"What Is Suez Canal?"

Something didn’t seem right when reading about the Suez Canal in our Lonely Planet guidebook for “Egypt.” The book talked about the engineering wonder being an “impressive sight to behold,” yet offered few practicalities on how best to view it. Lonely Planet takes pride in providing up-to-the-minute, practical information on how to experience a country, but beyond the glowing accounts of the canal, there were few particulars. In Ismailia, near the center of the canal and a two hour bus ride from Cairo, the book did not mention how to view the canal but it featured the house of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French builder of the canal. After describing the house, the book added that it was no longer open to the public. At the southernmost section of the canal, the guide stated that Suez “remains one of the best places in the region to view colossal cargo ships gliding through the canal,” again with no specifics. We had met a few travelers in Egypt—not one had seen the Suez Canal.

Despite the lack of information, we were determined to see the canal. We had all enjoyed seeing and learning about the Panama Canal and its history and we considered a Suez Canal visit an important part of our kids’ home-school education. Considering all our possibilities, we opted for the Suez option and jumped on a bus. After 2 hours of rolling through flat, white desert, our bus came to a stop and everyone exited. We looked around for a bus station, but all we saw were people loading a microbus and a few taxis near the end of a long row of apartment blocks. A taxi driver walked by and asked “Taxi?” and I said “Suez?” He held up 10 fingers and when I countered with six of my own, he shook his head firmly and said “No, Ten.” At this point, we’d been seen by a group of taxi drivers near the microbus and they all sprinted over yelling at us in Arabic. At the same time, a taxi sped right for us and screeched to a halt before almost hitting us; he wanted a piece of the action as well. We watched as the newcomers pushed the first taxi driver out of the way and it looked as if there was literally going to be a fight for our business. I was starting to worry that a small riot might break out, so I said to the first driver, “10. Yes. Let’s go.” I grabbed him by the arm and led him to his cab. After being in Egypt for only a few days, we’d witnessed many heated arguments amongst Egyptian men. The overwhelming majority of businesses were run by men; usually a bunch of them sitting around getting on one another’s nerves. We had already seen a few fistfights. We saw a fight on a boat on the Nile, a fight beside a mosque in Giza and a man being slapped by a woman who was pulling him across the street by the ear. I figured it was better to take the first taxi driver than wait for a fight to erupt. As we neared his cab, I heard my wife loudly say “Get out of my face,” to a snickering young Egyptian man who was saying things in Arabic to her a little too closely. We all jumped in the taxi and sped off. Nervous energy morphed into laughter as we left the touts behind.

Heading toward the port town of Suez, our driver turned to us and said “Suez? Yes?” I said, “Yes…Suez canal…canal of Suez.” He gave me a confident look and then a confused look as we made our way into town. We saw no cargo ships passing by and our driver was clearly unsure of where we wanted to go. In his broken English, he again asked, “Suez? Where in Suez?” Again, I repeated loudly and clearly, “Suez canal,” and starting making gestures like little boats floating by. By now he was frustrated with our lack of Arabic and his limited English and he blurted out “What IS Suez canal?” and pulled to a stop. The irony of a Suez taxi driver not knowing the English words for his town’s world famous attraction generated a shared smile between my wife and I, but now we were getting worried. I got out my guide book and read further in the Suez section to find that the nearby town of Port Tawfiq is “an ideal place to watch the ships go by.” Unfortunately, it gave no details on how to do that and the map surprisingly depicted no canal.

We left Suez and in 2 minutes were in Port Tawfiq. We turned down a long avenue and saw the multi-story “Red Sea Hotel” to our right. With our driver clearly frustrated and no cargo ships in sight, we decided to go to the hotel in hopes that someone might speak English. We paid our driver, walked into the hotel and asked the manager “Is there a place where we can view the Suez Canal?” He gravely nodded and said, “You can view it from our sixth floor restaurant; if you eat lunch there.” We went up to the restaurant and found a clean, breezy and empty restaurant with a full wall of windows facing the canal. After the struggle to get here, we had found the perfect place to view the canal.

Just as lunch was served, a convoy of container ships started slowly making their way through the desert, seemingly cutting their way through the sand, on their way southward to the Gulf of Suez. On a typical day about 3 convoys make their way through the single-lane canal. The passage takes about 12-15 hours with the ships traveling the 119 mile canal at 15 miles per hour (with stops to allow oncoming convoys to pass). We were fortunate to be eating just as a southern convoy was approaching. We pulled up our chairs to the window and enjoyed the view, our near-scuffle with the taxi drivers a distant memory. Despite the lack of information from our guidebook, we’d found that the best method for getting here was just to get on a bus and go.

Cairo, Egypt: The Art Of The Scam

Our Metro train stopped at the Sadat station in Tahrir Square and we walked up the steps, anxious to be spending the day at the Egyptian Museum. As we ascended the last flight of steps, I made brief eye-contact with an Egyptian man in neatly-pressed western clothes walking near us. We now started to walk along Meret Basha, looking for the museum. As we walked I looked down at my map trying to determine if we were on the right track, when the gentleman from the Metro said, “You are looking for museum, yes?” “Yes,” we responded, put at ease by his dress, manner, facility with English and the fact that he, like us, had come out of the Metro and was on his way somewhere and probably not trying to sell us something. “Unfortunately, it does not open for another hour,” he said, with a smile. “Oh, I’m so happy,” he continued, “my daughter gets married tomorrow. She is 22 years old.” We congratulated him and he said, “I am Ahmad…I am so happy…you have a nice family. I’d like to invite your family to my wedding.”

My first thought was: Wedding? That would be awesome! Getting an intimate glimpse of what life is really like in any foreign country is what travelers yearn for. I remember being in Fiji years ago and my taxi driver casually invited me to stay at his home and attend two weddings – one Hindu and one Muslim – and it was a great experience. I remember drinking kava and “getting low” with all his taxi buddies yet never being introduced to his wife. I recall caravanning to multiple stops for the Hindu wedding and eating a small, spicy yellow pepper at the Muslim wedding reception that made me unable to do anything but lay down for 45 minutes afterward.

While I did have my guard up against a potential scam, the thought of attending an Egyptian wedding completely trumped any concerns about getting fleeced. “That would be great,” I said. “Do you have a business card so we can contact you?” Yes, at my uncle’s place, not far from here,” said Ahmad. We walked along the street and Ahmad continued to beam with delight about his daughter’s wedding, talking about the number of guests and the amount of food he had to buy. We arrived at his uncle’s place and he opened the door with a key and said, “Come in please. Have some tea while I find a business card.” “Oh, no thanks,” I said. “We need to get to the museum.” “I insist,” he said. “You must have tea. Besides, the museum doesn’t open for another hour.”

Now that we were in what looked like a shop, my scam sensor was starting to beep more loudly. He led us towards the back of the shop and introduced us to his smiling family: an attractive wife and two pretty teenage daughters. If this was a scam, it was an elaborate one in which the whole family was participating. “Come and have a comfortable seat,” Ahmad said, and led us to a sweetly-scented, dark room with a large comfortable couch. Towards the back of the room an older gentleman sat at a desk, on top of which were what suspiciously looked like perfume bottles. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, went my scam sensor, now ringing very loudly in my head. Yes, we’d been had. We were in the middle of the spider’s web, ready to be shown perfumes until we’d buy a case just to get out of the shop. “This is Ali, my uncle. He has been to Minnesota. He knows your country.” Ali started talking and I muttered to my wife, “We gotta get out of here.”

While Ali talked about how beautiful Minnesota was and Ahmad moved to bring over a tray of perfume bottles, I thought about how we found ourselves in this predicament. Ahmad was indeed artful. He must have been waiting for foreign tourists in the Metro station and I was pretty sure that his information about the museum opening times was a lie. And his daughter’s wedding? I’ll let you decide that one.

If Ahmad’s artistry got us in to the perfume shop it was going to be our steely determination that got us out. I shot a glance at my wife and stood up. “We really need to go. Come on guys,” I said to the kids, who were confused at why we were leaving when we had just sat down. “No, no. You must stay and have tea!” said Ahmad. “No, we need to go now. I’m sorry,” I said, thinking our chances at escaping were better if we did not drink any of his tea. Ahmad reminded us that the museum was still closed, but I repeated our mantra: “We need to go now.” Ahmad’s tone quickly evolved from polite confusion about our impending departure to one of righteous indignation. “But you just sat down! You can’t leave!” he said, standing in front of the door. I reached around him for the doorhandle and brushed by him. He continued to protest, “You must have tea!” as the four of us skulked out the door towards the main entrance. We breezed by one of the daughters as she was bringing the tea tray. We opened the front door, walked outside and did not look back.

