Inhuman Swill

This morning,
with a high of seventy degrees in the forecast,
amazing for a November in Chicago,
I drove the dog to Warren Park.
That's where we go for a special treat
instead of our usual neighborhood walk,
because the squirrel chasing is most excellent,
and there are never any cops there to harass you,
a scofflaw walking his dog off its leash.

We like to run up the steps of the sledding hill,
which a parks department sign actually proclaims "Sledding Hill,"
and then charge down the slope,
after which we make our way around the skirt of the hill
where the squirrels rummage through the leaves
like so many bargain hunters.
We crunch crunch crunch across the orange carpet,
and if we're lucky we spot a squirrel far enough out
in the open that Ella can chase it full-bore
back to its tree.
She has never once caught one.
Or at any rate never killed one.

Next we like to follow the cinder jogging path
all the way around the little nine-hole golf course embedded
like an off-center yolk
in the albumen of the park,
and that's exactly what we did this morning.
I walked in the leaves at the side of the path,
trying to encourage Ella to do the same,
but unless she has a rodent, lagomorph or marsupial in her sights
she prefers to walk on pavement. Go figure.

We were on the south side of the golf course,
the tall chain-link fence meant to protect us from flying balls
off to our left,
when I saw two men coming our way along the path,
youngish men—younger than I, at any rate—
neatly bearded men dressed in long robes the color of wet sand.
It was already warm enough out that I was regretting
the heavy coat I wore over my hooded sweatshirt.
I snapped my fingers imperiously,
calling for Ella to return to my side,
to leave the path and get out of the way
of the two youngish men engaged in animated talk.



Ella is a good dog, shaggy-bearded herself,
and she mostly listens. But I know that Muslims
are afraid of dogs, or wary, or I think I know this,
having watched many women in headscarves
whisper urgently to their children to stay out
of our path. At least,
I assumed these men were Muslims. I admit I don't know
the taxonomy of robes and caps and beards.
They could have been Coptic Christians or even Jains for all I knew.
At any rate, they didn't have turbans on
so I knew they weren't Sikhs.
But despite my commands, Ella didn't leave the path
entirely. She shifted toward me, trotting along
the very edge of the pavement, but didn't leave it altogether.
"Ella," I hissed. "Come." She spared me only a sidelong glance,
certain she had already obeyed me to the extent required.
Letter of the law.
I only wanted to be a good neighbor.
The men were yards away.
Dogs are not consistent with Islam.
I braced for whatever.

It's not that I thought anything worse
than embarrassment might transpire,
but my dog does have a history.
She grew up in Queens, and she still has some of that attitude.
We socialized her with people pretty quickly,
my wife and I, but that didn't prevent her from
barking her selectively bred head off at any unfamiliar creatures
we encountered on the street,
ones with strange colors, shapes or motions.
Woman in full burqas, like shambling mounds of midnight.
People in big hats.
People on crutches or in wheelchairs.
Black people--a sad reflection of the diversity
of visitors to our apartment.
The worst was the time she lost it at an old black woman
in a wheelchair
in front of a funeral parlor
on Astoria Boulevard near the elevated tracks.
As we dragged her in a wide, apologetic berth
as far from the frightened woman
as possible.
As the woman's decked-out younger companions yelled at us.
As if we'd trained our dog to hate old black women in wheelchairs.
That was the worst.

But it's not as if Ella has never met a Muslim man before.
We used to walk her up Steinway Street in Queens,
right past all the Middle Eastern restaurants and pastry shops
and bookstores, and the men's social clubs with the curvy hookahs,
and even past the mosque.
Some people avoided us, though we never walked her
up the middle of the sidewalk or in such a way
as to block anyone's path.
We didn't mean it as a provocation
but more as a statement, an exercise of our rights
to free association, an exercise in multiculturalism.
And not everyone avoided us. One time
a group of three thirtyish Egyptians stopped us
as we walked Ella up the far edge of the sidewalk.
One of them with a reedy mustache and a look of childlike wonder
asked if our dog was friendly. "Yes," we said.
He asked if he could pet her. "Of course," we said.
We made her sit.
Ella could care less about most strangers, but she doesn't like
surprises, so we told the man to reach out slowly.
His fingertips barely grazed the hair on the top of her head,
while Ella sat patiently and yawned.
"Good dog," we said, while the man straightened up
with a smile as wide as the world on his face.
You could see him already composing the story in his head
that he would tell his friends,
about how he petted a dog
and didn't even get struck by lightning.
He'll be dining out on that one for years.

