The places I’ve wanted to visit are irretrievably linked to books, and romantic suspense in particular, which I fell in love with in middle school. The old-fashioned romantic suspense of Victoria Holt, Barbara Michaels, and one of my favorites in those days, M.M. Kaye. M.M. Kaye is better known for the Far Pavilions, set during the British Raj, but she also wrote a series of light mysteries in sing-song exotic spots around the world – the Andaman Islands, Cyprus, Kenya, Kashmir, Zanzibar. I read them all, and wanted to “…go sailing, far off to Zanzibar.”*In high school, I discovered Elizabeth Peters. I can still remember reading my first Amelia Peabody mystery while crossing the Everglades in the back of my parents’ car on the way to visit my grandparents. I stayed hooked and fell in love with the Vicky Bliss series too, my favorite of which was Night Train to Memphis. And as all fans of Elizabeth Peters know, Egypt is where her heart resides. And for over twenty years, I dreamed of visiting.
My chance came when I was working in Tbilisi, Georgia, last year. I met a Peace Corps volunteer who was taking a month trip to Israel and Egypt around the same time I was completing my work in Georgia. I didn’t know him and had been planning to travel in Eastern Europe alone, but when I heard the word Egypt over a bonfire late one chilly night, I invited myself along. Read Full Blog.
*Note, for my regular readers, I used a few paragraphs from my previous blog on traveling in Egypt, which I know you all have memorized, so my apologies for being lazy.
We were deep in Jordan, staying in the cave in Wadi Musa when Mubarak finally abdicated. But by then I’d already switched my flight home from Cairo to Amman and Shawn had made plans to meet up with his girlfriend in Istanbul. It wasn’t until the day I was supposed to fly home that we decided to go on to Egypt instead. We heard it was safe again and we were there, so we decided why not? It was only a ferry ride away. How could we not go?
The empty streets of Dahab, Sinai Peninsula
I cancelled my flight out of Amman and we took the night ferry from southern Jordan to the Sinai Peninsula. The crowded, almost entirely male passenger ferry was late leaving Jordan—by about 5 hours—and we didn’t arrive until three in the morning. The middle of curfew. We spent another hour or two wandering the gloomy docks trying to pay our visa and find passport control. Eventually we made it to a hotel in Dahab only to find we didn’t have enough money to move on since none of the ATMs were working and Egypt was strictly a cash economy at that point. (Revolutionary Travel Rule #1: Carry extra cash) Eventually we did find the one bank in town dispensing money, which lucky for us had just reopened that morning.
I won’t give you all the details of our whirlwind tour of ancient Egypt, but suffice to say time was limited and we fully used a mix of planes, trains, and automobiles, spending two nights sleeping on the night train to and from Cairo/Luxor. But this was Egypt, days after Mubarek stepped down, and you’d probably rather read something profound and uplifting, something about the joy and hope permeating the society.
Sphinx at Giza
I hate to disappoint you, but I felt little of that. What I did see was the poverty of Cairo pressed against the massive, barbed-wire wall surrounding Giza, the canals clogged with debris, the horses left to rot amongst the trash piled against that same Giza wall protecting one of the most heavily visited tourist sites in the world. Now empty.
Perhaps this was all amplified by a lack of government services during the previous weeks, but I have my doubts. Revolutions don’t happen in a vacuum.
Sunrise on the Nile, Luxor
In Luxor we did find the post-revolution benefit of walking through the Valley of Queens completely alone. Of being applauded in the bazaar with cries of, “Welcome tourists, welcome”. But it also meant we were the sole target of every poor, underpaid, or out of work street vendor, shop owner, taxi driver, unskilled tour guide, and kid selling postcards, camels, knickknacks, horses and tours. Even the tourism police demanded their cut of baksheesh. While intellectually I knew Egypt was an economy dependent on tourism and times were tough, it was still hard to like people who saw you strictly as a cash sign.
I write all of this as if I expected something different. As if I went to see something different. But I knew in theory what Egypt was like. It’s no different from the history of ancient Egypt that attracts most tourists—from the slaves who spent their lives building the gold encrusted tombs for their Pharaohs, to their ancestors who spent the next four-thousand plus years plundering them, to the more recent centuries of corrupt, poorly planned tourism built around those same pyramids and tombs. It’s why I was so disappointed to see the village of Gurneh bulldozed. That village of tomb robbers and tourist hustlers is part of the living history of the West Bank of Luxor. To knock it down is like bulldozing the Old City of Jerusalem.
