Siwa Oasis – 4x4'ing and Sandboarding Fun!

The last oasis we visited was Siwa, a little bit bigger and more upscale than the other two oases we visited. We stayed in the Mubarek hotel – probably named after Hosni Mubarek, the President of Egypt since Sadat was murdered in 1981. According to our guide, the Egyptian Constitution limits the President to two six year terms, but Mubarek has been in power for nearly 30 years. 
 So … if you have the power and you're willing to do what it takes to keep it, you can pretty much do whatever you want. (this blog-post was written on the 20th of January ..... after the outbreak of civil unrest it appears that the Egyptian people have had enough. We were aware of the upcoming Jan 25th Facebook Protest ... though I would bet that nobody expected this level of outpouring of support)

Anyway the hotel was originally an athlete’s village but was clean and comfortable enough. The rooms were clean, the shower worked, there was a pool table – but no Internet … criminy … what does a guy have to do to get Internet service in a hotel in Egypt?!?
  Marina and the rest of the gang found a restaurant in town: Abdu’s, that was good, cheap and had WiFi. Woo Hoo what a find! We ended up doing lunch and dinner there as well as doing a bunch of marketing for food in Siwa. Unfortunately they didn’t sell beer we ended up never finding the ‘trifecta’ of a place with good food, liquor sales and WiFi.

Sunset over Siwa



Dinner at Abdu's

Maybe in 10 or 20 years they’ll have it. Ross and I stayed behind – me working on a proposal and Ross playing computer games. Around 8:30pm we gave up and started walking to town – a little intimidating when you’ve never been there, it’s dark and not particularly inviting. We met up with Marina, Jessie, Samantha, Sarah and Jeremy – and Jeremy and the Alexanders found an internet place to send off some emails …. Ross and I devoured the pizza and cheese pie Marina brought us – then washed it down with Coke – no rum unfortunately. We walked back to the Hotel in a pack and collapsed into bed.


Day 2 started at a reasonable time (10am) with a bicycle ride around Siwa to Cleopatra’s pool, then a dip, then riding around looking (or in our case not-looking) at various ruins around Siwa.

Every year a wonderful teacher (now Vice Principal) in West Vancouver School District named Scott Slater, collects bicycles and sends a 40 foot container of them to Namibia for a program called ‘Bicycles for Humanity’. It’s an awesome program that helps enable some very poor Namibians to work their way out of poverty.

Anyway the bikes we rented would have likely been rejected by Scott as being too worn out for the program. Ross’ pedal broke off leaving him with a metal stud to ride on, my seat post dropped all the way downto the point where my calf was hitting my thigh so that my foot kept getting knocked off the pedal. Anyway by the time we made it back to the hotel our butts were sore and our thighs were burning.

After our bike trip, we took a pair of LandCruisers into the desert to do some 4-wheeling and sandboarding. These LandCruisers were newer and in better shape than the ones we came across the desert with – and good thing that was too.

 

Man could these things drive. The videos don’t really do it justice, the first dune we went tooling down at about a 45 degree angle was amazing, then we kept doing it and finding more outrageous things to drive over, around – and one time through.

Our guides were careful not to do jumps – but we did get high-centred once over the top of a dune and had to pile out. The driver backed up and then went over and jumped the top of the dune, stomping the brakes to make the nose dive over the dune so he didn’t high-centre again. We made an iMovie about it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WShyYa5Zug.

We stopped at the top of a dune to do some sandboarding. There were a couple of old snowboards – some with bindings and some without, we had a gas trying to go down the hills. I made 3 or 4 runs as a snowboard – the climb back up is a bit of a grunt. The kids used them like toboggans. Ross must have made 20 or more runs, his legs are like steel and cable – unbelievably strong and he seems to have endless reserves of energy.

The last run of the day we got picked up by the 4x4’s and then got a lift back to the hotel. It was pretty much the same as going skiing at $60 each but at the end of the day it was huge amounts of fun and well worth it.

That evening when we returned to the hotel, Ebrahim had negotiated to keep the bikes avilable for us and we rode into town at night and back to Abdu’s for dinner.

 It was quite the adventure riding on the dirt roads during the day and at night it was even more so. We were all bouncing around in potholes and dodging the bikes, motorcycles, motortrikes, donkey carts, cars and 4x4’s (none of whom use headlights btw) but made it back to the hotel safely for a game of pool and a good night's sleep.