We loved that neighborhood for reasons like that meeting
on the street. We loved it for our friend Ali,
who would never touch Ella because he was cooking
in his little restaurant, but who always had a kind word for her,
and still asks about her when we visit.
I love it for the times I stayed out all night drinking
with Ali, who knew everyone, for the times he Virgiled me
into the social club across the street from his restaurant,
where I smoked shisha with the Egyptian men and listened
to monologues on history and hieroglyphics,
on all the important things that Egypt invented, or did first.
Our travels in Cairo and Luxor and Petra and Amman,
talking Islam and politics and Christianity
with virtual strangers in coffee shops and cafés,
sometimes seemed the inevitable endpoint of our years
in that neighborhood, which we loved.

What I'm trying to get at is, I don't hate Muslims,
and I especially don't want any Muslim to think I hate Muslims,
or that my dog hates Muslims.
Which she doesn't.
The two men on the path had nearly drawn even with us,
and Ella still hadn't moved off the pavement.
But there was enough room for her and the nearest man to pass
each other without touching, which they did.
"Good morning, sir," he said to me with a cheerful trill,
his face like a gibbous moon, beaming.
"Good morning, how are you today?" I said with a smile
as wide as Lake Michigan,
a smile trying a little too hard,
wanting to be seen as a friend, not a fraud,
and reflect the genuine shiver of camaraderie I felt.
"Very well, thank you," he said, dipping his head.
He, the respectful, non-threatening immigrant,
me, the welcoming, tolerant native,
both playing the part of open-minded, ideal world citizen.
Maybe he was born here, I don't know, and maybe I was not,
as far as he knew.
No matter.
We both still played our proper roles—
roles still, even if based on a true story,
inspired by real events.
I might wish for a deeper connection,
a meeting of the minds,
but at least we all passed on our leisurely errands
without baring our teeth,
without drawing our guns,
and I can live with that.

Ella, more alien than us all,
paid none of our human posturing the slightest mind.

Finally, for a little closure, clicking this photograph will take you to a Flickr set of my choices for the best pictures from our trip. Relax, there are only 148.



But if you want to see more, way more, you can sample this collection instead.

We knew that Friday, May 30, as another long travel day, was going to suck. We just didn't know yet how badly it was going to suck.

Over dinner the evening before, Ra'ed had broken the news to us that there would be yet another change in our travel plans. It seems the tour company had not booked our return tickets on the morning ferry to Taba soon enough, and the earliest ferry with berths still remaining would not be until 7:00 pm. That would get us to Taba far, far too late to make any bus that would reach Cairo at any remotely reasonable hour.

The solution foisted upon us—dreamed up by that same favorite benefactor of ours in Cairo who only days before had failed to get us from Hurghada to Sharm al-Sheikh by boat—was overland travel. It seemed fairly straightforward, if tedious, on the face of it. Ra'ed would drive us back to Aqaba, hand us seventy American dollars, and drop us off at the border crossing to Eilat, Israel. Once in Israel, we would take a cab to the Egyptian border, where a driver would be waiting to spirit us south to Dahab to catch our bus.

It sounds so simple, doesn't it?

As it turned out, the crossing into Israel went just fine. There was only one dicey moment, when a large and scary immigration officer demanded to know the origin of my family name. ("I—I don't know," I said. "We're American or Canadian on both sides going back two hundred years." Now, I do know that my roots stretch back to England, Scotland, and Wales, but who can recall that when confronted by a hulking Israeli who probably thinks your name sounds Aryan? Laura, obviously French in extraction, had no problem.) This, by the way, was the only man among all the border personnel we encountered on our adventure in Israel. The women were generally much more pleasant.

Once we made it through passport control, a border guard hailed a taxi for us, and we were on our way. The cab driver sped us through Eilat, pointing out with pride such consumer temples as Zara and Club Med. He seemed a little offended when I asked him if his accent was French, but I think I managed to smooth it over by saying we knew Israel was like our home in New York City, full of people who've migrated from all over the world. At the Egyptian border, the driver charged us $25 American. I gave him a fifry, and he gave me back 50 shekels in change. (Two shekels to the dollar!)

Our exit visas ended up costing us, much to the amusement of the woman at the exchange desk, 50 shekels plus 20 dollars plus 2 dinars. That meant our transit had cost us, thus far, approximately three dollars more than the travel company had spotted us at the outset. And there was still one more border left to cross.

