Warning: This post contains descriptions of animal abuse and pictures of dead camels.
Last Friday, in a fit of wanting to do something other than
wander around aimlessly Cairo, I went with my Swedish friends Frederick and
Clara to the Birqash Camel Market. It’s
hard to explain the attraction of such a place. All of the guidebooks and websites
uniformly refer to it as a somewhat brutal spectacle for the tourist, a place
where camels, fresh from off an arduous journey from Sudan, are auctioned and
beaten. Or beaten, auctioned, briefly
fed, and then beaten some more. Mostly just beaten. For the low price of 25
pounds (That’s 4 dollars. In retrospect it seems a little steep.) the curious
tourist can have the pleasure of wandering around the market taking pictures
and dodging loose camels. I suppose I wanted to go because it seemed like the
kind of thing one does when one visits Egypt, and, more broadly, because it was
something I had never done before.
Birqash is a village about 30km (if memory serves me
correctly) northwest of Cairo. All the directions to Birqash in guidebooks were
vague and because we are cheap a taxi was out of the question. After some
research I determined that we need to get on a bus to Imbaba, from there a bus
to Niqla, from there a bus to Maneshe, and from there, a bus to Birqash. I knew
how to get a bus to Imbaba, but beyond that we would just have to show up and
ask around. And so armed with vague directions and that spirit of “whatever
happens happens” that seems to serve me well in Egypt, we boarded a microbus to
Imbaba at 7 AM. I have now learned to distinguish between
microbuses and minibuses. Minibuses seat like 20-30 people and are just a
little bit smaller than your standard city bus, while microbuses are about the
size and shape of a VW Bus and seat maybe 12, tops.
Our first stroke of
luck was striking up conversation with some folks on the bus, one of whom was
Mohammed, a kind customer service representative at TE Data (the company
currently responsible for me not having internet. I politely neglected to
mention this to avoid offending his sense of hospitality) who had just gotten
off an overnight shift in which he told me he dealt with 87 often angry
troubleshooting calls. He was disturbingly awake and good-spirited given the
circumstances, and, crucially, was going home to Maneshe where he said we could
catch a bus to Birqash. We tagged along with him and eventually ended up on a minibus
on which Mohammed, despite my protests, generously paid the fare for all four
of us and eventually arranged for the bus driver to tell us when to get off as
he got off a few stops beforehand. We had a long conversation and will probably
meet up for tea later this week.
In Maneshe the bus driver told us to get off, yelled
something to some other guy who immediately took us to a microbus heading
towards Niqla. In Niqla we got off and were told to follow some guy. I asked if
we were going to a bus and he said “Arabeeya,” meaning car, which raised my
thrift-alarms, but when I asked how much he said a pound (15 cents). We
followed him across a bridge and he pointed to a pickup truck with 10 Egyptians
in the bed. I walked up, said “Souk el-Gamal?”, they nodded and we hopped in.
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| In the bed of a truck |
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| View from the bed of the truck |
After a 15 minute ride through some lovely farmland and a less lovely dump we
were deposited at what appeared to be a door market. True to pattern, they told
us to follow some guy and he led us to the camel market which was about a 3
minute walk up a sandy road lightly strewn with camel carcasses. Between the
dump and the carcasses the smell was less than appetizing.
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| Camel carcasses along the side of the road |
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| Dead camel |
Once inside the gate, we paid a guy our 25 pounds and were
nearly run over by a stray camel. The camel market turned out to be exactly what
you would expect: a place to buy and sell camels. To do this, a few guys would
take a herd (is that the right word?) of camels and energetically beat them in
front of a crowd 20-30 prospective buyers. Mostly the beatings were on the back
of the camel, which didn’t seem too painful, but occasionally they would poke
one in the ass (somebody suggested a Freudian element here) or beat it savagely
in the face. We spent some time trying to apply our Western (I hesitate to use
that term, but whatever) thought-process to the whole enterprise. Why beat them
so much? It’s not like they were actually trying to drive them anywhere. Is a
camel prized on how much of a beating it can take? On how satisfying a “thwack” is made when you
hit it squarely on the back? I’ll grant that camel beating does seem somewhat
therapeutic (here I am referring to hit a camel on the back which makes a
satisfying noise and doesn’t seem to bother the camel all that much. I have
never actually done this and won’t. Don’t judge me). I guess the idea is to get
the camels to run around so that buyers can judge their health, agility, and
responsiveness to flogging.
