Michelle suggested that girls really like fancy unmentionables, something that makes them feel pretty and feminine even if they are the only ones who ever get to see it. Having no point of reference of my own, I concurred and a trip to the Bloomington Mall Victoria’s Secret it was.

Knowing at least that red was Chris’ favorite color, we started there. My fluency in women’s underthings by genus, species and order is weak at best, but I’ll just assume that what I picked out for her was a silk nightie. It was a one piece silk garment with spaghetti straps and sort of like a short dress that hung down to mid-thigh. Whatever you call that, that’s what I picked out. Michelle chose a sort of thin jacket thing that one apparently wears over such a garment, and thought that black would make a nice contrast to the red. I hadn’t really put the ensemble together in my head, but in principle it seemed like something you’d see women wearing in TV shows where people do things like lounge around in their pajamas when those pajamas are not of the flannel variety. Beverly Hills 90210 was popular at the time, and I could have easily imagined Kelly or Brenda munching on Toll House cookies and gossiping on the phone wearing something similar, although maybe not in red and black.

It wasn’t until Chris opened her gifts that Michelle and I were made aware of the fact that we’d basically purchased the appropriate uniform for a common street prostitute. Luckily I was able to choke back my immediate response of, “And?” and forever there after have been reminded of the error of my ways.

Now I find myself in a similar predicament. Here I am, taking this amazing journey around the globe, the list of incredible experiences growing too large to count, and I want to share it in some tangible way with the people who are important to me, who have supported me through all the internal debate that inevitably becomes external over brunch or Yoga or instant messages sent in lieu of actual productivity during business hours. These are the people who have allowed themselves to be dragged through the quagmire of my indecision, insecurities, procrastination and moments of indirection, and gosh, it’d sure be nice to bring them back a little something that says, “Thanks, whether I’ve said it before or not, you’ve been a great friend and someone to lean on or bounce ideas off of when I needed it, so here’s a little piece of this wonderful journey that I’ve brought back for you, since you were instrumental in one way or another for helping get my ass out of my old rut and into seat 27G on that flight to Istanbul.”

But what to get? What says “Thanks” without saying too much more, or worse, something unintended? “When I saw this I immediately thought of you,” can be a very potent and unintentionally-definitive phrase. “Really? You think I’m a desperate prostitute?” or “Seriously? Do I come across as both garish and color-blind?” So-oftentimes an item that seems wonderfully appropriate when viewed in it’s natural habitat, it’s original context, becomes entirely absurd when presented neatly shrouded in carefully-selected complimentary-colored tissue paper and culturally-relevant wrapping (yes, I think about these things. It’s an embarrassing affliction only slightly less-destructive than heroin).

Trinkets are the lazy-man’s refuge and equally convey the wrong message. “I care about you just enough to have grabbed this acrylic buddha keychain off the airport convenience store rack while stocking up on my preflight bottle of water and trail mix” or “What? doesn’t everyone want a plaster Sphinx paperweight? You have paper and the occasional breeze, right?”

So, discarding anything wearable or even remotely trinket-like, I considered making everyone personal gifts. I am a photographer, after all. I could just choose from the thousands of photos I’ve taken along the way and print and frame ones that speak to the taste of each recipient. Here too we stumble into awkwardness. What one hangs on one’s wall or displays on one’s bookcase is a highly personal choice. The very last thing I want is to have that awkward moment where the friends in question say, “Oh crap, Steve’s coming over for brunch. Where the hell did we stash that photo he gave us? Quick, find it and put it someplace prominent –and make sure it looks like it’s been there for a while. Sprinkle some dust on it or something. No, wait, just dust the whole place before he arrives! Shit!”

Leave it to me to turn a simple thank you into a minor crisis all it’s own.

To all of you, friends and family alike, who have endured my endless indecision, second-guessing, making of grand plans left unfinished, and offered a thoughtful ear, patient support and constant encouragement, thank you.

At 6,750 feet above sea level, Manali sits in a deep valley with massive verdant mountains climbing up either side of the Beas River. Where gaps appear between the hills yet taller mountains are seen immediately behind them. Taking one long inhale as you slowly absorb the panorama before you, it becomes imminently apparent where you are on Earth. Looking toward the source of the river, a massive dark peak rises ominously above the surrounding rise and fall of land masses. Covered in ribbons of snow and near constantly shrouded in dark clouds, it has left me transfixed. This morning after breakfast I asked the hotel’s resident yoga instructor if the mountain had a name. “Oh, there are too many to name them,” he happily replied.

And of course he’s right. While I’m already enraptured by the majesty and monumental size of these climbs, I’ve only scratched the surface of The Himalayas. At sixty seven hundred feet -already a good third of a mile higher than Denver, Colorado- I’ve barely entered the foothills of this great powerful result of India slamming into Asia millions of years ago -these soaring peaks and overpowering sights merely the first wrinkles on the surface of the continental version of India running a red light and T-boning Asia (India still swears that the light was yellow and Asia can’t get an adjustor to come out and give a repair estimate).

