Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Cairo: April 14, 2010

All material including photographs are ©2010 Ronald Dunlap / Doglight Studios

All my logistics were in place, and things were beginning to roll. I felt so good this morning that I decided to splurge on the breakfast buffet again. I found a table near the window and piled my gear into one of the empty chairs. After heaping eggs, beef bacon, sausage, and a couple of danish onto my plate, I sat down to shovel it in. A couple of glasses of orange juice and a cup of Lipton tea helped wash it all down. Then I went back for seconds. I was going to be shooting in the field today, and they don't break for lunch. I needed enough fuel to get me through the day.

As I was signing the check, the manager came over and handed me a couple of complimentary juice boxes. He looked really familiar — I swear he used to run the restaurant at the Nile Hilton. Unfortunately, another customer called to him and I never got a chance to ask him.


I met Magdy, the driver my friend Ahmed Safe had connected me up with, in the parking lot and looked over the little silver Toyota he'd rented for my stay. We discussed the day's itinerary and exchanged mobile phone numbers, then headed for the Antiquities office in Zamalek.

There's never any parking in front of the office, so Magdy dropped me off and began circling the block while I ran up the stairs to find Mr. Idress. His office was empty — he was probably operating on Egyptian time. Back at the entrance, I stood watching all the people come and go until I spied Mr. Idress's smiling face. He said he had to go up to his office for a couple of minutes but would be right back. On Magdy's next circuit, I told him it wouldn't be much longer and if he had the chance, could he go to the Alfa Market and get a few bottles of water for today.

Once we were all assembled at the car, I told Mr. Idress to take the shotgun seat, and I got into the back with my equipment. We headed out the Ring Road towards the Giza Plateau. Traffic seemed a lot worse than it had just a year ago.

Travel Tip: Most, if not all, Egyptian roads and highways have very large speed bumps. You'll being going along at 60 kilometers per hour, then out of nowhere there is a giant bump. Cars come screeching to a stop, then ease over the bump, then continue on until the next encounter comes out of nowhere. Some of the bumps are marked and some aren't, so you really have to keep an eye out.


After 40 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic, we left the Ring Road and headed south. I was under the impression we were going straight to Saqqara, but as we neared the Pyramid Road, we turned right, passed the Mena House, and went up to the entrance to the Giza Plateau, the site of the Great Pyramids.

We had to go through security and Mr. Idress had to show his credentials and argue for a few minutes until our car was permitted to pass. We headed to the administration center.


Before he was promoted, this was Dr. Hawass's office. There was a famous rumor that there was a tunnel from his bathroom to a secret ancient library under the Sphinx. I'm here to tell you that I've been in that bathroom more than once, and there is no tunnel. I wish there was, but there's not.

We parked in front, and Mr. Idress got out and went inside. Five minutes later, he came out with another inspector who knew where I was to go. We drove past Khufu's Pyramid, then at the junction turned east past the Sphinx and exited the plateau compound. During the past few years, they have built a 20-foot-high fence that surrounds the plateau to help control access and protect the area from over-eager entrepreneurs.

With the car loaded down with four of us, it scraped as we drove over the speed bumps. It felt like we were going to tear the oil pan off. In this area, the bumps are every couple of hundred yards. So our progress was very carefully slow.

We stopped at a break in the concrete barrier. The new inspector spoke with the police in charge of this entry point. The discussion took a while, during which we were interrupted by groups of camels and riders on horseback attempting to bribe their way onto the plateau. I finally got permission to enter, but Magdy and the car had to stay on the street. We agreed that he'd find a tea shop nearby and wait for us. I was to give him a call when I wanted to be picked up.


Once they got the word that I had permission to visit, the guards were very respectful. We walked a couple of hundred yards up to the Inspector Rest House. This is right next to the Workmen's Village (the place where the workers lived while they built the pyramids) that Dr. Mark Lerner has been excavating for the past few years.


