Christmas
After three fairly easy days of driving we hit “Dragon Country” on Christmas Eve. We had been making such good time that we had decided to try to reach an isolated site called “Ain Amur”; rather than head towards the Kharga Oasis, we would stay in the desert, and if possible travel on to Kharga after Ain Amur. The first photo shows one of the hundreds of patches of crystal that grew in “Dragon Country”; it was a singular place. The dragons decided they didn't want us to come any closer, and so after hours of winding through the labyrinth of low crumbling hills, sometimes easing the cars with painful slowness over sharp rocks and brittle hilltops, we had to eventually turn back. According to the GPS we ended up camping that night only 8km from where we had left our camp on the darb the night before. However, this time we were at the edge of a canyon, (visible in the second photo). The third and fourth photos show our Christmas Eve camp, complete with tiny battery-powered Christmas tree, bottles of Egyptian wine, and the moon that rose behind our camp. The next morning Uncle Bob and I woke up at dawn (I guess old Christmas habits die-hard, even in such atypical Christmas conditions). We took photos of the mist over the canyon; the night before had been dewy and the rocks glistened. The fourth photo demonstrates that Papa Noelle had visited. Luckily Aunt Myriam’s French tradition requires no chimneys, only shoes. And Uncle Bob’s favorite Christmas breakfast, Italian panetonne, available at our local grocery store outside Cairo. (Aunt Myriam had laughed when she bought it, explaining how much had changed from when they had first arrived in Egypt under socialism. Rice had to be hand-picked for rocks, flour sifted for grubs, if a shipment of canned tomatoes came in it was gone by sunset. Aunt Myriam’s cooking is superb, so I am sure she coped. But I was grateful that her expert hand had more ingredients with which to concoct our suppers.)
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