Taxi Madame? Carriage? Egyptian Husband?

Luxor—I'm still in Luxor because I missed my flight to Sharm El Sheikh after failing to look at the departure time on my ticket. The taxi that brought me to the airport cost $7; the one that brought me back cost $14. I guess I deserved that—no excusing stupidity.

No chance for another flight for three days so I'm back at the Nefertiti Hotel. I love this place and it feels like home. I have met so many fellow travelers here (the joke is we'd be 'tourists' if we were less pretentious). It's absurdly cheap given the location, the amenities and the warm service. I live on the deck below; that's the view across the Luxor Temple to the Nile.


Among my many new friends are two lovely Finns (one who lost her patience with a relentless tout and shouted "Fuck off!" to him, only to get her face thickly and disturbingly spat upon) who come here to see some sun. A solitary motorcyclist from London, traveling from Alaska down the West Coast to Chile and across to Africa, has been on the road for three years after selling his fashion business and "retiring." He has been blogging and studiously avoided for his mother's sake mentioning that in Guatemala he was surrounded by a gang and held with a gun to his head while they robbed him, but someone he met along the way mentioned it on HIS blog and linked to the British biker's, so his mum found out anyway.

I have the most fun with a crazy 60-something Canadian backpacker who has been all over the world many times since her hippie days in the '70s, always traveling on no money at all. She summited Kilimanjaro three years ago (she is my hero) and is on her way to Tunisia and Morocco with a backpack as big as she is. My company keeps her away from the cigarettes she's trying to avoid (ill-advised: EVERYone in Egypt smokes); her company does not keep us away from the alcohol I've avoided for more than two weeks. (That's another Canadian guest with her.)


At first we both like the big, booming Welshmen who join us on the roof-top deck in the evening...until their cigarettes come out and she starts to shake. I ask them if they can not smoke around us, and they do, until they pull out the gargantuan cans of Egyptian Stella beer, then the bottles of wine, and soon they're too inebriated to care about the cigarettes. We move.

I don't like their lack of discretion about the alcohol in this hotel run by Muslims where no alcohol is served, but I don't start to really dislike them until I find out they're revolution tourists—the Europeans who've been inserting themselves in the national political scene for its entertainment value. They happened to be in Cairo last year for the big demonstrations in Tahrir Square, and they're intending to be there again for the expected rallies and demonstrations that will mark the opening of Egypt's new Parliament on January 23, and the first anniversary of the revolution on January 25. One of them, Peter, is so proud of himself for having dodged rubber bullets last year (while Egyptians were being killed by real ones). I should've known that as Parliament Day approached he would not move his abundant self from the couches here on the roof, much less head north to Cairo on the train to join the first anniversary demonstrations.

Meantime the U.S. Embassy has emailed me to be aware of the possibility of trouble in Cairo and other cities as the anniversary approached, but the atmosphere here in Luxor is cheerful and celebratory. NOBODY has a good thing to say about Mubarak, and I'm teased good-naturedly for being from the nation that was so good to their despot. I hear the cheering from my upper deck and walk to the big central square opposite the main mosque and old Luxor Temple to watch the celebrations. Vendors are selling roasted nuts, candy and falafel; happy men old and young wave Egyptian flags. Children are circling around the "dangerous" demonstrators on rented electric mini-cars. I know from the TV in our hotel lobby that the parades in Cairo have shut down the streets (the military government declared January 25 a national holiday), but here in sunny Luxor it's a quiet, ordinary day.




I'm glad I'm still here because it's the first day in the 15 days I've been in Egypt that's been WARM, so I walk along the corniche on the Nile with absolutely nothing to do. Since there's so little tourist business EVERYBODY wants to stop me and either sell me something, book me for a carriage ride or a trip by taxi, or just chat about why no Americans come to Egypt. (I've noticed this too; I'm the only American I've met.) I'm starting to enjoy their ingenuity in getting my attention (note the headline, above) as I march past their stalls with my purposeful Egyptian stride. All I can think of is that the American news media have focused so much on the demonstrations in a few square blocks of Cairo that Americans fear they'll never get home.

It was too late when I got up today to join a tour; the cafe beneath the window of my new room went ALL NIGHT LONG. Tomorrow I'll be on one of the hot air balloons that float over the Valley of the Kings at sunrise for a view of these miles-long temple marvels from the air.




Later, my Canadian friend Gail and I stop at the famous Winter Palace Hotel on the corniche, a five-star hotel built in 1886 Victorian splendor. We have been told we can enjoy a cup of coffee amidst the acres of fabulous gardens behind the hotel.

Cutting through the vaulted lobby I see the gardens beyond. Groomed lawns, palm trees, an aviary, fountains, a swimming pool, several restaurants and a pool-side bar. Around a clay oven under some trees several veiled women laugh while they pound mounds of bread dough. We walk under a tree dripping yellow trumpet flowers and I notice that it's covered with hummingbirds.