When the camels weren’t being flocked and beaten one of
their legs was folded and tied up at the knee so that they couldn’t run too
quickly. I was certainly appreciative of this precaution as it turns out that a
three-legged camel can still run at a pretty good clip and has little regard
for whatever is in front of it. Also, some camels are fucking huge. Thinking
back on the whole experience, the camels seemed to be in generally good
spirits. Mostly they just hung around eating and looking content. I guess their
lives were divided into two phases: getting beaten and not getting beaten, and
if they weren’t getting beaten then things were good. The freshly sold camels
sitting in the back of pickup trucks often looked like they were smiling as
they drove off.
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| On their way home... |
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| Loading the camels |
The main activity for tourists was to wander around dodging
camels and take pictures, which got less interesting after like 20 minutes. The
market was basically one thorough-fare bordered on both sides by large camel
stalls. For lack of a better idea we just wandered to the end of the
thoroughfare and back. On the way we were constantly chatted up by the guys
working with the camels. Most of them wanted their pictures taken and
surprisingly didn’t want any money for anything. They were generally a pretty
easygoing bunch and I deflected fewer marriage proposals for Clara then I had
expected (this task fell on me rather than Frederick because I know more
Arabic). If I heard correctly, the best offer we got for her hand was twenty
camels, which seemed pretty low given that somebody had apparently offered “a
million” in Tunisia.
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| This guy really wanted his picture taken |
Around 11 we hitched a ride back to Niqla and enjoyed some
delicious tamiyya (falafel) and French fry sandwiches at a local cafe. We then
wandered through the narrow alleyways of Niqla for about 20 minutes. Niqla is a
fairly impoverished town on some small branch of the Nile and the buildings
were the haphazard (almost) Soviet-style informal brick contraptions that seem
to dot much of Egpyt. Between each building is an alley about 4-6 feet wide
and which have the feel, if not the timelessness, of the ancient cities of
Morocco or the old parts of Cairo. A lot of Cairo is like this too, although
not the parts foreigners usually end up in. It seems safe to guess that the
only foreigners who end up in Niqla are those going to the camel market and
that they rarely wander through the streets beyond the bus stop. Walking around
we were constantly followed by packs of children and every single eye was on
us. This is very different from Cairo where the foreigner is largely ignored,
except for the occasional “Helllooooo” “What’s your name?” (The experience may
be very different for women walking alone. I can’t know.) For me the feeling
was not that the place was foreign, it felt perfectly normal. Rather, the
feeling was one of being foreign, not at all belonging. In Cairo you can
come up with a satisfactory answer to explain your presence: I’m a student, I’m
working, I really like fried beans, etc. In Niqla you are immediately
confronted with the fact that you’re ultimately a voyeur and that there is
little you can give in return unless you are willing to invest time and/or
money. Even if you were there are certainly paternalism (maybe not the right
word) issues but I won’t get into that. Should such feelings stop one from
wandering around the countryside? Probably not, but it’s something to wrestle
with.
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| Bridge over the Nile in Niqla |
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| Levitation in Niqla |
After getting followed around for a while we hopped back on
a microbus to Maneshe and in Maneshe got a bus to Imbaba. On that bus we were
involved in a very Egyptian twenty minute dispute over something or other,
possibly whether we had paid enough. On the buses everybody passes their fare
to the person sitting in front of them and somehow people know what needs to be
paid and who has and hasn’t paid. Usually. I asked the old guy sitting next to
me how much and he said one pound, so we all paid one pound. Five minutes later
some other guy comes back and starts asking somebody for money. This eventually
(de)evolved into a shouting match involving the whole bus, where the guy
sitting next me and the guy who came back would alternate between shouting
hoarsely at each other and hoarsely grinning. The guy sitting next to me
appeared to be defending me as I had given him my fare, and every few minutes I
would jump in and ask how much, exactly, the fare was, never get a quite
satisfactory answer, and then sit back and watch. The whole thing had a kind of
ridiculous air, like they were arguing because it was hot out, but there was
probably at least half a pound involved somewhere. I think the one guy didn’t
get enough change or something. Eventually things quieted down and the old guy
next to me spent the rest of the bus ride apparently good-naturedly insulting
me to the woman and child sitting in front of us. I would love to know what he
was saying as he was a pretty hilarious guy. Oh well.
So that was pretty much it. Looks like I just wrote a blog
entry longer than the paper I’m supposed to be writing. Oh well. I guess I
should go theorize about the nature the early Islamic state.
First, coffee.