But I think the bigger problem was that I don’t like to travel just to see beautiful temples or museums. I want the whole experience—religion, politics, culture, the ugly and difficult, the boring and inane, even unrest and revolt. And I didn’t have enough time for that. It was strictly see Giza and Luxor and get out. And while the archeology was spectacular and there was plenty of beauty (sunrise on the Nile being my favorite), it was too rushed. I was tired from traveling and lack of sleep and the harassment, haggling, lying, bribing and wheeling and dealing wore me down.
Egyptians taking pictures of tanks in Tahrir Square
My last afternoon in Egypt I spent alone wandering into and out of Tahrir Square, taking photos of the Egyptians posing with the military in front of tanks, the vendors selling revolutionary flags and stickers and buttons. I wandered aimlessly around downtown, stopping to eat a delicious Egyptian mishmash of grains and beans, surprised how easy it was to wander as a woman alone. In fact, for the first time in Egypt no one harassed me, or followed me, and I finally felt some real pleasure in the country. And it lasted–until an airport security guard asked me for a bribe the next morning.
But really how easy is it to recover not just from a thirty-year dictatorship, but from thousands of years of extreme poverty and poor governance, from a political culture built on scams, bribes and corruption and disenfranchisement of half its population? Will all that change with the overthrow of one man? I doubt it. But I am glad I went. Revolution and all. And one day I probably need to go back.
I arrived back at my sister’s house late last night after 24-hours of travel with no sleep, but woke up when she brought my nephew in this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I ate a massive breakfast then had a long, wonderfully delicious hot bath and managed to remove several layers of Jordanian sand from my fingernails. But I still need to tell you about Jordan. I’m way behind….
Fauzi Azar Inn, Nazareth
Jordan begins at the Allenby/King Hussein Bridge where we crossed over from Israel, having spent around five days based in Nazareth at a really great hostel called the Fauzi Azar Inn. From there we took lots of day trips around Galilee, including the old city of Acre, which was definitely a highlight of Israel.
But back to the border. While waiting in line to go through customs we picked up a stray Canadian/Greek (Pavlos) on his way around the world before settling in for good at his ancestral home of Crete. His plans for a new life on Crete include building an ecological kibbutz with historical reenactments such as bull riding, wine making and the sacrificing of virgin tourists. I will of course be visiting one day and depending on the view may overstay my welcome as he’s obviously going to need an ecotourism consultant.
Nargeela cafe, Amman
To be strictly accurate, Pavlos might have picked us up, along with a very nice Israeli/Arabic girl who, when we arrived in Amman, let us store our luggage at her dorm (which men were not allowed to enter) and took us out for nargeela (hookah) and then dinner. She was so nice and accepting of Western ways that even when we asked her where we could find some beer (which in Jordan apparently means: “Where can we find some prostitutes?”) she directed the taxi driver to take us to a bar. She refused to go herself, asking to be dropped back at her dorm as quickly as possible, an alarmed look on her face.
Shawn had asked for some sort of Irish pub, which of course can be found on most street corners in Amman (not, it’s still a Muslim country even if it’s a relatively open Muslim country compared to its neighbors). But the taxi driver did okay in that respect. The bar was quiet and dark and in place of the Irish girls there were blond Ukrainian “cocktail waitresses” in high heels and layers of make-up sitting around drinking. Knowing Shawn is not into prostitutes and Pavlos had just come from spending time in a Greek Orthodox monastery I was okay hanging with them in this particular Irish Pub/brothel. We drank a couple of very expensive Heinekens and Shawn practiced his Russian and we left, feeling (on my part anyway) the cultural chasm that led the Israeli/Arabic girl to think I was either the equivalent of a prostitute for traveling unmarried and alone with men, or worse, that Western women like visiting brothels with the “guys”.
Jerash, Jordan
Over the next couple of days we went to Jerash (spectacular Roman ruins) with some fellow travelers from our hostel and then on to the Dead Sea where we rolled ourselves in mud and floated on the painfully (when you’re stupid enough to stick your head underwater that is) salty water and finally on to our Bedouin desert cave outside Petra, home for the next five days. The cave belongs to a Bedouin rasta named Ghassab who’s a bit of a legend on the couch surfing circuit in the Middle East. Shawn found him while we were still in Georgia, but we kept hearing about him as we traveled, including from Pavlos who was coincidentally also heading for the cave.