The last occupant of the Winter Palace was King Farouk (or FFF, as his subjects called him: "Fat F...... Farouk"), overthrown in the 1952 revolution that launched six decades of military rule. (His queen ousted him too for his other "f": philandering. She remained unmarried and a happy commoner for the rest of her life.)



We ask to sit at a lovely outdoor restaurant and watch the nearly naked guests pool-side while we drink our coffee. It becomes clear that Mohammad the server wants us to move on, so we order lunch we don't really want yet. Then he starts taking our plates before we've barely touched the food. He does this about five times and I'm getting pretty testy at the worst service I've ever had anywhere, much less at a five-star hotel. Then when he says he can't take Gail's Visa card, when we've seen the sign for it coming in the hotel, she gets up, goes and gets the bill from him, and marches off inside to pay the bill. He comes to me expecting sympathy.

I spend a good hour that night blasting him and the hotel on a travelers' web site I like (TripAdvisor). May Mohammad learn better manners—or pass his job along to someone who already has some.

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Note on Egyptian Humor

Luxor—This is Aladin, writing the date in hieratic figures on a granite slab in Hatshepsut's temple. I had sneaked into his small tour to the Valley of the Kings and learned not just how much a well-educated Egyptologist can pull out of his brain, but how funny the famously funny Egyptians can be.

We are an American, two Finns, two Belgians (I think), and a Canadian. As we bump along on the way to the sites, we chat about how few other tourists we see. Aladin takes the opportunity to rank tourists in terms of relative numbers and identifying characteristics, as follows...

1. Russians: A bottle of vodka in one hand and naked except for a bikini.
2. Germans: Sunburned and carrying big bags of souvenirs.
3. French: Face-down in a French guidebook whose name I can't remember.
4. Canadians: Great big backpacks.
5. Americans: Great big backpacks with Canadian flags on the back.
6. English: A drink in each hand. (I can vouch for this.)
7. Dutch: A beer in one hand and a plastic bag of drugs in the other.
8. Koreans: Two kilos of makeup.
9. Japanese: A camera, a mask, and an umbrella. (I can vouch for this too.)
10. Chinese: Plastic bags FULL of food.
11. Egyptians: Four women, two in each hand.

That's the only story I remember. Next time you're in Luxor, check out Aladin Tours, Nefertiti Hotel, and ask him for more stories. Laughing 'till you choke is a good way to approach the riches of the ancient world. You won't be disappointed.
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Location:Valley of the Kings, Luxor

By Felucca to Luxor, Inshallah

Aswan—I'm feeling smug about having arranged my three-day felucca trip down the Nile ahead of time until the driver who picks me up at my hotel shows me to the boat. It's a lot more rickety than Captain Abdullah's felucca of a few days ago, and THIS one I'm going to be stuck on for three days. There is no one else yet on the boat.
The first thing I notice is there's no head. None.

The second thing I notice is there are no life rings or anything other than the boat itself that floats.

The third thing, and the one I'll be paying for at least a week beyond the trip, is that we'll be sleeping on just the wooden deck with a blanket on top. My ex used to call me "the princess and the pea" because my broken and abused back prevents me from sleeping on anything less than a royal mattress.





I don't mind waiting a long time for the other passengers to arrive, but they turn out to be only one—a Canadian from near Toronto who has been traveling for three-and-a-half years. He's 30-something, handsome, and completely filthy. He cadges an extra toothbrush off me and neglects to say thank you.








While we wait for the others we chat about where we've been and what our plans are. He has been on every continent, often without visas and covering his costs by working illegally. He is a chef by training but mostly he gets carnival work in Australia and France—hugely well-paid because he works on commission, earning as much as $4,500 for a couple of weeks. He sleeps by the side of the road, hitchhikes, buys junk cars in some countries and sells them when he leaves, and apparently gets laid—a lot.

He has an ugly cough from sleeping on a cold train stopped north of Luxor. Between coughs he mumbles through a scarf and I can barely hear him, but we're not together long before he starts slamming Egyptians ("They'll look you right in the eye and lie to your face.") When the Nubian captain and mate arrive it's clear their English is very limited, and Steve the Canadian starts talking to them in mocking monosyllables like they're Chinese coolies in an old American movie. I'm embarrassed for every white person these men have to tolerate.

At one point he demands that they speak in English because he's sure they're talking behind his back. He says things like "We pay good money. You work." And when he asks for lemon for his tea while they're struggling to relight the gas stove, he holds out his cup and huffs, "do you understand LEMON? Do you care about any of us at all?" He will keep this up for three days and I'll get royally sick of him. I can't imagine how three-and-a-half years of world traveling can do anything but humble you, but this guy is an asshole and has the social skills of a rock.

Our boatmen are Sayid and Captain Mustafa, who's been working the felucca for 20 years and seems serious about his work. Though the captain is only in his 40s he has practically no teeth from years of chewing sugar cane. In fact even Sayid, age 27, has black and decayed teeth. I will learn later that Egyptians not only suffer large-scale premature tooth loss, one in five has diabetes. Nonetheless, though I've never had a sweet tooth and never put sugar in my coffee, I'm loading up while I'm in Egypt and damn the consequences.



