We’ve hired a kind driver named Imam, who’s just bought his own taxi and is pretty happy that his very first customers have hired him for two entire days. He speaks some English and he’s a bit shy, but one camel joke (tick off another scavenge) and a few blocks later, he has us all laughing and is as chatty and affable as everyone else here. Egyptians are thus far among the warmest, most hospitable and humorous people I’ve encountered traveling.
Per the hotel’s advice to avoid tourist-trap rides, Imam’s taking us to his own camel connection to save us being fleeced and assure us the camels don’t have fleas. He drives us through the narrow streets of a working-class neighborhood toward the pyramids.
A lot of life here seems to happen on the street, either at the side of the road or outside front doors where men are ironing, fixing tires, sewing, having tea, reading the paper.
We wait by giant cement-and-chain-link camel pens as Imam negotiates with three generations for a rate. A young boy with sea-green eyes that leap out of his dark complexion seems to be driving the hardest bargain. Grandpa finally waves his hand and I’m assigned a flirty gal with a pink bridle and multicolored necklaces; Mia chooses the horse.
“You can ride a horse anytime, Mia,” I suggest.
“Not around the pyramids, I can’t. Besides, I’m not getting on that beast. Those things look scary.”
“Not as scary as we’re gonna look once we tie these things on,” I mutter as I tie the Bozo scarf on. This is where you really get just how much youth is its own kind of beauty. A pretty young woman can get away with wearing this. At fifty, you could get slapped for scaring babies.
“Oh, my God.” Mia cringes when she sees me. “She’s gonna toss you off just on principle.”
Oh, pooh, I think, my Miss Camelia here is a little buttercup. She’s got the cutest nostrils and enormous bedroom eyes heavy with lashes, and her velvety lips are pluppeting all over my shirt and arms. She’s either kissing me, sniffing me, or preparing to eat me.
I notice the concrete wall between us and Cheops’s former digs.
“How are we going to get there?” I ask the boy, who’s attaching a chain to my camel’s bridle. He just throws back his head and laughs, “Don’t worry, kind madam!” As God is my witness, the camel throws back her head, stretches her floppy lips wide, and laughs right along with him.
I should have seen disaster coming.
As he beckons me to mount the camel, I notice something else: Mia’s got a nice, smooth leather saddle. I have what looks like two humps with a few thick, coarse wool blankets in between. And my skirt is thin.
Oh, don’t be a baby, Claire, just hike the skirt a few inches, nestle in between those humps, and follow her rhythm. The boy’s father comes, picks up our chain, then hooks it to the ring in the lead camel’s nose. I cringe and my hand flies to my nose in sympathy. My sympathies are about to lie elsewhere.
Old Camelia lumbers up slowly, groaning as if I weigh five hundred pounds, and suddenly lurches off after everyone else down the alley with a terrible racket. I’m thrown straight up in the air and then, yowza!! slam down not between her two humps, but on top of her one hump and whiz down in agony.
There’s only one hump under the upholstery! And wool blankets my ass, it’s a boar’s pelt! My skirt’s up to my waist and I’m getting a wedgie and a vaggie—this camel is going where no man has gone before.
Every trot and clop sends me shooting straight up in the air . . . then slamming back down. My arms flap and flail as I try to reach for the horns.
“Hey up there!” I try to yelp but it comes out like hay-yay-yaayy yuh-uh-pp-pp ththth—he-el-el-p-p!! and all the clattering drowns me out anyway.
Suddenly a bolt of inspiration, yoga, and irony strikes—Camel pose! I grab the horn behind me with both hands and pelvic-tilt my rear up—yes! Ohhhh relief, relief!
Except my arms are only going to hold out so long and I look like I’m trying to give “offering myself up to God” a whole new meaning, on top of a camel. In a Muslim country.
But, look, just ahead, the sand! Yes! Sand is soft! One more alley to go! Ohhh, yes! Camelia’s front hooves plunge into the hot white sand . . . and “Whooooooaaaa . . .” off I go to the left . . .
