Factual Storytelling

Landing in Cairo was an assault on the senses. It was the first time that either my little sister or I had been overseas, and following a 20 hour flight, all we wanted was sleep. Cairo, however, is not a city for the weary, or the faint hearted. We had headed to Egypt to celebrate my mother’s birthday. She had not wanted a party, but instead chose to take her husband and two teenage daughters to the Middle East. The first shock was the airport. The dank, dark and dilapidated building was literally a world away from the airy Brisbane International airport and the bright lights of Singapore that we had just left. Emerging from the terminal, we were hit with the unfamiliar. Sights, noises, smells, crowds, all of which I had never seen before, were suddenly sprung upon me. Fortunately we had arrived in January, their winter, so the temperature was mild and the weather was one less element to contest with. We had read the travel guides prior to departure, all of which had attempted to illustrate the atmosphere in their knowledgeable pages, however nothing could have prepared two teenage girls for what was about to ensue.

The first few days passed by in a flurry. We were going to be there three weeks in total, and Cairo was our first stop. Visiting the requisite sites, such as the pyramids at Giza and the Sphinx were both surreal and in a strange way, slightly disillusioning. The great monuments were not, as I had originally thought, located in the middle of the desert, but a city had rather unceremoniously built itself around them. Now after visiting the Sphinx it’s possible to pop across the road for Pizza Hut. The crowds were something I had never encountered in such a magnitude. The population of the city is approximately seven million, an amount of people that I had never considered, let alone experienced. We quickly learnt to stick together, as it was far too easy to get separated in a crowd. My parents kept a watchful eye on my sister and I, as even a brief trip to the supermarket was hazardous.

Following our time in Cairo, we travelled south along the Nile. Our next destination was Luxor, home to a vast array of temples and tombs. My mother was on a mission to see as many ancient sites as possible so the next item on her list was the temple at Karnak. Karnak is a complex of several different temples and ancient chapels and is considered to be the largest ancient religious site in the world. It is also the second most visited site in Egypt, after the pyramids. With a tourist attraction, however, comes large amounts of tourists. Tourists in turn, attract large numbers of locals attempting to sell a variety of paraphernalia. What ensues is excessive amounts of shouting, shoving and sheer astonishment. It was in Karnak, amongst the semi-organised chaos, that we lost my sister.

“Where’s Edwina?” my mother asked. I looked around, expecting to find her standing behind us. Her absence was both alarming and frightening. Had we just lost a 13 year old girl at one of the busiest monuments in the Middle East?

Edwina wandered through the temple complex, unaware that she was alone. Having been unwittingly separated from her family a mere five minutes before, she strolled along, admiring the workmanship and scale of the ancient hieroglyphs. She turned, hoping to find either my parents or myself, but was instead faced with an unknown family of Japanese tourists. In her version of events, this is the point at which she became afraid. She was unsure of what her next move should be. Should she stay in the one spot, on the chance that we were looking for her? Should she attempt to look for us, despite the unlikelihood of finding someone in an area and crowd this large?

My mother is not normally a panicker. I could see, however, the lines of worry beginning to form on her forehead. My father too, is an equally calm person, yet I could see that he was beginning to, in his own words, ‘freak out.’ Had we been in Australia we would have employed the search method that is divide and conquer. We were not too keen at the prospect of losing another family member though, so we stuck together. Unsure of how to begin our search, we just began looking.

As Edwina made her way through the crowds, the tall pillars that had once seemed magnificent now seemed menacing. The random eye contact with strangers had initially been comforting, now it made her fearful. She couldn’t remember what any of us were wearing, thus making it even harder to spot us. The sun, no longer in the middle of the sky, was beginning to sink into the horizon. We had planned on leaving the temple before sunset. Edwina made her way to the entrance of the complex, in the hope that we had decided to wait there.

The worst possible outcomes were running through each of our heads. Had she fallen? Was she hurt? Ducking and weaving through the stones and pillars, each turn came with a new thought. Our unmapped path through Karnak had lead us back to the starting point, the entrance. 

We approached the entrance feeling somewhat defeated. Edwina was yet to be found, and it was getting late in the day, the crowds surging towards the exit point. It was then that we spotted her.

Edwina says she can’t remember the feeling of when she first saw us. The most basic description of what we were feeling was relief. She did later refer to the incident as one of the scariest moments of her life. Luckily for all of us though, she is able to look back on it in amusement. My mother fully recovered, and no longer felt the guilt that would stem from misplacing a child. Had it been socially acceptable though, I imagine she would have got her children leashes for the remainder of the holiday.