So, how to convey the feeling of these hills, the sense of the place? I think I’ve finally narrowed it down to a decent analogy (you know how much I love a good analogy!): These hills are the geological equivalent of the cello from the movie Jaws. While they themselves are not the climax of action, they foretell it, they are the precursor to the moment we’ve all been waiting for through a solid 45 minutes of Richard Dryfuss and Roy Schneider and a bunch of 1970′s teenagers swimming in too-short denim cut-offs and flat dialog delivery. Like that sole cello, these mountains approach you quietly, then they loom. While minor activity continues in the foreground, there in the background they persist, reminding you that soon, soon, you’ll be in the heart of the maelstrom -be it of razor-sharp and brilliantly-white teeth and blood and ripping and thrashing, or of dizzying heights, even-more-massive hulking sections of up-ended earth and the otherworldly habitats and societies it houses as a result.

The Himalayas are known as “The Rooftop of the World,” and while I will still be a solid 700 miles away from Mount Everest, I will be entering some of the most vast, extreme, remote places on Earth. It’s finally seeing the big fish in all his (was Jaws male?) glistening, sleek, powerful unclenching glory. I’m about to break the seal on one of those amazing, exotic, mysterious, paramount places on Earth that has lingered in my heart for a very long time and I’m overjoyed about the experience about to unfold.

Now where did I pack my denim cut-offs and flip-flops?

In true Indian fashion, of course, the fantastic had to be coupled with the infuriating.

I had booked a sleeper class ticket from Delhi to Jaisalmer, an 18 hour train ride crossing magnificent Rajisthan overnight. India has one of, if not the largest railway system in the world. They move an approximate 14 million people each day, so one would assume that they pretty much have the whole running of a railway thing down pretty solid.

Yeah, I need to stop making assumptions.

To keep it brief, the independent India did not seem to acquire its previous dark overloard’s (e.g. The British Crown) knack for keeping people properly, if not even disturbingly overly-informed as to the status of virtually everything at any given moment -that and their love of queues. God how the Brits love a good queue. You get two Englishmen standing near one another, facing the same direction with one directly aft of the other and you’ve suddenly got yourself a proper queue. Others will neatly line up behind them, even without knowing the purpose for said queue. They just do it like moths to a flame. Indians don’t. They also don’t have a knack for providing some of the more basic information required to get passenger to train. Platforms weren’t clearly marked, nor was how to find yours. There were no employees to be found on any of the platforms from whom to seek assistance, and well, I should just take a deep breath and deal, because, after all it’s India. Clearly no amount of exasperation is going to change anything. But honestly, I’d like to pull some managing member of the Indian Railways System aside and ask him or her to walk me through the process of finding my train, finding my car and then finding my seat. My bet is they can’t actually do it. But anyway, back to the quick rant: Once I found my train I saw a man looking somewhat conductor like scribbling in chalk on each of the carriages. My car was S-3 and I found just such a scribble faintly scratched into the side of a sleeper car as this man was freshly walking away from having scribbled it. Yeah, that wasn’t my car. He later had come back and sort of turned the three into a two.

He had also posted a passenger manifest to the outside of the door. This car was now officially S-2. Going left I found S-1. Going right I found B-1 B-2, A-1 and so on. Where the holy Jesus was S-3?! And then of course the train started moving. Furious, I jumped on board a car and figured something would work itself out.

If, at this point, you’re saying to yourself (or shouting into the computer screen as I know at least a few of you are capable), “what’s the big deal? You can just walk through the train’s interior until you find the proper carriage.” Well, my screaming friend, you would be mistaken. You see, some cars are air conditioned and some are not. They lock the passages at either end of the A/C cars upon departure to keep the riff-raff out. And I wasn’t traveling in and A/C class carriage. Oh, and they also don’t group all the A/C class carriages together, you know, seeing as how that might follow some line of logic or reason or thoughtfulness.

I finally found S-3, but my seat/berth number had been changed on the manifest listed on the door. As people streamed in, some had read the updated manifest and some had not, so, well, there was minor chaos simply in that as well as people fought over seats where the name of the manifest didn’t groove with the number on someone’s ticket.. Mind you a conductor of some sort might have quickly resolved all these problems, but such a position appeared to not exist in the Indian Railways system. (Mind you, riding the subway in Delhi requires waiting in line to purchase a token from a single employee behind a desk before one can enter the system. How messed up is that? Token vending machines have been around since the last ice age. What sort of employment guarantee system are we dealing with here?)

So, there was the infuriating part. Let’s just say that everyone’s seating/sleeping eventually worked itself out and be done with that and move on to the sublime portion of the story.

So, as the train readied to leave Delhi it filled to the brim amazingly fast at the very last second. Benches designated to seat four were cramming to capacity and then some with seven people filling my narrow little parcel of ass real estate.

The train was crowded, crammed, jammed beyond capacity as we pulled out of Delhi and it was fantastic. It wasn’t so crowded that one’s body was contorted into discomfort, but any desire for personal space, or even a bit of a stretch, or even airspace between one’s thigh and the thigh of the old man in a kaftan next to one, found himself wanting.