As we walked, my son asked why we had left and I explained the ruse to him. When we arrived at the museum we found that it was open, and had been for a couple hours. While we were fortunate to have escaped without buying perfume or having to politely try to leave for an hour, I had to admire Ahmad’s skill in getting some fairly seasoned travelers sequestered in a sales pitch. Ahmad was indeed an artist and the unsuspecting foreigner was his canvas.

Abu Simbel: A Mirage In The Desert

Our 2:30 a.m. wake up call seemed to shake our hotel room, rousing the four of us from a deep sleep. We dressed and went downstairs to the hotel lobby to join other half-awake guests searching through their complimentary box breakfasts to find something edible. We were herded into a minivan and drove through the Aswan streets picking up more tourists until we had a full minibus. Our driver then took us to a spot south of Aswan where a couple dozen minivans and several large buses lined up ready to start the convoy to the Abu Simbel temples. We sat in the chilly pre-dawn desert for a half hour until someone decided that we had enough minivans and buses to start our convoy.

The convoy is a legacy of the 1997 terrorist attack on tourists at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor. In an effort to reassure foreign tourists, the Egyptian government mandated that all foreigners travelling overland between the country’s main tourist centers to join armed convoys. This visible security was intended to dissuade attacks and reassure visitors, but some argue that the convoys have done nothing more than draw attention to potential targets and make it more difficult for the various tourist attractions to process large surges of people at one time.

If we thought that the logistical procedures necessary to get to the monuments were complicated, learning about how the monuments themselves had to be moved dwarfed it by comparison. The Abu Simbel temples are two massive rock temples in Nubia, southern Egypt on the western bank of Lake Nasser about 230 km southwest of Aswan. The complex is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site known as the "Nubian Monuments." The twin temples were originally carved out of the mountainside during the reign of Pharaoh Ramses II in the 13th century BC, as a lasting monument to himself and his queen Nefertari, to commemorate his alleged victory at the Battle of Kadesh, and to intimidate his Nubian neighbors. The temples fell into disuse and were forgotten until 1813 when the Swiss explorer Jean-Louis Burckhardt stumbled upon them while searching for the source of the Niger (yes, Niger) River. (Read blog entry on Burckhardt here) The complex was relocated in its entirety in the 1960s, on a domed artificial hill, high above the Aswan High Dam reservoir. The relocation of the temples was necessary to avoid their being submerged during the creation of Lake Nasser. Starting in 1964, a multinational UNESCO team of archeologists, engineers and skilled heavy equipment operators carefully cut up the site into a 3-D jigsaw puzzle of large stone blocks of up to 30 tons (averaging 20 tons), then lifted and reassembled them in a new location 65 meters higher and 200 meters back from the river, in one of the greatest challenges of archaeological engineering in history.

We arrived after three and a half hours of convoy driving and piled out of our minivan ready for our allotted two hour tour of the site. The façade is of course impressive for its size, detailed carving and its situation overlooking Lake Nasser, the bloated reincarnation of the Nile in Southern Egypt. The interior was well preserved and the fresco of Ramses leading the charge on his chariot in the battle of Kadesh is stunning (photo). The battle of Kadesh featured 5,000-6,000 chariots and pitted the Egyptians against the Hittites in modern-day Syria but there is no scholarly consensus on who won the battle. We visited first the larger temple, dedicated to Ramses, and then the smaller one dedicated to Nefertari, then returned to sit in front of the famous façade, looking for lines where it was cut as well as small tell-tale numbers that allowed its reassembly.

The awe-inspiring sensation of antiquity of this UNESCO World Heritage site was, for me, equally offset by a sense of artificiality. The site is supposed to commemorate a great victory but no one really knows who won the battle of Kadesh, a conflict waged on another continent. The temple’s current location has been barren desert for thousands of years until a 20th century dam was built and the lake behind us, the world’s largest man-made body of water, was not there either. Legend indicates that even the name Abu Simbel is a misnomer. The name has nothing to do with Ramses or Egypt or Nubian history; tour guides regularly talk about a young boy named Abu Simbel who led 19th century explorers to the site and the temples and nearby town were eventually named after him. A tour guide in the desert is a good idea, especially if you are looking for a mirage.

Cairo, Egypt: How Do You Say Motherboard In Arabic?

Our family travels with two computers so that we can pay bills, keep this blog going, check email, skype back home and most importantly, allow the kids to keep up with their studies. We’d been lucky for most of our travels, although our second, older computer died while we were in Mancora, Peru, succumbing to a deadly Trojan virus that brought it to its knees. (From what I saw in that northern Peruvian party town, our Trojan was probably not the only virus being passed around). Once back in the U.S. for Christmas, we replaced it with a new, smaller mini laptop and set off for Africa. All went well until we arrived in Cairo and the new minicomputer started going berserk: colorful patterns and bars flashed across the screen to form a pyrotechnic display of depixelation where the familiar Windows logo should have been. Great. How will the kids do their homework? How on earth are we going to fix this in Cairo, Egypt?

Options flashed through my head. Throw it away and get by on one computer – not possible. Buy a new computer - nope. Try to fix it – O.K., where? I went to the customer service section of the web site for the company, a well-known brand that rhymes with “hell.” I started a chat session early in the morning with Krishna in India who thought that the motherboard was the problem. She said that if I were in the US she could ship me a new one within 15 days. When I mentioned that I was in Cairo, she said that my warranty was not valid outside the U.S. and there was nothing she could do for me. After an hour and a half chat, trying to find any loophole in their policy, I gave up. I now had a malfunctioning motherboard and a useless warranty. Before the end of the chat session, I got the phone number of the Middle Eastern representative, which happened to be located in Cairo.

Cairo is the most populous city in Africa and virtually no one speaks or writes English and all I had was a phone number. I was desperate and was now thinking in magnitudes of hundreds of dollars in order to get it fixed. I asked Mahmoud at the front desk of the African House Hostel to make the call for me to the service center. Fortunately, he located Tarek, an English-speaking technician who told me to bring in the laptop and he would see what he could do.

Mahmoud wrote down the address for me and said that all I had to do was go to the Behouth metro station, jump in a cab and show them the address that he had written down for me in Arabic. In theory, this sounds like a great plan, but the skeptical side of me viewed this like finding a needle in a haystack. I got to the Behouth station and found a taxi driver who seemed to know the address and we drove off. After 15 minutes and many stops to ask other taxi drivers, it was clear that he had no idea where this authorized service center was. After another 10 minutes and a few more stops for directions, we stopped at a corner. The taxi driver pointed down a street and held out his hand for payment. I paid him and started walking.

There is no doubt that finding your way in countries that don’t use roman script (i.e., Arabic speaking countries, China, Japan, Russia) is a bigger challenge than in Europe, South America and most of Africa. I walked for 4 blocks looking at Arabic scribbles and just as the street was coming to an end I finally saw the boxy blue logo of my computer manufacturer. I went inside and asked for Tarek, who took the ailing machine and looked it over. After fiddling with it for 10 minutes, he said, “I will replace the motherboard. You can come back for it tomorrow.” This was great news, but I also had to ask, “How much will it cost?” Tarek waved his hand and said, “It is under warranty, it is free.” I told him about the type of warranty that I had but Tarek again waved his hand and said, “No problem, we’ll just transfer the warranty to Egypt. See you tomorrow.”

I did get the repaired laptop from Tarek the next day, but at that moment I thought about how in six hours my situation had turned around 180 degrees. I had gone from having a fried motherboard and an invalid warranty, to locating the only English-speaking technician in the Middle-east who happened to have the right part who would replace it for free! How do you say “Needle in a haystack" in Arabic?

The Cairo Metro: Protecting The Booty

Sometimes a common objective is what brings a family closer together. While in the crowded Cairo Metro during rush hour, that shared goal brought us much, much closer together. The common objective in this case: protecting the derrière of our 12-year old daughter. We squeezed into the crowded subway car, three of us forming a protective triangle around my daughter. Thinking strategically, I took the aft, positioning myself at the area that was most vulnerable while my son and wife formed the other two points of the triangle. We moved through the sea of men wearing grey, beige and black clothing until we found a spot in the corner of the car. We giggled about the absurdity of our mission and I made a few wisecracks about looking out for “pirates seeking booty.” After four stops we exited the subway car and successfully made it up and to the street without incident. Mission accomplished: we had successfully protected the booty.

The reason for all this fuss about my daughter’s hindquarters was a direct result of what happened to her the previous day. We had gathered into a car at rush hour and all grabbed hold of the vertical pole running from the floor to ceiling of the car. There were about 3 dozen hands holding the pole for stability and the male riders who were pressed together either avoided eye contact or gave polite and impassive smiles of acknowledgment. A middle-aged man smiled at us and I greeted him with salaam aleikum and a nod. After a few more stops we got off with no incident…or so I thought.

