Atef

“Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen. My name is Atef, A-T-E-F. You may call me A-T. It is my pleasure to be your tour director and tour guide as well.” Every morning of the tour, once we were settled on the bus, Atef gave this little speech (or something very similar). By the end of the trip, we were saying it with him. When asked why he introduced himself to us every day, he replied that it was because his name was often terribly misspelled on the evaluations at the end of the tours. One common misspelling of his name was the Arabic word for trash. He wanted us to get it right.

This was just one of the interesting things about our tour director. Atef was a college educated Egyptologist. Here is a definition of what an Egyptologist according to Wikipedia:

An Egyptologist is any archaeologist, historian, linguist, or art historian who specializes in Egyptology, the scientific study of Ancient Egypt and its antiquities.

 

His was very knowledgeable about anything to do with ancient Egypt. My first impression was that he was very controlling, gave out information only as needed and had no sense of humor. By the end of the trip, I was beginning to really like him. He did have some really annoying traits. He referred to us as “you guys” all the time and kept us on a very tight leash. After we had checked in at the Cairo airport on our way to Luxor and were walking towards the gate, he fussed at me for walking too fast. I was just walking down the concourse with my normal airport walk pulling my carry-on. There was nowhere that I could go except to the gate and all I could do once I got there was wait. What difference was it to him? Everywhere we went, we were always herded together and allowed no independence. Needless to say, I’m not used to this. In his defense, I’m sure that he was only trying to protect us. There have been cases where tourists in Egypt were the targets of terrorists. My guess is that he had some bad experiences in the past with the safety of his group, but he shared none of this with us.

Atef had some strange sayings. Goats were always “stupid goats”. Ancient Nubians were always “miserable Nubians.” (This is probably true because the Egyptians were none too nice to the Nubians.) Ancient Coptic Christians were always “fanatic Christians”. (Considering the efforts that some of these Christians put into defacing the Egyptian artwork, I don’t doubt that they were fanatic.) I asked him why he always called the goats “stupid” and his answer was because it usually got a laugh. I don’t think that I laughed, but from now on, I’ll always think of goats as “stupid goats”.

In the end, I did learn a lot from him and that is one of the major objectives that I have of travel. By the end of the trip, I was able to recognize some the hieroglyphic symbols, I knew what hypostyle meant, I learned the 5 pillars of the Islamic faith, I knew the mythology about the gods Horus, Isis, Osiris, Sobek, Seth and Hathor and I had some concept of the size of the ego of Ramses II.

Like, I said, by the end of the trip I realized what a wealth of knowledge he was and that I really did enjoy him as our tour director. He just took some getting used to.

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