Sure, to me and the three Korean teenagers nervously seated nearby, this was all new, but to the locals, this was simply Monday. Two men in my seating alcove placed a briefcase across their knees and several men began playing an impossibly complicated card game using it as their table. Tattered old twenty Rupee bills and tiny butcher-paper brown cigarettes changed hands as round after round of the impenetrable game progressed.

An old plump lady in a mustard colored sari sat next to the window, the little golden bobbles and mirrors stitched into it fluttering as the breeze puffed in from outside. Men and women passed around chai and fresh mangos and a band of musicians a few alcoves back pulled out a small orchestra of percussion instruments and began singing and chanting beautiful Hindi songs. The sound of steel denting and then rebounding occasionally tumbled up and down the car as kids ran along the roofs of the train cars jumping from car to car as the train pulled away from Delhi Station in the late afternoon glow. As people settled into their crammed little routines and began nesting for the ride, the sun, looking like a massive butterscotch candy still in it’s golden cellophane wrapper slowly filled the train with beautiful sugary sunlight and bid a beautiful adieu to the thatched straw houses and small farms of the Rajisthani countryside passing by outside.

India Giveth and India Taketh Away

It’s the following day now -the following night, actually, and I feel I would be doing you a great disservice to not share with you, at least in brief, the rest of the trip. I’ll keep it brief, because for one, I’d rather not dwell on the negative and two, I have some clothes so filthy and disgustingly stinking that need to be burned in sacrifice as quickly as possible, and I’d like to do it before the light fades.

So, the next morning my wake-up call was the horn of a passing train blaring just as it reached our cabin. So that fun doppler-effect horn sound we all know an love? Yeah, that, a few feet from my ear, lurched me out of slumber and immediately into a panic at some random train station in the desert (wouldn’t you panic to be abruptly awoken from slumber by the blaring horn of an oncoming train?) That wasn’t the bad part though -heck, that I might look back upon and simply remember fondly. It would at least make for a good scene transition in the movie of my life.

The bad part would be the self-contained sandstorm. Think of a car driving down a dirt road. Maybe you’re even watching from afar, a dirt road out in the middle of some soybean fields or something. I’m sure your imagination automatically inserts the requisite tail of dust thrown up by the car as it goes. And the faster it goes, the more dust it throws into the air.

Now, instead of the vehicle in question being a puny car or Chevy pick-up, let’s replace it with a twenty-plus car train, and that soybean field has instead become a vast desert. I had the good fortune of being in a car roughly three-quarters of the way toward the back of the train. While many a story problem in eighth grade mathematics involved the movement of trains down a track, they never asked that one calculate the precise portion of a train that would bear the wrath of all the sand and dust thrown up by the movement of the train along the rails. Well, now I can tell you the answer to just such a question. Despite closing all the windows in our air conditioning free car, the sand still made its way in through every possible crack and crevice, not the least of which were the toilets at each end of the car. They were simply holes that dropped straight down to the tracks below. While you contemplate that, I’ll continue on (since I had the pleasure of contemplating that for several hours on the train today) to paint a picture for you of these holes essentially becoming intake ports for all that sand.

I wasn’t misfortunate enough to need to use the facilities (after seeing the thoroughness of the plumbing, my body thankfully shut down the fires in every last boiler allowing us to miss that iceberg.

But back to this sand. Can you imagine needing to use the facilities and having your “nethers” (a nice little phrase I learned from Honey, a delightful South African woman who I met in Delhi) basically sand blasted at the moment of need?

To paint a fair picture, the sand was blowing in from every possible opening in the car -windows that didn’t quite close all the way, an exit door left ajar, and then also the loos.

So, a not so fine powder of sand and dust about an eighth of an inch thick coated everything and everyone. Being that we’d been riding through the desert in a non-AC car with the windows closed, that just allowed us each to create our own nice little gravy of gallons of perspiration, fatigue, exhaustion and dirt.

That lasted for about eight hours (a solid four more than it was scheduled to), as our express train maneuvered its way down every side track and remote corner of the Raj desert to pick up the occasional passenger. We’d then sit and wait for an hour while another train on the same line passed going in the opposite direction, being that it was a single track system in many places.

I’m writing the people in Geneva. Surely there’s a tribunal to be whipped up to deal with these kinds of things.

Thankfully though, now I’ve completed my second shower in the last six hours since arriving in Jaisalmer in my huge marble-tiled walk-in shower and am enjoying the equally-lovely bed and hotel room I found for a whopping $3.00/night.

The ride up was truly epic. The roads are little more than muddy double-rut cuts in the sides of mind-bogglingly steep mountains twisting their way up into sky. When there were stony rivers to be crossed, we simply drove through, with the water sometimes up to the bottoms of the doors of the Jeep. At times when other vehicles were making their way down the mountain, we’d somehow find a way to squeeze past one another, our tires barely clinging to the side of a rocky, muddy cliff. Along the way we’d stop in small valley villages where round-faced Himalayan villagers constantly welcoming and with smiling faces would feed us and give us a minor respite from the spine crushing journey.

