Spiritual Journey | Confessions of a Cruise Director

After lunch, I wanted to smoke a hookah.  Mohamed, our other guide, laughed.  “You mean a shisha, my sister.  What kind of flavor do you want?”  Shisha (called a hookah in places like Turkey), is tobacco is soaked in molasses.  Often, the molasses is flavored, I guess so it’s a little like dessert when you smoke it after dinner.  It turns out there are a lot of shisha flavors.  Apple, mint, and coffee are the most popular in Egypt, but I have also tried honey, cantaloupe, mango, raspberry, strawberry and new car smell (I’m kidding about that last one).  It’s also fun to mix two or more flavors to create a new one, but that’s more likely to happen at the hookah lounges in Vegas than in a little outpost of hookah heaven in Cairo.

For about a dollar a person, the waiter will bring you a huge, standing water pipe, with the flavored tobacco of your choice on the top of the stand, and a hot charcoal disk on top of that. Most restaurant shishas have at least two pipes, long snaked hoses that end in cigarette filter mouthpieces.  To share with others in the States, you get a plastic tip that you can take off and put on as the pipe is passed to you, but in Egypt they simply cover the mouthpiece with a bit of foil.  This means you are fairly protected from the last group of people who smoked this pipe before you, but you’d better be comfortable with the hygiene of the ones you are smoking with now.

 The important thing to remember is that, while you can inhale the smoke, cooled by the water that is the whole point of this method, an unaccustomed smoker (a shisha ingénue) can still get what those in the know refer to as a “harsh toke.” There is nothing more hilarious than seeing your mother trying to French inhale, when she hasn’t smoked in about 40 years, causing her to  hork up a lung instead.  I, on the other hand, occasionally imbibe a ciggy butt when the mood hits, so I am capable of holding my own on the shisha front.  This mightily impressed Mohamed and Emil, who, in addition to the enjoyment of blowing smoke rings on a shisha, also shared a pack-a-day habit.

Eventually, this caught up with Emil, who had a heart attack and nearly died.  Both he and Momo quit smoking, but only Emil, touched by death and knowing he narrowly avoided the rigor mortis dance, stayed the course.  They both lost weight because of this brush with the Great Beyond, though, which of course only added to their pull with the ladies.

After lunch, we boarded the bus, with more music and dancing (and request for tips) accompanying our exit.  Suddenly, those who have had a glass of wine or beer with lunch are dancing with these locals, feeling less intimidated than the rest of us, or else more in tune with the music.  We all clap and take pictures and leave the restaurant very happy. And very full.  Another chance to improve relations with the Middle East, another successful afternoon!

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This is the next installment of my book, tentatively titled, “Travels through Egypt.” After visiting the Temple of Sakkhara, we always go to the same restaurant, one of everyone’s favorites on the trip…

In the afternoon, after Sakkhara, we stopped a desert oasis for lunch.  On our way down the steps to the open air restaurant, a tiny crew of musicians and dancers serenaded us with drums and homemade instruments.  On the left, in a covered area about 20 feet square, two women sat on their haunches, busy working fist-sized balls of dough into flat circles.  One by one, they slid the dough a mud brick oven, and pulled it out minutes later.  The layers of dough had parted, and a huge, pita-sized puff emerged.  They smiled and passed it over to those of us watching, and we greedily tore it to bits to share amongst ourselves.  The fresh, hot bread was immensely satisfying, and the women laughed, pleased with our expressions.  They shyly held their hands out for tips, which we gladly gave, then our guide Emil bustled us over to the main restaurant.

It was huge, and would have easily held a hundred or more people at the long tables.  A soda machine leaned against a tent pole at one end, a group of hookas clumped next to it.  The whole establishment was under a big group of tents, and in all the time I have been coming there, we’ve never seen the kitchen.  Our tables, as is often the case when we eat as a group, were already laid with an assortment of Egyptian mezzes, the appetizers so plentiful you could make a meal of them.  Little dishes held hummus (chick pea & tahini dip), baba ghanoush (a dip made of grilled eggplant), tabouli (little granules of cracked wheat with garlic, lemon, parsley and mint), assorted spiced olives, cubed boiled potatoes dressed in oil, a fava bean dip that seems especially popular with Egyptians, and my favorite, fresh white beans cooked al dente, drizzled with olive oil, and topped with chopped onion and parsley.

Everything in Egypt is fresh, and for the most part, macrobiotic.  Especially on the ships, you can see food being brought in that morning that was picked at most the day before, and will be on your table within hours.  The Egyptians eat at least two courses (for those who can afford it); a salad course consisting of these appetizers, and then a meat course, possibly followed by a fish course, with fresh fruit for dessert.  Pork is almost unheard of, and beef not particularly plentiful or popular, with chicken and lamb served everywhere.  After our appetizers were mopped up with plenty of the fresh bread puffs, plates of grilled chicken and lamb took their place, each with a side of local rice, threads of saffron streaking orange through the soft white granules.