As we were exiting the Metro station, my daughter whispered something to my wife who said, “What?” My daughter had just experienced a first: her butt had been improperly caressed on the subway car. “Why didn’t you say something?” asked my wife. My daughter, clearly embarrassed by the whole situation said only, “I didn’t know.” Apparently it was the smiling man next to us who had done it. In hindsight, I guess it had to happen. A very attractive, blue-eyed, blonde-haired girl on the verge of womanhood in the middle of a subway car jam-packed with men. Throw in some middle-eastern, Hollywood-spawned stereotypes about the loose virtues of western women and you have a situation ripe for culture clash. And clash we did on the Cairo Metro.

The Cairo Metro is the only full-fledged metro system in Africa. The system consist of two operational lines, which carry around 700 million passengers a year and on average 2 million people per day. On all Cairo trains, the middle two cars (the 4th and 5th) of each train are reserved for women. We learned this after the successful ‘protecting of the booty’ episode described above and the women-only car became our modus operandi going forward; my son and I headed into the mass of people in the mixed car and my wife and daughter going in the slightly less crowded women-only car.

With the booty successfully protected, riding the subways became a more pleasant experience. Looking back on this episode always gives us a laugh and my wife never fails to point out, in mock indignation: “How come no one was after my middle-aged booty?”

Dahab, Egypt: Incense And Squirt Bottles

We arrived in Dahab after a long 18 hour overnight bus ride from Luxor and the difference between this seaside scuba haven and the rest of Egypt was immediately apparent. The sea breeze was a welcome respite from the dry desert heat, the men wore T-shirts, shorts and sandals instead of dark-colored robes and skull caps and for the first time we met a woman who was actually in charge of something. Dahab sits on the Gulf of Aqaba directly across from Saudi Arabia and is a laid back corner of Egypt, a virtual paradise…except for the flies and the cats.

We knew that we wanted to have our kids get their scuba diving certification while near the Red Sea but we had to decide between the European tourist hotspot of Sharm el-Sheik and smaller Dahab. Dahab was the easy choice -- it was less touristy, less costly and more laid back – and we set up a dive course for the kids beforehand. While the kids went off to their daily lessons, Mom and Dad each prepared to cross an item off their respective bucket lists: my wife wanted to dive “The Blue Hole” (“The World’s Most Dangerous Diving Site”) and I wanted to visit Petra in nearby Jordan.

Dahab is a small town located on the southeast coast of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. When we arrived by bus, a smiling Hosni Mubarak waved to us from a large billbord in the desert that said "Welcome to Dahab." Formerly a Bedouin fishing village, located approximately 50 miles northeast of Sharm el-Sheikh, Dahab is considered one of the Sinai’s most treasured diving destinations. Following the Six Day War, the town was occupied by Israel and is known as Di-Zahav, a place mentioned in the Bible as one of the stations for the Israelites during their Exodus from Egypt. The Sinai was restored to Egyptian rule in the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty in 1982.

These days tourists are flocking to Dahab for its warm weather, clear waters and excellent diving. It is a paradise with the two exceptions mentioned in the first paragraph. I remember visiting the Balinese town of Ubud 24 years ago, a town with a reputation as a cultural and artistic center set amongst beautiful rice terraces in the center of Bali. I also remember that the town, for all its beauty and art, was plagued by dogs: dogs digging through garbage, dogs prowling the streets and dogs barking all night. The Balinese just shrugged and said that “Even paradise needs balance.” Perhaps that’s why Dahab needs the flies and cats. Sit down to breakfast or lunch and as soon as the food is set at your table, the flies are everywhere. Kick back on your cushions for dinner and cats will arrive with your meal. In Ubud I never walked anywhere without a large stick for fending off any aggressive dogs and likewise, Dahab has its unique solutions to the fly and cat problem: incense and squirt bottles. The waiters at the seaside cafes bring several smoking sticks of incense with every meal, strategically placed around the table, creating a forcefield that keeps many of the flies away. While occasionally you inhale some frankincense while eating, it does seem to keep the majority of the flies away. At dinner, waiters bring you squirt bottles to keep the cats away from your food; after every few bites you can perfect your aim by hitting a feline between the eyes. Our kids loved the target practice and within minutes water was flying everywhere. After a few minutes we had to insist that they hand over the bottles. Like the incense for the flies, the squirt bottles kept the cats mostly at bay.

Despite these twin nuisances, Dahab was a peaceful and enjoyable stay for us. Our point of contact for our kids’ diving was Hanan, who very competently dealt with all our questions and concerns. Aside from a female doctor working in a Cairo pharmacy, all businesses we'd seen were run and staffed by men and we had virtually no interaction with women. Hanan was from Cairo and moved to Dahab with her husband several years back when she got married. She was drawn to Dahab for the same reasons that tourists love it. If you haven’t been to Dahab, I suggest that you plan a trip there. Just don’t forget the incense and squirt bottles.

Sinai, Egypt: Only Four Camels For Our Daughter?

After Abdul asked my daughter’s age, he was quiet for a minute. The sun was going down over the rough craggy hills of the Sinai, washing them in a dark reddish hue. Abdul continued, “Your daughter is very pretty. I can pay four camels.” My first response was Marriage? She’s only 12 years old! but I collected my composure and asked, “Why only four?” “Four is a good price,” he said, “I am poor Bedouin man.” I wasn’t sure if Abdul was serious or just playing with me, nevertheless, I countered with ten camels, not having any idea if his initial “bride price” was fair or not.

Like most traditions, the “bride price” is rooted in economics. Bedouin boys have traditionally stayed with their family and tended goats and camels or helped in the family business and girls were married off to join a new family. Girls offered more than cooking and cleaning in terms of economic value…they had the ability to generate more boys, thus more laborers who could work for the receiving family. It made economic sense to be compensated for this loss. In addition to labor and food, the camel is a medium of exchange and it's appropriate that camels would be the basis of the “bride price.”

This was all interesting, but what I was dying to know was had I been insulted? Is four a good price? We knew from our visit to the Birqash camel market outside Cairo that a large camel could be bought for $700 (see Cairo Camel Market blog post), so that would put the monetary value of my daughter at $2,800. Later Internet research told me that anywhere between 2 and 20 camels is customary for the Bedouin but, most importantly, it depends on the potential groom’s ability to pay.

Bedouin people have been traditionally poor, but few live like their ancestors these days, especially those who are guiding tourists for a living. Abdul’s ancestors, those of the Muzeina clan, lived in camel- or goat-hair tents and raised livestock, hunted and raided their neighboring tribes. Bedouins of the Sinai are going through dramatic changes and are forced to rapidly adapt to a new way of life due also to the impact of tourism. Since the rise of Islam, Bedouins have acted as 'tourist" guides, leading pilgrims across the Sinai to places of worship: Mecca, St. Catherine’s Monastery and Jerusalem. The Sinai Bedouins are split into roughly 10 tribes. The oldest tribes inhabiting the Sinai desert are the Aleigat and the Sawalha sharing a territory between Suez and Al Tor reaching into the high mountain region around Wadi Feiran and Sarabit el Khadem. For the last 500 years the Muzeina tribe occupies the territory from around St. Catherine to the Gulf of Suez and from Al Tor covering the southern Sinai from Sharm el Sheikh to Nuweiba. The Tarabin Bedouins are located just north of Nuweiba and arrived to Sinai some 300 years ago.

We sat a while longer enjoying the view of Dahab, a fishing village turned into a scuba diving haven for backpackers, and watched the distant lights of Saudi Arabia across the Gulf of Aqaba. We walked over to where we’d have dinner and Abdul brewed us some strong, sweet mint Bedouin tea as he made dinner. Dinner was roast chicken, vegetable stew, rice, unleavened bread and a tasty taboulleh-like salad. Abdul and I didn’t speak again about the camels. He drove us back to our hotel and we tipped him well for his guide services. My wife and I occasionally make jokes about our daughter’s “bride price” but I still wonder, “Had I been insulted?”

The Cairo Camel Market

Quite often the journey is as interesting as the destination and getting to the Birqash camel market on the outskirts of Cairo was no exception. The guidebook made it sound easy to get to (by taxi 30-40 minutes north of Cairo) and Mahmoud, one of the men who alternate at the front desk at the African House Hostel, offered to write down the name in Arabic for us as well as his cell number in case we got lost. He scribbled this down on the back of a business card for the hostel and we were set. Just like a Monopoly “Get out of jail free” card, we had our "lifeline." As long as I didn’t lose my little piece of paper we could avoid any problems getting to where we wanted to go.