After a very long first day and well after dark, we were only nine kilometers from our overnight campsite when we came upon about 10 trucks stopped along the road. It turned out that a fuel tanker truck had broken down on a narrow bridge over a raging river and none could pass until it was repaired. In this part of the world, self-sufficiency is a necessity, so all of the drivers went ahead to help fix the stalled tanker (apparently air had gotten into the fuel pump and had to be manually pumped out). After about 45 minutes the tanker was fixed and we were off again, only to come upon another hurdle in our path moments later. A river crossing was deeper than an earlier jeep had estimated and there it sat in the middle of the river, up to the windows in water, stones and mud.

What to do? Our driver, Benny, undaunted and ready to be out of that Jeep for the night as much as the rest of us, gave a quick appraisal of the situation and plowed through in the most direct route possible. The Jeep erupted in cheers as we climbed out of the other side of the river and made our way on to the campsite. There, high up in the mountains, the sky crystal clear, the entire Milky Way hung above us in hyper 3D with the jagged mountain horizon crating a crater-like frame for our vision of the universe. Amazing doesn’t begin to describe it.

The next day we made our way on to Leh. We were all tired and pretty well beaten down from the ride, but one highlight was passing over a summit that is the second highest road in the world, at 17,683ft. We stopped to take photos and enjoy the view, but even the smallest efforts were difficult. Slowly walking from one side of the street to the other left me winded like I’d just finished the final sprint in a marathon. In fact, a bit later, and at a slightly lower altitude, I got winded after lunch, sitting there as my food digested. Digestion left me breathless! It’s an amazing place to experience, even if it does tend to wreck your body. But I’d find more out about that later on.

After arriving in Leh, we had dinner the next night with all of our fellow classmates from the Jeep ride up. Some of them had met a girl who was doing a small three day trek across the region starting the following morning. Called “The Baby Trek” it was supposed to have a very low level of difficulty and took you to several remote mountain Tibetan monasteries. So, Josh and I were game and quickly packed day-packs that night for a 7AM departure the next morning.

The trek was really amazing, but not at all “Baby-like” we stopped at some fantastic Himalayan monasteries and stayed in some fantastic (and fantastically-remote) tiny mountain villages, but by the end of the trip I was suffering from severe exhaustion and dehydration. That part wasn’t terribly fun, but luckily we were all in the same boat, so we hopped on the morning bus on day three and after about 5 hours were back “home” in Leh to rest, relax and rehydrate. -Speaking of which, don’t believe it when the re hydration salts package promises “Orange Citrus” flavor. It’s really nothing more than saltwater with the slightest hint of orange lurking somewhere beneath the brine.

Not terribly interested in tackling the two day Jeep back to Manali quite yet, I plan to spend a another day or so here in Leh. I may foot the bill for a flight out from Leh to Delhi instead, but it’s rather pricey, so we’ll see.

I stay in slums, the backpacker ghettos of the world where a super cheap room with super-cheap quality can be had for pennies a day. But in exchange, the water coming out of my shower head has the not-so-faint smell of Kerosene, and a magical unseen faucet somewhere in the vast labyrinth of plumbing in the building controls whether or not my little bathroom will have water at all. Surely this wouldn’t happen at the Four Seasons, would it?

The thing is, I enjoy it. I think I like the challenge. I like proving to myself over and over again that these things don’t bother me, that these things are just part of the human condition, a reality we rarely see in the US, but are capable of withstanding should the need arise. Sure, I still hold my breath when walking past homeless people in San Francisco (as if homelessness is somehow found in an airborne contagion), but toss a couple of century-old piss holes reeking of decades of collateral damage at the end of my street and I say to the Universe, “Is that all you got? Bring it on!”

Last night, I ran a tissue across my brow after a day of sightseeing. The tissue was nearly black from the grit, dirt and pollution. I can’t even begin to imagine what my lungs must be thinking (but I can assure you my gorge has already issued a protest or two in regards to the public urinals and the occasional whiff of living rot.

Then there’s the honking -the incessant honking. It’s as if it’s become a subconscious aspect of operating any sort of vehicle. This guy today, was honking his way down the dusty, pitted dirt road that runs through Main Bazaar -where I’m staying. Even with absolutely no one in front of him, he continued to honk. People honk constantly and most oftentimes for no reason aside from habit.

Thus I have began mental development of a new tool for my backpacking pleasure. I call it the “jab the ignorant” stick. It’s a simple thing really, a piece of rebar I might find along the street (rebar is to developing countries what dandelions are to suburban lawns in the summer). It can be blunt or pointed, at the end, it doesn’t matter, although I’d prefer blunt -I don’t want to draw blood, I just want to strongly convey a message. And I’ll simply jam it into the breastbone of anyone stupidly, needlessly honking while making his way down the street. I think it’s the ignorant pointlessness of the act more than anything else, that has drawn my ire.

India also hasn’t failed to impress by the quantity, if not quality of the touts and scams afoot. Yesterday I ran into a couple of backpackers fresh off the plane from Australia taking refuge from all the hassle in Lodi Gardens. I told them that India was easy. Unless the person you are talking to is wearing a badge and sitting behind the desk of a tourist office that is specifically listed in your guidebook, you can simply assume that anything that person is telling you is a load of crap.