From there, a 15-minute walk through deep sand took us up a hill to the new excavation. It's the tomb site of a worker who was probably a middle manager. He must have died unexpectedly, because the tomb decoration was only in the early stages of completion. When I got out of the car, I made the mistake of asking the inspector what I would be shooting. He told me that it was all out in the open daylight, but once at the site, I found something different. I had to do the sand swim back to the car to get a flash and my tripod.


Entering Tomb from Ronald Dunlap on Vimeo.


Back at the site, I put on my helmet-cam and made my way into the tomb. It was very unfinished, and the ravages of time had also taken a toll. I moved the excavators out of the tomb and took the next hour to get what photographs I could. It was very claustrophobic. Even with a flash it was impossible to get even a semblance of flat light, even after I blocked the window. Wearing the camera helmet while shooting stills was very uncomfortable, and I couldn't tell at what or where the lens was pointing. After an hour of shooting, I wasn't sure what I had, but I'd done what I could. Once outside, Dr. Khajagy told me how he wanted me to frame the exterior shots and what to include. Another 20 minutes and I was shaking hands with everyone and heading back down the hill. I called Magdy, and he was waiting for us as we exited the check point.


Saqqara is another 30 minutes south along the River Road. It is the site of the step-pyramid of Zoser (Djoser), the first large-scale, cut-stone structure on earth. As usual, when we got to the entrance, there was no advance instruction, so we had to show credentials again and argue for the next five minutes before we were allowed to enter. We took a side road past the museum and magazines (where they store artifacts) and headed to the administration center. Mr. Idress got out and went inside to find Dr. Karrar, whose excavation I was supposed to shoot. Dr. Karrar said he'd love for me to shoot his new dig but that we were too late for today. The workers had closed the tombs, and we'd have to come back tomorrow as early as possible. It was agreed that we'd meet his driver in front of the Serapeum, where the Apis Bulls were buried. We'd need a truck to get to the dig site.

We were going to head back to Cairo, but Mr. Idress suggested that we stop at one of the storage magazines and see if they had anything new to document. That was fine with me, so we knocked on the door and made arrangements to shoot a few of the latest finds before they were refurbished and placed on exhibition.


I spent an hour there shooting on the floor with whatever was available. The artifacts were between three and four thousand years old. There were several small religious statues, head rest, an alabaster jar with lid, a broken sandal, lamp, scarab, blue bowl and a scribe's ink palette and stylus. It's amazing how the Egyptian sands hold their secrets so precisely.


After an hour of shooting I could tell our hosts were getting antsy. Most government workers in Egypt tend to try to get out of the office by 3 or 4 in the afternoon. Being a government worker can be prestigious, but the pay is lousy. Even if you hold a Ph.D., you're always in need of a lift and never have any minutes on your phone.

We said our goodbyes to the magazine's staff, got in the Toyota, and headed for Cairo. We would drop off Mr. Idress near downtown, and I asked Magdy if he knew of any computer stores in that area. Naturally, after being in the business for 20 years, he knew where everything was.


He dropped me off in front of an indoor arcade, a warren of small shops selling everything that might have to do with computers, home theaters, or sound-systems. It took me ten minutes of stumbling through the place to find a sales clerk willing to deal with me in English. I showed him a CF memory card and told him I was looking for a reader. He left his shop and went searching through the mall. He returned 15 minutes later with a plastic reader that had a slot for a CF card. I purchased that along with a stack of DVD-Rs for 130 Egyptian pounds ($23.63).


Back at the hotel, I intended to transfer the last three days' shooting from my 16GB card to the desktop and cut a couple of DVDs for Dr. Hawass's team. I plugged in the reader using a USB connection and put in an empty card, and it popped up on the screen. Then I took the Lexar Pro CF card out of the Canon 1Ds Mark III and put it in the reader, then opened it and saw the folder I wanted to copy. The second I dragged the folder onto the desktop, it froze up everything, like the card had been fried. I shut down the MacBook, pulled the card, and put it back in the camera to see if I still had data.

The camera screen said that the card couldn't be read and that it needed to be formatted. I was stunned. I'd just lost three days of shooting. What a major f_ck-up.

It took me most of the night to reconcile myself to continuing the expedition.