Steve the Canadian and I are the only passengers as we debark from Aswan. By midafternoon we have more tea in our hands and I'm feeling pretty special. We spend the day in the bright sunshine and it is GLORIOUS. At dinnertime as we cruise, Sayid and the captain light the gas stove again and begin cooking dinner. Tiny onions, fresh tomatoes, beans, bread and pasta—a surprise. They spread out a tablecloth for us but don't join us for dinner. I guess it's a good thing for their sakes but I feel a little bit like the old South with the "help" eating in the kitchen.






Before we're done eating darkness falls and so does the temperature—by about 30 degrees. We can see our breath and I'm freezing. I ask for a blanket and get one. Steve has a down sleeping bag plus a blanket and still finds more to complain about.

I put on everything I can think of and climb under my blanket with my iPad to read. It's still awfully early but there's nothing left to do. The boatmen tie up for the night and bunk down under the bow deck.

It's about 10 p.m. and very dark under our deck-mounted tent, but outside the stars make night into day. I realize I hear snoring and it's not coming from the side of the boat where Steve is. I roll over to relieve my back—I'll be doing this all night—and land right on someone's hand. It doesn't stop the snoring.

By now I really have to pee. What was I thinking with all that tea?

All night I roll—one side to the other, on my back, on my stomach—all the time trying to avoid whose-ever hand that is. I have no idea how long I hold my bladder hoping for someone to wake up and give me a hand getting to shore, but then I hear the gentle trinkle of someone peeing off the boat. I'm really pissed not to be a man.

Eventually I hear the distant call to prayer and know there'll be enough light soon for me to get off the boat. When the light is up but no one else is, I can't stand it anymore and despite my back I lift the two-ton plank and slide it along a mast-line to steer it toward the shore. This takes some doing because the boat has drifted out to the end of the bowline. I pull the boat closer and purposely run it aground.

I say my prayers and walk down the rickety 8-inch-wide plank to step ashore. I find some bushes...and relief. The relief, however, comes at a price. That was a lot of tea I drank. My cuffs are soaked.

I get aboard with a lot more back pain and effort, and I've brought some sand on the clean deck with me. When the boatmen get up they're obviously not happy about this, or about pushing the boat out of the shallows. They point accusing fingers toward sleeping Steve and I smile hoping they'll put something in his tea.

Kwan and Maria
Thank God today we will pick up two new passengers—Kwan, a Korean student who just finished a semester studying in Budapest and is traveling for the rest of the year—and Maria, a "much older" Korean researcher who had quit her job and is almost finished with a year-long journey through Africa and the Middle East.

The first thing Maria wants to know is what the facilities are like. It's funnier now than it was last night, and I tell her with restored humor what to expect. The absence of accommodations plus the increasingly frigid weather have her doubting the wisdom of the journey. I want the company and persuade her to stay.

She is great company. Her English is excellent and she insists with gentle good manners on getting what she wants—like landing on shore at reasonable interludes for hunting out facilities, meaning bushes.

One such landing is at Elephantine Island where Sayid's village is.



We walk around the village, which is pretty tidy and surrounded by produce fields. A boy throws dirt clods at a donkey that's pilfering clover. Two boys run up and say "American?" When I nod they give me a thumbs-up and shout "Obama!" Everybody says that when I admit I'm American. At least Egyptians like him right now.







Sayid takes us to his house and introduces us to his family. He is unmarried and lives with his parents, his little brother and sister and her husband and baby. The house is made of mudbrick covered with brightly colored stucco, and is built around a large open-air courtyard where cooking, meals, prayers—everything takes place.

During our walk Sayid asks me softly if I would like to join him on the felucca alone after our journey is over. I have heard that middle-aged female sex tourists come here looking for just such an invitation, but I'm a little surprised to hear this from him. About the third time he tries it I yell, "What are you, nuts? Go get a wife!" I know he can't afford one—they cost money up-front here. I'd tell on him to the captain but I know he'd lose his job and his whole family would lose the only income it gets.

In a very tidy, dark parlor we meet his family and look at terribly stiffly-posed wedding photos. His mother brings us tea and his sister lets me hold the fattest baby I have ever seen. The little boy can't be older than five or six months but he weighs as much as a toddler. A HEFTY toddler. His face is so black all I can see is his eyes. I hand him back when Sayid's mother brings us the tea. More tea.






That night around 10 p.m. Maria and I decide we'd better pee once more before crawling under the covers, but the water is shallow here and we can't get anywhere near close enough to put down the 10-foot plank. The boatmen do their best to pull the boat in, even standing barefoot in the freezing water. She looks at me laughing and asks how I feel about peeing off the bow. A wild wind is rocking the boat.

What the heck, part of the experience. But I'm hanging on for life. With all that tea we both have to get up once more during the night. These jeans will never be the same.

On my last day, thank God, the wind is too wild to sail (we'd taken on water a couple of times yesterday as we tried tacking through it). Mustafa uses my Egyptian cell phone to call for a van to pick us up. It takes us all the way to my hotel in Luxor and I'm one happy traveler.