Leaving Israel was perfectly pleasant. We crossed the long barren stretch of pavement between Israel and Egypt and entered the Taba border station. In all innocence, we strolled right up to the Egyptian passport control officer, handed him our passports ... and were denied entry to Egypt.

Let's back up over a week, to the day we flew into Cairo. The very first person to meet us there was a travel facilitator from our tour company. His job was to provide immigration with a "guarantee" for our stay in Egypt—proof that our travel was all prearranged and would be supervised by the company for the duration of our time in country. This allowed him to purchase our fifteen-dollar entry visas for us. Without such a guarantor, the only way for us to enter the country would have been for us to acquire visas at an Egyptian consulate before leaving the U.S.

The passport officer at Taba pointed to the visas in our passports, which had been closed out when we left Egypt for Jordan two days earlier. "If you don't have a company here to purchase your visas," he rather impatiently explained, "then you can go back to Eilat and apply for visas at the consulate there."

Of course, it was a Friday, and in that region of the world the weekend is Friday and Saturday. The consulate in Eilat would not be open until Sunday.

"We were probably in a rush, and missed our tour guide," I said. "We'll go back and find him. Sorry."

It turns out that in our hurry to reach passport control we had strolled right past a small group of tour guides inside the border station. We went back to them and asked which of them was from our company.

Ahem. None was.

The tour guides were as helpful to us as they could be, though. They got on the phone to our accursed travel agent in Cairo, who, when the cell phone was passed to me, seemed utterly mystified that we hadn't been able to waltz through the border like Fred and Ginger. "You don't need another visa," he said.

"Um, yes, we do. Now, where's the guy who can get it for us?"

I won't detail the further phone calls and mounting anger and frustration we experienced over the next couple of hours, stymied at the border as we were. A driver was waiting for us on the far side of the crossing, but he wasn't authorized to make the kind of guarantee required by Immigration. A helpful and friendly tour guide explained to us apologetically that there were guides who could be bribed to provide such a guarantee, but that his was a reputable company which could not assist us in that regard.

Eventually our nimrod in Cairo called with a brainstorm. "Do you have e-tickets for your flight out of Cairo?"

"Yes."

"You have your flight itinerary handy?"

"Yes." I had taken to a certain measure of curtness in my dealings with him.

"Take it to the passport control officer. Explain that you've been in Egypt already, and you need to enter again in order to leave."

Next to the currency exchange, there was an office marked "Immigration." The door was open. I shrugged, and Laura and I walked over to peek through the door. Inside was a tall, stern-looking man in an immaculate white uniform seated behind a desk. His hair was steel-gray and receding, and his nose was a thin curving blade. I sat down, laid the itinerary before him, and explained the situation—adding that our travel agent in Cairo was an obvious loser with a camel and a donkey for parents. (Okay, maybe I only said I didn't know why their man wasn't there.)

The immigration officer said, carefully, "I am only immigration officer. I am sorry, I can do nothing. But perhaps I have possible solve for you."

He went on to explain, as the reputable tour guide had, that certain companies would provide guarantees to tourists for a fee of $35 American. He pressed a button and went to the door. After a moment a fellow appeared in the doorway. The immigration officer raised his hands, palms forward. "I am only immigration officer. I know nothing of these things."

To truncate a long story, the man at the door wrote out a travel guarantee for us, purchased two visas from the bank, walked us through passport control where the same officer who had denied us entry stamped our visas with a cynical smirk, and walked us outside to the parking lot beyond. That's where I forked over 380 Egyptian pounds, the equivalent of 70 bucks—30 for the visas, 40 for the grease.

And that's what it took. We were back in Egypt.

And hopping mad.

We met our driver and set off south in his van. It was now 1:00 pm. We had missed our 12:30 bus from Dahab. The next bus would leave Dahab at 2:30. It was a two-hour drive from Taba to Dahab. By now we were impervious to terror on tortuous, twisting desert highways. Our driver got us there in ninety minutes. We barely had time to pee, and then our bus was off and rolling.

It was a large, comfortable coach-style bus, but with no restroom on board. We tried not to drink much water for the duration of the ride. We'd been told the trip would take six hours. Actually, it took eight. Having traveled south down the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba, we then drove west across the Sinai Peninsula, back north up the coast of the Gulf of Suez, and then through the tunnel back underneath the Suez Canal. There was one rest stop in the middle of all this, but it was only a quickie so the men on the bus (Laura was the only woman) could have a smoke and pee in the sand. I held it, in solidarity with Laura.

