For any interested, I’ve finally been able to upload and organize ALL of my Africa photos onto flickr. Click here to see the whole collection.
I’ll also be sporadically posting some of my favorites on my new blog sarahinsanfrancisco, along with pictures from my other travels, stories, amusing San Francisco related activities, my polaroid and 35mm photography experiments, sex and gender musings, and anything else I find particularly interesting.
Love,
Sarah
Hello all you wonderful sarahinafrica followers. I’ve really enjoyed sharing my journey with you, so thanks for following along. I finally got my stuff together and finished my new sarahinsanfrancisco blog setup (after a few hiccups) and would love to continue sharing my stories, travels, and experiences with you there. It’s San Francisco themed, but I have a feeling I’ll be posting a lot of my old travel pictures as well (more from Africa, from Europe), among other neat things.
I’ve decided it’s time to put sarahinafrica to rest, as I want to leave it as a memento of my trip rather than attempt to re-appropriate it, as much as I hate to lose some of you wonderful followers. I also want to work on creating a new identity within the Tumblr community. So if you haven’t, please head on over and follow me at my new home, sarahinsanfrancisco
If this makes you sad, hopefully a lion will make it better:
Did that make it better? I hope so.
Anyway I’m bad at goodbyes so I’ll have these children do it for me.
Love, Sarah
Brilliant idea. Wish I had thought of it!
The Khan el’Khalili marketplace, Cairo.
Also you should add my new blog because it’s awesome and because it’s San Francisco themed and you know you want to. So what are you waiting for?
Forgive my lack of posts. While most of the final stories have been written and pictures are all edited, I have been distracted by both 1) life and 2) getting my new, more current blog, up and running.
I’ve been looking for a way to continue my presence in the blog-sphere as sarahinafrica is slowly running out, and decided that, due to the prominence of New York blogs on tumblr (I’m looking at you wiseash and laviebelem) San Francisco is sorely in need of some representation. That, and I decided I wanted to leave sarahinafrica as a digital remembrance of my trip, rather than re-appropriate it into something more current.
So, sarahinsanfrancisco is born. I’m still working on the design kinks, but look forward to pictures, stories, personal/social/political thoughts, and my journey as an almost-post-grad-figuring-out-what-she-wants-to-do-with-her-life. This will slowly become my main blog on Tumblr.
Looking forward to seeing you all there.
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.A Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan, October 13, 1994.
This little taxi was the car we rode around in all day on our Pyramid adventures to the Giza Plateau, Saqqara, and Dashur.
Getting to all the Pyramids (the Step Pyramid, Red Pyramid, Bent Pyramid, and the Plateau) is essentially, well, impossible without a car of some sort. Of course this leaves you at the mercy of travel agencies and hostels who will try and charge outrageous fees per person just to drive you around for the day. But, being smart and unwilling to let yourself get taken advantage of can generally produce the desired results. With bargaining especially, it’s all about patience and confidence.
After leaving our third agency of the morning (we were quoted some absurd price like 200 E.P. per person and didn’t feel it worth it to even try and bargain) we were followed and hailed down by a short, stocky, and incredibly upbeat man. He introduced himself to us, and claimed he was a professional driver and that he could offer us a good fee for the day trip we had planned. He pointed us to the hotel where he worked, bragged about his father’s photo on the wall, and did his best to convince us to negotiate. We told him we’d think about it, and went on our way to explore other options.
By the afternoon we quickly realized this man may have been our best shot at a cheap ride, so we returned with a price in mind, ready to fight for it. Before any bargaining began he insisted we sit and have tea - a pretty standard process. When bargaining, in Islamic countries especially, it’s an event, and crucial for both parties to provide and accept hospitality. And it’s fun, too. You sit and drink mint tea, you make jokes, you bargain, each of you making it seem like there’s no possible way to go lower/higher, and you have fun with it. When Robb refused the tea at first, for example, our future driver was incredibly distressed until this err in the negotiation dance was corrected (i.e. Robb finally agreed to get himself a cup of tea).
When that step was completed, the real negotiation began. “I can offer you this much” he said. We countered with a lower price, claiming we were students/teachers and it was all we could afford. “But I’m providing you with an excellent service, and I’m telling you, you can’t get it for that price anywhere” he countered. “We still can’t afford that” we retorted. He launched into a story about his driving experience, about the struggles to afford gas and make a living, about the amazing trip he was going to provide for us. We listened patiently. “We respect that, but really, this is all we can afford” we responded firmly, raising our price by a few pounds. The process began again. More stories, more explanations, more excuses. “Well really, we can afford this much. And that’s our highest price” we ended, raising our starting price by a few more pounds. More back and fourth, more “I can’t do it for that low” and “that’s all we can afford” and finally, after 15 minutes, a deal was made for the price we wanted all along (of course more than we initially offered, and much less than he initially suggested). We shook hands, and finished our tea over jokes and plan making. The journey would start at 8:30am the next morning.
Camel at the Pyramids
Desert.
I haven’t written a story in a while, so I figure it’s time to balance out that side of my tumblr. And in fact I haven’t really written any stories about Egypt at all (besides the ridiculous Egyptian Train Party one), so it’s about time I tell those tales.
So I’ll start with the cruise, which to be honest was a very much needed back and fourth between air conditioned cabin room and tours of ancient temples. After 20 days of being on the road moving non-stop (and cherishing both toilet paper and hot water when we found it), and then getting off an overnight train after not being able to sleep normally for three days straight, actually having someone pick us up, put us in a car, drive us to our destination, and give us an itinerary felt like heaven.
And so we showered, with warm water. And had toilet paper, and a mirror, and a sink. And we slept on a bed, with a pillow, that wasn’t on the ground. And we had a lovely tour guide named Wahleed (I hope I’m spelling it right) who had a lovely accent that was somewhere between British, Egyptian, and an unknown third, who took us to Luxor Temple and the Valley of the Kings and told us stories about “Gots and Gotsses” while we took pictures and told jokes.
It was lovely.
We shared the boat with the most random assortment of people you could possibly imagine, too: four crazy upper-middle class Indian guys from Mumbai on vacation, two Japanese girls who decided to come on a last minute trip, an Indian family with two daughters going to school for “dentistry” and “home ec.”, a Chinese family who took an insane amount of pictures, a recluse dad with his two kids who I think were dutch, a large deaf group, and us. There was a ‘party’ on the boat one evening (I was too sick to attend), and you can only imagine how ridiculous it was. Musical chairs was involved. Need I say more?
We spent most of our time taking jumping pictures in front of random monuments, playing cards, trying not to melt, and freaking out about how BEAUTIFUL the sky looked all. the. time.
Of course this wasn’t travel reality. It was a wonderful break, but I think once it was over the three of us were definitely ready to move on. I mean, when Cairo’s calling you that’s something you can’t ignore.