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Danger: Souk

Aswan—To expiate my sins I am introducing you to a man I knew would be laying for me when I came to Egypt, and who managed to separate me anyway from many, many unbudgeted pounds.

Meet Muhammad.


I was brought to Muhammad by his "cousin" who spotted me looking up at signs for "internet cafe" in an alley market just off the Nile. When he asks if I am interested in looking at his shop, something about his lack of urgency makes me pay more attention. I notice there's no one inside and agree to because I'll have him all to myself.

Muhammad is Nubian and his English is excellent. He asks what I'm interested in seeing. Since I don't know, he asks who I might like to bring souvenirs home to. My sister and three sisters-in-law have rooted for me on this adventure and supplied VERY helpful accoutrements (like this iPad!), so that's how I end up in the jewelry area. I know nothing about jewelry. But here I am, seated on a bench that another "cousin" brings, and soon I have tea in my hands and the selling is under way.

(Note the tea on the tray above: It's about my fourth cup. It takes a long time to choose suitable things for four wonderful women, longer to work down from the lung-sucking 3,000 pounds Muhammad suggests as the starting point of our negotiations.)

But I am enjoying the game anyway. Haggling was invented in the East thousands of years ago, and the idea of a price tag is as foreign as I am here. I quickly do the math in my head and try to come up with a figure to limit my spending to, then do the conversion once again to suggest the price I really want to pay. Muhammad does his own bit about the fine quality, pure silver, hand-craftsmanship, etc., etc., but I know my budget and start removing items from the bowl that has been collecting things I'd like to consider.

We go along like this for what seems like hours (measured in tea), until he starts working within my price range. In the end I pay exactly what I had wanted to limit myself to, and he has replaced in my bowl all the items I had removed to bring down the price.

After he wraps all the items in little velvet bags, he bids me goodbye with a handshake and his warmest Nubian smile. This is service apart from any price tags. I have no doubt I've been robbed blind but we both get what we want.

In the evening at my hotel I will compare notes on prices with various fellow travelers, and we will be variously amused or outraged at the degree of suckering we've suffered.

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Happy Birthday, Me

Aswan—The cheapest way to get around Aswan is by carriage (30 pounds—$5—for practically as long as you like) so I opt for a ride with Ali. I don't know yet that his horse will expect baksheesh too, but he is a very good horse and seems to like Ali fine. Each of them gets too generous a tip. I will learn in time to cut this out.



(It's -11 degrees in Minneapolis today. Look at this brilliant sun and sky. Guess who's not even a little homesick?)

I had asked at the desk of my hotel today whether I could join a tour to Abu Simbel, the great temples that Pharaoh Ramses II built around 1,200 B.C. in Nubia, south of Aswan. They were relocated in 1968 to a hill above the Aswan High Dam, which created Lake Nasser and flooded the ancient site—along with many Nubian villages that also had to move out.

But I'm told that there are protests on the road to the site and there will be no tourist trips there today, which doesn't bother me at all because I've got some people watching to do. Breakfast at my modest hostel is a hard-boiled egg, some flat Egyptian bread, two small pots of coffee, and then I'm off.

I'm not two steps out of the hotel before the touts descend. These people who rely on tourists for their living are desperate since the revolution, and my increasingly irritated "la, La, LA!" (no) to offers for everything from souvenirs to felucca rides doesn't stop them from stepping right in my path. I have not been left alone just to walk around in the hour or so since breakfast, so I give up trying and nod to Ali when he comes trotting along abreast of me.

Climbing aboard his carriage is like putting on a mosquito net: Suddenly the buzzing stops. As I relax and look around, Ali takes me back in time to the Nubian neighborhood behind the Nile riverfront commercial district. I'm glad I've chosen his carriage. There's a whole old world back here.




Several times he tries to get me to agree to stop at a shop (he doesn't say so but his homing instinct suggests "cousin" to me). And he wants to take me to his family's house for tea. "La, shukran," I say. I will say this a lot while I'm in Egypt, sometimes loudly and with the meanest face I can make.

After our ride I am still kind of at loose ends. I have been harassed by felucca captains all day—dozens of these sailboats sit empty along the corniche—but one captain has this million-dollar smile and a special warmth about him. I try to put him off but he gives me a piece of paper with his name and a phone number and tells me to give him a call if I change my mind.

After lunch (falafel sandwich: 5 pounds, or less than a dollar), I call Abdullah and tell him that if he can snare some other passengers, I'd love to go for a sail. Moments later he calls to tell me that he has two other passengers and he'll meet me on the river in front of my hotel and direct me to the boat.

What was supposed to be a sail of an hour and a half or so becomes an all afternoon sail into the sunset. The wind is just right for a brisk trip around the rocks and islands in the Nile off Aswan. For some reason, no one's watching the time. We're just enjoying a gorgeous sunny afternoon.

