Food Feature: Missed opportunities and chance encounters

The latest rage in civilization’s cradle is the sound and light show. Those of you who’ve been to the laser light show at Stone Mountain should be familiar with the concept. Beams of light are used to illuminate monuments at nighttime to the accompaniment of cheesy music (and to the delight of cheesy tourists). It’s meant as some sort of tribute to the past — old meets new in green and blue. The first sound and light show I saw was at Istanbul’s Blue Mosque. After seeing it, I decided one sound and light show is probably more than I’ll ever need to see. The show was very literal — shades of blue danced across the ancient mosque like a joke with a wide-open punch line. Thick beams of indigo flooded spires and minarets, washing out the detail that characterizes the building as a world-class architectural achievement. Massive speakers blared out the history of the mosque in English, French and German. The choreographed assault on the senses repeats itself every half hour from 8-10 p.m.
You can understand why those who have never been to such an event might find the idea kind of cool, like a real-life version of the lava lamps and black-light posters teenagers spent hours gazing at in the ’70s. It’s hard to talk those hell-bent on seeing it out of going. I met a group of such people on a bus from Da’Hab to Cairo (Tony and Jodi from the United States, and a Danish guy named Mike). As is so often the case when budget traveling, we ended up traveling together, splitting the costs of hotel rooms and taxi fares. Since I was a tag-along, I didn’t press the issue that the sound and light show is probably best experienced as something you read about in your guide book.
Leaving our hotel our first night in Cairo, we found a cabbie who would take us to the sound and light show. He told us it would cost $3 to get from the hotel to the Great Pyramids, but when we arrived at a gate toward the edge of the city he stopped the van and told us he could “drive no further.” When we asked how far the sound and light show was he shrugged his shoulders. We became infuriated because we saw this as a ploy to get more money out of us unsuspecting tourists. “I can drive you to the other side for another $6,” he said. Rather than comply, we got angry and vowed to walk.
When he pulled away and left us standing at the side of the road, we realized we had no idea where the hell we were — a gravel road winding through streets of thatch roof houses where Arabic women stared at us from windows, their faces covered in veils. Dogs roamed the street and fires burned from trash-filled oil drums. Above us was the black sky of the nighttime desert. Tony, Jodi and Mike were visibly nervous as we walked through uncertain neighborhoods, but I found the experience exhilarating.
After about three blocks the gravel road turned to sand and we left the city. We walked yards and yards, the road making its way up a small hill. The further we got from the city, the further into darkness we walked ... and man, was it dark. There was no moon in the sky, and we’d left the streetlamps and trashcan fires burning behind us.
At one point Tony threw his hands in the air and said, “This is ridiculous. Come on, let’s go back.”
We walked another 30 or 40 yards, and were about to turn back when I realized why the sky in front of us was so dark. Standing no more than 200 yards away were the hulking, silent shapes of the Great Pyramids, camouflaged by darkness. They are so big they actually blot out the stars behind them. While an arm of the Milky Way speckled the sky above us, the sky in the foreground was dark and foreboding, reaching up like black triangular fingers from the arm of a tidal wave.
The effect was eerie. Rather than having the impression of looking upon a three-dimensional object, you feel you are looking into darkness, into the bottomless pit of space and time.
I grabbed Tony’s arm to point the shapes out to him. As he spun around to look, a red beam of light from the sound and light show flashed across the pyramids from the other side, giving a groovy outline effect a la Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. “Well, it looks like we missed the sound and light show,” he said in frustration, once again throwing his hands in the air.
Riding in the taxi on the way home, Tony and Jodi grumbled about missing the show while I stared out the window at the dirty streets of Cairo. I was glad we missed the show, although I thought it was cool that one of its stray beams provided us with a beautiful Pink Floyd moment. It amazed me that Tony and Jodi failed to see the value of our visit, but I didn’t let it bother me. I saw the Great Pyramids of Egypt, standing as they have for thousands of years. It was a moment that, although I’ve traveled extensively since, has yet to be matched for the sheer sense of awe and wonder it produced.