Here, Laura interviews me on the bus:


We reached Cairo at 10:30 pm. Our guide Shiko was there at the bus station—had been, for a couple of hours—with a van driver. Our dear friend the travel agent was waiting to meet us at the hotel. Believe me, when you haven't peed for eight hours, the man who put you in that situation is is the last person you want to find standing between you and the nearest plumbing.

The idiot didn't even realize that we had another full day in Cairo ahead of us. He tried to tell us that our van would be there at five in the morning to take us to the airport.

Okay, let's fast-forward past the discussion that followed. It was past midnight by the time we managed to get rid of the tour people and get settled in our room. That's when Laura and I set out in search of food. All we had eaten since breakfast seventeen hours earlier in Jordan was a banana apiece and some of those crumbly chocolate-creme sandwich cookies that come in a tube. I had spotted a sidewalk cafe a couple of blocks away on the way to the hotel that looked inviting, and it wasn't difficult for us to walk there. Our waiter was funny and nice, and I ended up eating a dish called koshary, sort of a kitchen-sink affair built from lentils, chickpeas, tomato sauce, rice, pasta, chunked meat, and assorted other ingredients. It damn well hit the spot. Laura had chicken shawarma, and we took turns feeding bits of meat on the sly to the two stray cats that prowled up to our table from beneath a parked car.

It was a good way to close out an interesting but ultimately shitty day.

[Writing in Cairo hotel room, hoping to stay up all night in preparation for sleeping through our 7:35 am flight to Paris.]

According to the original plan, we shouldn't have been on that overnight train back to Cairo at all. This was the first leg of our two-day journey from Luxor to Petra, and it was supposed to have started first thing Tuesday with a drive east to Hurghada, a resort city on the western shore of the Red Sea. From there we were to take a ferry to Sharm al-Sheikh, another Egyptian resort city, this one on the western shore of the Gulf of Aqaba. We would spend the night in Dahab (yes, another resort city), and then continue on our way from there.

We had been informed of the change in plan on Friday evening, our first evening in Cairo. We were sitting at an outdoor cafe near the train station at the end of our sightseeing day with Shiko our guide and our three new Australian friends. I was smoking a shisha, and Shiko was favoring a distinctly reluctant Jemima with a rather flirtatious palm-reading when the Egyptian agent of our tour company showed up. He had some news for Laura and me.

It seemed he had just learned that the ferry from Hurghada to Sharm al-Sheikh would not be running the day we needed it. It seemed, also, that he had known this might be a possibility, but hadn't let us know any sooner. His alternate plan would be for us to take a train back to Cairo from Luxor, then ride a bus from Cairo to Dahab. He said the bus would take six hours.

Let's just say of the very calm argument that followed that it is an unwise man who gets on Laura's bad side. Especially over poor planning. And doubly especially when the unwise man is trying to tell her a bus ride will be a good thing, when bus rides make Laura carsick.

To make a long story short, we arrived back in Cairo on the train Tuesday morning only an hour late. Shiko and the travel agent were both there to greet us, together with the news that the company had decided to offer us a private van instead of the bus. And that fast, we were hustled into the van and the van was on its way.

What is there to say about a seven-hour van ride across the Sinai Peninsula? It was no Death Race 2008, though it did have its harrowing moments. We were becoming more accustomed to the idea that Egyptians regard lane markers and dividing lines as little more than interesting suggestions, especially on empty two-lane desert highways, but we hadn't yet come to terms with it fully.

There were cool moments, too. Did you know that one crosses the Suez Canal by taking a tunnel under it? I didn't. And did you know that camels enjoy hanging out at filling stations? Well, here's proof:



Dahab, when we reached it, was a revelation. The Sinai Peninsula juts south into the Red Sea, splitting it in two at its north end. The western arm is the Gulf of Suez, while the eastern arm is the Gulf of Aqaba. That's the one our hotel in Dahab looked out on, and the water had a pure, deep, inky blue color I have never seen the like of. If we had to have a way station on the journey to Petra, this would definitely do.

Laura and I spent the afternoon walking along the beach, lounging with books under umbrellas, and napping. For dinner, we enjoyed a sumptuous and delicious Egyptian buffet in the hotel restaurant, looking out of course at the water. And that night, after dark, we took the hotel shuttle into Dahab proper, strolled along their equivalent of the Boardwalk looking at souvenirs and dive shops, tarried a while at an internet cafe, and sorta kicked ourselves for eating at the hotel and not saving ourselves for one of the cabanalike restaurants serving tropical drinks on the water.