For instance, a rickshaw driver stopped me not twenty yards from the front of the frenetic New Delhi Train Station to tell me it was closed because it was Sunday. Considering we were already well within the melee of humanity streaming in and out of a railway system that carries 15 million people a day and is the second largest employer in the world, I felt his little con was quite a Hail Mary attempt to divert me to “another” tourist office which could book my tickets (at an offensively inflated rated, a huge chunk of which would go to our happy little rickshaw driver in commission).

I deliberately looked around at the crush of humanity around us and then turned to him to say, “The Indian Railway System is closed on Sunday? Really? Do you kiss your children goodnight with those lying lips of yours?” Sadly my caustic retort was lost to the cacophony. But since he didn’t hear it, I’m sharing it with you. Rickshaw and tuk-tuk drivers are possibly the worst. No matter where you want to go, it’s always ten kilometers away (even when you know for a fact that it is two). They also divert you from your requested route to show you a very special bazaar, basically a crap tourist shop where they get a commission off every sale. Thankfully I’m naturally suspicious of pretty much everything and that’s served me well.

Reading this, at the very least, likely affirms that I do not have a sparkling career with the India Department of Tourism in my future, but it should not be concluded from today’s essay that I dislike India -quite the opposite is true, actually. Heat, crowds, horns and hassle are bound to wear anyone down, and with 65 days of travel so far under my belt on this trip, I think it’s natural to need a breather, to take a break. To find an air-conditioned Starbucks with wifi access and spend an afternoon pretending to live back in the developed world -a world of paved, bovine-free streets, delicious drinking water, the rule of law and recognition of the basic rules of a civilization by even the most destitute among them.

But India, India in retrospect, India from my current air conditioned lilly pad serving iced lattes truly is a place of amazement. Brilliantly colored saris swirling in the wind, the jingle-jangle of tiny strings of anklet bells and giant-sized burlap bundles balanced on steady heads, beautiful elaborate bindis adorning women’s foreheads like precious jewels, and the delightful scent of incense dancing on the tip of your nose like a whisper of a beautiful melody, a tune you can remember but can’t quite place. India is aptly described as a country of extremes. At one moment the extreme offends with pressure, hassle, poverty and filth, and the next it delights with beauty, flavor, delicate joy and immeasurable peace.

It’s a hard place to place, this India, but it’s a joy to discover.

Why when it’s time to head out for the day do I only then remember that I need to apply sunscreen which I have already repacked in my backpack (see item above)?

Why after finally applying the sunscreen and repacking it do I realize I need my hat (again, see the top of the list)?

Oh, right, my camera (again, see the top of the list).

All this when finding the motivation to head out and sightsee has alluded me for the day to begin with.

…

I’ve arrived in Cairo.  I’ve been entirely remiss in keeping my travels properly journaled, but that comes as little surprise.  I tried keeping a diary once when I was about eleven.  I made it though maybe 4 days before missing a day, and then another, and by then I’d moved on to other pursuits (probably involving turning our garden shed into a secret fort or finding a way to flood the garage into a mini-”It’s a Small World” ride) and thus the chronicling of  my great journey though life would be lost to the ages.

There have been so many things I’ve wanted to share with my friends -sights, smells, music, children playing, children getting a brutal whollop from an over zealous parent, the looks from women’s eyes peering out through the narrow gap in their burkas, the unsure glances from men on the bus, wondering who I am and what my intentions are in their corner of the world.  In Jordan herds of sheep and goats meander across the motorways.  In Lebanon parades of young kids waved giant silky flags of their preferred political parties from their car windows while honking in unison leading up to the general elections that went off with relative quiet.  In Israel it was the gut-souring apartheid where the Israelis have basically caged and dehumanized the Palestinians, humiliating and harassing them at quite literally every intersection.  

In Syria, great piles of spices are tidily sculpted into tiered pyramids of flavor, with different spices delicately layered upon niches to create colorful and savory delights.

And the honey.  Honey is everywhere.  Sweets are coated in it, drowned in it, extracted from it.  It’s impossible to escape the sticky sweet delight.  As a woman named Ruth told me in Goreme, Turkey, honey is the cure to obesity.  One piece of honey-soaked baklava and you can’t possibly eat another.  She’s right.  I’m not one to know when to put the breaks on something delicious, but one small bite-sized piece of baklava (flaky layers of phillo dough, crushed pistachios and honey) and even the most gluttonous among our species would be hard pressed to consume a second piece the sweetness is overwhelming.

I’ve also been forgetting to eat.  I know it sounds ridiculous, but it happens more often than I’d care to admit.  Yesterday I had about six crackers and a wheel of bread roughly the size of a soft pretzel that I bought on the street.  Oh, and I also had a handful of some sort of large buttery-tasting beans that an old toothless man offered me simply because he likes President Obama.  I’ve gotten more free food on this trip simply in homage of our President than one might expect.  It’s fantastic.

But enough about that and back to chronicling.