Clutching our lifeline, we walked out onto the early-morning Cairo streets. The first two taxi drivers we flagged down stopped and looked at our little piece of paper as though they’d never seen Arabic before. After a robust salaam akiekum greeting, we stood and watched each of them silently as they wrinkled their foreheads, looked at us, then gave us an apologetic shrug before handing us our piece of paper and driving off. The third driver who stopped for us took a glance at the paper and instantly invited us into his taxi. We quickly negotiated what we knew was a fair price and sped off through the half-empty streets. Everything seemed to be going well until our driver turned his taxi around and started coming back the way we came. Then he turned off near some large apartment buildings and slowly looked around. We’d read that the market was on the edge of Egypt’s Western Desert so we knew we were not close. Time to pull out the lifeline: I flipped over the little slip of paper and pointed to Mahmoud’s phone number.

We watched while our driver had an animated conversation with Mahmoud that looked like it involved some re-negotiations. After 10 minutes on the phone, the driver grumbled and we drove back the way we came, finally turning north on a freeway and following the Nile for awhile. After 30 minutes, we turned off the freeway and our driver rolled down the window and asked a man driving a horse cart “Souk gamel?” (camel market?). He pointed to the right and for the next hour we drove through small towns, stopping many times to ask the same question: “Souk gamel?” About two hours after leaving our hostel, we finally arrived at the Birqash camel market. If our journey to the market was arduous, the camels’ were far worse. Most of the camels are from the Sudan and are walked up the Forty Days Road across the Egyptian border to a point just north of Abu Simbel. They are then driven north on a 24 hour dash to Birqash and by the time they arrive, they are not in the best of shape.

We paid our entrance fee and entered Egypt’s largest camel market. In the hot, dusty compound there were hundreds of somewhat-scrawny camels with robe-clad men whacking them with sticks. Aside from some women selling drinks and food near the entrance and a few tourists, there were no women at the market. The compound was surrounded by low, flat stucco buildings with stacks of hay and grazing goats on top. The camels were marked with blue spray-painted Arabic script on their sides and their left legs were folded back and tied to reduce their mobility, their protruding knee resembling an amputee’s stump. Little boys, imitating their fathers and older brothers, whacked away at the camels, many of whom let out loud groans. Navigating the market was difficult; if you stopped to take a picture in one direction, invariably a massive camel would be come up behind you from the opposite direction. We stopped to watch an impromptu auction. Men in blue, grey and khaki robes stood on the steps of a building while camels were paraded in front of them. Multiple hands shot up to place bids and each sale took about a minute. I learned later that prices range from $350 to $700 per camel, depending on the size and health of the camel.

We kept walking through the market and I suddenly heard my kids utter a collective groan. Right in front of them, a recently-purchased camel was being held down and its throat slit. Aside from being used as beasts of burden, many of the camels were used for meat, a fact that was made all too plain for our kids. The market had been great but seeing this definitely put a damper on the experience for our kids. It was time to go. We found our taxi driver and headed back towards Cairo. Presumably, getting back to Cairo would be much easier but we had our lifeline just in case.

Safety Tactics On Cairo Streets: The Human Shield

I first heard the term "human shield" during the Iraq war in the 1990's, when the Iraqis were placing people near strategic military targets to deter the sites from being bombed. While the term entered my vocabulary 20 years ago, I'll bet the pedestrians of Cairo have had a word for it as long as they have had their serious traffic problems. Cairo traffic is so completely choked with cars and pedestrians that the safest way to cross a busy street is to keep the local Cairenes between you and the traffic. This works pretty well, especially if you've got gaggle of veiled Muslim women acting as your human shield.

Walking the congested streets of Cairo, this term popped into my head many times as, by experience, we discovered that this was the best way to cross the streets and not get killed. After a few days and many street crossings, the term became our rallying cry whenever we had to cross the street. My son delighted in yelling “human shield,” while running over to some locals, then turning to look at us with a big grin. We needed this tactic even if we wanted to cross the street in front of our hostel at midday just to go to our favorite bakery.

When you can't find your human shield, you have to improvise. We needed to cross a busy street on our way to the Khan il Khallilly bazaar but there were no locals to hide behind. A man stepped between my wife and daughter and tried to halt traffic for them to cross, while my son and I, smelling a potential baksheesh liability looming, looked the other way and started crossing on our own. Once we all crossed, I looked over to see if he had asked for baksheesh but he was no longer escorting my wife and daughter. A fat, veiled Muslim woman had grabbed him by the ear and was dragging him across the street. A small crowd had gathered to watch and we craned our necks to see the very public, one-sided fight. She was slapping him over and over again and our guess was that he had disgraced his wife by being seen in public with two western women with their heads uncovered. (more on aggressive Egyptians here: What is Suez Canal?)

There are many dangers on the Cairo streets: from heavy traffic to angry housewives. Do yourself a favor and always look for the human shield.


For more Travel Safety tips, visit featured Lonely Planet blog Todd's Wanderings

The Last Fez In Cairo

As printed in Hand/Eye magazine on April 8th, 2010

Mohammed Al-Tarbishi is a man of his word.

Before his father died, he made a promise to carry on the family business started by his grandfather over a hundred years ago. The business of the family is the fez, or as it’s called in Egypt, the tarbouche. Buried deep within Cairo’s frenetic, market alleys just off the famous Khan al-Khalili bazaar, the small Al-Tarbishi storefront factory continues to handcraft the iconic tarbouche. While attitudes in Egypt towards the tarbouche have changed dramatically in the past couple hundred years, time stands still in the Al-Tarbishi factory, the last remaining fez maker in Cairo and indeed all of Egypt.

The tarbouche is the familiar-looking, truncated cone hat made of red felt that is topped with a black tassel. Its origins are somewhat of a mystery but its rise to prominence started during the Ottoman Empire in 1826, when the sultan Mahmud II decreed that all males should wear the hat. At that time, the tarbouche symbolized Ottoman modernity and the brimless hat was perfect for Muslims when they pressed their forehead to the ground for daily prayers. In 19th century Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha mandated the tarbouche as required headgear for Egyptian males. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, most men in Morocco, Egypt, Turkey and Syria proudly wore a fez or tarbouche.



Its decline began in 1925 in Turkey, when Mustafa Kemal Attaturk outlawed the fez in his successful efforts to make Turkey a more modern and secular country. Egypt followed suit in the post-revolution 1950’s. “Before the 1952 revolution the tarbouche business was much bigger,” says Mohammed. Indeed, hardly anyone wears the tarbouche in Egypt these days and the al-Tarbishi business is a fraction of what it was prior to the 1952 Egyptian revolution. Mohammed’s principal livelihood is as an engineering consultant, but he continues to keep the factory going and he looks in on it a few days a week. He apprenticed in the shop while in school and university from the time he was 15 to the time he was 27. While his grandfather started the business and he and his father have carried it on, the future is uncertain. “My son doesn’t want to continue the business. When I retire…,” and he leaves off with a shrug and rueful smile.

Mohammed walks over and displays the raw materials, which are now all made in Egypt, but during the business’ heyday were imported: felt for the outer surface of the cap (previously from Austria and Czechoslovakia), woven straw for the interior padding (previously from Greece), leather for the interior headband (previously from Belgium) and silk for the black tassel (previously from Lebanon).



He continues over to the waga, the large tarbouche press that takes up almost a quarter of his dusty thirty-five by fifteen foot storefront factory. The waga looks like an oversized brass stovetop upon which rest three large hand-tightened presses. Each press has a large handle on top that hand-cranks pressure downward onto the forms – which in turn resemble two upside-down, brass pails that nest on top on one another. With heads coming in all sizes, the factory needs to keep quite a few sizes of brass molds on hand. One of his workers, Ramadan, works at the waga heating the molds that shape both the inner straw padding and outer felt surface of the hat. The inner form is hollow and Ramadan heats it on the waga’s stovetop. “The mold is heated to 90 degrees (Celsius) and there is no thermometer on the waga,” says Mohammed. As he says this, Ramadan gauges the heat by licking his fingers and briefly touching the waga. He does this a couple times until he is satisfied that he’s got the right temperature. “If the temperature is more than 90 degrees,” says Mohammed, “the felt will burn. He knows what he’s doing; he’s been doing it for 40 years.” Once the inner straw and outer felt are formed they are allowed to cool and are sewn together with the antiquated Singer sewing machine next to the waga. The waga is so old that the manufacturer died 50 years ago, leaving Mohammed and his staff to improvise repairs on the ancient machine. The waga sits on a track so that the press can be partially rolled outside when it gets too hot.