Our Bedouin cave, home for five days
You might wonder what it was like being the only woman in a desert cave with no toilet or running water but lots of men. The truth is I just became a guy. I wasn’t a very good “guy”, which means I was at the bottom of the pecking order and, at least from the Western men, received much ridicule and had little input into our decision-making. But that was actually my choice as I don’t care much where I go or what I do when I’m traveling. I just like to wander along and see what happens and prefer other people take care of the details. I work pretty much the same way when traveling with women, although with women, thankfully, meals, sleep and showers are usually ranked higher in importance.
Glimpse of the Treasury, Petra
But that is essentially how it worked most of the trip. Shawn (or also Pavlos or Ghassab while we were in Jordan) took care of the details of what we were doing each day and I stepped in only when it was necessary for someone to ask for directions or help, or when we were about to wander off into the desert in the noonday sun with little water, or when my fingers could no longer penetrate my hair and I insisted on a visit to the Turkish baths. They in turn treated me to lots of farting, bad, bad jokes, endless nargeela, a cacophony of snoring each night, and regular teasing about the weight of my backpack. Because really what kind of man would travel with a hair dryer when there’s no electricity or running water?
The Bedouin men, in contrast, were quite aware that I was a female but although there were a few slippery hands and encroaching bodies in the night there were no real problems and certainly not from our host, despite multiple attempts from Shawn and Pavlos to sell me off for 200 camels (alas, the asking price was too steep and I remain unwed). But I had a wonderful time those five days in the cave and Petra was massive and magnificent. We explored it for two days and it was definitely the highlight of a month-long trip utterly soaked in archeological ruins.
The Monastery, Petra
After Petra, Pavlos left us, heading for Asia, and Nils, a German guy joined us in his place. We went on to Aqaba on the Red Sea in southern Jordan, where Nils and I spent a half-day diving a shipwreck and exploring a coral reef. And in Aqaba Shawn finally found his “real” Irish Pub (or so it said on the door), although it once again came stocked with Ukrainian bartenders. Our final night in Jordan, Shawn and I went to Wadi Rum, the legendary red sand desert made famous (at least in the western world) by Lawrence of Arabia. We took our longed for camel ride there, at sunset, and it was worth the wait.
As the evening set in, our camels turned toward a distant camp of black tents at the base of a sharp cliff face and I grew a little alarmed at the disco music thundering across the desert. But luckily it wasn’t an all night party camp but rather a wedding between a Jordanian and a Bedouin to which we had a ringside view–the dancing men being the highlight (see video at the end of blog). The next day it was back to Aqaba and goodbye to Jordan.
Our camels and guide taking a rest, Wadi Rum
What I’ll remember most about Jordan is our desert cave and Ghassab’s hospitality and always Petra. But in the back of my memory will be his Majesty King Abdullah II who smiled from every store window and street corner. We heard only good things about him, and he did have a kind face. But of course people are forbidden to say bad things and since our travels were always overshadowed by the larger backdrop of unrest and revolution in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya and Bahrain and even a little in Jordan, we had to wonder whether King Abdullah would soon be joining that coterie of dictators living it up in a compound somewhere in Saudi Arabia.
Will it happen in Jordan? I don’t know. It isn’t a rich country or even a great democracy (it’s technically a constitutional monarchy), but it isn’t Egypt either and seemed to have a “comparatively” decent standard of living, fairly happy people, and was clean and safe with the nicest drivers outside of Kansas.
I’ve never been particularly interested in visiting Israel. Or at least not as a priority. I always thought I’d visit some day in the distant future with my friend Dafna, who’s Israeli, or go in my “old age”, particularly if I ever found religion. Despite the constant barrage of negative news, I’ve always pictured Israel as a safe place to travel. Maybe too safe, maybe overrun with elderly tour groups.
Dome of the Rock
When I started talking to a PCV in Georgia about traveling in the region he already had Israel as the beginning part and Egypt as the end, maybe a little Jordan in between. The Jordan part grew as we planned, but for me the destination was always Egypt, not Israel. If you’ve been watching the news, you probably realize the Egypt part is out.