Yesterday I arrived in Cairo after an overnight bus from Dahab, a beach town on the Red Sea.  The last couple of weeks have been pretty fast moving, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that I slept for about 18 hours yesterday.  I needed it, or rather, I wanted it, and with four more days before my flight to Mumbai, I’m ready to be lazy for a bit.

Take, for instance, that I’m already solidly in to day two of Cairo, and I have yet to see the pyramids.  It’s not that I’m not excited to see them.  I’m just enjoying a lazy couple of days at the moment.  As much as I’d like to get down to Luxor to see the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens, I think I’m going to chalk those up to, “you’ll be back to this part of the world again.  They can wait.”  

By all accounts India is immediately and persistently overwhelming, so the notion of a few lazy, sleepy days here in Cairo  sounds fantastically appealing.

Yesterday I visited the Egyptian Museum.  It’s a bit like wandering around in the attic of your eccentric aunt who traveled around the world in 1926 (assuming you had such an aunt).  Sarcophagi and colossi are stacked from floor to ceiling and rows of golden miniature humans, entombed as servants to dead kings, line the walls.  Six thousand years of ancient history are piled up in wooden shipping crates in ways that would set aspiring Indiana Jones to salivation.  In the preservation room a massive golden sarcophagus was standing on a table unceremoniously wrapped in heavy plastic awaiting shipping.  It was fascinating to see how such treasures, en masse, simply become “stuff” to the locals and employees who deal with it daily.

Not surprisingly, a section of the museum is set aside for the collection of King Tutankhamun.  While he only ruled for a few years, and his time upon the throne was relatively unremarkable, the collection of materials from his tomb is simply remarkable.  The time, care, intricacy, and level of detail applied to his burial items exceeds the hype by an incredible factor.  There’s little point trying to describe it.  To find out, you’ll just have to come see it for yourself.

Also on display are the Royal Mummies -including Ramses II.  It’s very strange to actually see these infamous people quite literally in the flesh.

Today I’ll head over to the old city of Cairo -the medieval, Islamic portion of Cairo to wander around and check out the views.  

…and I’ll try to be better about keeping a journal. 

I’m writing to let you know that I’ve found your all-terrain vehicle in the deserts of southern Jordan conveying adventure tourists across the vast sands once traversed by T. E. Lawrence, of Lawrence of Arabia fame.

I assume your car was stolen due to the fact that Illinois license plates with the last two digits of the expiration date conveniently scratched out are hard to come by -that and the fact that its current owner used a sort of metal hook, inserted just right into the ignition switch and gently tapped repeatedly was the only means of starting the car. While I’m not familiar with Mitsubishi’s products, I’m going to just go ahead and assume the car didn’t originally come that way. And the passenger side front door only opened from the outside. And by all accounts, I’m pretty sure the car was just generally hot-wired anyway.

If you have any immediate feelings of ill-will toward your 4×4′s current owner, I’d remind you that Sadeh, the twenty four year old Bedouin with the magic touch with the ignition shiv and a way of trilling his R’s into long breathy infinity that would make man, woman or beast swoon, probably wasn’t even remotely related to whomever decided it was time for you and your SUV to part company. Life is meant to be lived in the present, not the past, so hopefully you can enjoy this little update on the secret new life of your car for what it is and let the past remain in the past.

You probably wouldn’t want it back at this point anyway. With the hood held closed by nylon bailing twine, one headlight missing and the other of questionable luminance and a dashboard now upholstered entirely in thick gray shag fur, I’m guessing any potential recovery/resale value has long since been lost. Of course, if the shag upholstery was your doing, then maybe you’re still interested.

In fact, if SUVs have souls, I’m guessing they all long to be your Mitsubishi. It spends its days doing real SUV things that one really only sees in, well, commercials for SUVs. Your car now spends its days climbing up massive oxide red dunes and bouncing down the other side in a long slide to the bottom. It chases herds of wild camels and climbs over slippery rocks to reach amazing corners of the desert where time and wind have created natural bridges and tunnels. When the day is done, it sleeps under the massive star-filled skies outside a Bedouin camp famous for its location for viewing the sunset on this great vast region of sand and rock.

While I don’t know the circumstances by which you and your Mitsubishi parted ways, I can assure you that it’s living a fantastic life out in the desert, seeing far more action than in probably would have in the wilds of Illinois.

Best wishes,
Steve

I enjoyed seeing “the Holy Land” albeit most sights visited were appended with a mental asterisk in my head, since I am a “trust but verify” kinda guy. I can’t help it, but I have a hard time working on faith alone, especially when faith alone makes things amazingly convenient sometimes (like placing Christ’s crucifixion, preparation for burial and final burial place conveniently within about 50 feet of one another so as to be easily turned into a church with a very Disney-like appeal. What the Church of the Holy Sepulcher really needs is a series of small boats chained together on a track that wind through the place with happy-but-reverent music playing over speakers installed in the rear of each boat with a Charleton Heston-like voiceover, “If you’ll kindly turn your attention to the left, you will see the very stone that the crucifix of Christ was placed upon.”

