the insanity of the traffic, that crossing the street was far more dangerous than attempting to drive through them. Needless to say we Americans, completely taken aback and terrified by the oncoming-yet-never-attempting-to-yield cars, took to sprinting across the street whenever an opening in the traffic appeared sufficient…we might as well have plastered neon signs to our bodies reading “TOURISTS! FEEL FREE TO LAUGH AT OUR EXPENSE” for that was the exact response we received from everybody, schoolchildren and tourist police alike. Well at least we provided our hosts some entertainment!

Seriously though, exploring Cairo was an otherworldly experience, one that was as entertaining as it was awe-inspiring. We walked miles around the city, across the life-giving Nile, through the busy streets, and into markets and shops taking in the culture and lifestyles of its people who, although they often wanted us to buy something, were nothing but kind, patient, and enthusiastic to put up with our dazed ignorance of both the customs and language. It was here that my fellow explorers and I were privileged enough to welcome in the new year as we sat on the rooftop cafe of our hotel sharing stories, fighting off persistent jetlag, and getting to know one another.

So, after two nights in the city, we, all the students, professors, and about twelve archaeologists on our dig house, arose at the crack of dawn and squeezed into a tiny bus with our luggage precariously latched to the roof to begin the twelve plus hour bus ride across the Sahara to Dakhleh. From my window seat perched above the wheel well (a tight squeeze even for my tiny, collapsible, 5′1″ body) I watched the endless sands of the black and white deserts and the great sand sea and tried desperately to ignore the monotony and discomfort of the ride and take in the awesomeness of what I was witnessing. We traveled slowly along the poorly paved roads laid down in the 80’s when electricity was delivered to the remote Oases; the very path the Egyptians of antiquity used for trade and travel from the Nile Valley to Dakhleh, Kharga, and Farafra, the three great gifts of water and life to the unrelenting winds and unstoppable sand of the almighty desert.

After passing through Mut, the capital of the Oasis, we arrived at our new home: an amazing mud brick open air dig house a couple of miles outside the city, a place heated by the sun and cooled by the evening desert chill, which consists of two residential wings, a large dining room, several smaller sitting areas, rooftop porches, and capable of housing upwards of 50 archaeologists (a capacity which will be fully exercised toward the end of the month when the rest of the team arrives for the beginning of dig season). Although living in the desert is certainly an adjustment and a way of life vastly different than that of the United States, I have loved every minute of my life here. We are beginning to settle into a routine of seminar in the morning, Arabic instruction after lunch, and basically all other time spent in the library doing research, reading, and schoolwork. Mealtimes are spent in truly wonderful company as the tables are lined with an international cohort of newfound friends: American students (of which I am the only mid-westerner, everyone else coming from the east coast- namely Manhattan) and one from Puerto Rico, and American, French, English, Dutch, and Egyptian archaeologists and teachers. To be in the company of such wonderful, kind, accomplished, and passionate individuals is truly a blessing and an honor and I often find myself stunned that I am actually here. This incredible feeling may only be surpassed by the awesome beauty of this miraculous place, where thousands upon thousands of years of human history have unfolded and been concealed beneath the ever shifting sands, and the unique opportunity we have to re-discover, bit by bit, many worlds that have grown, flourished, and fallen silent beneath our feet.