Arrival in Siwa

On the way down from the acropolis, I met a Siwan woman wearing her traditional costume. Before I could practice my Siwan "Hello! Good Morning!" with her, she lowered her head, ducked against a wall and didn't move again until I had moved further down the path. I guess I was terrifying. I'd have loved to take a picture, but besides whatever psychological damage I surely would have caused, I understand that it's taboo to photograph the Siwans. The men might grant a request, but you shouldn't even ask the women.

It's a shame, because the traditional costumes are incredible: embroidered shawls, brilliantly patterned veils and scarfs, elaborate silver jewelry. It's very cool, so long as you can put out of your head the fact that the purpose of some of these articles, however beautiful, is to remove the wearer from public life. Like Christmas lights strung over barbed wire, it's a nasty barrier no matter how you do to beautify it. That's not an entirely fair metaphor, but the lack of women in the oasis is one of the first things you notice. Actually, the absence of women recurs in other contexts here as well: the oasis is a place that has historically been tolerant of male homosexual relationships, allegedly sanctioning such marriages through the early 1940s. Increased exposure to "mainland" Egypt has driven this aspect of the culture underground, if not ended it completely. My guidebook informs me that this is another topic I shouldn't raise.

I tried to find some photos of the villagers on the web (taken by travelers less scrupulous than me) but the taboo appears to be pretty effective. The only shots I could find were of tourists trying on Siwan costumes and they tended to look like jackasses. While in the oasis, I did find a man who carried a selection of literature related to Siwan culture, including some with photocopied pictures. My favorite was an English-language pamphlet that had the unintentionally provocative title "To Go Under Her Gowns" and the undeniably perverse subtitle of "To Get Inside a Woman of Siwa." The French version didn't suggest anything nearly so racy, so I think maybe something was gained in translation. I didn't buy it because I would have embarrassed myself with all my snickering at the register, just like when I bought a biography of WWI Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch only because it was titled "Foch the Man."

There were plenty of hotels in Siwa, and if they weren't full when I arrived, they wouldn't be before the evening bus arrived, so I had time for a lazy breakfast. I dropped by the "East-West Restaurant" located just off the market square. The name alludes to the clan violence that has plagued Siwan society since the Middle Ages, when a group of Berber and Bedouin families (the "Easterners" or "The Thirty") migrated to the oasis and became neighbors of the original Berbers (the "Westerners" or "The Forty Ancestors"). I didn't let talk of factional violence put me off my breakfast though. The East West Restaurant makes an excellent omelette, which, together with fresh squeezed orange juice and a generous-sized Turkish coffee, costs less than $4.00.

While I ate, I conducted some amateur forensic genomics prompted by the number of cases of albinism I had seen in my first three hours in town. By my math, "Thirty" Easterners plus the Westerners' "Forty Ancestors" equals seventy founding Siwans. That's a pretty tight genetic bottleneck for the present population of 25,000 to squeeze through and it doesn't look like they succeeded without consequences. Imagine having Albinism in the Sahara Desert! It didn't occur to me until after I'd left the oasis that maybe this was the reason why the only sunblock available at the local pharmacy was SPF 95.

The Hotel Yousef is the cheapest place in town, but is is also the best located if you don't mind the noise from the market square. I took a bed, or rather, I took three because Yousef only had a triple room available. To get any kind of room for less than I'd pay for a burrito in Brooklyn is still a wonder, so I wasn't going to complain. Have I mentioned that Egypt is very affordable? I think I have. I'll probably keep mentioning it. I've never been so obsessed with money as I am now that I feel like I have so much of it.

It was early afternoon at this point and the heat was really starting to sap my energy. They take proper siestas in Siwa, and most shops had already closed their doors for the afternoon. I even had a hard time finding someone to sell me a bottle of water and had to buy one from a cafe that couldn't close because a bright-red Englishman had fallen asleep in the sun and the staff couldn't figure out what to do with him. By this point, the effects of twelve hours on a bus were starting to take their toll, so putting off any further exploring, I headed back to the hotel, collapsed on the nearest of my beds, and slept soundly through the hottest part of the day.