Captain Abdullah is a charmer. He loves Bob Marley (everybody in Egypt seems to) and he frequently breaks into song. He can dance impressively while managing the tiller, singing "No woman, no cry," a song that especially speaks to him. He had a wife, then a girlfriend. Both are gone and he likes it that way. In a country where Muslims can have up to four wives, he prefers none. "Two wives, two knives," he says, drawing a finger across his throat.

I've had a long day when I get back to my hotel. I try to read myself to sleep but there's a narrow market right under my window that turns into a children's playland at night. Why a handful of very small children are playing (loudly) in an alley at 11 p.m. is a mystery to me. But it's brightly lit and there's no traffic there, so it's probably considered pretty safe.

Just as I turn my light out there's a knock on the door: A man from the reception desk has a package for me. The small red velvet bag he hands me has a note inside: "Happy birthday, Terry, from Essam, Warda and Lobna," my new friends in Cairo. It's a bracelet with a cartouche bearing the initials of my name in hieroglyphs. I had forgotten it was my birthday.


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No Atheists on THIS Road

Starting in Giza, maybe 20 minutes after boarding at Cairo, the cement and brick apartments give way to farms and the cars are suddenly gone. Transportation is by donkey now and they're everywhere--in the streets, in the fields, in the yards behind the mud-brick houses. The men all wear galibiyas, and with their wives and children bouncing along on the backs of the donkeys they could be the Holy Family on the flight into Egypt. Twenty minutes south of the largest, most cosmopolitan city in Africa, little has changed in 2,000 years.

There are no women on this train. Did I say no women? I am not happy about this since I expect to be harassed. But no one does. I turn to the view but the windows on my "first class" coach (foreigners are allowed to ride on no other coaches) are as cracked and filmy as those on the Chicago subway. I doze to pass the time.

This trip will take 14 long hours all the way up the Nile Valley. I've brought fruit and cheese to tide me over, but the boys who come aboard carrying baskets up and down the aisles filled with something that looks like solid brown ice cream cones are getting my attention. They smell delicious and I learn later they're a chewy sweet made with hand milled grain and molasses—solid as a golf ball and about as digestible. The boys are barefoot and wear dirty gaibiyas, but as they go about their work laughing with each other, they don't look like they mind their jobs much. The little girls who make straight for me pointing fingers at their mouths are another story entirely. They're seized roughly and shoved screaming from the car.

I have been delighted in my few days in Egypt to watch my preconceptions shatter. For example, even the poorest-looking man and boy has a terrific haircut. Nobody has a beard. (That doesn't mean they're not devout Muslims: The overwhelming majority bear the telltale prayer bump in the middle of their foreheads.) Teenage girls walk together holding hands and when they pass me they say Hello! Welcome to Egypt! Even the boys hold hands. I might have looked too long at the first woman I saw in the full face veil, gown and gloves, but she too called Good Morning! as she passed.

We are stopped at the station in Naj Hammed, still at least six hours from my destination in Aswan, when it dawns on me that something isn't right. A five-minute wait becomes 25 minutes, becomes more than an hour and by then I've found a "conductor," pointed meaningfully to the Arabic "Aswan" on my ticket and looked at him questioningly. His response is to point me back to my seat. People continue to come and go from the train but no one looks put out. Just then a man who has joined my car asks in perfect English if I know what's going on.

It seems the district where we're stopped has been hotly contesting the outcome of the parliamentary elections, and many of the locals are camped across the tracks intending to stay until a reelection is called. These local protests have been going on for weeks and have stopped traffic in both directions on the railways as well as the highways, keeping people, food and fuel from getting anywhere at all.

Osama explains this with what I come to know is typically Egyptian patience. A 48-year-old English professor from Cairo, he commutes the 14 hours to Aswan each week to teach. Between us we decide it would be better to try to hire a car to get us the rest of the way, and so begins an Egyptian adventure I guess I've come here to get.

An Adventure Begins

First comes the haggling with taxi drivers schooling like sharks as we emerge from the platform. Soft-spoken Osama grows louder and more animated as he and a driver begin haggling over price. They walk away and reunite several times (very Egyptian) before he tells me the driver wants an extortionary 400 Egyptian pounds—many, many times the price of my train ticket for the full route. But we have little choice: I know the protesters will outlast me.

For the next few hours Osama talks to me about the revolution last January and the continuing protests with the same air of understanding mixed with exasperation that I've heard from many Egyptians so far. Egypt was already very poor but it's getting poorer by the day as tourism dries up. (I can verify this: I have seen no tourists anywhere and have not liked the spectacle I make.) Osama says simply, "We are fed up." His share of the cab ride will consume his entire earnings from the teaching job he must travel so far to keep.

But my new friend has lots to talk about and I am enjoying myself anyway. Among our many topics:

Economics: ("Explain foreclosure to me: How do people in rich America lose their houses?")

Domestic life: ("Why do children leave home before marriage?")

Religion: ("Are all Americans atheists?")

