Jazz is not something that people immediately associate with Egypt. In fact, most people have never heard Egyptian music and it is an acquired taste somewhat. Traditional Egyptian music is written on a different musical scale from Western music and is usually based on poetry in Arabic. Once you get your ear tuned into the music, it fits the landscape well.

Last night a Dutch friend of mine who's also been living in Egypt for about 20 years and I went to a downtown restaurant/club with our daughters, one of my son's Egyptian friends, a visiting American, and one of my Sudanese nieces. The music was live and performed by a group of young Egyptian men on base, guitar, drums (local variety of bongo called tabla) and voice. Some of the songs were based on old traditional poetry...I didn't recognise it but the kids did. It was unlike anything that I've heard before (I'm an old jazz fan) but very beautiful. Sometimes the vocal was a call across the desert and in other numbers, it was a laugh among friends. Many of the rhythmns were those of the Middle East and people dancing to the music blended western dancing with the traditional dancing that most visitors only see in a belly dancing performance. Watching girls in jeans and tshirts shimmy and twist to the drum beat was quite something.

When I first moved to Egypt there was a group of women who got together for belly dancing twice a week. The lessons were at my place for about a year or so because I had a villa with an oversized living room that was perfect for this. The fun part of dancing is that different parts of the body dance to different instruments, like the hips dance to the tabla, the hands to the flute, the shoulders to the violins or guitars. Not so easy to learn but so much fun to do. And I appreciate good dancing even more for understanding a bit about it.

Next week the outside theatre at the Cairo Opera House has a performance of another of Egypt's jazz musicians, Fathy Salama. Fathy became friends with my late husband when he was playing with his group in Sharm el Sheikh years ago, and I've been to a number of his performances. I don't want to miss this one as he has a band now that is made up of Egyptian, Senagalese, Brazilian and even a European. Should be fun.

Driving in Sinai

USATODAY.com - New warning: Electronic devices are suspect Well, this is the second news story that I've seen about more paranoia regarding bombs and so on from the US. I think that I'm going to stay home from now on in the safe old Middle East. I travel with a digital camera and my laptop and a palm pilot and a tri-band phone that can call anywhere in the world. With the new edict, I can spend hours getting checked in, and for what? Not worth it.

I arrived home last night about 11:30 after driving from Sharm el Sheikh to Cairo. The drive takes about 5 hours (maybe less during daylight hours) and the route runs up the west coast of the Sinai Peninsula to Suez, under the Canal by tunnel, and then across the Western Desert to Cairo. The portion between Cairo and the Suez Canal is very forgettable, miles of divided highway filled with homicidal/suicidal drivers and the odd new housing settlement. Once you are in Sinai, however, it's different, although Egyptian businessmen and international hotel chains are doing their best to change that. The peninsula itself is about 300 odd miles wide in the north and about the same distance from north to south. The landscape is modern moon. Sand dunes cuddle up to bare rock cliffs, beige against black, red and grey. Occasional oases pop out of bare rock and sand like a bouquet of roses from a magician's hat, just as surprising and just as lovely.

We left Sharm rather late, stopping at the Marriott Bakery for smoked salmon sandwiches to sustain us on our journey. Sound a little un-Egyptian? Not really, but the pharaohs would have liked them if they'd had them. The first stretch took us over the line of mountains that runs the length of Sinai angling into the point of the triangle that jabs south into the Red Sea. These mountains run right down to the sea at Ras Mohamed, one of the loveliest reef parks around. Barren stark rock, the hills are carved with trenches that testify to years of war in the area, trenches that must have been nightmares in the summer heat. Now they are not occupied but just cast a solemn gaze down on the frivolous cars flying by.

The second stretch of the journey is flat sand run-off from the hills to the north from the western gate of the park to Tur el Sinai. I've never been into Tur, which for many years was the port in which sea-going pilgrims from Mecca rested long enough to determine that they weren't bringing any epidemics back to Egypt. From Tur the road heads inland to a long valley between the main mountain ranges and a coastal range to the west. This valley is virtually featureless other than the odd acacia tree and camel. But if you are not the driver and have the luxury of gazing out of the window, the passing mountains are hypnotic and absorbing. Changes in rock layers bring changes in colour with changes in texture, and the edges are knife sharp against the sky like something created by computer.