“It takes about three hours to make one tarbouche,” offers Mohammed. “If I sell one hat to a tourist it will cost one hundred Egyptian pounds (about $18) but these days we only sell a couple per month. Before the revolution we sold many, many times that amount each month,” he says. With demand for the tarbouche down to a trickle, it is only orders for similar-looking religious caps from nearby Cairo schools that keep the business afloat. “There are a few workshops that sell to tourists in Cairo, but we are the last factory.” When Mohammed al-Tarbishi retires, a long Egyptian tradition may retire with him.


You can buy a tarbouche from Mr. al-Tarbishi at his storefront factory on 36 Alghoria Street, which runs between Khan al-Khalili bazaar and the Bab Zuweila citadel.

The Seven Wonders Of The Ancient World

At some point it was getting a bit ridiculous: get up early, run to see some ruins that weren’t there, jump on a bus, connect with another bus, arrive late at the next town and then do it again. And again. This is what our itinerary was like for the better part of last week. We made the mistake of ordering a Kids Discover pamphlet titled “7 Wonders of the World” and making our kids read it as part of their homeschooling. Unfortunately, our daughter decided that we must see as many of them as possible. “We’ve seen the pyramids and the lighthouse at Alexandria and we are planning to go to Rhodes,” she said as she browsed the pamphlet, before continuing. “You know…Bodrum is not that far from Rhodes and the Temple of Artemis is right next to Ephesus, which you said we were going to anyway.” Control of our itinerary was gradually slipping away from us and into the hands of our 12-year old daughter.

The Seven Wonders of the World is a well known list of remarkable constructions of classic antiquity. Alexander the Great’s conquest of much of the known world in the 4th century BC gave Hellenic people access to the great civilizations of Egypt, Persia and Babylon and a consensus formed from such writers as Antipater of Sidon, Philon, Herodotus and Pliny the Elder. The seven ancient wonders are the Great Pyramid at Giza (Egypt), The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (Iraq), The Lighthouse at Alexandria (Egypt), the Temple of Artemis (Turkey), the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (Turkey), the Statue of Zeus at Olympia (Greece), and the Colossus of Rhodes (Greece). Ironically, five of the seven wonders were celebrations of Greek or Hellenic culture (all except the Great Pyramid and Hanging Gardens) yet these days five of the seven are in Muslim lands (all except the Statue of Zeus and the Colossus of Rhodes).

The thing that you have to remember about the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World is that, with the exception of the Great Pyramids, they are gone. The Hanging Gardens, Alexandria Lighthouse and Colossus of Rhodes were toppled by an earthquake and fire did in the Statue of Zeus and the Temple of Artemis. There are a handful of other lists like the Seven Modern Wonders or the Seven Natural Wonders and even the recent internet vote for the New Seven Wonders, but we focused on the ancient list because it dovetailed so nicely with our itinerary. In Egypt, the Pyramids and the Lighthouse at Alexandria were easy to get to because they are near large cities. At Alexandria, we visited the site and our kids touched some of older stones of the Quaitbay Castle, allegedly from the Lighthouse. Having also touched the Great Pyramid, our daughter was now on a quest to touch at least a part of them all. (I should mention that we have no intention of going to Iraq to look for or touch the Hanging Gardens; six out of seven will have to do)

We arrived at the Rhodes harbor via ferry from Marmaris. After checking into our hotel, we went to the old harbor entrance that was supposedly the site of the Colossus and saw nothing but a small fortification and lighthouse. The Colossus was a copper statue of Helios, the sun god and was built in 226 BC. It was about 110 feet high and only stood for 60 years. We looked for pieces of copper in the shallow water; we’d later learned that the copper ruins lay around for almost 900 years before invading Arab armies looted it and sold the copper pieces to a Syrian merchant. We left Rhodes by the same route and made our way back to Marmaris, Turkey so that we could catch the last bus to Bodrum, the location of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. We arrived at our Bodrum hotel at around 9:00 pm and went right to sleep. We woke up early the next morning and marched over to the ruins of the Mausoleum. The site was predictably unimpressive and had a couple dozen column pieces scattered about the site. The structure was built in 351 BC for King Mausolus, which is where we get our name for mausoleum. There is a beautiful marble frieze from the mausoleum that, like many antiquities, sits in the British Museum. After the initial fire, crusaders looted the site to use for other purposes.

After 45 minutes at the site, we picked up our bags and jumped on the first of two buses to Selcuk, the site of the Temple of Artemis. At Selcuk, while rolling our bags away from the bus station and towards our hostel, we caught a glimpse of the lone remaining column from the ruined site. Checking my watch with my daughter, we realized that we had seen 3 of the 7 wonders within a 24 hour period. The site was also unimpressive but we had to visit so the kids could touch the remaining column. The temple was built in 550 BC and may have been the most beautiful of all the wonders. We headed back to the hostel so that we could get much needed naps. Five down and one to go. Within the next few weeks we’ll be visiting the site of the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the site of the first Olympic games. That is unless our daughter gets control of our itinerary again.

Leaving Egypt Behind

Our Cairo-Istanbul flight lasted two hours and connected two great, populous Islamic cities whose countries have most of the eastern Mediterranean coastline. Within the first few hours of our arrival in Turkey there were clear differences. In Istanbul, there were fewer head scarves and burkhas and more tight jeans and high heels. We saw virtually none of the forehead bruises that shouted “look how devout I am” and not once had we seen men rolling out prayer mats in the middle of the street to pray. The streets were cleaner and prices higher: In downtown Cairo dinner for four costs us US$9.00 at Al-Tabeh restaurant but it took a lot of effort to find a lunch in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet section for less US$50.00. Despite the surface similarities of the two countries, we felt very clearly that we’d left Egypt behind.

Many of the differences are because of one man: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In the wake of the Ottoman Empire collapsing during World War I, he embarked upon modernizing reforms to make Turkey a secular nation. In 1922 the Sultanate was abolished and in 1923 the capital was moved from Istanbul to Ankara. In 1924 the Caliphate was abolished, Islamic law was abolished and a constitution was adopted. That same year the fez was outlawed and women were discouraged from wearing veils. In 1925 the Islamic calendar was dropped in favor of the Western Gregorian calendar and in the following year European-type laws were adopted. The new laws ended Islamic polygamy and the common practice of divorce by renunciation. In 1928 a new Turkish alphabet, basically a modified form of Latin, was introduced and replaced Arabic. In 1933 to the Islamic call to worship was required by law to be in Turkish rather than Arabic. Within a ten year period, Ataturk had successfully instituted these reforms that made Turkey much more western and much less Arabic.

If these things weren’t enough to let us know that we’d left Egypt behind, our experience at the Gedikpasa Turkish bath left no doubt. We walked into the dark, dank and domed reception area and were given a changing room and a towel. My son and I entered the men’s area and started with a sauna, then waited on the large, heated marble slab for our Turkish masseurs. Mehmet came for my son and brought him over to the washing area and Yacush did the same for me. The bath area’s floors and walls were made of white marble which held up a large stucco dome pierced with ventilation holes. Water ran swiftly through cut-marble conduits, steam hissed from the sauna and water droplets fell at irregular intervals creating a Turkish symphony of water. Yacush started by sloshing me with a bucket of warm water, then lathered me up with soap and started to work me over with his black loofa mitt. I leaned my head back, enjoying being cleaned thoroughly and looked over and saw my son doing the same. I closed my eyes for a few minutes and my reverie was interrupted by Yacush exclaiming something in Turkish. He said it again and motioned for me to look down at my arm. There I saw long, black worm-sized strings running across my arm. At first I thought that his black loofa mitt was falling apart, but when I looked again I recognized that what I was looking at was my own dirty skin being rubbed off my body. Five weeks of travelling through desert oasises, dusty archaeological sites and dirty downtown Cairo had accumulated on me and was now being released. I heard the same exclamation from my son’s masseur and I knew he was just as dirty as I was. Afterward, my wife and daughter related similar experiences. The Gedikpasa Turkish bath was built in 1475 and we wondered how many pounds of skin and dirt have been flushed away through its beautiful, marble water canals.

It was at that moment that we knew that we’d left Egypt behind.

Finding "Midaq Alley"

We’d been here once before, but this time I wanted to get a better look. We walked through Cairo’s Khan il-Khalili’s labyrinthine market alleys and passageways, while touts and vendors, sensing that we weren’t completely sure where we were going, kept saying, “Here it is,” or “Hey, you’re back,” anything to get us to stop and look at their wares. We turned left past the spice merchant and the smell of cumin, saffron and dried hibiscus flowers filled the air. We were walking in Egypt's most famous market bazaar, searching for the eponymous location of Naguib Mahfouz’ literary masterpiece Midaq Alley.

