Wrecked weekend plans

As some of you may have seen from my Facebook status, my totally awesome trip to the remote oasis town of Siwa was cut depressingly short early Saturday morning. About four hours into a ten hour bus ride, some idiot in a van decided to flip a U-turn and head back toward Cairo. What he didn’t realize was that the highway away from Cairo and the highway toward Cairo were separated by a 50 foot stretch of sand. He was heading the wrong way down the highway at 3am in dense fog. Our tour bus hit him head-on.

No one was seriously hurt, or at least not as seriously as we could have been. The driver went into the windshield, as did my friend Karim, whose tour company organized the trip. The driver went to the hospital right away, obviously in shock and possibly with a broken arm. Karim stayed with the group over the next few hours, as ambulances took us all to a nearby police station where we waited for another bus to take us back to Cairo.

When we finally got back, Karim underwent a complicated surgery to repair a deep cut to his cheek and might have to have another surgery in the next couple days, but beside the wound to his face, he is also okay (though he said if he has to have another surgery, he’s flying back to Canada for it . The only other bad injury was a kid who didn’t wake up right away after the accident and who couldn’t remember certain things like where we had been going and what Siwa was for a few minutes afterwards. It turned out he had snapped his clavicle and had a concussion, which we were pretty certain of, but he also waited until we were back to Cairo to go to the hospital.

I had taken a sleeping pill around 11 so by 3 I was totally zonked, a long scarf triple-wrapped around my face and eyes and my noise cancelling headphones blaring Sugarland. I was sitting sideways in my seat, which was a single, across the aisle from the double seats. A few people shouted right before we hit and someone yelled “Car!” Even as out of it as I was, I pulled into a little ball, lifting my knees to my chest, ducking my head, and protecting my head and neck with my arms to make a kind of a frame. When we hit, the impact threw me into the seat in front of me so that I now have a big bruise on my right thigh and right bicep but I was definitely one of the least injured people on the bus. It is true that you hurt even more the next day and even this morning, I was still finding new sore spots in my back and neck but I’ve loosened up since then and will go into work tomorrow.

The bus itself was a total wreck. The luggage rack on top was torn completely off and every seat inside snapped at the hinges where the back meets the seat from the people behind slamming into the seats in front of them. The windshield was completely shattered but stayed intact so there wasn’t much loose glass around (good thing because a lot of people ran off the bus barefoot because we weren’t sure oncoming traffic could see the bus broken down in one lane in the fog) but there was a big pool of oil that leaked on to the highway. The front of the bus under the windshield was inset about a foot from the impact but the van we hit was in good enough condition for the guy to make a run for it after he made sure everyone was more or less okay.

In Egypt, the person responsible for the accident has to pay for everything, vehicle damage, property damage, hospital bills, medicine, etc. and there is no such thing as auto insurance so it comes out of pocket. I imagine that the guy who learned he just about killed 20 or so foreign tourists was scared to death. He didn’t get too far though because someone had taken his plate number down and, too much in shock to keep driving, he had to pull over at a rest stop a little ways down the road.

I took the day off work and am recovering quickly, with just some bruises and soreness in my abs and back. If anyone is planning to survive a similar wreck, I do recommend the curling into a ball idea, but if possible, try to keep your abs relaxed so they don’t get pulled out of whack…laughing and sneezing are both killers right now.

I am really disappointed we didn’t get to go to Siwa, but, eternal optimist that I am, I did take note that I have never been in a car accident before. So although this was not the weekend adventure I signed up for, it was a new experience nonetheless.