Atar
Had a good night’s sleep last night and woke up at 6.30am. I went for a hot shower and had breakfast. I then did some laundry; a towel and a shirt. I put them on my tent to dry and they were bone dry in an hour or so. Talking about bones, there are lots of bones lying around. Some are camel, I think.
There are cats, ducks and hens loose around the site and the ducks have learned how to beg for food when people are eating. They’re gas. I love ducks.
The heat here is pretty ferocious. The temperature today was 39°C and feels it. The song about mad dogs and English men going out in the noonday sun, kept popping into my head. I interpret English men as meaning anyone pink or beige skinned with little brown bits on.
I went out at 11am for a stroll into the town. It was completely different to what I’m used to. I have travelled through many ‘exotic’ lands before where almost everything was alien to me. West Africa feels different. It’s still as ‘alien’ to me as before and the poverty is terrible. There was poverty in Central Asia or SE Asia or China too and the culture and language was just as different but still felt accessible to me. There were many guidebooks written and there were transport routes such as the Silk Road winding through these places. This doesn’t seem to happen here or, more likely, it does but I’m missing it. Message to self – keep them peepers open!
I went out or a stroll to the local town with about a dozen of our trip mates. It was interesting. I found it difficult to interpret the expressions of the people we met or passed. Some seemed very distant or uninterested, some seemed friendly and welcoming, some seemed downright hostile. I would need to be here much longer to knows instinctively what was going on. But I’m just passing through.
We passed through a market area where food and household items were sold. It was 100% authentic with not as much as a nod to tourism. Indeed, they got angry if you attempted to photograph them. I’d love to have a hidden camera to record the street scenes as they were so varied and fascinating.
We stopped at what seemed to be a local gathering or meeting place by a general store on a major roundabout. We wanted some cold drinks. As we were milling about outside the store, people started gathering around us. These were mainly schoolkids or hawkers. One of our group is a consummate, and excellent, photographer and she was asked by some local boys if they could take selfies of her. Boys being boys, they were a bit too handy with their hands. Nothing nasty or abusive, just boundary pushing. This delighted the other boys enormously and they whooped and hollered and high-five`d.
However, this is a very traditional Islamic society where men have not learned to control their sexual urges and contract this whole sorry business out to women through repression and control. Religion, as always, is the glue to facilitate this diminution of humanity. Mind you, the same thing happened in my own country, Ireland, until fairly recently. Just look, also, at the inquisition in Europe and the witch hunts in the New World.
Anyway, I digress again; the old guy thing again.
What all religions need are grim-faced, cold-hearted men to enforce the rules and ensure the powerful remain in power and the downtrodden remain downtrodden. Sure enough, one of these arrived and gave one of the boys a fierce clatter about the head and shouted loudly at the others and chased them away. He then seemed to lecture them and was wagging his finger in what seemed a pompous and authoritative manner. But, who knows. Maybe he was imparting a recipe for strawberry jam. I’m not sure whose virtue he was protecting, theirs or ours.
As a few of us were rambling back to the campsite, we got to a bridge over a small stream. There were about a dozen or so boys, around 10 years old or so, gathered around. I wondered if they were the same boys who chucked rocks at us yesterday. As we got nearer, several were stomping their feet on the road and shouting ‘fuck you’ and then something unintelligible. The kept shouting this in a very aggressive manner, directing it towards us. I didn’t feel threatened and went closer to see what this was all about. I noticed that they were stomping on a flag of Israel. I figured out that they were shouting ‘fuck you, Israel’ One asked me, aggressively, by pointing at me and saying Israel? in an interrogative manner. I nodded no and said Irlandais. This seemed to delight them and we were all friends from then on.
They didn’t ask for anything or beg. One of them noticed a pen in my belt pouch and mimicking writing, seemed to ask me had I any pens. I had a spare pen and gave it to him He, and the other boys, seemed delighted at this. I then gave them my main pen as I knew I had brought a few others with me. This brought home to me the importance of education to these boys and that it’s a pathway out of poverty. Writing is the bones and sinews of schooling and pens facilitate this greatly.
One of he things I considered before I left Dublin was buying a hundred pens and a stack of copybooks to hand out to kids I met on the way. Unfortunately, I forgot to do this.
One thing I noticed, with regret, was my huge reluctance to interact with children because of the paranoia about being viewed as a paedophile. When I was the same age as these kids and if a stranger, especially a foreign looking one, came into our street, we would mob them delightedly. They would respond. Now we avert eyes and shuffle on.
Had a nice evening meal and retired to my tent to watch some old Dr Who episodes.
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