The end of this valley is at the junction of the main road with another road that heads off into the mountains. This road, to Wadi Feran, goes all the way into the center of the mountains to the monastery of St. Katherine. The route itself is a trip into time, winding in and out of Bedouin villages in the oases that line the wadi (a watershed). On the way to Cairo, we give the turn off a regretful miss and head west to the sea again. By now the sun was setting and we all were in awe of the sunset arrayed before us. Egypt's dust gives us sunsets to die for, although it's worth living to see as many of them as possible. Yesterday's was a knockout. The sky over the Gulf of Suez was a wine red with a silver strip to mark the edge of the sea on the far coast. The sun was an electric orange through the haze, a bright ball that gradually slipped below the lavender hills behind Hurghada.

I'm asked many times why I don't just fly to Sharm from Cairo, and I always answer that I enjoy the decompression time that the drive gives me. The hours that take me from Cairo to the moon let me relax when I'm there and let me postpone the crash landing when I get back to Cairo.

Damaging The Reefs

Time can get away from me sometimes. I think of things that I want to comment on and then find that a week has gone by....or maybe two. I'm back in Sharm for a few days before my daughter goes back to college. August may seem like an odd time to go to Sharm el Sheikh as it is the hottest month and Sharm is only cooler than Aswan by virtue of the wind off the sea. But it is one of my favourite months. The Perseid showers come at the end of August and light up the skies with falling stars. The sea is so warm that it feels like a hot bath for the first ten centimetres or so. Snorkeling has a sensation like drinking coffee with ice cream in it. The sun is burning, the water is bath warm to about half way down the ribs and the cold water chilling the front of your body. Amazing.

Not all of the aspects of snorkeling are wonderful though. If you've never been to the Red Sea, it is an unforgettable experience to be swimming among brilliant fish of every size and shape. But it was even more incredible when I came here the first time over 10 years ago. The last time I was here I went snorkeling at Ras Um Sidr, near the Sharm lighthouse. The reefs are greyer than before, the product of the dust that has blown into the sea as the building has taken over the shore. Sand and dust kill coral. Tumbled stands of old fan coral lie like Roman ruins along the edge of the reef. Looking for some of my favourite fish, the clown fish, was disturbing because I didn't see a single pair. Neither did I see any anemones, the territory of choice for clown fish. Today I looked for clown fish along our reef at Coral Bay. I only found one pair. Not good.

There are some signs of hope, however, even though they may be somewhat tenuous. Last year I saw millions of crown of thorns starfish along the beach hiding under rocks and coral outcroppings. This year I can find none. Crown of thorns starfish eat coral and are a serious pest. They are also rather creepy looking with long, snake-like spiny arms. One of the difficult things about collecting these predators of coral is that if you should accidently break off a piece of one arm, the piece can regenerate a whole starfish. Where those starfish have gone is a mystery. As my snorkeling buddy noted, they might simply have moved to another bay having exhausted what they wanted to eat here.

Another sign of hope is rather more heartening, however. Among the dead corals there are new soft corals growing and some new hard corals as well. Soft corals are less spectacular than hard corals, but if you take the time to examine them closely they are lovely. Some are shaped like bells that open and close with the current. Others are pastel colours, long like grass or short as velvet. Hopefully now that the building boom has slowed the reefs will have a chance to come back.

Light of Egypt

Light in Egypt is a location's signature. Alexandria light is soft and gentle with a playful aspect of the breeze that wanders in from the sea. The glints of the sun on wavetops are reflected from homes and even pedestrians along the sea wall. The light of Sinai is ascetic, almost hard. Sunlight shatters on the rocks and sand of the desert, and flings itself against the clear turquoise of the sea. This is the sunlight of the cave-dwelling saints, the sunlight of 40 years wandering in a wilderness, and shade is man's friend, even in the cooler winter months. The night sky of Sinai is black, deep, untouchable black, with diamond stars scattered through it. Cairo's light seeps through a curtain of dust, softening the sun's glare and diffusing the light that crashes into the city's walls. The pyramids slide into the horizon and pedestrians wander out of the haze into view. Night skies outside of Cairo are a true midnight blue with stars more like candles than diamonds.

Peace Through Disco

It's been a long time since I posted. I've been working too hard to reflect on life; I guess that in itself is a reasonably important observation. But now I'm in Sharm el Sheikh skipping school and hiding out from phone calls. Sharm is quite an extraordinary place. The Sinai Peninsula was returned by the Israelis with the Camp David accords, and the first people other than the Bedouins to live in Sharm were divers. The reefs here are extraordinary, even now after way too much building and development.