“Oooh noooo . . .” Then my torso swings waaaay over to the right. “Whoooooaaah . . .” Then oooover to the left, then I flop forward and swing right again.
She’s like a drunken bucking bronco, pitching me back, forth, and sideways in slow motion, burnishing my inner thighs to a brilliant crimson sheen.
“Stoooop!! This is awful! Stooop! I want to get dooooown!”
Mia trots up beside me. “Mom, are you okay?”
“Hell no, I’m not okay!! Where have you been?! I came to see the pyramids, not ride one! Send that kid over!!”
The kid bounds over and trots alongside to offer a cold drink and get a better look at my naked thighs.
“Don’t worry, kind madam! We take break soon! You can buy cold drink for refresh you!” he says as he ogles me.
His dad hurries over and yanks my skirt down angrily as we continue the march of death. The skirt slides up. He yanks it down. It slides up. He yanks it down.
“Can I get down, pleeease?” I whine miserably. “It’ll solve both our problems!”
If I had half a brain, I’d hold the skirt up, that would make him stop. But, of course, if I had half a brain, Mia would be wearing this T-shirt and I’d be in pants, on a horse.
I can’t decide which is more memorable: seeing the last remaining of the Seven Wonders of the World or seeing my mom bounce around it.
I feel horrible, because (a) it must hurt like hell, and (b) I can’t stop laughing. She’s holding her hat in place with one hand, holding on to the camel for dear life with the other, and yelping every time it lurches forward. She knows how absurd the whole thing is and is alternately laughing, wincing, and getting mad at me for laughing.
She’ll never admit it, but this is so quintessentially her. My mom’s a mixture of Queen Elizabeth and Lucille Ball; sometimes she’s regal and cold and proper and other times she’s, well . . . not. This week it’s riding a camel in a skirt; last week it was drinking from a washbowl.
Our second day in China we ate at the Red Rose Restaurant, a Muslim restaurant that was one of our food scavenges. Because the menu didn’t have English translations, we had no idea what to order, so we typed “soup” into our electronic translator and showed it to our waitress.
Ten minutes later, we found ourselves staring into an enormous bowl filled with a pale orange goo. It didn’t taste bad, almost like watered-down Jell-O, but I had no idea what it was, a scary thought in China. Thankfully, we recognized the next dish the waitress brought, a plate of wontons, and behind her a young busboy carried a ceramic washbowl with steaming hot water and thinly sliced lemons. He placed it on the table, but before I had time to dip my fingers, my mom plopped three wontons into it. She broke one in half with her spoon, scooped it up along with some liquid, and ate it, followed by several more mouthfuls of water.
“Mom!” I whispered, mortified and noticing the busboy’s bewilderment. “What are—”
“I guess it’s a do-it-yourself kind of soup,” she said, chewing thoughtfully. “It’s on the bland side, though. They really should have flavored it; this just tastes like lemony water.”
“That’s because it is lemony water, genius! It’s a Muslim restaurant. That’s the washbowl!”
My mom stopped midchew, looked down at the soup, and then back up to me. She swallowed hard. And then we heard a snort. The busboy was clearly puzzled when she dropped the wontons into the washbowl but he didn’t say anything. Maybe he thought she was cleansing them, too. But once she started spooning water into her mouth, he lost it, and tore out of the restaurant. Two seconds later, he ran past the window and down the block, holding his sides laughing.
If he could only see her now. I kick my horse to trot on ahead because, well, somebody should photograph the pyramids.
The pyramids rise from the desert, giant, pale gold structures silhouetted against a cornflower-blue sky. What’s really amazing is that as majestic as Giza is today, it’s almost drab compared to how it once was. Originally, the sandy pyramids were encased in polished white limestone and capped with a huge, pure gold top that gleamed, literally, for miles.
Even eroded they’re near perfect; the base has a mean error of fifteen millimeters and is only twelve seconds off in angle from being a perfect square. My apartment building in New York, built on a level, paved street just in the last century, is infinitely more crooked. This stunning perfection is the reason large groups of people credit aliens for constructing the pyramids. Nothing against alien-theorists, but the actual explanation is that, contrary to Hollywood lore, the pyramids weren’t built just by slave gangs but by specialists eager to be a part of such a prestigious project.