But I digress. I was about to introduce you to Crazy Gary -or perhaps he should be “Mentally-Disturbed Gary” or “On the Verge of a Psychotic Breakdown Gary.”

So, I flew through the exit immigration quickly and shared a cab to Amman with two UN employees on “R&R” from Beirut and Pakistan. My next destination was Petra, the huge (and hugely famous) Nebatanean city carved into the stone walls of a canyon in the middle of the desert in southern Jordan. The easiest way to Petra was via mini-bus from Amman.

I arrived at the bus station around 1PM and the place was expectedly dead. Friday is the Muslim Sabbath and folks around these parts (aside from Christians) really do observe their holy days as ones of rest (or at least ones not spent out and about). The general routine for mini-buses is that they aren’t on a particular schedule, but rather they sit in the lot until full (or nearly full) before departing on their routes. The driver reminded me that it was a Friday afternoon and it could be several hours before the bus was full enough to depart.

Having spent all my energy for the day on simply wanting to NOT get hung up at Israeli immigration for several hours while being repeatedly asked the same stupid questions over and over again (like my arrival into their fair country), knowing that I was where I needed to be and had no greater responsibilities than to step on the bus once it was ready to depart, I was entirely happy to sit in a big empty parking lot in Amman and watch the world that wasn’t going by because they were all at home.

Some amount of time later (was it one hour? two? I had no idea and really didn’t care since I’d already spoken at length with the bus driver who had the misfortune of spending three months in Washington DC working as a guard at the Jordanian Embassy -December through February -what a terrible thing to do to someone who grew up in the hot desert!), a somewhat disheveled man with a ratty green T-shirt, khaki travel pants, a “photographer’s vest” and pathetic Outback-style hat wandered up to me and began asking me questions in his thick Australian accent (complete with all those colorfully-retarded Aussie-only phrases and idioms) about the bus as if I were the driver.

Honestly that should have been my first warning sign that things were not quite right with our man Gary. Yes, I’ve heard several times on this trip that I looked vaguely like I was from the region (despite the fact that I completely disagree with them), but really, I invite any of you to come to the Middle East and look around for a bit. I defy you -as fellow Westerners- to see any resemblance between myself and a solid 99% of the local populations.

In any case, after speaking some non-accented English complete with proper verb conjugation and whatnot, Gary got that I was not in charge of our lovely beige and sea foam transport chariot, but was merely a passenger, also en route to Petra. This is where the real crazy bits set in. Gary had found his prey. An English speaker, stranded with no means of polite escape, upon whom he could launch his endless, pauseless diatribes on world geopolitical military history. Toss in lots of colorful fifty cent words, like Leftennant, whatever the hell a Lefttennant is, and lots of random dates and numbers of dubious accuracy and you’ve got yourself Crazy Gary.

So, Gary’s monologue continued for quite a while before he tired long enough to complain about the fact that the bus hadn’t gained any new takers. He suggested we split a cab down to Petra instead. I quickly did the math in my head, “A cab ride down would be two more hours of this nonsense, but I’d be in Petra in two hours. Waiting for the bus would mean an unknown-but-likely-greater amount of time before departure, plus at least three hours stuck together on the bus.”

I opted for the cab and quickly negotiated us a decent price down to Petra via private car. The ride down didn’t reveal any surprises, and I was lucky enough to quickly discern that Gary’s ego was so inflated that one really need not participate in his mental diarrhea aside from the occasional “uh-huh” to keep him satisfied while we headed down the King’s Highway. I contemplated pulling out my iPod figuring he was so self-involved that he probably wouldn’t even notice I’d not only stopped listening, but was actually using an electronic device to block the sound of his incessant “facts” and figures.

We stopped along the way so that our driver and his co-pilot (a man who for unknown reasons had come along for the ride in the front passenger seat) could perform their afternoon prayers. As we were returning to the car afterwards, the other man explained to me that they were going to meet a friend in Aqaba (hence his presence) and asked if I minded if they dropped us off with a friend to take us on to Petra at the junction of the freeway (which was heading to Aqaba) and the Petra road.
Happy to oblige (and curious as to what random series of events that might lead to), I agreed. Sure enough, we turned off the freeway and onto the Petra road and there was a car waiting along the shoulder. Our cab pulled along side and said to the very caucasian man behind the wheel of the parked car, “Pardon me my friend. Do you mind taking these two gentlemen to Petra.”

The whitest voice I think I’ve ever heard in my life replied from the other car, “Why sure, I’d be delighted.” This, I would later learn, was Allen. Allen lives in Virginia with his wife but had just finished a government contract of unspecified nature in Afghanistan. Not only was Allen’s voice the whitest voice I’ve heard in my life, but Allen himself might very well be the whitest person I’ve ever met. Wholesome and clean-cut, gosh and darn seemed the worst expletives to have tumbled out of his mouth in decades. Turns out Allen had never met our happy cabbies before in his life. He had simply pulled to the side of the road to photograph some rock formations on his way in to see Petra.