I first came here with my children and some friends from Alexandria in about 1991. At that time the facililties were still a bit rugged, although there were about 4 or 5 hotels. Now Naama Bay is almost a small town. The good points are that there are doctors and dentists and grocery stores, but the bad points are quite a few thousand too many visitors for my taste. I have the luxury of a house on a hill in an Italian time share compound with a lovely garden and a view of the island of Tiran in the middle of the Gulf of Aqaba. My late husband bought the villa from the plans of the compound and we had it built to specification with enough bathrooms that half the Egyptian army could take showers at once, very useful when you have a houseful of salty teenagers who have to make themselves beautiful before heading off to Naama Bay's disco's.

When we first had the house, I used to have to carry most of my food down from Cairo. Now I come down with the minimum and can pick up reasonable fruits and vegetables, fresh bread and even the sorts of non-necessities such as halloumi cheese that are so nice while on holiday. Usually, I stock up on my way into Sharm and head for the house, where I install myself on the lawn to watch the colours of the island change all day long. The sea may be still as oil or choppy with the wind off of the Saudi desert. The island is pale beige in the morning and grows darker through the day reaching a rose pink in the evening. I can see the water just off the beach below where sometimes dolphins and manta rays play just off the reef.

There is a strange trans-national aspect to Sharm. Although it is nominally Egyptian, our European tourists outnumber the locals, and the topless tourists afford endless entertainment for the waiters and beach boys from the villages in upper Egypt. It's extraordinary how quickly they learn Italian and German! One of the most amazing things to see is Sharm el Sheikh on the October 6 weekend, however. This is the same weekend of Yom Kippur in Israel, and the Egyptians are celebrating the October 6/Yom Kippur War in which they came the closest to actually winning a conflict with the Israelis. So what do you find on this holiday but Sharm absolutely full to the brim with the less religious Israelis and holidaying Egyptians. Maybe the UN could learn something here. Peace through restaurants and discos.

Being an Outsider

I know that "civilisation" and "progress" have brought improvements in life style and quality for many people, but I have to also wonder at what cost. I look at Egypt and I see so many different societies. The extremely wealthy live much as the extremely wealthy live in other parts of the world. Let's face it, once the assets reach a certain point, the rules that everyone else is expected to play by can be bypassed. This is a fact of life everywhere. After all, if Chelsea Clinton had other parents would she have gotten such a lucrative job right out of university....even if she did go to Stanford. The truly wealthy have no more idea of the stresses and pressures on the less wealthy than they do of space travel. The upper middle class in Egypt are probably more comfortable than the upper middle class in many countries because the wages are low and household help is readily available and very affordable. Middle and lower middle class are caught in the same catch as I remember in the US when I was young. They have enough money to try to educate their children beyond the parents' level, but often are caught very tightly actually carrying this out. The poor in Egypt are much more poor than in the US, but they aren't likely to starve to death. Food is available, especially for the rural poor but extra money for things that have to be bought is likely to be hard to come by.

Each of these groups have their own sorts of tradition/social rules. The extremely rich have the choice of what types of rules they wish to follow, and on the whole, many of them are more liberal and westernised in some senses. The older traditions and rules hold a stronger sway among the middle and lower classes. Many of the fellaheen (the peasant farmers) live very much as their ancestors did centuries ago, with the additions of pumped well water and electricity.

It would make sense to assume that as a foreign woman I would be most comfortable among the least tradition-bound group, but that isn't always the case. As a foreigner, obviously, to the members of any of the groups, I am an outsider. I am an outsider to my way of thinking too. I will never have the easy, automatic responses of a genuine group member because there is so much that I never learned as a child. I learned this through my marriage. Although my middle-class family from North America had much in common with my husband's Egyptian/Sudanese family in terms of income, employment, and education, there were fundamental differences that could never be ignored. Some things they could never really understand and some things I could never truly believe enough to make them the basis of action.

So, if I am an outsider, what is it about Egypt that makes me feel at home? It's a very reasonable question, and, actually, one that I ask myself quite often. In fact, it may be that it is my very position as an outsider that is appealing, along with the fact that many of my friends are also outsiders in some sense, by birth or marriage. Our fringe positions in this society give us some fudge factor in people's expectations of us, since we are not "native". The vantage point of the outsider is an interesting one, from my point of view. I can observe situations without the emotional/cultural baggage that many people carry. At the same time, I do not feel that I am locked out of any of the segments. One of the most important things about Egyptian society is that it welcomes strangers. It may not understand them, but it does welcome the novelty from beyond, and it is willing, for the most part, to try to explain itself to the newcomer. But it may take a VERY long time for the newcomer to catch on.