But that’s okay because Israel is fascinating and beautiful and green and angry and even wet at the moment and not at all what I expected. What I like best is the constant stream of political talk from the taxi drivers, the waiters and café owners, our couch surfing hosts.
Tel Aviv was modern, as expected, but also nicely formed and walkable—with palm trees and beaches and great food. Everyone spoke English. It helped that we landed in a neighborhood near the beach, staying with a secular Russian Jewish guy in his late twenties who kept up a stream of hilarious invective against the religious politics of Israel, particularly in Jerusalem, where, according to him secular people go for university and then get out as quickly as possible. He said Tel Aviv residents prefer to travel abroad over dealing with much of Israel. For him the problems were as much between secular Jews and religious Jews as between Jew and Muslim or Israeli and Palestinian.
Jewish Cemetery, Mount of Olives, Jerusalem
When we landed in Jerusalem, again through couch surfing, our host was a Jewish guy who left (or escaped) his Hasidic community in his early 20s, running away from an engagement. He was able to leave largely due to a group that helps former Hasidic Jews adjust to secular society. He now teaches gender issues (of all things!) and Jewish religious law at a university and runs an NGO that brings Jewish, Muslim and Christian kids together for a leadership/dialogue program and summer camp in the US. His perspective was not who is right or wrong but how Israel moves forward. A rare opinion in Jerusalem.
The first thing I noticed about Jerusalem was how the opposing cultures were so close yet so segregated. We knew the moment we entered or left East Jerusalem or the Muslim quarter in the old city, not because of any barrier, but because the dress and shops changed from one block to the next. Bethlehem in the West Bank was only twenty minutes by bus from where we were staying the first couple of nights, including passing through the wall. Easily walkable, yet a world apart.
Jewish Cemetery, Mount of Olives, Jerusalem
Where we could move freely between the quarters of the old city, visit the tunnels under the western wall or enter the Temple Mount, talk freely with Muslims, Jews or Christians, Palestinians and Israelis and be welcomed, outside Tel Aviv I didn’t see much intermingling. As just one example, when we emerged from visiting the western wall tunnels, up into the Muslim quarter of old Jerusalem (an area we’d walked through quite freely), we now needed an armed escort on both ends to walk the ten minutes back to the Jewish quarter—because it was a Jewish tour and mostly Jewish group.
Mostly I heard plenty of hate. “Only animals over there,” a woman told us from the hillside in Galilee looking into Jordan. She wasn’t talking about the wildlife. “Arabs can’t handle democracy,” a taxi driver told us. From Palestinians in the West Bank we heard about their poverty, oppression, their anger. For me, compared to Georgia, the West Bank looked quite prosperous.
Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Mount of Olives, Jerusalem
I think an Arab café owner in the Muslim quarter summed it all up best when he said he hated everyone, especially in Jerusalem: Jews, Muslims, Christians. “They all have an agenda,” he said, “and by-the-way how hypocritical are you Americans proclaiming democracy but supporting Mubarak? I hate you too!” I picked up a book in his café while we were drinking coffee which claimed not only the Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, but also the tunnels under the western wall, all the pretty parks in Jerusalem, the light rail—they were all Zionist conspiracies to claim more land.
In Israel, it seems, it’s never just archaeology and good city planning, there’s always ten more layers of history, politics and meaning. And since I don’t have to live here, or deal with the tension, the bombs, the hate, it’s been strangely fun to experience. But then I’m a little weird.
The places I’ve wanted to visit are irretrievably linked to books, and romantic suspense in particular, which I fell in love with in middle school. The old-fashioned romantic suspense of Victoria Holt, Barbara Michaels, and one of my favorites in those days, M.M. Kaye. M.M. Kaye is better known for the Far Pavilions, set during the British Raj, but she also wrote a series of light mysteries in sing-song exotic spots around the world – the Andaman Islands, Cyprus, Kenya, Kashmir, Zanzibar. I read them all, and wanted to “…go sailing, far off to Zanzibar.”*In high school, I discovered Elizabeth Peters. I can still remember reading my first Amelia Peabody mystery while crossing the Everglades in the back of my parents’ car on the way to visit my grandparents. I stayed hooked and fell in love with the Vicky Bliss series too, my favorite of which was Night Train to Memphis. And as all fans of Elizabeth Peters know, Egypt is where her heart resides. And for over twenty years, I dreamed of visiting.
