Spiritual Journey | Confessions of a Cruise Director

In honor of finishing my first draft of my book Travels Through Egypt I am posting a section on the guys who rent the camels, which is a favorite story – enjoy!

Everyone visiting Egypt wants their picture taken on a camel.  There is therefore no shortage of enterprising young men who hover as close as the Pyramid police will allow and offer to put you up on their camel.  It used to be that you could get up on the camel and have a picture taken, for free.  Of course, it costs a dollar or two if you want to get down!  These days, they also all carry packages of makeshift “Lawrence of Arabia” head wraps, and as you are trying to maneuver your way up onto said camel, will thrust one on your head (whether you are male or female) and ask you to pay for that, too ($5 will cover it, less if you try to give it back first).

I do not care a bit for sitting on or riding camels, though I have done my fair share.  The first time I rode one, he complained.  About having to kneel down so I could mount him, about getting back up again with me on his back, about being led around, and about the way I sat — which could have been no more comfortable for him than it was for me, which is to say not atall!  Camels are the boniest creatures — but how would you like someone sitting on your spine?  So how does a camel complain?  It sounds just like Chewbacca, the giant brown Wookie from Star Wars.  As deep, as resonant, and come to think of it, exactly the same pitch. In fact, this realization caused me to look up Chewbacca’s voice on the internet.  Thank God for Wikipedia, which confirms that indeed, camels were among the voices used to create Chewie’s freakish sound (and bears, and a walrus… in case you were wondering.)

These guys obviously make a living getting you up on the camel and selling you A) junk — pyramids and postcards, along with the Arab hat — and B) the right to get off your camel.  I think of them as camel jockeys, because they are always jockeying for position.  One guy is so aggressive with us he literally grabs one of our group around the waist, and tries to hoist him up.  Carter, who is from East Texas, protests the whole time in his distinctive twang, “No, Ah do not want a ride, thank you very much, cowboy!”  But he ends up on that camel.  Just doing some math, based on the 5 minutes and an average $2 someone spends on a camel, these guys are clearing a hundred bucks a day, easy.  Which is pretty incredible in a country where the average salary is $400… a month!

If you’re a tourista in Egypt, enjoy your camel ride, but remember, it’s far safer on the ground, in several regards…

Today we drove to Alexandria. It’s about 3 hours from Cairo by bus (with a 20 minute rest stop at the largest souvenir mall we can find), through desert being largely claimed by homesteaders, and – increasingly frequently –  builders creating communities out in the middle of nowhere. This is distance it once would have taken days to cover by horse or donkey, but now it’s an easy day trip.

Alexandria is home to the Library, opened in 2002. An amazing building with soaring ceilings and a planetarium that looks like the Death Star, the library is one of only two places in the world which claims to have a comprehensive backup of the Internet. However, it has a dearth of books. One of the shelves, for example, held only 5 books under a section of the Dewey decimal system, one of which was “Horoscopes of 1972″ (I have no idea where the other years were). But the library is digitizing every book they get, perhaps in an effort to ensure that there can never be a repeat of the loss history suffered when the original library was burned.

Alexandria, or as it is affectionately called by the locals, Alex, is largely cosmopolitan. It is also uniquely Mediterranean, and indeed it sits on the sea. Once Greg and I wore our galabeyas (the typical Egyptian dress) to Alex and all the locals looked at us as if the hick tourists were in town. Now we know better and wear hip Western clothes, and the looks we get are mostly approving.

In the library, I go into the ladies room, where a group of college girls, all Muslim, are adjusting their taiyas, the head scarves they wear with their blouses and jeans. As I leave the stall, they surround me so curious, and the bravest ones pepper me with questions.

“What is your name?”  ”Halle.”
“Where are you from?”  ”America.”
“How old are you?”  ”41.”
“Do you believe Mohamed is the one true prophet?”

???

Uh-oh. Danger, danger, Will Robinson! If I answer this one wrong I could set Middle East relations back by 50 years. I consider my answer carefully.

“Well, I believe Mohamed was a prophet, just as Jesus and others were prophets, too.”  She nods, satisfied, and launches into an explanation of Muslim religion that I only half follow.  I remember when I was 20 and every word I spoke was a justified pearl.  I am just grateful the road to Alex is still open.

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