Back to the World Tour main page ð Back to the whole site's main page

DON'T HIT REPLY (unless you want everyone in this Internet Cafe to learn

about your Aunt Myrtle or happy you are with Viagra or whatever). AS

ALWAYS, send a new message to me and all will be well.



--------------------------------



SHE GETS HERS



Picture me on a bus from Cairo to Luxor in the middle of the night.  After

the grit of the city shrinks to haze behind us, the desert opens up and

accepts us.  Inside, me and ten local men are sitting barefoot, struggling

to be comfortable, and watching the TV screen above the driver.  It's an

early-80s Egyptian movie, but like everything else here, it looks about ten

years out of date.  The film features a rock-'em-sock-'em man who

accidentally kills a lady on a boat off of Alexandria, then has to live

with the guilt.  Meanwhile, there's a woman who craves him.  During a

party, she corners him in a quiet room (unsupervised!) and comes on to him.

 Like a good Muslim hero, he spurns her haughty advances, which (let's

admit it) are decidedly too Western to be acceptable.  She gets her

come-uppance and is left in tears; our hero retains his valor and his

chastity.  



I may retain my own chastity, too, until my Geritol years.  The bus is

bucking and jumping through the desert as if it's mounted on wild horses.

Every minute or so, we honk wildly at any visible cars, and the driver

pretends he's going to kill us all in order to keep the oncoming traffic in

line.  Other than headlights, there's nothing outside.  No civilization

aside from the occasional trucker stop.  (Wonder what an Egyptian truck

stop has for a men's room...)  We might as well be flying like Pegasus

above the clouds, or atop a road made of sleeping Nubians.



It's just me and the boys.  No women.  All during the night, we stop at

military checkpoints and grumpy soldiers stalk down the aisle, shooting

venom from their pupils at everyone but me.  I am ignored.  I am a tourist.



Eventually, I pull the curtains over my head and sleep with my head against

the window.  Even from inside this fluorescent capsule, I can see thousands

of stars over the sands.  We're all pinpricks tonight.



MISTER SUNSHINE



I don't take tours.  Never do I take tours.  But it's 125 degrees, and the

air is so dry that it even steals the moisture from your mouth before you

can use it to complain about the heat.  The idea of an air-cooled van

whisking me through the desert is too inviting.



One by one, the people in our group for the morning are picked up at their

various crappy hotels.  We whisk through the dusty streets, narrowly

avoiding killing half the downtrodden of Luxor, before our last stop:

Mister Sunshine.



Mister Sunshine, as he likes to be called, is an Egyptologist and a tour

guide.  He's been guiding vanloads of tourists, by his count, for 22 years.

 His name has appeared in the bibliography of a book, and he is proud to

point out that the Rough Guide mentions him by name.  



Behind his sunglasses, he just seems like a collection of Middle Eastern

features: Moustache, dark skin, slight belly, a spotless white cloth around

his neck.  (Later, at the tombs, set against forbidding towers of sandy

stone and fierce-looking crags, his casual attitude make him seem almost in

control of time.  Later, as he greets the guards at the Valley of the Kings

and chats with them in Arabic, he'll have the leisurely gait of a tennis

star.)



"My name is Mahmoud," he says as he climbs into the van. "You can call me

Mister Sunshine."



Mister Sunshine deciphers hieroglyphics.  He covers his mouth with the

cloth, complaining about the dry air. ("You come here every day and it's

not so good for the lungs.") He picks one or two people in the group and

calls them smart every now and then, to create a sense of relationship.

"Jason, you always ask the hard questions," he says. "You make me work for

my money."



Mister Sunshine also knows a great deal about cartouches, and the depth of

tombs, and why kings are never depicted giving offerings of fish to the

Gods. He talks and talks. But he also tries to get us to buy papyrus, and

tries to sell us necklaces with our names in ancient writings. He suggests

we buy cold Cokes from his buddies at the alabaster factory.  I permit

myself a little arrogance and feel sorry for him--a smart man like this,

prostituting himself!  Convincing tourists to buy trinkets.  Boy, these

people will do anything for money, I think.  They'll sink as low as Mister

Sunshine has to.  