Music: (He likes Elvis Presley and Barbra Streisand—"even though she's a Jew"—which detours us onto the Israeli question ("All Jews are Israelis and all Israelis are our enemies.") I already know how Egyptians feel about America's support for Israel and am not surprised when he says that America is controlled by Jews. For some reason that doesn't make us enemies. Osama clearly distinguishes between American people and the government, despite the fact that in the U.S., the people are the government. I am grateful that among his requests for information he doesn't ask me to explain this.

He wants help shedding the remnants of a British accent learned in school, so we chat about language and expressions for hours. ("What's a 'hub'?" "What is 'dude'?" "What's a 'snack'?")

I've loaded some pictures onto my iPad and I pull it out to show him. He loves this. When we get to a photo of my son in his college band uniform, Osama wants to know what that big black spot in his earlobe is. I tell him it's an earring and smile to myself while he digests this. He's heard that depending on which ear is pierced, a man declares whether he's gay or straight. I tell him I've heard that too and couldn't tell him which is which, but I can assure him with all my heart that this man is not gay. Osama is deeply relieved. "Ah, GOOD!" he says.

Perhaps the longest conversation we have concerns Egyptian and Western values, sparked by my question about why there isn't a word for "boyfriend" in Arabic. (You're either a fiance, a husband or a wife. In Egypt, there's no trying someone on to check the fit.)

The answer centers around love and loyalty, he tells me. While a woman can live without a man, no man can live without a woman. But when you marry, it's for life. If a man and woman enjoy each other and aren't married, where is the commitment? What if there's a child? What about the larger family? The larger society? How do people grow old and take care of each other if there's no marriage? Osama's commitment to his family is as clear as the bump on his forehead, and the same God that inspires that commitment is telling him to take care of me. He believes that if not for the train delay we would never have met, and isn't Allah wonderful in making us new friends?

During all this talk the high-speed ride in a rattle-trap car on a two-lane stretch of broken pavement and rubble has me frozen in blinding terror, so I kind of overdo it agreeing with how wonderful Allah is. The Egyptian way of passing slower vehicles is simply to pass between them and the oncoming cars, which often have no headlights. It is very dark outside now. In one instance we are passing between such an oncoming car, which itself is being passed by a very, very large truck with no headlights. Now there are four cars in two lanes heading right for each other. Suddenly Osama explodes from his seat and bellows something at the driver, and we roar back into our own lane. I think his God is trying to convince me of the wisdom of Osama's belief.

Occasionally the driver slams on his brakes to cross a two-foot-high berm of rubble strewn across the road. This is traffic control, Egyptian style. The farmers who live in the apartment-like villages on the left of the road must cross to reach their fields on the right. Too many have been killed by drivers who wouldn't stop. Now, problem solved.

Once or twice we stop for petrol—a black market item these days and hard to come by—before we arrive at a gathering place for microbuses headed in all directions. Our driver hands us over to another driver, who stands by his tiny van shouting "Aswan! Aswan!" until it's packed to the glass. Eleven Nubian men come aboard—very black Egyptians from the south—and join Osama and me.

Much more arguing and hand waving so my red bag with my computer won't end up with the others on top, more money promised, and we're off.

I have chosen the rear seat for us—a mistake—thinking it will have more leg room. It doesn't and not only that, every pothole and "ramp" as Osama calls speed bumps launch me squarely into the roof. Though I will be squashed by it for the next four hours, I am glad my bag is with me. We use it as a table between us for the goodies Osama fishes from his bag.

We have traveled barely an hour before Osama erupts once more shouting at the driver. I think we must be lost because he makes a u-turn and heads back the way we came. Soon we arrive at a brightly lit cafe in the middle of nowhere and all the men get out. I just sit there with my what? face on until Osama leans in to explain that they had all pulled out their cigarettes intending to light up. I can't imagine what that airless microbus would have been like with 11 smoking men inside. Once more I am grateful for Osama's company.

It wouldn't have taken us so long to reach Aswan if it hadn't been for the police checkpoints. At each stop, boys no older than my son shouldering American-made weapons walk around the van, always stopping for a better look at me. At one stop they ask the men in the front seats to get out, and Osama begins talking pretty fast. They ask for my passport, then check his ID, and then they let us go. The story Osama gets is that as a tourist I am not allowed on public transportation because the police can not ensure my safety. This sounds fishy to me. I have never felt threatened (except for the driving) until they showed up. They let us go because Osama tells them that we are traveling together.

If he had not been there, the police would have removed me from the van in that remote checkpoint and it could have been who knows how long before I'd have been allowed back on my way. Osama says that if not him, Allah would have sent someone else along to look after me.

By now it is very late. With travel, four days of all-night traffic noise and 5 a.m. calls to prayer, I have had little sleep my whole time in Egypt. Once we're in Aswan Osama hires another taxi and delivers me right to my hotel, hauling my bags three flights up and seeing that I am comfortably checked in. This is also very Egyptian.

Taxis and microbuses to Aswan? 675 pounds ($112.50, or six times the price of my train ticket.)

My debt to Osama? Priceless.

