Letting Go

I discovered my camera was gone halfway across the no-man’s-land between Israel and Jordan, at the Rabin border crossing near the Gulf of Eilat. Preoccupied with the formalities of this politically tortuous part of the world, I had not noticed, as I did now, that my shoulder bag was lighter than it should have been. It was a bad moment, not so much because of the camera, but because of the photos—my beautiful photos—taken with such care and passion through Egypt and Israel.

“My camera’s gone!” I called out to my two travelling companions who, always quicker than I, were already dragging their suitcases through the gravelly dust that separated the offices of the officials we had just left, from those we were yet to encounter. “Let’s get through the border,” David said sensibly. Once on the other side, phone calls back to our Israeli guide yielded nothing. I could only conclude the camera had been lifted from my bag as I faffed about in a convenience store where we had stopped beside the highway that leads south to Eilat.

I do not travel, as many appear to do, for the purpose of taking photos. The experience (I have told myself many times) is what matters. But we relive our travels through photos, we beguile relatives and friends (or think we do) with the images we have brought back. For me, the act of seeing and composing photos is part of the way I experience what I see.

Because, with a digital camera, we can review what we have taken, I had in fact already picked out my favourite shots—the importunate Egyptian boat boys, calling out “Hallo, hallo” as they tried to sell us tea-towels from their rowing boats, expertly roped to the side of our cruise ship on the Nile; the boy in the red fez at the window in the Nubian village; the mighty pillars of the temple of Karnak; the glimpse of the temples of Rameses and his queen overlooking the vast artificial lake as we rounded the last boulder at Abu Simbel. And sadly, there were the dozens of empty Nile cruise boats tied up by the river bank, their crews long gone, testimony to the tourists who were no longer coming and would perhaps never be back.

At one point during the night, I was sure I overheard someone saying that the camera had, miraculously, been found! But, of course, I had been dreaming. The camera never appeared again. I bought myself another one, from a rather nice Jordanian shopkeeper. “I suppose it is the pictures, rather than the camera, that you are missing,” he said. Yes, indeed. I gamely started taking pictures with the new camera. Attachment, I said, suffering is all about attachment. I must detach myself from my photos. “You have your memories,” said Ottman, our Jordanian guide, sympathetically. Unlike the Israelis we met, who while professional could be somewhat offhand, the Jordanians seemed naturally to retain more human feeling.

After we all returned home, my friends kindly gave me copies of their pictures, but the images, wonderful though many of them were, did not have my mana. Even the shots we had taken in common seemed somehow different. The world, seen through other eyes, had a documentary look, as if requiring explanation. Over time, the loss, as losses do, started to fade. “The family will be secretly relieved they won’t have to look at so many photos,” I joked sadly. What is a trip, anyway? The images would have spoken to memory. Now memory had to do without them.

The urge to get around the world is strong in most Australians. We love our country, but we need to get away from it every now and then. And for those who are ageing, travel is said to add years to your life, because the need to concentrate on unfamiliar events slows down the apparent passage of time. Each day, even on an organised tour, can be, as Laurence Sterne put it, “the daily expectation of the unprecedented”.

But as you get older, there is more anxiety, which must be overcome. In this case, too, my destination—the Middle East—had been dismissed by most as too risky. But you have to see the pyramids before you die, and Jerusalem beckoned, too.

My very rough risk assessment before I went to Egypt was that, as President Sisi had rightly or wrongly (probably wrongly) locked up most of the Muslim Brotherhood, there were not likely to be street disturbances. In any case, the tour company I travelled with held the view that no sane Egyptian would want to endanger one of their few sources of foreign exchange. Sinai was considered less safe, but the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh had little attraction for me anyway.

Nevertheless there had been a massive falling-away in numbers, not just in Egypt but in Jordan as well. The Egyptians, who have been showing visitors the wonders of their civilisation for centuries, are not only much poorer, but I think genuinely saddened by the drop in numbers. As it turned out, the time I chose to go (March 2015) was probably the last feasible time for the moderately timorous traveller.

Northern Egypt is a stark place. The inequalities of Cairo, particularly around Giza, are startling. There are roughly-built apartments every­where, encroaching on the pyramids from the east. The pyramids themselves were smaller but also more extraordinary than I could ever have imagined. It was hard to believe the same people, even if separated by a few thousand years, were responsible for both the ancient and the modern structures. Yet the apartments were as much social protest as accommodation. There had been an outburst of such building when the Muslim Brotherhood was briefly in power. The rules, said the middle-class people we talked to, had broken down, enabling poor people to move into the city by building on farmland. Sisi, they believed, had brought some order. Yet how long can a political system ignore a teeming population of rural and semi-rural people with few prospects?

Cairo never sleeps. There is a hum over the main square which is never-ceasing. And the Nile is mighty indeed. To actually see it is to understand that Egypt is the Nile. On either side, to the east and the west, stretches a desert that seems as inhospitable as the moon.

What makes countries last, what makes some hang together, while others fall apart? It is a fundamental question, one that has perplexed political scientists for centuries. Egypt, a state of ancient lineage, seemed volatile. Jordan, a kingdom of recent provenance, seemed stable and peaceful, a surprising place of even-paced, relatively modern cities, Roman ruins and crusader castles. But every country wants to show how special it is. How keen the Jordanians were to claim the Nabateans of Petra as Arabs. As Israel’s nearest neighbours, they have become adept at keeping out of trouble.