My horse picks up the pace as we near the Sphinx, and my guide suddenly pulls his horse up beside me and smiles slyly.
“I see you know to ride the horses?”
“Yes.”
“You like we go fast then?”
I should give a definitive “no,” given that I haven’t ridden fast, slow, or anything in between in a few years, but I can’t help picturing the scene from my childhood obsession, The Black Stallion, in which Alec finally gains the trust of a wild black stallion and rides him bareback on the beach, whooping with delight as they race through the sand.
So what if my horse is a dull brown instead of a shining black? So what if instead of a deserted beach I’m at a tourist haven with my yelping mother in tow? I’m being offered the chance to gallop through the desert!
“Yes!”
He says something in Arabic and, whoosh, we’re off! The sand is flying from my horse’s hooves, my hair is whipping in the wind, it’s just like I always thought it would be!
Then he grabs my horse’s halter and pulls us to a dead stop.
“Okay, you like?” he smiles, out of breath.
“Yes, very much! Why did we stop?”
“Just ten dollars and we keep going,” he says, smiling.
May I be in your picture?”
We’re in the Mohammed Ali mosque atop the Citadel, a fortress built into a limestone outcrop in the twelfth century during Saladin’s successful campaign against the Crusaders. Over the centuries, palaces, mosques, museums, military and government buildings were added to the fortress, which is now one of Cairo’s biggest tourist draws.
The mosque’s interior is enormous, jammed with tourists and the faithful; its soaring domes are filled with chandeliers and thousands of tiny lights illuminating the gilded neo-baroque designs and high-relief carvings.
We made the trek up here around the massive walls at the bottom of the fortress, with me in extreme bow-legged discomfort, through crowds of schoolkids who were warm, bold, and joyful.
Girls of all ages circled round us for photographs, with their cameras and ours, chattering nonstop: “You are American! Hello!” “We are so happy you are here!” “Do you speak Arabic?” “Hello hi my name is Luli!” “What’s your name?” “Welcome to Cairo!”
There isn’t any teen attitude anywhere we’ve been. The young here, even teenage boys, are sweet and deferential to me out of respect for my age, which you often don’t see in the United States. Being seen as “old” in a way I’m not used to has been interesting. Once you’re past turning heads as a woman in the United States, there are no societal advantages to being an older woman other than those we decide on ourselves—feeling wiser, more confident, empowered. It seems a worthy goal to find a happy medium between multiple wives and the invisibility of women over fifty in the West.
I’m about to take Mia’s photograph in the mosque when a beautiful woman about my age, in a chic suit, asks if she can be in my photo of Mia, which isn’t typical.
“Of course!” Mia tells her, holding her arm out to join her.
Not much else about her turns out to be typical. Bayan’s features are strong, with wide cheekbones, downturned green eyes, and olive skin framed by very thick black hair. She has a wistful, almost sad, expression and seems both curious and wary. A trained architect, as minister of construction and development, she’s one of the few women in the new Iraqi government. Her close friend, a tall, heavyset woman in traditional Muslim dress, doesn’t stray more than a few feet from her at any time.
A few moments and photographs later, we begin one of the most compelling and treasured conversations I’ve ever had. This is an unusual trip for Bayan, who normally has a hundred and fifty bodyguards. Seeing how watchful and protective her friend is, I’m thinking there may be more than a slip under her loose chador.
While her friend is more vocal about how we botched the war, Bayan is more measured. She agrees (who doesn’t?) that the lack of postwar planning has had terrible consequences, but as a Kurd, she’s grateful for Hussein’s demise and that, with American dollars, she was able to build three hundred and twenty-two new schools in the last year alone.
“Once you leave, there will be very little money for me to continue to build schools or infrastructure. The money will keep coming, I just won’t see it.”
We discuss politics, food, fashion, our lives as mothers and as women who want to see change in our own countries and in the world. We talk about where we’ve traveled, life in Kabul and Baghdad before and after the war.
