EGYPT:-I FOUGHT THE LAW

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It is a place too vast to imagine. It’s a place where old men die without ever seeing a drop of rain. It’s a place so hot that it makes mountains crumble and oceans melt away. It is the hunting grounds of a demon, whom, so it is said, brings to the earth the curses of draught, famine and, ultimately, death. At its centre it’s so arid that most bacteria cannot survive, but yet, inside its belly, if you look very carefully, you will find a single, solitary figure locked in chains, busily breaking rocks under the hot sun of the desert of deserts.

Why here? Of all the places she could have chosen why make it here? What could possibly have made the Mother of the World choose this one spot in which to make her home? The answer is a civilisation born of a river. A river, born in the heart of Africa, that is the foundation block of all our lives. But why did he make it here? Of all the places he could have chosen what could possibly have made Fréd Roux choose this one spot in which to pass a life locked in chains, breaking rocks under the hot sun of the desert of deserts? The answer, I’m afraid, is not a grand one. He did not sacrifice himself for any greater cause. He did not inflict hardship on himself for any spiritual gain and he did not volunteer himself as a sign of devotion to any high ideals. No, Fréd Roux is spending his life locked in chains, breaking rocks under the hot sun of the desert of deserts, simply because the narrator of this tale is a bastard.

It’s a wonderful feeling waking up in the morning, peeling back the curtains and realising that at that moment you are a small part of the Mother of the World. Don’t get too excited though because you are nothing major, you are just a tiny piece of dirt on the delightfully formed finger nail of Cairo, the capital of Egypt. The city’s motherly instincts were first mentioned in the stories of The Thousand and One Nights, which, though some may debate it today, states that ‘Baghdad is Paradise and Cairo is the Mother of the World’. Ever since then millions of us, sixteen million at the last count, have flocked to suckle on her maternal bosom.

But what does Cairo with its mosques and Pharaonic ruins have to do with surfing? The answer was an intense low pressure system bubbling away in the eastern Mediterranean. I had experienced Mediterranean surf once before, over in beautiful Sicily and along the fringes of Rome. The waves themselves had been small and gutless but it had intrigued me and so for three whole years I watched the weather charts like a hawk, waiting for a storm so violent that it would even send swells marching into the most easterly corner of this normally tranquil sea. For most of the year Egypt is about as likely to provide a swell during your visit as the centre of Siberia, but this depression was different. It was powerful enough not to fade away as soon as it passed by Italy. In fact it just kept growing in size. It became a low pressure system that was big even by Atlantic standards. I had waited three years for such a swell and as soon as I saw it all other plans fell by the wayside. I called up a friend, Fréd Roux, whom I knew would be keen for the adventure and within twenty four hours of the low pressure bursting onto my weather chart we were on a plane for Cairo. Fréd could have had no idea what he was about to let himself in for.

We’d have been laughing if all our Egyptian problems were just about surf inconsistency, but unfortunately that wasn’t the half of it. Our real problem was that Egypt is 94% desert and we’re not talking any old desert here. We’re talking about a desert so massive that the entire United States could fit comfortably inside it. It’s so big and so daunting that the first Arab arrivals took one look at it and realised that it was impossible for them to come up with any name that would even half portray the horror of this desert and so they simply called it Sahara, which means desert in Arabic. Dealing with the Sahara on a surf trip is bad enough, but we were taking it one stage further. We were dealing with the confusingly named Western Desert. It is widely regarded as the most ferocious and bad tempered piece of desert in the entire Sahara. And at its core is the Great Sand Sea. It is one of eighteen sand seas, those great piles of peachy-red dunes that are the favourite of storybooks, in the world, and it is the biggest and baddest of them all. The sand sea alone covers 72,000sq km and contains some of the largest sand dunes in the world. One is a staggering 140km long. It has no human presence in its centre, nor has it ever had. It has no life giving oases; it has no mammals, no birds, no insects and no plants. It has the Earth’s highest evaporation rate and it is baked by the sun for approximately 96% of daylight hours. In the winter the north winds blow cold enough to freeze the water in a bottle solid and in the summer the same bottle simply melts in the heat. In fact, the Great Sand Sea spills over the Libyan border and it was here, in the Libyan Sahara, that, in 1922, the thermometers hit 57 degrees. No where else has ever been hotter.