In Egypt, Finally

Cairo—Omar and his friends pick me up at the airport at 11:30 p.m., practically jumping out of his skin when he recognizes me going through customs. At 22 years old he couldn't be more charming with his gallant manners and calling me "madam." But then the hair-raising ride though the streets of the city in a car the size of a microwave, everyone laying on their horns as if it makes any difference at all. I'd be taking pictures but I'm holding on for life. Welcome to Cairo.

I'm staying in an old-ish part of the city called Meet Okba that few tourists venture into. The apartment belongs to an Egyptian-American Friend who has not been invited along. Omar is his nephew. His family, most of whom have stopped by to introduce themselves, bring me sweet tea and cakes, or otherwise just get a look at me, all either live in the building or nearby. I have never met lovelier people. Communication is no obstacle.

In the morning I wake up for my first glimpse of the city in daylight, throw open the shutters on the balcony and look down as a donkey cart clops by right beneath my feet. I could sit here all day with my camera and a cup of coffee, but a friend of my Friend is due soon. We're going sight-seeing.

January 13

Essam and the Purple Carrots

We are headed toward ancient Sakkara when we pass a man in a galibiya driving a donkey with a cart. Though not quite used to donkeys, horses, and buffalos in the midst of six lanes of screaming traffic, I am captivated this time by the contents of the cart—a mountain of vegetables, half of them purple. What are those? I ask Essam. Carrots, he says. Would I like to try one? He pulls the car over and after what seems like a long time for a carrot he returns with a clean and peeled purple carrot for me, his daughter, and his wife. I do like the carrots and say so—they're more tender and sweet than any American carrots. So back he goes to the vendor and now I'm the proud owner of about 10 pounds of freshly picked carrots...to add to my 80-pound suitcase.

We go to the Citadel on a mountain at the top of Cairo, built by Saladin in the 12th century. The views of the city are arresting from up here, and there is no one else to interfere with the view. There is no tourism in Egypt right now—which is good for me, horrible for Egyptians.

We visit some tombs, museums, and the Titi pyramid and Sakkara, and I enjoy Essam's knowledge and enthusiasm for a history that must get tiresome for contemporary Egyptians. We try to get to the Great Pyramid but ordinary Cairo traffic is so bad we can't penetrate it before it's closed to the public for the day.

No matter. I am interested in antiquities and pharaonic architecture, but I am more interested in religious history and culture. It just so happens we're touring on a Friday and are still near the Citadel in old Islamic Cairo, in time for the noontime prayer. Essam joins the prayers at this greatest of all mosques in the world, leaving me at the car to watch as men stroll purposefully toward the door. I'm turned away because I'm clearly not Muslim.

Then the call to prayer begins. I'm in the middle of an ancient square with the Citadel just above me and all around me are the sky-high minarets of innumerable mosques that used to carry the live muezzins. Now, the call to prayer comes from all those spires via loudspeaker—that's LOUDspeaker—and the racket is overwhelming. For once you can't hear Cairo's incessant traffic. God has bigger pipes.

It would not be the last time that Essam would disappear for prayer. I don't know how a city can function with everyone disappearing in the midst of something they're doing to find a place to pray—usually a mosque, sometimes just the end of an alley that's been set aside for the purpose. While I wait for him in a parking lot, I watch the attendant abruptly sit on the grass, remove his shoes, and begin the ritual of prayer.

Despite the chaos that is Cairo, I have had a remarkably comfortable and enjoyable day. That evening at dinner with his wife and daughter—a surgeon and an architect—I tell Essam he is blessed with lovely women. I know he had lost this daughter's mother and her brother in a car accident not many years before. I think maybe that's why he's so quiet and sometimes far away.

"God takes away, but he gives," Essam tells me. "God is merciful."

January 14

Omar the Evangelist

There's nothing like standing in the center of a mosque in old Cairo trying to explain the Holy Trinity to an earnest 22-year-old Muslim with serviceable but unsophisticated English.

We had stopped during our saunter through the old quarter for Omar to pray; I was invited to join the women on their side of the large wooden screen. A man took a coin in exchange for my shoes and gave me a long electric-green gown with a hood—no mistaking me for a Muslim among the black-clad women on the floor before me. I was to meet Omar at a certain place after prayers in an area at the back of the men's side.

When I thought the prayers were over—the women began collecting the toddlers who had been cavorting around—I went to my appointed spot. Instantly, two small, leathery men intercepted me and insisted in increasingly urgent tones that I get outside. I could see from the open courtyard that prayers indeed were not over.

When Omar finds me he is in a missionary mood. We climb the steep steps to one of the towers overlooking Cairo and questions that tax my dusty knowledge of Christianity begin.

"What is this 'son of God' that is God?" he asks. "God is God. He cannot be both God and man." (This is the first and most significant profession of the Muslim faith: There is no god but God.) He wants to know if among Christians "the Christ" is also God. To him this is heresy. (As it was for many Christians in the early Church—a direction I definitely don't want to go.) When I try to explain "the Word made flesh" we are headed down a vortex of history, religion and culture that I hardly know how to escape. And we haven't even gotten to the Holy Spirit yet.