Frankly, I didn’t care. I was just happy to find that the crazy-to-relatively-sane ratio had once again tipped back to my benefit. Allen was quite a nice guy and seemed fascinated by Gary’s endless spew of nonsense. When the conversation turned to where everyone was staying, they had both picked out a somewhat upscale (by my backpacking standards) hotel very near the ruins. When I told them I was looking for something more of the budget variety, they insisted that our happy threesome couldn’t be broken up and Gary quickly offered to split a double-twin room with me if it would keep us all together.

Feeling the momentary pinch of peer pressure (although, in retrospect, neither of these men were my peer), I acquiesced. The thought of a proper hotel room with a proper shower and towels and air conditioning and all the goodies also did a bit of good to sway me into accepting the offer.

Gary continued his jaw-flappage to an unnerving degree throughout dinner and even over scotch on the hotel terrace afterwards (his one outstanding positive quality was the amount of Chivas Regal he traveled with). What I hadn’t considered was that Crazy Gary’s storytelling might not stop when the lights went out and we were each tucked happily in our own beds. He just kept rambling -no room for a pause, no room for a breath, no room for an interruption by his audience which might allow them to either participate, refute or politely end the “conversation” for the night.

I decided that provoking the madness stirring just beneath the surface couldn’t possibly make matters any better, so I earned my patience points for the week by listening to him throughout the evening and on any occasion thereafter that he could again corner me in a space with his tales of Russian Royalty or Ottoman Turks.

He was a bit interesting to witness, however. When his “knowledge” of world military history no longer seemed to impress his audience (me, and, it had never impressed me, I just stopped caring if he noticed that fact or not), it was interesting to see how he turned the topic of conversation to his personal wealth -at one point claiming and then forever thereafter repeating, that he was “in the top one percent of the top one percent of the wealthiest people in Australia.”

This from a man who didn’t appear to have washed his hair in several weeks and had several other tell-tale bits of evidence to the contrary -not the least of which was his ancient portable CD player and a huge album of Compact Discs which he carried around with him. Surely if he had acquired such tremendous wealth he could have replaced his bulky CD player and discs with a tiny, convenient iPod or something. I didn’t dare challenge any of his assertions or stories though, because really, provoking the crazy rarely turns out well.

1. The race to the border crammed into a 1993 Buick Roadmaster between “Dusty Middle of Nowhere” Lebanon and Damascus with four other guys and two women.  The English woman was a nightmare, asking ridiculous questions in a very anxious fashion at even the most obvious of occurrences along the way.

2. Buying the second-to-last available seat on the “VIP” bus from Damascus to Amman and loving the “Business Class” luxury of it all.

3. Gliding along the highways of the Jordanian deserts as the sun was setting and seeing the hilltop towns looking like clusters of brown sugar cubes climbing the hillsides while homemade kites danced high above the silhouetted skylines at sunset.

4. The absolute disgust of how the Israeli settlers are treating local Palestinians in Hebron and watching President Obama give a speech on Middle East relations live from Cairo right there in the heart of the occupation.

5. Finding “Helen’s Cistern” almost by accident and having it all to myself and choosing to meditate to the sound of water drops falling from the cave into the deep green pool below.

6. All the friends I’ve made along the way (hard to forget since they’re all Facebook Friending me).

7. How very much the Hezbollah ringleader in Baalbek sounded like Adolf Hitler in tone and crescendo over the town’s scratchy PA system and how odd it was to hear that echo off the city walls of the ancient Roman ruins of Heliopolis.

8. How much 3.5 hours of detention and interrogation at the Israeli border did little to make me like them.

9. How my iPod playlist reminds me of the friends who’ve introduced me to various artists and makes me feel like they are right there with me during the long haul bus rides crossing deserts or vast plains.

10. How many famous dead people’s birth or death places I’ve now seen:

1. Abraham
2. Issac
3. Rebekah
4.  Jacob
5. The Blessed Virgin Mary
6. Jesus H. Christ
7. Oscar Schindler
8. St. John
9. Homer
10. The World’s First Alphabet (Ugarit)
11. Job
12. Soap
13. The Phoenicians
14. Her Majesty Queen Zenobia
15. See… I’ve already forgotten a bunch of others
16. The River Jordan
17. The Euphrates

11. How I’d like to get in touch with my childhood friend Anne.  She’d always said her last name was Mesopotamian, and while traveling through Mesopotamia how I could see her and her father’s features in so many people I passed on the street.

Typically, items in a blog are posted in reverse chronological order (newest post is at the top of the screen, oldest at the bottom). Since I have two weeks worth of wordiness to catch you up on, I’ve posted all of the last few weeks’ events in chronological order so that you can read them from top to bottom.

All of the posts with today’s date (May 15) can be read starting at the top with Tea, Sugar, a Dream, which takes us back to the middle of my time in Turkey and eventually gets you through Greece and into Syria.

I hope you enjoy the posts. I haven’t properly proofread them for grammatical accuracy (or even exact chronological accuracy for that matter), but they should give you an idea of what I’ve been up to.

Don’t bother asking about photos. It took me three trips to the internet cafe simply to get my laptop, power cable and international plug adapter here. I don’t think I have the energy to consider posting any photos. You’ll just have to wait for those until later.

Cheers,
Steve