The Train to Luxor

May 14, 2006

I sometimes forget how punishing a 10 hour train or bus ride can be.. and then I inevitably sign up for another one, thinking: this won't be that bad. Of course it is.

The reason I am a sucker for such long trips is that I like to see the countryside.. to get a feel for the monotonous look of the land. It is about nothing that makes for good pictures, since it is simply the repetition of houses and fields that I am looking for. This repetition speaks volumes for the way of life of a country. In the case of the trip between Cairo and Luxor one is treated to an absolutely unique spectacle: a pastoral landscape of green sitting in a land that gets no rain. It is all fed by the Nile of course.. and there are the piles of sawdust, the narrow strips of wheat or corn or alfalfa, the canal running alongside the tracks for miles at a time.. then the water buffalo and the little donkey with its oversized load. And that is before we get to the ubiquitous garbage and other signs of crowded living conditions.. the unfinished brick houses with steel rebar sticking up from the roof and the endless crowded minivans carrying people to set destinations.

But what are people out there thinking? Above is a picture I took from the train as we chugged past a station for minivans.. and some guy, in an orange shirt, sits there looking out at the train. What is life like for a young man like this? Or what is it like for the women bending over and working in the fields? I can't help but think that anthropology has let us down.. by not filling in this world more clearly, and allowing these individuals to become realities in our imaginations. But why do I pick on anthropologists? Novelists are also guilty of choosing to write about characters that are a lot like themselves (and us).. and thereby abjuring the harder task of making a foreign world clear.

I realize that this is quite a difficult task.. quite as hard as discovering and writing about past worlds. These little shit-holes rarely see Westerners come through, let alone Westerners who stop to live with them and ask questions. And the Egyptian government is itself strict about not letting outsiders see what is going on in these lost places. I left the train ride determined to see what had been written that could make these lives less obscure to me.

Most of the tourist trade is designed to keep you away from such scenes.. the one above will never make it onto Egypt's television commercials advertising the Sinai or its ancient sites. But here is the endless labor and the dusty roads and the poor brick houses (though not without a satellite dish for television).

If we turned our eyes away from the passing world outside our windows.. this is what we saw. A few newspapers being read.. no books in view.. and occasionally people standing and talking. I often think that the upper class Egyptians know as little about the life outside those train windows as I do.. only they are less curious to know anything about it.