But this gentle young man who at his age in America would be hanging out in bars and chasing girls is determined to understand how people who are not Muslim think. He looks me right in the eye and asks about my faith in God. I have seen this coming and tried to dodge it; he has been so kind that I don't want to disappoint him.

The best I can do after much gentle prodding is an uninspired and unconvincing "belief" in "Nature."

"But who created 'Nature'?" he demands. "Where did it come from? Who started it? There must have been a beginning." We go along in this vein until I try a more humble approach, and suggest that these things are unknowable. Perhaps the best we can do with our limited minds is appreciate the wonder of the universe.

This satisfies Omar not at all.

He is getting exercised now and we've stopped to face each other. He walks me through the entire book of Genesis--all of it--and arrives back at the place where God evicts man from Paradise. Since man must redeem himself and reclaim Paradise through submission to God, am I not just a little bit worried that I'm not doing enough toward salvation?

Meanwhile I have a few questions of my own. Why do you need to pray five times a day to get your point across? Omar replies that it keeps the heart close to God.

Why do Muslims read the Koran all day, every day? (I of course know the answer to this—there's plenty of Hebrew and Christian precedent—but many Muslims read a 1,400-year-old classical Arabic that few modern speakers understand.) His answer is simple: God is God. Islam is a way of life. The Koran teaches us how to live.

For the rest of the day he points out book kiosks that carry copies of the Koran that I might like to study. I feel like an exam is forthcoming. I have brought a copy in translation of my own and hope to have much of it read before I return to Cairo at the end of February. No doubt we will resume this conversation then.

Seven Hours to Lift-Off

I already know I made a mistake by booking a train from Cairo to Aswan—14 hours straight up (south) the length of the Nile Valley—5 hours of it in the dark. I wanted to see the country and the farms, the shepherds and the camels, and was a touch too eager to get out of Cairo. Now I'd miss a big stretch of the landscape while I stared at myself in the window.

But even looking at the ticket I downloaded from Egyptian National Railways today is getting my heart rate up. I haven't been on a train in years and the sense of journey they inspire is exciting all by itself.

(Note to myself: trains in Egypt aren't much like Amtrak.)

I'll be thinking of the practically teen-aged Cleopatra as she cruised up the Nile with a ring through old Julius Caesar's nose, showing off the mighty emperor to her people along the way (and, lest anyone forget, her vast wealth to him). I like to think he was no match for her.

Tourist toes

May I not have too many piasters in my pocket when I'm loose in Cairo's Khan el-Khalili bazaar or this will happen.

Walking down an icy street in Minneapolis, a day before lift-off, something about the empty Nails & Co. salon sucked me inside for an indulgence I should NOT have caved to before I even get on the plane.

But now my toes match my new Chacos, and isn't that just one more thing to lighten the load on my mind?

Christianity 101

As a cradle Roman Catholic I had every reason to think I understood the history of the Church after years of sitting through readings of every single book of the Bible. But when the Coptic Orthodox churches in Egypt started going up in smoke last year, it was the first I'd heard that Egyptians hadn't skipped right from building temples to Amun and Ra to memorizing the Koran. The Christian Copts—an ancient Egyptian word that went through many iterations before it emerged as meaning, simply, "Egyptian"—had been more dominant in the country until the Arab conquest than the Muslims are now.  But trying to find out who they were led me deep into a very dark and confusing church history that left me with more questions than before.

Enter Father Youannes Tawfik.

I found Fr. Youannes when I was googling "Copts," "Coptic Christianity," "Orthodox Christianity," and a dozen other terms that popped up in the searches (forbidding terms like "Aryan heresy" and "Islamic apostasy"). Under a listing for Coptic churches in the United States was a link to the web site for Fr. Youannes' church in St. Paul, Minnesota: St. Mary's Coptic Orthodox Church.

Egyptian Copts in Minnesota?

Fr. Youannes has been the priest at St. Mary's for 13 years, helping it grow to a population of 200 families. And a patient man he is, drawing a diagram for me of 2,000 years of church history from the first Christians in Jerusalem through the spread of the religion and the ecumenical councils that bound the five patriarchates...and then led to their rapidly accelerating disagreements starting as early as the first ecumenical council at Nicea in 325. He recited for me the Orthodox profession of faith, which I recognized as the Nicene Creed I grew up reciting at every Mass. But as we recited together he stopped where I continued on at the part identifying the Holy Spirit as proceeding "from the Father and the Son."

Over that, essentially, the Christian world broke apart.

Above: Fr. Youannes' diagram of the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox
churches after the schism from Rome in 451.

I knew that there were points of religious doctrine that church leaders wrestled over in the dim past, but I didn't appreciate how ugly the fight became. Who cares if Jesus had two natures or one? Didn't his message speak for itself?

(I could've gotten torched for that.)

Of course power and empire figured big into the evolution of Christianity over the years, and Christian teaching and values brought little restraint to the slaughter that came to dominate the story. All this sounded pretty familiar. What excellent background for approaching the explosive nature of religion in Egypt today!