Someone asks him, late in the day, if he knew where the massacre happened

last November 17.  Fifty-eight tourists just like us were machine-gunned

and hacked to death here.  The police chased down the terrorists, who were

from Middle Egypt, and killed them one by one.  



"The Temple of Hatshepsut," he says tersely.  



"Wasn't that the first place we were this morning?"



He nods.



We pause. Then someone asks it:



"Were you there?"



Mister Sunshine says he was there with a group of his own.  Yes, he saw

nearly 60 people slaughtered in front of his eyes--he faced death

himself--and yet he returns, day after day, to the scene.  He still works

for his salary.



As the van speeds back into town, we tourists are very quiet. So is Mister

Sunshine. 



I should have bought a necklace with my name in ancient writing.



TINY WOMAN



I see a dwarf woman crossing Tahrir Square.  She's wearing small versions

of exactly what all the normal-sized Muslim women wear--veil, sarong--but

her face is the international face of a Little Person.



Somehow, seeing her in the sea of this foreign sameness made me chuckle at

the useless things we do to fit in.  Veil, sarong...dwarf!



ENTRANCING



The whirling dervishes can spin for a half hour at a time, round and round

on one foot, as they take off their clothes.  They pull their skirts off

over their heads and spin those, too.  Round and round, dizzier and

dizzier.  They shut their eyes and rotate to the drone of the music. It

brings them closer to God.  As I sit and stare, I lose myself.  Oh, yeah,

I'm in Cairo.  



"Cairo," I whisper to myself, and shut my eyes, too.



OVER EGYPT AGAIN



Now that I'm leaving it, I think, Egypt from above doesn't seem so fetching. 



Every price quoted to me was four times what was fair.  I talked with

another traveler about it.  Even somewhere like India, they don't gouge you

for stuff like food.  You pay what everyone pays.  But in Egypt, they try

to cheat you.  Even a six-year-old tried to charge me ten times the fair

price for a piece of bread.  It got really draining.  You try to talk to

the people, and they're not interested.  They're only interested in your

money.



Then again, I was in many tourist districts, where the people are

different.  And the massacre at Luxor has scared away the big money, so

even little spenders like me are now being poached by ten times the normal

number of people.  Add to that the fact it's summer, and the income is

already at its lowest ebb of the year.  But still...



Watching Egypt again from another plane, it looks the same. But the

patchwork of green land is less a plush quilt than a ratty thrice-recovered

couch.  It's been plowed under, sliced up, stripped, and lived on for

centuries. And the cities that spring from the land look like age spots, or

random smears of mold.  The desert isn't taffy, but endless dust, where the

dirty-footed hordes live in search of shade.



Egypt is still mysterious, still affecting.  Just no longer a wonderland.



It's an important step in a traveler's maturity to not like someplace.

Although I liked Egypt, I was disgusted by many of the habits of its

people.  It wasn't how they lived, or looked, or bathed.  It was how they

treated me.  I am not a Walking Dollar Sign.  



But, looking down over the endless desert, I realized I was probably just

as naive as they thought I was.



IRONIC



In Jerusalem, guess what happens if you open your store on the Jewish holy

day?

Someone--a zealous Jew--is likely to come round and smash your windows.



In the Old City, many signs are written in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic,

and English, in order to accommodate all the faiths that live within the

walls.  In the Jewish Quarter, it's common to see the Arabic writing

spray-painted out.



In the Muslim Quarter, I see some graffiti.  It's a swastika, an equal

sign, and a Star of David.



Apparently, some Muslim finds some Jewish behavior to be like the Nazis.

How ironic, I think.



WRONG TURN



I get lost in the Jewish Quarter. Up the wrong stairs, down the wrong

street.  I find myself standing on the roofs of the Old City.  It's nearly

the end of shabbat, and the sun is setting. Across the way, framed by

steeples and minarets, a group of Orthodox Jewish children are squealing

and shouting as they slowly release a paper kite.  All eyes trail it as it

ascends to the winds over the city.  From over the rooftops, I watch too,

as the sun streaks us all in gold.  All for a wrong turn.