We stopped in at a T-shirt shop for some souvenirs specifically because the owner didn't hassle us as we strolled down the street. Laura picked out three shirts, then proceeded to haggle for them like a pro. She managed to work the price down from 150 LE to 125. My favorite line of the whole exchange came from the young merchant, as he sliced beneath his chin with an extended finger: "Seventy-five pounds?! That is cut-my-throat price! One-forty."

And then we rode the shuttle back to the hotel and turned in. It was the most relaxing day of our trip.

No time for a long post, but Laura and I are having an utterly relaxing day in Dahab, which is on the Sinai Peninsula, on the shore of the Red Sea. Our hotel is amazingly beautiful, and the water of the Red Sea is the most amazing blue I have ever seen in my life. (asphalteden, the diving here is supposed to be amazing, although according to the book in our hotel room, almost everything in the water is poisonous.)

You can see mountains directly across the water, ten to twelve miles away. That, I am told, is Saudi Arabia. Tomorrow we drive north, then cross the water in a catamaran, landing in Aqaba, Jordan.

A full account of yesterday in Luxor will come, as will an account of our adventures crossing the Sinai today. In the meantime, before Laura drags me out of this internet cafe, I will try to upload a couple of our videos to YouTube, especially the one of the baby camel wandering through our petrol station in the desert.

[Written Sunday afternoon in the Sara Hotel, Aswan.]

We awoke at 2:45 am today. Well, I awoke earlier to deal with the unsavory consequences of our delicious meal at Makka. Sorry, Ali! I promise my heart will never stray again!

The reason for the early hour was to meet our guide Ahmet at 3:30 am, and thence to meet the Abu Simbel convoy at 4:00 am. Access to Abu Simbel is restricted to certain hours of the day, so buses and cars collect at the entry point to the route in Aswan, then are released to proceed at either 4:00 or 4:30, depending on how many vehicles have gathered.

When we heard the word "convoy," we thought of a rather stately, sedate procession. What actually transpired was a road race. For three white-knuckled hours, Ahmet piloted our van through the desert like the utter fucking lunatic he is, using whichever lane was most convenient, overtaking other drivers, tailgating another van for miles at a distance of a couple of feet at I-shit-you-not what had to be eighty miles and hour or more. I'm sure there were times we hit a hundred. Laura and I were each locked in our own private hells. All we could do was try to keep our eyes closed and pretend to be asleep.

As Ahmet explained once we arrived, he had to drive fast to beat all the other guides, because he has to give us his history spiel outside the temple site because guides aren't allowed to accompany tourists into the temples because of the cacophony that produces and he needs to give us the spiel while it's still quiet on the cafeteria plaza.

Right, whatever. He's still an utter fucking lunatic.

Abu Simbel consists of another pair of temples rescued from rising Lake Nasser. The site, now on the shores of the lake, is 280 kilometers south of Aswan (a distance we covered in two and a half hours) and only 50 miles north of the Sudan border. The temples themselves are amazing, one dedicated by Ramses II to himself, with colossal Ramses II statues outside and inside, and another dedicated by Ramses II to his favorite wife Nefertari, with colossal Ramses II statues outside. Oh, and a couple of Nefertari statues, too.

It was quite startling to think that we saw the actual mummified body on Friday of the man depicted on those statues. Very weird and wonderful.

Another harrowing race through the desert followed this blissful interlude, only this time Ahmet gave a lift to an Egyptian soldier who was fairly careless with his automatic rifle. It was only pointing toward me from the front seat for a few moments before Ahmet sort of resettled it more to his liking, but now added to the thrill of the chase was the expectation that any moment a stray bump would send a volley of lead spraying through the van. Lovely.

We made it back to the hotel, though, shaken and stirred, and now are resting until our evening train to Luxor at 5:45 pm.

[Written Sunday afternoon in the Sara Hotel, Aswan.]

What's most distinctive about driving the expressways of Cairo by night, at least compared to the cities I've visited, is the number of minarets you see, all lit up from within in eerie greens and oranges, or from without by gaudy neon. What impresses you once you enter heavier traffic is how Egyptians can turn a three-lane road into a five-lane road just by willing it so.

We were punchy when we came off the plane from Rome. A travel facilitator from our tour company helped us acquire visas quickly and pass through customs, then our first day's tour guide, Shiko, took over and bustled us into a van. At 4:00 am, we were settling into our room at the Zayed Hotel, and we had only three hours of sleep to look forward to before the day would begin.

