Traveling Man
For this adventure, Thaao stopped in Egypt and Syria, with an aside through Russia on his way home. He began in Egypt, where, to finish the story of the balloon crash, Thaao told us "we came down hard and landed on concrete. My back was jarred. Then we were surrounded by police and military men with rifles. We were in military territory!" Fortunately, he got out of that scrape in time for an interview he had scheduled with Dr. Zahi Hawass, the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (quite a title!). When questioned about how he had finagled an interview with him, Thaao responded that he had merely "called from LA and said I was a big shot!" Works every time.
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Unfortunately, Dr. Hawass was not quite the charmer he appears on TV, when he's putting his stamp on new discoveries. He was answering questions with short, single lines, but did that deter Thaao? Not exactly. The "actor came into the picture" for him. "I kept not flinching and every time he'd answer a question, I had the next question going. Where was Bahariyya, where the 10,000 mummies were found? Where was Seti's tomb? Have they found that? He said nothing, nothing, nothing. I said that I knew Omar Sharif because from his book I knew that they were very good friends. Even that didn't make a difference. Maybe a cocktail! Something. I thought, I'm not going to be dismissed here. I'm going to finish this interview. So I got up. Suddenly, it wasn't in his control anymore. I stood up and I said 'Dr. Hawass, thank you so much for your time. May I say you're doing great things for Egypt.' He stood up. That was a sign. He didn't stand up when I walked in but he stood up when I left. He gave me his card and said, whenever you're ready and you want to come and shoot here, then come."
In Luxor, Thaao visited the Tombs of the Nobles, where he was able to take photographs of the three thousand year old tombs, which "was kind of terrific." From Luxor, he visited Kom Ombo, "which is where crocodiles were used as gods. There are stuffed crocodiles there, preserved, from 1600 BC. They used to throw cows in the river, and whichever crocodile got the cow and ate it, that would be the crocodile that they would take out of the water and stuff and preserve like a god. That was the way their myths were."
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And, then, more drama. You have to remember that in Egypt, in certain places, Thaao was traveling with a police escort, all the time. He wasn't feeling well – mostly from the heat of 130 degrees Fahrenheit – and couldn't go with his escort to Abu Simbel. They dropped him off in a restaurant area, where he lay down on the carpet. Unfortunately, the "walls started to move. I thought it was a wall of carpet; it wasn't. It was a secret door that opened and behind it was the secret police!" As Thaao said, it was threatening and trying. It seems like there were lots of run-ins with the police on this trip!
More trials arrived in Syria, where Thaao traveled for the first time as an American, not an Australian, citizen. "They threw my passport back at me," Thaao said. "My identity changed. They didn't even want to look at me. They were all dismissive. I thought, this is a lovely way of being greeted in Damascus. You think of Damascus as the oldest existing inhabited city in the world." Oldest city or not, they still don't take American Express. Thaao had to take money out of the ATM every day, just to survive.
Problems or not, Thaao saw some amazing things in Syria. He went to the museum and to the souk. "It's amazing! It's the biggest arcade in the world. In the end of it are Roman columns. It's all mixed up in there. Then I went to the Christian section. I went to where St. Paul of Manaus, Paul of Tarses, was baptized by Saint Aeneas. This church is from the third century. You go down into it and it's still there. On the east gate, where Pompeii came through with all the Romans, the ancient wall is still there. Can you imagine?"
He also got a driver to take him to Krak du Chevalier. "It is a castle, on top of a mountain. It's spectacular. It was built in the eleventh century. There were symbols of Richard the Lion-Hearted. They had two moats. If you passed the second, they would pour boiling oil on the soldiers. We went through everything in that. The angles, the shapes of the things, their quarters, where they cooked. We're talking a thousand years ago.
"Then we went to Palmyra," Thaao said. "It's an ancient Greco-Roman city from the second BC – second century AD. Nabateans, nomads. The golden-yellow and red color of the sand. On the ceilings, you wouldn't believe it, astrological signs. They were doing astrology there, in those days.
"We'd sit and have cocktails in the afternoon to discuss what we'd done," Thaao continued. "But I just felt so blessed. Here I was so far away from the soap world, so far away from certain mundane things that happen in LA … I'd go back to Egypt tomorrow. I'd like to go now where I don't have to feel that every day I have to see something else, but just to be on the Nile. There's something about the Nile, when you think of what has passed through, it's just a mystical place.
"Imagination flies, but myths are things that never happened that always are, to me," Thaao finished. "That's why they are what they are. It allows us to romanticize. You're going into these places and you wonder if it's truth or myth but it doesn't matter because that's what makes our imaginations soar. That's what's great. And I came back and I was full."
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