32



Better than diet, better than exercise--there's disease.



In Egypt, the heat (plus a little bug I'd caught in Morocco) was keeping me

down to one meager, half-eaten meal a day.  Plus 5 liters of water.  On

Thursday night, I decide to go out in Tel Aviv.  Since my blue jeans still

have Egypt smeared all over them, I have no option but to put on my black

ones.  



That's right: The ones I have never been able to fit into.  The Size 32s.

(Holy Grail music here.)



And--zip--they go on.  No leaping up and down, and no writhing on the bed.

Trumpets sound and angels weep. I FIT INTO SIZE 32s AGAIN!!!!!!!   



This truly is the Holy Land.  And I'm one snazzy-lookin' stud.



--------



All right.  I'm tired.  I should have probably mapped these out before I

wrote them.  They seem kind of weird now, and not very interesting.  But,

hey, it was an experiment.  A draft. And my time is nearly up.



Interesting facts: In Arabic, the number 666 looks just like 777



In Ancient Egypt, they had a 10-day work week.



I got the fastest haircut of my life in Cairo.  And it's not just because

I'm losing hair.  It was literally a mere whizzing and flashing of razors,

and I was trimmed.  Amazing!  



I've grown strangely soothed by Arabic music.



There are machine guns everywhere!  And 20-year-olds behind every single

one.  One of them dropped hers (hers!!!!) on the bus to Jerusalem from Tel

Aviv.  It clattered to the aisle.  



Tel Aviv is like Miami Beach.  Maybe a little more Jewish, though.  Israel

in general, in fact, is like home.  



Jerusalem is chockablock with places they say Jesus was crucified and

buried.  It's really disheartening.  Everyone wants to own it, so more keep

cropping up. In one of them, the gold-plated Church of the Holy Sepulchre,

six Christian faiths have been fighting for more than 150 years over who

gets to run the place.  Nothing gets done.  Even light bulbs go unchanged.

Honestly!  Jerusalem brings out sickness in people, I think.  The

Christians hate the Christians, the Jews hate the Jews and the Muslims, the

Muslims hate them too... this place hasn't illuminated much about God's

colorful history for me, but the sad history of the follies of man.

"Numberless are the world's wonders/ But none more wonderful than man."

And that was said thousands of years before Christ OR Muhammad came to turn

this city into soup of me-first, possessive nutcases.



And Israel does attract the kooks. People are attracted by the lifestyle,

check in, and become psycho fundamentalists. One guy at my first hostel

(which I quickly left) just sat in the common room all day.  He was 60

years old, from upstate New York, but has lived here for 20 years (in

hostels!!).  His beard went all the way down to his considerable belly.  He

started by telling me, in painstaking detail, about a boat he built and

lived on once.  Then he got silent, took a personal trip to Neptune, and

returned to tell me that drug runners sank it in Eilat when he refused to

sell it to them.  And he told me the government took his house.  And he

told me not to cook the calf in its own mother's milk.  



I've learned to play backgammon.  It's very popular in the Middle East.

I'm a whiz!  I gammoned one girl twice in four games.  (That sounds a bit

saucy, doesn't it?)



So much unsaid!  So many questions!  But time's almost up.



Several people have asked me about my birthday.  No, I don't know where

I'll be yet.  (It's on July 12.  I'll be 27.)  Maybe Istanbul.  But I will

be in London soon after that.  If you want to send cards or letters

(please!), you can send them to P.O. Box 88, Village Station, New York, NY

10014-1088, and my friend Jessica will send them to me in London.  When we

get closer to my stay there, I'll give out the actual address, in case you

don't trust the double-jeopardy mail thing.  It usually takes a week at the

most from America to London.



I was thinking of telling everyone my name is Patrick for a while.  Test it

out.  Whaddaya think?  Everyone says I look like a Patrick.



Tomorrow: The Dead Sea! And so on.



Thirty-two, baby!!!!

--Jase



Right now I'm in: Jerusalem, Israel



Strudel - The Internet Bar

11 Monbaz St., Jerusalem, Israel, 95150