Thoughts After Work

Have I mentioned that I have a rotten job? It isn't really a job, I guess, but more a mission. My late husband was one of those odd creatures that we call an entrepreneur....what it boils down to is a passion for creating new businesses and, hopefully, having the insight and luck to hit the right niches. He had the passion and a lot of the luck, at least until the end. He was in the process of building a massive factory here for the processing of animal feeds, when he had to make an emergency landing while flying his private plane home to Cairo from Germany. He told me that afternoon that if he was going to stop in Greece to refuel, he would call me about 10 pm. He didn't call, and I went to bed at 11 or so, assuming that he'd be arriving about 12:30. He wouldn't be home before 1 or 2 am, following a usual pattern for such trips. When the phone rang at 12:35, I knew there was a problem. He ordinarily would never call.

He had tried to make an emergency landing in a field just northeast of Cairo, only about 20 minutes from Cairo International. He landed, but his wingtip caught a palm tree in the corner of the field and he was killed instantly. His factory was only a month to start-up and everything we owned was invested in it. We were over $200 million in debt (as I soon found out), and Egypt is not a nice country to be in debt in. My son was home from his first year in university and my daughter still had a year of high school to do. Leaving Egypt was out of the question. My home and my friends were here. My children's grandparents were here (my parents had died years before). Shocking doesn't really cover it.

The options for the banks who were involved in a project to build a $200 million factory that was about a month to soft opening were to either take the assets, such as our house, that were pledged to support loans, or they could try to work all the companies, take shares and cover their debts in that way. I really didn't care. I'd already lost the part that was important to me. I'd been working editing an English language magazine for three years and had only a passing acquaintance with the business. No matter what, I knew that I had money saved for the children's education and that I would probably have to be self-supporting, another reason to stay actually, since my skills are much more in demand here. So I stayed, and to help the bank settlement, I became involved in the management of my late husband's businesses, as my children and I were the majority shareholders. It was three years of hell. Two of his businesses were being run by "friends" of his who gutted the companies in the first two years after his death. I regained control, but by then at least one of them was a hopeless case. It's hard, however, to close a business in a country where the unemployment is so high. You have a real responsibility to your employees to try to keep going to provide the hundred or so families a living. We haven't done too badly.

Now, I've finally gotten to the point where most of the problems are worked out and I can begin to raise my eyes from the road and think about doing the things that I want to do. One good thing that I've done for myself is to lease about an acre of land to use as paddocks for my horses. They are just local Arabs, but very decent honest horses for riding. Now they live outdoors and have room to roam in when they aren't under saddle. Eventually, I want to be doing trail riding with them. The "farm". as it is somewhat grandly called, is simple. Pipe corrals with either grass or sand, a fiberglass-roofed shelter for the sun and rain, a bathroom, the grooms room and tack storage. Not much, but there is a patch of grass under a shade from which I can watch my horses graze and play, while the farm dogs (two female balady dogs just recentlly neutered) chase crows and egrets.

All of this is a roundabout introduction to the joys of doing absolutely nothing about 6 pm on an Egyptian summer evening. I'd just escaped from meetings with lawyers and the horses needed to have some carrots bought, so my driver brought me out to the farm where I plonked myself down with a notebook, pen, bottle of water and a kilo of warm apricots bought from a donkey cart on the way. The driver and one of the boys wiorking for me at the farm went off to the market to buy about 150 lbs of carrots, and I began to let real things take place of all the nastiness that I'd been dealing with all week.

Apricots have to be eaten warm. Just the dust rinsed off and the juice sliding out of the golden orange halves.

Night blooming jasmine (Malaka el Lil (Queen of the Night if you come from Alexandria), gradually fills each of its buds with the thick sweet perfume that will flood out just after dark. I'm convinced that the buds begin to leak fragrance as the sun goes down.

Swallows stitch lines ove the floofed right paddock as the horses work away at their evening meal. At dusk they will be replaced by the smaller bats.

Egrets and crows stalk the flooded field in search of insects. The dogs will charge any one of them if the girls think that they have caught something interesting.

While the horses were waiting for their evening mix to be prepared, my oldest mare came over to investigate the rumour that new carrots had arrived. Having just pinched a handfull of basil buds, I offered them to the mare. Horses don't like basil, I guess. For that matter, most Egyptians use it to repel mosquitos rather than to enchance their chicken.

Pigeons, crows and doves rotate over the small piles of spilled grain; one taking off, one landing, one circling.

The sound of the muezzin and the soft laughter and shout of the village children blend into a very local melody.

This is worth any amount of aggravating work.