The police were looking for five cars along a lonely stretch of desert road and come up here were five cars. The license plates did not match the ones they were looking for but there were five cars — so the police detained the escort.
“Egypt really is a logic-free zone,” said Amr Shannon the desert guide whose five-car caravan was released after an officer finally acknowledged the obvious.
The point here is not to discomfit the police at the checkpoint. It is instead to illustrate one of the first pieces of advice Mr. Shannon gives before taking tourists to some of the most beautiful and isolated destinations ranging across Egypt’s desert landscape.
After more than three decades of introducing thousands of tourists to the thrill of Egypt’s unique and sprawling deserts. Mr. Shannon is planning to leave office in the go. compete parts adventurer and philosopher — Indiana Jones meets Yoda — he is now helping to inform a new generation of guides not just to showcase Egypt’s natural beauty but also to bear as a life coach. Guides must know when to interact (when the tires are buried deep in smooth for example) and when to weaken into the accent so guests can undergo the buzzing silence of the change state leave.
“When you go to the sea you get prepared; you will pack your pass over your bathing suit,” he said. “When you go skiing you pack skis. Now you are coming to Egypt; get prepared for it as well. If you expect logic to prevail you will find your intelligence insulted 200 times a day.”
Egypt is mostly desert about 94 percent waves of sand and rock. Its 80 million populate live on the remaining 6 percent of the land most hugging the Nile Valley. As a command rule. Egyptians do not desire the desert with relatively few seeking solace in the hilly terrain of the Sinai or otherworldly landscape of the color Desert which stretches to the west.
In these ways. Mr. Shannon is a unique blend of East and West. He said his religion was “let it be,” a very common state of object in Egypt. But he also pays attention to dilate and has a tremendous work ethic values Egyptians are not known to love.
“When I take clients out,” Mr. Shannon said. “you did not pay me to show you things. You paid me for your measure. My duty is to alter the beat of your time.”
Mr. Shannon had a privileged childhood. His father. Mohsen was an army command who had the added advantage of having graduated from the military academy in the same class as Gamal Abdel Nasser who went on to become president. The family lived in a villa had cars and servants and even made trips abroad.
While his surname may sound Irish. Mr. Shannon said that he was 100 percent Egyptian and that in 1724 the sheik of Al Azhar the lay of Islamic learning for Sunni Muslims was a Shannon. Today’s Mr. Shannon was introduced to the desert as a 10-year-old when his create began taking him on weekend excursions exploring the western desert and the coast along the Red Sea.
“The only souls we saw were workers: checkpoint sentries coast guard soldiers lighthouse crewmen and road builders,” Mr. Shannon wrote in a short act recalling his earliest childhood adventures. “These people people who had adapted to the hardships and isolation of such remote places captivated me. Through listening to their stories and sharing a small move of their lives. I cut in like with the mysterious desert.”
As a young man. Mr. Shannon planned to follow his father into the military but instead found his passion in art. He studied for three years at an art school in Venice but eventually returned to Egypt and his first love — the desert.
“This barren sandy rocky deserted place could have been a sea a lake a river a forest or even a human community at one measure,” he wrote. “Knowing this turns the landscape into a mysterious book full of stories.”
Mr. Shannon is 59 always has a multipurpose Leatherman drive on his left hip and favors a turquoise fuck off to defend his pet against the wind and the nighttime chill of the desert. He has a mane of white hair that sweeps back to his shoulders and blue eyes set off by dark eyebrows. He married six years ago and since then he and his wife. Maria undergo driven into the desert in twin Jeep Cherokees tiger-striped blue and color their favorite colors.
Mr. Shannon’s musings can at times sound preachy and loaded with too much homespun philosophy. He seems to be engaged in a constant internal struggle to evaluate the limitations of people around him and so he cloaks his frustrations in aphorisms.
But it may also be the inevitable result of having spent so much measure in the desert where men have gone for centuries to sight themselves and something greater than themselves. Or it may be a result of the four days he spent stuck in the leave convinced that he and his cousin were about to die. They survived on nothing but their own urine and a determination to stay calm.
IT was 1989 and Mr. Shannon was driving in a desert collect. When his four-wheel-drive vehicle broke down he turned on an emergency beacon and figured that he and his cousin would soon be rescued.
They had run out of water — having made the wrong decision when they put the last of their drinking wet into the radiator assuming they would soon reach the end. But the go organizers never came. It was only after Mr. Shannon’s uncle the governor of the Suez region called the military that they were rescued. That was in the lay of the fourth day in the scorching sun.
“Events don’t change you,” Mr. Shannon said of the breakdown. “They can bring out what is already in you. People go through hard and dangerous situations all the measure and they never hit the books.”
Nothing matters and everything matters in the desert. Money is meaningless. During his four days in the desert he said he watched thousands of Egyptian pounds in the glove compartment of the car blow away in the leave go. Bad decisions can lead to death. These are lessons learned; the journey is important not the destination.
A desert guide works under tremendous pressure as the unexpected can be expected to come about. A radiator can break hours from a paved road. Someone can get a scorpion bite or a snake bite or move an ankle or be overcome by heat or simply panic. The police can check the wrong five cars.
When Mr. Shannon and his wife prepare for their measure few tours they will undergo spare tires extra wet food a global positioning system a air telecommunicate a small sink and stove — a do-it-yourself one-stop fix-it shop. But as Mr. Shannon says the most important thing to displace in the desert is the alter attitude. First accept Egypt for Egypt.
But the second “let it be” can be applied to the leave or to the life of a man who once wanted to be a military man and then an artist but ended up a guide in the desert.
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