It seemed that if we were too tackle the Western Desert and survive then we would need exactly the right transport and supplies. There were no short cuts to be taken here, no skimping or half measures. Our lives could depend on it. If we were going to do it then we were going to do it right and so we stocked up on the liquid needed for such a journey - a few bottles of Coca-Cola. Then spent hours scouring the streets of Cairo, enquiring in travel agencies, hotels and car hire offices for the perfect wheels for the job. After much searching we found exactly what we were after - a stretched out, bright red Mercedes Benz taxi. It seemed a far classier, though quite possibly less practical, way to move around than any camel or desert equipped 4x4 and our driver, Mr Aideed, with his over blown belly, cheap shiny shell suit and an ability to find a cup of tea within seconds of stopping the taxi, seemed equally suited to the task at hand. Feeling suitably prepared we set off north for the desert of deserts and one of the most remarkable surf trips I have ever been on.

The swell gathered itself up and reared way up into the sky, the offshore wind holding it up until the very last second and then, with the moment of no return passed, it came cascading down from the heavens. A thick, powerful left hander unfolding in a dramatic, treble lipped, ledgey death barrel that surged back in on itself and tripped up over virtually exposed razor sharp reef. For a second or so the wave calmed and braced itself for the knee deep inside section where it came to a nasty closeout finale on the rock ledge. This was truly a wave fit for a Pharaoh and so, being anything but Pharaohs, we just stood on the cliffs staring at it in total awe.

Between our departure from Cairo and our arrival at Egypt’s deadly Pharaohs Point several days and many empty kilometres had passed us by. With the Mother of the World’s most famous monuments, those tombs to God like Kings that are so breathtaking that every word in the world has been used by someone, somewhere at some point in time to try and describe them, receding into the distance, our Mercedes pointed its nose north and sped towards the coastline of Alexandria. The city, founded by another God like ruler, Alexander the Great, is so totally overshadowed by Cairo that you imagine it to be nothing but a small, provincial town. It comes as something of a shock to discover that it is in fact a mega-city in its own right with a population rivalling that of London or Paris. It is also more than a thousand years older than Cairo and was once the most magnificent city of the Hellenistic period. Alexandria was made famous by a library that was the most important centre of learning in the Ancient World and the Pharos lighthouse, which once stood proud with the Pyramids as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The city became so powerful under the beautiful Cleopatra, its second most famous governor after Alexander himself, that it even gave Rome a run for its money. Today there is nothing but a name and a legend to remember those times by and, for surfers, a sprawling seafront corniche open to any northwest swell in the Mediterranean. On paper it looked promising and I recalled how I was once shown a grainy photo of a surfer riding a hollow right somewhere in the city’s environs. Search as we did though we could find nothing that resembled this wave and so we pushed on westward along the lonely desert coast highway. Things here though were not quite what we expected. Instead of tumbling sand dunes folding across the horizon we found ourselves in an Egyptian Costa Brava. For seventy kilometres the hotel blocks continued unabated, all private and all their beaches out of bounds to non-guests, even passing surfers in search of a salt water fix. What was more bizarre though was that of the million odd beds contained in these complexes, not one of them was occupied. Aside from the security guards manning the front gates not a soul stirred. It was as if the desert had swallowed up all its visitors leaving behind just the outlines of these summertime playgrounds. It wouldn’t have been the first time the desert has done such a thing. Whole armies have vanished here. King Cambyses of Persia was once careless enough to loose 50,000 of his men here after they were devoured by a sandstorm. Ever since then romantics and explorers have combed the Western Desert for some sign, some little reminder, of the armies passing, but nothing at all has ever emerged from the sand. At El-Almien, site of the worlds biggest ever tank battle and a turning point of World War II, the hotel complexes finally gave way to the desert beaches we had come hoping for, but quickly a new problem arose. The north Egyptian coast is one of the illegal gateway’s to Europe for the desperate of Africa and along the coast are military bases, police posts and coastguard look outs and none of them are welcoming to passing surfers. Who knows what potential waves had been made unobtainable to us. We could see headlands and bays that might all have contained something even better than Pharaohs Point but every time we tried to access the beach soldiers pulled us back to the road. Maybe we should have opted for a slightly less conspicuous car? Whatever the reason, it was frustrating watching the two hundred kilometres of coast between Alexandria and the first accessible beach flash past the car window.

