Last weekend we took our first group trip of the semester, spending three days in Siwa - a desert oasis in western Egypt. Siwa is a beautiful town. It is literally smack dab in the middle of a huge desert, but because it is at a much lower elevation than the rest of the land around it there is a huge lake (which seemed to be a mix of saltwater and fresh water, I'm not quite sure) that gives rise to thousands of palm trees, and, of course, a human settlement.
My favorite part of the trip was the beautiful views that we were treated to from atop the hills that dot the area. Because the desert beyond the town is relatively flat, you can see for miles in every direction from atop the hills. To one side you see the palm trees, the lake, and town, and to the other side you see the endless sand of the desert.
The hills themselves are intriguing, too. Some of them hold tombs from the era of Alexander the Great or from the various groups that populated Siwa in the Middle Ages when it was an important trading post. We saw hieroglyphs, the trademark, one-eyed Egyptian wall paintings, and old dwellings carved into the hillsides.
We spent our last night in Siwa in a camp in the desert. Contrary to what you might think, nights in the desert are really cold! Luckily we had a fire (and s'mores) to take our minds off the temperatures that felt like they were in the high 30s. The night was great; we ate a traditional Siwi dinner, chatted, and ran around in the desert outside the camp. Unfortunately it was a cloudy night so we couldn't see too many stars. That one cold night, though, was enough for me. As I write this I am sitting in a cafe in Alexandria in a short sleeve shirt enjoying the warm day. My heart goes out to everyone at Tufts shivering in the cold.
One last thing that I found interesting about Siwa was the interaction between the old town and the new "touristy" parts. The first paved road to the town was built only 10 or 15 years ago, so tourism and connections to the outside world (even to Egypt) in general are still very new. Whenever I visit a place like Siwa that tries to cater to tourists as an "exotic" destination offering things like desert safaris and building tourist-trap sort of restaurants and shops I am always interested to talk to the locals about how they view the influx of outsiders into their town. I had an interesting chat with one of the staff at our camp about the topic, and he said that, although tourism had opened up some job opportunities, the average standard or living for most of the Siween had not changed. Perhaps this is best exemplified by the new, state-of-the-art streetlights that dot the town's main streets and the roads that lead to the sightseeing destinations. The irony, of course, is that the lights illuminate the ramshackle dwellings that dot the sides of the streets. Furthermore, the side streets have streetlights too, but they are much older and usually all that remains of them is a pole -- the actual lights have long since been removed. We went on to talk about the way that most Siween viewed the advent of tourism in their town in general. He said that the Siween not employed in the tourist industry tended not to view the changes that tourism had brought about kindly and would rather just be left alone. It's hard to tell how the younger generations will adjust, or even to think about how the town will look 10 years from now considering how much it has changed in the past 10 years.
So all in all it was really fun weekend. We have a really great group of people and it was nice to spend time together exploring the town and huddling tight in the desert to escape the cold. I would temper my rave review, however, with the observation that it is important to enjoy the beautiful views from the hilltops while at the same time considering the impacts - positive and negative - that the swift advent of tourism brings to a previously isolated area.
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