At 9:15 am, we hopped back into the van with our luggage and joined three Australian travelers. Our first stop was the Egyptian Museum. I would like to describe and lovingly linger over everything we saw and learned there, but that would take days. With this, as with the monuments and temples and other sights I will mention over the next few days, you can generally assume an inverse relationship between how cool and awe-inspiring something is and how many words I spend on it. You know what most of this stuff looks like already, and otherwise I'll never catch up.

Among the big things we saw at the museum were Tutankhamen's gold masks and sarcophagi, the actual mummies of Ramses II and many other kings and queens of ancient Egypt, a collection of various royal jewelry, and a replica of the Rosetta Stone (the original being at the British Museum). What's staggering about the Egyptian Museum is not just the major pieces but the sheer size of the collection. There are rooms filled with arcane classes of objects only an archaeologist could love, but when taken together the number of artifacts boggles the mind.

We crossed the Nile to Giza, and suddenly there were the Pyramids, right on the edge of the city. Somehow I always pictured there far off in a remote corner of the desert, but no, there they are just west of town. The first view is breathtaking, but even moreso is to stand at the base, or a few levels up, and look up toward the apex. The angle is dizzying.

We didn't enter the first pyramid—not enough bang for the buck, according to our guide—but three members of our little group, me included, ponied up the 25 Egyptian pounds to enter the second pyramid. Laura, who can get claustrophobic, stayed behind. I didn't think that I got very claustrophobic myself—I've been fine in caves like Timpanogos— but something about the exertion of duckwalking down an angled shaft for fifty meters or more with no room to straighten up and barely enough room for you to pass people going the other way, then arriving at a chamber in the bottom only to realize there's still a similar incline up ahead of you, and then to emerge sweating and gasping into the hot air of the bare chamber at the heart of the pyramid—well, despite the high ceiling and comparatively generous dimensions of that room, I could barely control the panic that had arisen toward the end of the ascent, and I couldn't stay in that room for very long. The shafts down and up were bad, but somehow not nearly as bad as that room.

Fortunately, the trek back out didn't seem to take as long as the trek in. I've never been so happy to see sunlight. Laura managed to snap a picture of me at just my moment of emergence, and you can tell.

We took a camel ride out behind the third pyramid. Camels don't look quite as huge when they're lying on the ground as they do when they stand up. I don't think I ever realized just how big the things are until I watched one rise to its full standing height. The process of standing is a fascinating one, too, at least from a position perched atop one's back. First the camel stands up, then it stands up again, and just when you think you're as high as you're going to go, it stands up one more time. At the end of all this elaborate unfolding of legs, your seat is eight or nine feet in the air.

There was some excitement on the ride when Laura's camel bit Holly's, but no bloodshed or injuries resulted.

After the Pyramids, we hit the Sphinx, which is smaller than I had imagined, but no less impressive.

One thing that makes all this sightseeing less than perfectly pleasant is the continuous hassle from merchants and entrepreneurs of all sorts. Like the one that comes up and takes your hat and starts wrapping his scarf around your brow so you can be an Arab in a photo. Or the one that wants you to change his British coins to dollars. Or the one with all the dancing camel dolls, and on and on and on. The constant harassment is wearying, and you learn some sticky lessons before becoming expert and ignoring their advances.

No less wearying is the constant need to tip this person and that. We don't really begrudge the money—well, not much—but the constant confusion about who deserves tips and who doesn't, and how much, gets to be a burden very fast. Oh, the difficulty of keeping sufficient single-pound notes on hand!

A less than thrilling aspect of our Friday tour was our stops at a parchment "museum," a jewelry store, and a perfume factory. Ostensibly these were all educational stops, but of course they ended with a hard sell to purchase their products (in the case of the parchment museum, very hard). Not that the demonstration of how papyrus was made, for example, was not interesting. Does the tour company get kickbacks from the merchants? I don't know, but by the time we reached the third edumerchant, we had a bad taste in our mouths. This is too bad, because the highlights of the tour are very high indeed.

That evening, our guide deposited us at the train station where we boarded our 8:10 pm overnight train to Aswan. We ate dinner in our compartment, enjoyed a whisky in the smoky, shabby club car (I'm not sure why I assumed we'd have no alcohol in Egypt), then summoned our attendant Mohamet to convert our seats to bunks. With the door secured, we joined that club I was talking about earlier, entry to which requires no small amount of gymnastic ability in the cramped space. There will be photos and videos to come later of some of the things we did and saw on Friday, but not of that.