The lamb is delicious and seemingly unspiced, the flavor delicate and rich at the same time.  The chicken is tender and perfectly grilled, full of flavor in my mouth.  A few years ago, the Egyptians were convinced to import chickens from Denmark, because they eat so many of them here.  The Danish chickens were larger and fatter, so it was thought they would quickly become more popular than the wiry little chickens so ubiquitous in Egpyt.  But they were practically flavorless, so they never caught on.  Emil talks about a European friend who brought his boy over to play with one of Emil’s sons.  Although the boy was only a year older than Emil’s kid, he was huge in comparison.  But Emil’s small, skinnny boy more than held his own with the big kid, outrunning and outplaying him until the older boy was exhausted.  ”The European boy,” Emil shrugged, “he is like Danish chicken!”  He laughed hard, slapping his knee.  Emil can be weird, but we love him.

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This is the 2nd excerpt from my work-in-progress memoir, Travels Through Egypt.  This is the last part of chapter 3.  If you have a suggestion for the name, let me know.  I’m about halfway through writing it, and I’ll try to publish a chapter a week.

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Food helps to ground me, but for two days, I foundered, as we traveled from site to site visiting Cairo.  Jet lag, the newness of the Middle East, the strangeness of the “getting to know you” period with the group, and my general work exhaustion, all seemed to overwhelm me until I felt as if I were swimming through sand.  The most important thing I remember from this period, is meeting our guides, Mohamed Nazmy and Emil Shaker.  Emil and Mohamed are the reason we go back to Egypt year after year now, and it was at their suggestion that we eventually began to lead trips.

Mohamed Nazmy, the President of Quest Travel, has always been a bit of an enigma to me. When I first met him, I described him as, “What if a bear and a beagle gave birth to an Egyptian?” These days, he is formidable, a big man with a full face, smooth skin, heavy lidded eyes, and jet black hair with a white Bride of Frankenstein streak at the front.  Mohamed wears Armani suits, and his every gesture is elegant.  His staff is obviously both afraid of him and worshipful of this father figure, who acts as sort of a benevolent dictator.  Everyone in the hospitality business knows Mohamed, and I once scared off a man on the street who was trying to hustle me by telling him I knew Mohamed Nazmy.  I believe Mohamed has done more for spiritual travel in Egypt than perhaps any other man, and he counts Marianne Williamson, Greg Braden and Graham Hancock among his many luminary friends.

To Greg and me, Mohamed is a teasing boy, who giggles and loves practical jokes and surprising people with gifts, unexpected opportunities, or little extras that he knows will make his guests happy. On our first trip, he looked in Greg’s and my eyes and called us his brother and his sister.  He obviously saw something there we did not, since at the time we would never have guessed we would come back to Egypt again and again.

Last year, I nicknamed him Momo, and to my surprise, the name stuck, and now Mohamed has taken to signing his e-mails Momo, or Big Mo (which is larger than life like he is, but sounds too gangstery to fit).  But, in typical Momo fashion, woe to the staff member who calls him by his nickname.  They all still refer respectfully to “Mr. Mohamed,” at least to his face. 

Momo is the most incredible marketer I know of, and has mentored me on many of his secrets over the years.  But his best one is simply understanding the dynamic of many of the people who visit, knowing to always give them nothing less than the trip of a lifetime.  For each of his guests, this is his goal, and that he almost always achieves it can, in Egypt, be nothing short of a miracle.

Emil and Mohamed have been friends for over twenty years.  Emil was born in Luxor, not just the city, but on the actual grounds of the temple, which in those days was still full of mud structures that were formed on three sides, and attached to a wall of the temple.  Emil can stand at the entrance to the main Luxor temple compound, point just behind the left Collossus, and say he was born there. Needless to say, Egypt’s in his blood.  When he was a kid, the authorities came in and kicked everyone out of Luxor temple and demolished all their homes, making way for the badly needed temple refurbishment in anticipation of the growing tourist trade, made possible by the advent of cheap plane travel. 

Emil was, by his own gleeful admission, a bad boy.  He will tell you as many stories as you like to prove this to you.  For example, when he was a kid, an old man who lived near him married a young, beautiful woman and was having sex with her every night.  Their bedroom was on the second floor, and Emil used to shinny up the metal downspout next to the window, so he could watch.  After a few weeks, the old man got wind of it, and wired the pipe to a circuit.  The next time Emil grabbed the pipe, Emil got a jolt of electricity that knocked him to the ground.   When he tells this story, he laughs uproariously and slaps his leg. 

At fifteen, Emil got into so much trouble, his mother decided he had to leave Luxor, and sent him away to school.  Eventually, he went to Cairo University and became an Egyptologist, and it was in this capacity that he met, and began working for, Mohamed Nazmy.  Emil has less than a full set of teeth, and even less hair, but women for some reason find him devastatingly attractive.  On every trip, they fight over Emil.  Who does he like best? Which one will he end up with?  I’ve seen a seventy year-old and a thirty year-old go nuts over the guy.  Emil gets the last laugh, flirting with everyone, making all kinds of promises, but when I ask him if he ever follows through, he says, “No! I am a good boy,” and gestures dismissively.  I almost believe him, but the seventy year-old seemed especially determined.

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