Written by the Egyptian Nobel laureate, Midaq Alley follows the intertwining lives of impoverished people living and working in an old, narrow alley in the heart of Islamic Cairo. Although I’d heard of Mahfouz at the time of his winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988, I had until recently not read anything by him. My wife had read the Cairo Trilogy with her book club (most of whom, surprisingly, didn’t care for it) and had raved about his writing for years. At a bookstore in Luxor she bought a copy of Midaq Alley for our 19 hour bus ride from Luxor to Dahab on the Red Sea and it was there that I started the book.

In the first twenty to thirty pages of the book the characters of the alley are introduced. Kirsha is the café owner with an eye for young boys and Abbas is the barber who wants to get married. Hamida is the beautiful young woman who dreams of a better life and Um-Hamida is her adoptive mother who is a matchmaker and bath attendant. Zaita is the cripple maker, Ibrahim Faraj is the pimp and Dr. Booshy is the dentist who fits dentures at “too good to be true” prices. Husniya is the bakeress who regularly beats her husband and if anyone has problems they usually go to Radwan Husseiny for a reasonable solution. While the sum of these parts add up to an entertaining book, it is the way that Mahfouz weaves them all together that makes the story so satisfying.

When we walked by the alley previously we could not believe that this dirty, non-descript place was worthy of the attention of a great writer. We’d been on our way to shop in the famous bazaar and our guidebook mentioned its approximate location. This time, after having read the book, my son and I came back to sit at Kirsha’s café and soak up the ambience. My wife and daughter went shopping, looking for alabaster votive candle holders. (They went away to buy three but would end up buying twelve) By my reckoning, we were sitting at Ibrahim Faraj’s table, where he sat and wooed Hamida by blowing kisses upward towards her window as he exhaled hubble-bubble smoke. To our right a spice seller displayed his neat pyramidal piles of dried spices in front of his shop and to our left a dry goods vender unloaded large boxes of matches near the beginning of the alley. In front of us was a boarded-up business and I wondered if this was Abbas’ barbershop. We’d been in Egypt for over a month and had met many Egyptians but had not seen any of their private moments. After reading Midaq Alley and absorbing the details of how they seduce, fight, aspire, cheat, fret, desire and worry, it added some depth to the impressions I got from the Egyptians we encountered every day.

Midnight At The Oasis

When we were starting to leave the town of Bawati, Nasser told us, “At checkpoint, say you are German. Also, tell them you leave passports in Cairo.” This statement by our Bedouin guide raised many questions for us, most of them unsettling. “Why should we say we’re German?” Is there anything wrong with being Americans here?” “What has happened here that makes this necessary? Nasser was our guide for a three-day, two-night desert trek at the Bahariya Oasis, an oasis in the middle of Egypt, and we eagerly awaited his answer.

“German people no problem. American people no problem. Americans and British people have escort with gun…make it difficult for desert safari.” I asked, “Why do Americans and British people need escorts?” Nasser replied, “French, Spanish, German good. Americans and British VERY good.” What Nasser was trying to tell us was that the Egyptian authorities took extra precautions with American and British nationalities in the desert, specifically an armed guard to accompany them, and that the guard’s presence put some of the more interesting sights off limits. We agreed to pose as Germans and the kids were practicing “Guten tag” in the back of the jeep. If we were caught in a lie, we could always say we misunderstood the guard at the checkpoint. We rolled smoothly through the checkpoint and left Bawati and the Bahariya Oasis.

The Bahariya Oasis has been a permanent fixture on the Egypt-Libya caravan route since antiquity and in the past has produced wine and dates for export to the Nile Valley and Rome. The Romans set up a fort here and the discovery of Alexander the Great’s image and cartouche in the 1930’s suggest that he visited as well. We motored south down the highway and within a half hour entered the Black Desert. The Black Desert looked like hundreds of small volcanoes with black rocks spread all around. The desert was formed by the erosion of the conical black mountains, which spread a layer of black rock and gravel everywhere. After an hour, we reached the White Desert and the landscape changed significantly. Now the white sand had and many wind- and sand-eroded rock formations all around. The formations – eroded calcite deposits – took the form of many familiar shapes: chickens, mushrooms, birds, camels, Pharoahs and many others. We stopped for photos soon after we entered the White Desert Protectorate and while there came across a solitary, black scarab beetle in the sand. The scarab beetle was considered sacred in Ancient Egypt and is found on the inscriptions of many temples. We learned of its significance while in the famous Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The scarab beetle, essentially the feces-collecting dung beetle, is typically seen rolling around a ball of dung and the ancients assumed this ball to be its own egg; the beetle thus came to symbolize death and rebirth, common preoccupations amongst the Pharaohs.

We stopped for the night in the New White Desert and Nasser parked the jeep in the shadow of a large rock formation. While he set up camp and got our “Bedouin dinner” started, we walked around a bit. The kids went exploring and climbed every possible formation near our camp. Once dinner was ready, night had fallen and we sat down to a meal of chicken, stewed tomatoes, zucchini and rice, washed down with some sweet Bedouin tea. As we ate, we were visited by a few curious and hungry desert foxes, who would alternately inch forward then sprint backward with any sudden movements on our part.

Nasser was a tall, slender Bedouin with misaligned, yellow teeth but he was a good guide and cook. He looked elegant in his turban and grey, floor-length Bedouin gown. Clues to his cultural identity came when I asked him if he was Egyptian. “No, I am Bedouin,” he stated. He mentioned that he’d be “going to Egypt” for a wedding later that week, which to him meant Cairo. I actually ran into him when he was there; he looked non-descript, short and insignificant in his western clothes and I hardly recognized him. After dinner, we watched the moon rise from below the horizon and traverse up into the night sky, giving the sandstone sculptures around us an ethereal glow. We cleaned up our dishes and got out some massive camel-hair blankets in preparation for a night under the stars. We watched shooting stars for awhile but the cold desert night soon made us retreat under our blankets and we fell asleep.

We left the desert the next day and got back to the Bahariya Oasis. Nasser put us in a shared microbus back to Cairo that was going to take about 5-6 hours. As we left, we came to another checkpoint. While officials peered into our packed microbus, passengers chattered amongst themselves, wondering where we were from. The kids, remembering Nasser’s words at the desert checkpoint, muttered something about us being German. This information got to the lead official who looked at me and said, “Passport! Go inside.” At this point my wife and I were concerned that we’d be in trouble for lying. I went inside with the passports and waited while four Egyptians officials argued with one another. Two of them had bruises on their foreheads, something that we’d seen a lot of in Cairo. The bruises were from daily prayers -- vigorously touching the ground with one's forehead -- and the more devout the Muslim, the darker the forehead bruise. Both my wife and I had been to Egypt over 20 years ago, and neither of us remembered the forehead bruises or the large percentage of women wearing burkahs, for that matter. Egypt had definitely gotten more conservative during that time.

As I was preparing my story – I don’t know who said we’re German, we’re Americans…here, look at our passports – the two forehead-bruised officials looked at me for about five seconds and said, “No passport. Go,” and motioned for me to quickly leave. I jumped into the microbus and we rolled out of the Bahariya Oasis and back to Cairo.

Baksheesh!

Our driver had just dropped us off from our all day Abu Simbel tour and we started out walking along Aswan’s corniche riverfront towards our hotel. From behind us I heard a hissing noise, once faintly, then a second time, more loudly: “Baksheesh!” Our driver, who had been paid well to drive us to Abu Simbel and a few other Nubian monuments for the day wanted to know where his tip was. On this occasion I ignored him – we were already walking away, his engine was running and there were other passengers in his van – but I later regretted this. As our guidebook mentioned, museum guards, bellhops and drivers are not paid well in Egypt and rely on baksheesh to supplement their low incomes.

Baksheesh is a Persian word that originates from the Pahlavi (Middle Iranian) language and has 3 basic meanings: charity, tipping and bribery. Charity baksheesh is paid to a beggar or incapacitated person, tipping baksheesh serves to supplement meager incomes, and bribery baksheesh motivates public servants to give you what you want. None of these meanings fully correspond to the North American or European concept of tipping, whereby 15-20% is added to a restaurant bill to reward good service from the waiter, and because of that most westerners have trouble in Egypt. For example, we found it odd that the 7-year old boy in Dahab who walked with our camels demanded baksheesh – all he did was walk with us for a half hour. We did feel that the policeman in Cairo’s Khan il-Khalili deserved a tip because he helped us get a taxi home, something that we were unable to do because of our inability to speak Arabic.

