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.
