Sun, Aug 19, 2007 page12

• Amr Shannon, Egypt's ultimate tour guide

  A desert guide works under tremendous pressure. Someone can get a scorpion bite or a snakebite, twist an ankle, be overcome by heat or simply panic

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  The police were looking for five cars along a lonely stretch of desert road and, well, 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 convoy.

  "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 embarrass the police at the checkpoint. It is, instead, to illustrate one of the first pieces of advice Shannon gives before taking tourists to some of the most beautiful and isolated destinations across Egypt's desert landscape.

  

  Tour guide Amr Shannon looks into the desert in Cairo last Tuesday. After more than three decades of introducing thousands of tourists to the thrill of Egypt's unique and sprawling deserts, Shannon is planning to retire in the fall. He is now helping to teach a new generation of guides not just to showcase Egypt's natural beauty but to behave as a life coach.

  PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

  After more than three decades of introducing thousands of tourists to the thrill of Egypt's unique and sprawling deserts, Shannon is planning to retire in the fall. Equal parts adventurer and philosopher -- Indiana Jones meets Yoda -- he is now helping to teach a new generation of guides not just to showcase Egypt's natural beauty but to behave as a life coach. Guides must know when to intervene (when the tires are buried deep in sand, for example) and when to fade into the background, so guests can experience the buzzing silence of the open desert.

  "When you go to the sea, you get prepared; you will pack your towel, 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 people live on the remaining 6 percent of the land, most hugging the Nile Valley. As a general rule, Egyptians do not like the desert, with relatively few people seeking solace in the hilly terrain of the Sinai or otherworldly landscape of the White Desert, which stretches to the west.

  In these ways, Shannon is a unique blend of East and West. He said his religion was "let it be," a very common state of mind in Egypt. But he also pays attention to detail and has a tremendous work ethic, values Egyptians are not known to cherish.

  "When I take clients out, you did not pay me to show you things. You paid me for your time. My duty is to make the best of your time," Shannon said.

  Shannon had a privileged childhood. His father, Mohsen, was an army general 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, Shannon said that he was 100 percent Egyptian, and that in 1724, the sheik of Al Azhar, the seat of Islamic learning for Sunni Muslims, was a Shannon. Today's Shannon was introduced to the desert as a 10-year-old, when his father 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," Shannon wrote in a short essay 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 part of their lives, I fell in love with the mysterious desert."

  As a young man, 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, Italy, 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 time," he wrote. "Knowing this turns the landscape into a mysterious book full of stories."

  Shannon is 59 years old, always has a multipurpose Leatherman tool on his left hip and favors a turquoise scarf to protect his neck 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 his wife Maria six years ago, and since then they have driven into the desert in twin Jeep Cherokees tiger-striped blue and green, their favorite colors.

  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 accept 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 time in the desert, where men have gone for centuries to find themselves, and something greater than themselves. Or it may be the result of the four days he spent stuck in the desert, convinced 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 Shannon was driving in a desert rally. 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 water into the radiator, assuming they would soon reach the finish. But the race organizers never came. It was only after Shannon's uncle, the governor of the Suez region, called the military that they were rescued. That was in the middle of the fourth day in the scorching sun.

  "Events don't change you," Shannon said of the breakdown. "They can bring out what is already in you. People go through hard and dangerous situations all the time, and they never learn."

  So what did this bring out in him?

  "We were actually very calm," he said. "It must have been based on the belief nothing really matters."

  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 desert wind. 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 happen. A radiator can burst hours from a paved road. Someone can get a scorpion bite or a snakebite, or twist an ankle, or be overcome by heat, or simply panic. The police can detain the wrong five cars.

  When Shannon and his wife prepare for their last few tours, they will have spare tires, extra water, food, a global positioning system, a satellite phone, a small sink and stove -- a do-it-yourself, one-stop fix-it shop. But as Shannon says, the most important thing to carry in the desert is the right attitude. First, accept Egypt for Egypt.

  But the second "let it be" can be applied to the desert, 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.

  "People want to go from Point A to Point B," Shannon said. "But sometimes fate gives you another path."
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