One thing that we had to watch out for was people initiating baksheesh-worthy services that we did not ask for, like the luggage porter grabbing our bags at the Aswan train station or the man in the Cairo station who offered to personally guide us to the car in our train. Museum guards at Egypt’s many fine temples are notorious for offering to show you an inscription or frieze that is allegedly “off-limits” in return for baksheesh. A guard at Giza’s pyramids graciously invited us to enter and take pictures inside a tomb he was guarding. As we were leaving, he pointed to the small “No Photography” sign, placed his body between me and the doorway and whispered “Baksheesh.” A bit perturbed, I handed him 50 piasters (about US$0.11). Without moving out of the doorway, he looked over the admittedly meager tip and pleaded, “five pounds?” I decided we’d split the difference, handed him more and brushed past him and out of the temple. While attempting to cross a particularly busy street in Islamic Cairo, a man started helping us cross without our consent. He guided my wife and daughter as they made their way across the intersection and once we made it to the other side we looked back to see a veiled woman screaming at him while holding on to his ear. Our guess was that he disgraced his wife by being seen with two unveiled women. We never found out if he was going to ask us for baksheesh. Technically, baksheesh is supposed to be voluntary, but at Jordan’s Petra my guide told us about the free horse rides down to the ancient carved sandstone city. He said, “The ride is free, but at the end you must pay baksheesh of two Euros.” Free? Must? Two Euros? What happened to the concept of voluntary? The whole idea of baksheesh had us on our toes.

We thought we’d found the “Rosetta stone” for baksheesh when my wife spotted the following in a guidebook: “Services such as opening a door, delivering room service or carrying your bags warrant at least one Egyptian pound. (US$0.22)” Armed with this knowledge, I was ready to tip the guy at our hotel desk when he helped me locate and call a computer technician in Cairo. Once we finished, I handed him some money but he waved me off and said it was not necessary. Back to square one.

Instead of trying to understand all the nuances of the concept of baksheesh, we’ve decided to just go with the flow. Whenever someone is performing a service for us, we get out a small amount ahead of time and have the money ready. We are also careful not to implicitly accept any services that we did not ask for. It’s not a lot of money and it makes getting around in Egypt much less stressful.

Lightning Strikes Twice: Jean-Louis Burckhardt

Within the space of two weeks I’ve seen two UNESCO World Heritage sites, both of which had been lost to the world for over 500 years until being “rediscovered”: the giant tombs of Ramses II at Abu Simbel in southern Egypt and the exquisite carved sandstone city of Petra in southern Jordan. Both are amazing places but what is more amazing is that that both were stumbled upon by the same European. Jean-Louis Burckhardt, a Swiss explorer rediscovered Petra and Abu Simbel, in 1812 and 1813 respectively, while on a long quest to find the source of the Niger River. Talk about lightning striking twice. That’s like Hiram Bingham, a year after climbing up to Machu Picchu in 1911, finding himself at Chichen Itza in Mexico’s Yucatan or clearing the Mayan jungle to find Guatemala’s Tikal.

I visited Petra on a day trip from Dahab while my kids were getting their diving certification and my wife was exploring Sinai's famous "Blue Hole" dive site. Petra was the ancient city of the Nabateans, Arabs who controlled the frankincense trade routes around the time of Christ. The city was carved into the rosy, reddish sandstone sometime in the 6th century B.C and is reknown for its rock cut architecture and water conduit system. In 2007 Petra was chosen as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World (along with Rome’s Coliseum, Peru’s Machu Picchu, India's Taj Mahal, Rio de Janiero’s Christ the Redeemer, Mexico’s Chichen Itza and China’s Great Wall) and it has been a World Heritage Site since 1985. Petra was also chosen by the BBC as one of “the 40 places you have to see before you die.” For me, arriving at the amazing "Treasury" edifice after walking a narrow gorge for two kilometers was a moment straight out of the movie "Planet of the Apes." Like finding the New York Stock Exchange buried under 2,000 years of hardened sand.

Just under two weeks ago all of us took the three hour police convoy from Aswan to Abu Simbel in southern Egypt near the Sudanese border. The Abu Simbel temples are two massive cut rock temples in Nubia on the western bank of Lake Nasser. The temples were carved out of a mountainside in the 13th century BC by Ramses II as lasting monuments to himself and his queen Nefertari as well as to commemorate his victory at the Battle of Kadesh. In the mid 1960’s, the temples were moved when authorities realized that the construction of the new Aswan High Dam would completely submerge them. In an amazing feat of engineering and with much financial assistance from nations around the world, the temple was cut into giant blocks and moved, one at a time, 65 meters higher and 200 meters back from the Nile river. We looked closely and could see the places where the rock was cut along with the numbers that aided their re-positioning. Abu Simbel remains one of the top tourist sites in Egypt, along with the Sphinx and Great Pyramids at Giza and Luxor’s Temple of Karnak. It has been a World heritage site since 1979 .

Jean-LouisBurckhardt was born in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1874 and studied in Germany and England before the African Association asked him to launch an expedition to find the source of the Niger River. Believing that this cause would be facilitated by speaking Arabic and understanding Islamic law, he planned to spend two years in the Middle East prior to striking out in northern Africa. While living in Syria, he changed his name to Sheikh Ibrahim ibn Abdallah to facilitate his cover as a devout Muslim.

Setting out for Egypt in 1812, Burckhardt was robbed many times in the desert and had to ask his London employers to send money several times. While in what is now southern Jordan, Burckhardt was lured by the tales of a lost city in that region known only to the local Arabs. He hired a guide and, under the pretenses of sacrificing a goat at the nearby tomb of Aaron, was led into the lost city via the two-kilometer long, extremely narrow gorge known as the siq. Burckhardt wrote in his diary, "The precipices…are about eighty feet in height; in many places the opening between them at the top is less than at the bottom and the sky is not visible from below." Finally they emerged into the sunlight and through dazzled eyes Burckhardt stared with amazement at what lay before him: a towering mausoleum some 90 feet high carved into the face of an enormous sandstone cliff. Not wanting to arouse suspicions from his guide, he moved on to the tomb of Aaron and performed the goat sacrifice.

Unconcerned with the notoriety gained from his rediscovery of Petra, he continued on to Egypt, still intent on finding the source of the Niger River. While in Nubia the following year, he was distracted again by stories of nearby temples that had been around since antiquity. While heading up the Nile, he discovered the top frieze of the temple of Abu Simbel, the great majority of it covered by sand. He mentioned this to an Italian explorer named Giovanni Belzoni, who later returned to excavate the temple. By this time Burckhardt was ailing and had to return to Cairo, not before making a pilgrimage to Mecca disguised as a beggar. Clearly, his understanding of Arabic and Islamic culture helped him find things that other westerners could not. He died of dysentery in Cairo in 1817 at the age of 33. He never even got close to the Niger River.

Inspired by Burckhardt’s rediscovery of Petra, John William Burgon wrote a poem entitled Petra, which won the Newdigate Prize in 1845:

It seems no work of Man's creative hand,
by labour wrought as wavering fancy planned;
But from the rock as if by magic grown,
eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!
Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine,
where erst Athena held her rites divine;
Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane,
that crowns the hill and consecrates the plain;
But rose-red as if the blush of dawn,
that first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;
The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,
which Man deemed old two thousand years ago,
match me such marvel save in Eastern clime,
a rose-red city half as old as time.

Monar: The Man Of The House

At the last minute, after arranging the details of our three-day felucca trip down the Nile, we impulsively asked our captain if we could stay one of the two nights with a Nubian family. We’d just learned that this could be an option and Aswan was Nubian territory, the northern frontier of an ancient kingdom that followed the Nile downward to the middle of Sudan. This was how we met Monar, a 15 year-old Nubian girl from the village of Ballana. Monar was undeniably one of the most mature, focused and self-possessed teenagers we’d ever met.

We set sail on a Wednesday morning and stretched back on the cushions of our 30-foot long felucca, enjoying the breezy sensation of heading downriver past minarets, palm trees and sand dunes. Our journey on the “Nile Crocodile” would be for three days and two nights and, with the exception of our stay with the Nubian family, we would eat, sleep and play solely on our felucca. The first day we tacked against the wind as we sailed down the Nile, stopping only for the tourist police to check over our papers and to have lunch. Every 20 minutes or so, a large boxy tourist boat would motor past us and a tourist in a skimpy bikini would snap a picture of us from the pool deck. Motez, our solemn captain, and Ahmed, his first (and only) mate effortlessly guided us 18 kilometers down the Nile to our first night's destination.