I cannot imagine a group of men from such different backgrounds discussing their lives in a way that included all aspects of it. Women see their lives, and the world, much more ecologically, with political, social, cultural, familial, economic elements integrated and interconnected.
I believe we also see it much more protectively. Once your baby arrives, the world is no more the same than you are. Because from our very bodies we add to the collective human destiny. Our deepest urge is always toward life, to wholeness and well-being.
When asked if wars would still exist if women ran the world, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia, said, “No, it would be a better, safer, and more productive world. A woman would bring an extra dimension to that task—and that’s a sensitivity to humankind. It comes from being a mother.”
A dear friend, Trish, said the same thing to me several years ago. We’d both sent our daughters to a school halfway around the world to save their lives, giving them up to get them back. Which gives one a whole new take on motherhood in general, and on oneself as a mother in particular. She left banking to found Starshine Academy, a K–12 school in Phoenix whose curriculum actually includes hope; there are actually classes that teach peace. Nations around the world are now asking her to create schools and curriculums. She’s in Liberia right now, training their teachers. “It’s the mothers who are going to save this world, Claire. That’s what you should write about,” she urged me. “This is what we should be teaching our daughters.”
I believe there’s something else we bring to the table, in addition to nurturance. We have a peerless ability to endure—we’re tenacious and determined. Who’s unstoppable if not a mother? Imagine what a nation of us can do.
Alexandria feels like a fossil. Only the faintest of imprints remain of what was once a thriving city in the ancient world, crumbling amphitheaters never restored, toppled columns lying on the sandy ground, ruins that, if they were unmarked, you’d walk right by. Still, it’s thrilling to be here, because as a former classics major, I can fill in the blanks in my mind’s eye.
Alexandria, founded in 331 B.C., was the brainchild of Alexander the Great, but Cleopatra, the brilliant and sexy ruler who lassoed Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, was the one who turned Alexandria into a city that rivaled Rome. It was here that Euclid developed geometry, Aristarchus realized that the earth revolves around the sun, a
nd Eratosthenes calculated the earth’s circumference. Alexandria was also home of the Pharos, a legendary lighthouse that was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
But the library that Alexandria was so renowned for and its 700,000-plus volumes were burned to the ground in 48 B.C. During the fourth century A.D. war, famine, and disease initiated a slow but sure decline, and the lighthouse toppled in 1303 A.D. after a violent earthquake. Over time, almost all of Alexandria’s monuments were destroyed by wars or earthquakes.
We pass a few hours wandering around the ruins before leaving the historic inland to head for the shore. As we do, each block gets brighter and brighter, the buildings changing from caramels and honeys to shades of peach and honeydew.
A burst of intense aquamarine signals we’ve reached the Mediterranean Sea. Wind whips the leaves of palm trees every which way and the water breaks roughly along the walls of the Corniche, the paved walkway running parallel to the shore. Multicolored fishing boats bob along the water, and far in the distance you can see Alexandria’s magnificent new library peeking above the buildings. After Imam parks the car, my mom and I walk to the edge of the Corniche’s walls and rest on our elbows, looking at seagulls swooping into the water, inhaling the crisp, salty air.
A large group of schoolchildren, perhaps here on a field trip, wave as they skip by and laugh when we wave back. Four girls walk up to us, giggling and smiling brightly as they ask for our names and if we’ll take their picture. These girls are so cute, and we spend several minutes chatting with them and comparing the seashells we’ve each bought.
Yesterday in the mosque, before we met Bayan, I wandered off on the pretense of exploring so I could have a moment alone. Since arriving in Cairo, we’ve been met everywhere by smiling young girls, holding hands, linking arms, singing, chattering. It’s been a delight to see them at every turn, but it’s been difficult as well.
It surprised me, that sudden feeling of sadness and longing. I’ve dealt with being sexually abused as a child but that doesn’t mean I never have issues come up around it; I still have triggers, movie scenes that bother me disproportionately, times when I’m inexplicably scared or randomly get that sick, frozen feeling that something bad is about to happen.
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