Following the Yom Kippur War, thousands of Palestinians once resident in the West Bank were resettled in Jordan. More recently, over 600,000 Syrians have come. But when it comes to the security of the state, pragmatism comes first. Jordan cut its formal ties with the Palestinians in the late 1980s, and receives considerable aid from the United States on condition that it keeps Israel’s eastern border secure, while Israel returns the favour from the west. Many Jordanians have Bedouin origins, and can be fierce when it suits them. When dressed traditionally, Jordanian men sport a large knife, with multiple uses, including, as one playfully illustrated, as a toothpick. Now that’s a knife. Strategically placed posters of King Abdullah and his late father King Hussein are reminders, rather than assertions, of royal authority.

I understood something about the Israelis: how despite their success as a nation, the strain of the long war with the Palestinians has told on them. They seem not to like themselves very much. While flying to New York is a straightforward exercise for them, in the immediate neighbourhood they are personae non gratae. Countries that are side by side geographically can be a million miles apart politically.

Israel and Jordan are small countries. You can stand on Mount Nebo in Jordan and see Lake Tiberias (the Sea of Galilee), which is in Israel, shimmer in the near distance. Compared with Australian distances, all the biblical places are almost within a stone’s throw of each other.

Egypt is much bigger, in both area and population. From the mid-1960s its population has increased particularly rapidly, despite government attempts in the Mubarak era to improve the availability of family planning, particularly among poor women. The conflict between conservatives and modernists was not far to see. I thought of the hostility towards our female guide, who defiantly did not wear the hijab. “I am as good a Muslim as they are,” she said. But it was hard to ignore the disapproval shown towards her by both women and men as we passed them in the street.

The Hungarian artist and theorist Moholy-Nagy wrote that photography is a way of enhancing our way of seeing, a potentially transformative act. He listed eight varieties of such seeing—abstract, exact, rapid, slow, intensified, penetrative, simultaneous and distorted. For the average punter, like me though, the photograph is both less and more than this. It is a way of seeing, but it is also about preserving something from the passing of time, a relationship with the world. But there is something, too, of the moment that can in a way be recaptured through the act of remembering when the photo was taken, at the same time as the photo re-evokes the moment it depicts.

Digital technology has transformed the act of the photograph, rendering it more accessible than ever before. Had she returned to the subject she covered so brilliantly in the 1970s, I wonder what Susan Sontag would have made of this democratisation. Film, even with a fairly ordinary camera, required careful selection and examination of variables. There was focus, exposure, focal length. The prints, when they came back, were objects of craft, rather than mementoes. The prints often disappointed, but somehow seemed the more precious for that. With digital, mostly, we blaze away. If we wish, we can check the photo we have taken while we are still in the moment. Reality has never been more malleable.

The urge many have (which I do not share) of seeing the world as a backdrop to repeated images of themselves reaches its apotheosis in the selfie. I saw people taking selfies lying on their backs on top of the supposed rock of Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Digital technology can be quite astonishing. Tiny cameras can do so much. They are point-and-shoot heaven, unless of course, you are trying to do a bit more, in which case it is necessary to have some sense of aperture, shutter speed and the parameters of light.

Is film still better, at some level? Do the nuances of a really good print have something that the best digital image does not? I guess a rationalist would say, it’s a matter of how you like your distortion. Is reality analogue, or digital? A rationalist would say it is a pointless question. What we see with our eyes is light converted to electrical pulses in the rods and cones of our retina. But is the place where numbers fuse to become a seemingly seamless reality the reality captured by film?

Whatever the tourist thinks he or she knows, he or she will always know less than the locals. They know you are in their country only briefly. They know they will never see you again. In Israel, a first-world country even if a very strange one, tourists were welcome, without being particularly sought after. Jordan, with its incredibly high exchange rate relative to the Australian dollar, was too expensive for shopping.

The dearth of tourists in Egypt had brought out truly unbelievable levels of desperation among those who were still trying to make a living. Each stunning precinct of temples or tombs would be succeeded by a gauntlet of small shops selling tourist tat. Shawls would be draped on your arm, calculators produced. In some places, I literally had to shoulder my way past desperate vendors.

I found myself wishing I could still travel as I once did—lightly, with only a pack on my back. Now, there was less time, and more was expected, although when and how one was expected to tip, and whether people had been pre-tipped or not, was never completely clear.

It is difficult for the touring and the toured-among to understand each other. Most Australians work hard for what we have. It is chastening but also annoying to be seen as a relative millionaire, a walking source of potential funds. It gets wearying being quoted prices that would be considered high for the same product in Australia. When this was pointed out, one vendor said, “But that amount is a lot for me, it is nothing for you.”

Who to trust? How much to care if understandings prove worthless? “Did you post my cards?” I asked the shopkeeper on the Nile cruise boat. He had told me a long story about there being no taxes on the boat (so every­thing would be cheaper) and, feeling a bit sorry for him, I had bought some jewellery, and some postcards and stamps. I still love postcards—even though it is becoming tougher and tougher to negotiate the logistics of actually sending them. Oh yes, he said, the cards had been posted by his friends ashore. But I thought his eyes flicked slightly as he said it. Of course, none of my six carefully-written accurately-stamped Egyptian cards ever reached its destination. Not one. (Eventually, all the cards posted for me in Jordan and Israel reached their intended recipients.)

I am not sure how much we learn, as tourists, about the countries we travel through, but every time we travel we certainly learn something about ourselves. Travelling teaches us how little we can control, and how pointless it is to worry about it. Ultimately, we have to let go of everything, including ourselves. It makes sense to practise for that event, without being overwhelmed by the prospect.