Greek and Roman accounts talk of the treacherous seas around the ancient town of Paraetonium and modern divers still come up with occasional treasures from the sunken Roman galleys lying just offshore. And, as if to live up to its age old reputation, it was in Paraetonium that we first discovered waves, but it was also here that Fred’s destiny led him to an eternity of breaking rocks under the hot sun. Today’s town is much like it has always been; a shell white cluster of buildings built around a natural harbour. Stretching along the desert shoreline, away from the town, are a whole series of bays and beaches with, so we thought, none of the military or holiday complex restrictions of the road we had just travelled along. As the WAM chart turned the whole eastern Mediterranean blood red we set out to explore. The first day we were rewarded with a shallow point break and clean walls wrapping into a huge sandy bay. With offshore winds and, until a massive sandstorm blotted out the sky like an eclipse, sunshine to boot we thought we had scored as good as we could hope for and that evening we both toasted the rewards of our patient three year wait. As good as we could hope for, that is until, swinging back the shutters of our hotel room the following morning I realised, in glassy eyed wonder, that I was looking at the biggest and best Mediterranean swell I had ever even heard of, let alone seen. Giant three metre waves cascaded over the harbour wall and poured across the offshore reef. The whole coast was burning with energy and what was more, the sandstorm had given way to blazing sunshine and the winds were blowing steadily offshore. Yesterday had been nothing but a taster for today, because this was the day that we were too round a corner and stumble upon a wave fit only for the God like Kings of Ancient Egypt.

There were other waves here as well and one of them packed a real surprise. It was me who suggested we gave it a go. A hollow shore break, close to the beach where Cleopatra is said to have bathed, it was less attractive to look at than the points, and certainly less attractive than Cleopatra, but with its pitching, sandy lips I knew which one I would rather have had a kiss from. We suited up, ran past what we thought was an abandoned hotel, ducked under the wire fence and trotted off across the soft sand to a tasty looking peak. As we neared the water the shouting began. I turned to see a group of men heading towards us. Smiling to them I said hello, “No, no, police. It is forbidden”, the portly leader of the group replied, “What’s forbidden?” I asked, already knowing the answer, “Swimming. It is forbidden. We are military police”. The frustration of having been prevented from seeing so much coastline had obviously got to me more than I realised and I could feel the anger building up inside me. “Yeah right, come and get me then”, and, pushing the tubby leader out of the way, I ran into the water laughing too myself. Then I remembered Fréd. Fréd hadn’t been quite as fast as me. I turned around to see four large Egyptian soldiers grab him by the arms and legs and drag him on his back up the beach towards our so called abandoned hotel. For a second Fréd’s eyes met mine and, with fear written all over his face, he meekly called out, “Stuart, I think maybe you should get out”. He barely had time to protest any further though before he was forced into the army base headquarters and thrown into a cramped and dirty military prison cell.

For maybe thirty seconds I wondered what the best course of action should be. I could be the gentlemen and give myself up in exchange for Fréd’s freedom? I could be the hero and, battling my way into the military base, I could make a daring rescue attempt? A wave barrelled off in front of me. Or, on the other hand, I could do what any real mate would do in such circumstances. As Fréd prepared himself for a life time of hard labour, breaking rocks under the hot sun of the desert of deserts, I paddled off and went surfing.

So today, whether you are sneakily reading this magazine at work or relaxing with it at home, please, take a moment to consider Fréd, locked in chains and sat alone under the hot sun, breaking rocks in the desert of deserts and all because his ‘mate’ went surfing. And maybe, if his tale of woe pulls at your heart strings, you could do something to help him. For I have heard a rumour that our unfortunate hero is planning his escape. So please, help Fréd break out today, by sending him a nail file.

Thank you to Mr Aideed for the coolest wheels in the Western Desert and Oceansurf Publications, www.oceansurfpublications.co.uk and C-Skins Wetsuits, www.c-skins.com for sending Fréd a bar of soap to keep dropping in the shower.