We arrived in Ballana around five o’clock and Motez took us to our Nubian family where we were introduced to Uhn-Ahmed, a widow and mother of three kids: Monar (15), Monar’s sister (whose name we forgot) (13) and Ahmed (11). Uhn-Ahmed welcomed us warmly and told us right away that her name in Nubian meant “Ahmed’s mother.” We thought this was a bit strange, given that she had two other, older children, but we smiled and sat down for tea. After black tea spiced with ginger and peppermint, Monar gave us a tour of the town, starting atop the hill overlooking Ballana and the Nile. We walked through the high, colorfully-painted walls and narrow dirt alleys of the town, seeing about 25 homes, 1 mosque, and no stores of any kind. While walking we got to know Monar who, in addition to her excellent English, spoke Arabic, Nubian, was currently learning French and about to start Hindi. For a 15 year old, she was incredibly self-possessed and spoke with a confidence and frankness that belied her years. We asked her what she’d like to do when she grew up and she looked us straight in the eyes and said, “I’m going to be a doctor. I want to attend Cairo University then come back to my village to work here.” We asked Monar if she’d ever been to Cairo and she said, “No, but I was once in Luxor on a field trip from school.”

We were astounded by this 15 year-old girl living in a mud hut village that only recently acquired running water and electricity. When most of the men from her village were drivers, laborers or felucca crewmen and the woman stayed at home with their heads covered, we found it amazing that a girl from this environment could have such lofty goals. Everywhere we went in Egypt, the men did everything. With the exception of a few women cleaning restaurants or hotel rooms, virtually every hotel, restaurant, market stall, taxi, and business establishment was run by men.

The family’s house was made of brick and recently-painted stucco and had a few other rooms, presumably for the occasional visitor from a felucca. During the course of the evening, it became clear that Monar and her family did not live in the house, but lived in her grandmother’s house. I later asked Monar why her family doesn’t live in the new house and she told me, “Because we cannot live here without a man. My father died 7 years ago and Ahmed is not yet old enough so we must live my grandmother. When Ahmed is big enough, we can move in.” I asked her how old Ahmed would have to be for that to happen and she said, “Old enough to protect us.” That night Monar suggested we all play cards and guided us through a fun evening of games until it was time to go to bed.

The next morning Monar’s mom gave my wife and daughter henna tattoos and we packed up and got ready to leave. Upon leaving, I mentioned to Monar that perhaps the next time we came back they’d have moved out of their grandmother’s house and into the new house. Monar said, “Yes, perhaps it will be soon because my mother, she is like a man…like a father as well as a mother. She is very strong.” I couldn’t help thinking that she was describing herself as well.





Read about more "Encounters" with interesting people while traveling; visit Camden's Lonely Planet Blogsherpa Carnival (July 2010) at "The Brink Of Something Else"

An Oasis In Cairo

Cairo had been giving us a bit of an edge. We bargained hard with the taxi driver at the airport to get the price we wanted but he got the difference back when he stuck us with the parking fee. En route to the Egyptian museum, a friendly older man “coincidently” exited the subway station when we did and told us about how happy he was that his daughter was getting married the next day. After a few minutes of genial conversation, he invited us to the wedding. We knew we’d been had when we somehow ended up in his perfume shop with the hard sell about to begin. Near the Al-Azhar mosque an affable souvenir salesman told us it was closed and offered to have his friend take us to a “much nicer one.” Once there, we decided not to enter because the price he quoted seemed high. We found out later that Cairo mosques don’t charge admission…and the first mosque we were headed for was really open! I was beginning to distrust everything that anyone said to me in Cairo.

A few variations of these scams were listed in our guidebook but when someone looks you in the eye and distorts the truth…and then gets outraged when you question their sincerity, it is hard to know the difference between ruse and reality. After walking around all day in a city of over 10 million people and harboring such suspicions, one needs a place of serenity; an oasis in the desert. For us, it was the African House Hostel.

African House is in the Midan Ramses section of downtown Cairo, located in an aging building with high ceilings, wide stone stairways, a barely-functioning antique elevator and original wood floors and shutters from the 19th century. The hostel has most of the key things we look for in a hotel: great location, breakfast included, wireless internet in the room (so kids can do online homework), and a large room with four beds and a bathroom. Our kids’ favorite feature is “Sphinx,” a kitten who comes running into our room every time he hears our squeaky door. The drawbacks – so-so showers and an occasional mosquito -- are more than offset by the intangibles…the pleasant and helpful attitude of the staff. The staff is comprised of 6 men who rotate at the front desk who seem to act as one. Begin planning a desert trip with Ali and follow up later with Mahmoud and you’ll notice that he knows all the details of the earlier conversation. Get directions to the souk from Zizu and when you return Karim will ask you how you liked it. Order your 24/7 complimentary tea with Abdul – “three with milk, one without” – and you won’t have to tell Nagy the details next time you order. When we told Mahmoud that we wanted to visit a camel market 30 miles outside of Cairo, he wrote the instructions in Arabic for us to show a taxi driver – essential to get anywhere in Cairo -- and gave us his cell phone number. Sure enough, our taxi driver got lost so we had him call Mahmoud, who guided our driver in the right direction.

Aided by the staff at African House, we became more comfortable independently navigating Cairo. We successfully came back from the Khan el-Khalili market one evening to see all six of them on couches watching the Egyptian soccer team in the finals of the African Cup – Africa’s “Super Bowl.” Instead of consuming beer and potato chips, as we’d see back home for a sporting event, they all leaned forward in the same crouching position, drinking their black tea and smoking cigarettes. We’d come home to our oasis.

Homeschooling Essentials: HBO's "Rome"

Okay, we’ll admit that having our 14 and 12 year old kids watch HBO’s graphic and award-winning “Rome” series as a part of their homeschooling curriculum is a bit unorthodox. Along with online textbooks, workbooks, writing journals, web tutorials and classic novels, we are making them sit through one of the most violent and sexually-explicit series in television history. It’s filled with blood, four-letter words, quite a lot of nudity and several fornication scenes. It’s not that we are extremely permissive parents – we’re not – it’s just that we have found no better way to have the myriad of characters and events of Ancient Rome come alive for our kids’ education.

HBO’s “Rome” series is set during Ancient Rome’s transition from Republic to Empire, starting around the time of Caesar’s invasion of Gaul and ending around the time of Mark Antony’s death and the rise of the first Emperor Augustus. The series started in 2005 and lasted just two seasons. It was a critical and ratings success but ended due to the price tag of the lavish costumes, extensive sets and on-site locations in the Italian capital. The first season alone cost over $100 million.

In order to shield our kids from the gratuitous sex and violence, we simply mute the sound and ask them to cover their eyes. It helps that both my wife and I have already seen both seasons and can therefore anticipate the more explicit scenes. And there are plenty of them. The Los Angeles Times describes a “vivid portrayal of a dirty, cacophonous, amoral metropolis steeped in the tumult of the time. There are graphic depictions of both the city's violence and sex within the first few minutes of the premiere, which features blood-splattered soldiers thrusting fatal blows into their Gallic enemies and the full-frontal nudity of a woman emerging from a post-coitus bath.”

A byproduct of our unique censorship method is a story that gets a bit choppy. We watched the first episode from our Cairo hotel room and my wife and I were prepared to pause the DVD at the first graphic sex scene between Atia (Caesar’s niece) and one of her lovers. As soon as I saw the edge of the bed in the frame, I paused the remote, said “Cover your eyes” and muted the volume. When the inappropriate scene was over, I paused again, un-muted the volume, said “Ok, open them,” then hit the play button. With so much inappropriate material, watching an hour-long episode of “Rome” can take almost two hours, with a lot of wear and tear on the pause button. Hitting the pause button is something that happens a lot when our family watches DVD’s. Oftentimes, my son or daughter will say, “Pause it! Why is Pompey leaving Rome?” which will lead to a short discussion of the politics of his decision. In terms of learning about Rome while avoiding the sex and violence, this isn’t the most elegant educational solution, but we’ve found none better.

About a year ago, knowing that we’d be touring the Mediterranean, I began reading Gibbon’s 3-volume “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." I am usually pretty good at slogging my way through long history books and I even printed out both an event and emperor timeline to begin my assault on the empire. I got about 200 pages into the first volume and had to give up; Gibbon was just too dry and the work covered too many personalities and events that I was unfamiliar with. About 4 months ago my wife and I started watching the “Rome” series and were hooked. After watching Augustus, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Cicero, Mark Antony, Pompey, Cato and others for 24 episodes, we felt close to the characters and that we had a good understanding of this very important period of history. We hope for the same for our kids…minus the sex and violence.

Read more about kids and travel at the July 2010 Lonely Planet Blogsherpa Carnival at Glennia Campbell's The Silent I blog. Here is the link to the carnival post "Kids Around The World".