Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  When I slowed down to push off the money changer, two of his competitors leaped onto the running board and clung to the door as I shifted into second, screaming their prices into my ear, trying to outbid one another, but offering no bargains. Meanwhile two rogues elbowed each other for possession of the other running board, one of them offering to sell us whatever we might want, and the other offering to buy whatever we might want to sell. Willy introduced them to each other and shoved them off.

  When we stopped at a corner for cross traffic, a score of shouting Alexandrians besieged us, waving bottles of whiskey, photos of naked women, cigarette cartons, nylon stockings, Egyptian money, packets of hashish, all screaming their prices. Everybody knew that five foreigners had just arrived in two red 4 × 4s pulling two loaded trailers, and everybody was eager to sink his teeth into us before we learned what Alex was all about.

  We decided to disassociate ourselves from the cars and trailers, at least until dark, when they’d be less conspicuous and we could look for a campsite without half the town at our heels and the other half in our pockets. We parked along the 26th of July Avenue, the most splendid thoroughfare in Alex, a wide boulevard that curved in a sweeping crescent from the sea. We walked over to an attractive outdoor restaurant where we hoped we could a) get a good dinner, b) shake off the entourage of pimps and peddlers, c) keep an eye on the cars so that nothing was stolen, and d) enjoy the sunset over the Mediterranean. We were partly successful: We saw the sunset.

  The hawkers did not give up easily, and when our waiter chased them away, new ones took their places. We eventually succumbed to their entreaties, as they’d known we would. Willy bought a dozen colored handkerchiefs for the bargain price of 30 cents, and his nose turned green from the first one he used. Woodrow bought a wristwatch for four dollars after carefully checking what turned out to be the demonstration model, which the peddler then palmed, so all Woodrow got was the face and the back of a watch encasing a lump of dirt. Manu bought a bathing suit from a man lugging four suitcases of clothing. It was a size 36, as promised, but with a strangling size-24 jock inside. Steve bought a pack of Chesterfields at a high price, but still a bargain considering what American cigarettes usually cost abroad. He lit one and choked as the peddler disappeared while another one clarified that they were “Egyptian Chesterfields.”

  All this was going on while we were trying to eat. The peddlers were all around our table with their bags and boxes of merchandise, waving silk underpants in our faces and dangling brass bracelets in our soup, which, I admit, improved its taste, for the food was wretched beyond belief, and that’s damn faint praise coming from someone who’d had only one full meal in the preceding five days. The soup was indigestible, the salad unchewable, the bread unbreakable, the meat uncuttable—and the bill unbelievable. We were charged 50 percent above the already high prices on the menu because, the waiter explained, it was an indoor menu and we had eaten outdoors. We were also charged extra for the bread, extra for the butter, and extra for the sugar and salt. Extra for the tablecloth. And extra for a couple of flowers one of the peddlers had filched from the vase on our table. To this were added fees and taxes, which, the manager told us with a straight face, were for such essentials as the waiter’s old-age pension, repainting the kitchen, improving Egypt’s balance of payments, and widening the Suez Canal.

  We now fully grasped how pervasive the con game was in Alex. But it could have been worse: At least the restaurant had been a convenient spot for watching our cars.

  As we crossed toward them, we noticed that the Jeep was leaning at us. We ran around to its far side and discovered five kids at work. Three of them had the passenger side jacked up and were removing its tires, a fourth was siphoning gas out of the tank, and a fifth was trying to jimmy the latch on the camper door. They were so brazen they didn’t even try to escape, barely batting an eye when we grabbed them. The leader, a tough of 15, claimed they worked for a garage and assumed we were the car that had called for assistance. When I asked him how that justified siphoning off our gas, he replied that it was dangerous to work on a car with gas in the tank. We found a policeman, but the gang leader and the cop were old friends, and in the end we felt fortunate that we weren’t compelled to pay for the “work” the kids had done.

  We were just getting the tires back on when a leering man sidled up to Steve with a collection of pornographic pictures. When Steve turned these down, the man pulled a dozen vials of “aphrodisiac” out of his pocket, purportedly Spanish fly, absinthe, sperm-whale lotion, pulverized shark fin, and pepper extract. Steve told him he didn’t need any.

  “Okay. No need aphro. Muneer understand. You stud man. Then must need this.” He winked and withdrew from his other pocket an assortment of condoms in various sizes, colors, and enhancements. Steve pushed him away and told him to try me.

  Just then Willy came back, clutching a pile of Egyptian pounds he’d gotten from a money changer who was offering a decent rate, seven pounds for ten dollars, 35 percent better than the government rate. Willy pointed out a fat guy in an oversized overcoat standing next to a tree a few yards away. The man smiled a gleam of gold teeth. He spread his arms and opened his coat to show us packets of money held in place with safety pins: Egyptian pounds, U.S. dollars, Swiss francs, French francs, British pounds, lire, pesetas, marks, dirham.…

  Woodrow rushed over to him, waving a ten-dollar bill.

  “What did you get?” Willy asked when he’d returned.

  “Seven pounds. I gave him a ten and he gave me—hey, there’s only six pounds here! Hey, mister, you only gave me six pounds.”

  “Yes, certainly,” the money changer shouted. “Stamps. It’s for stamps. One pound for black-market stamps.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know about those. Black-market stamps. Well, uh, I mean, uh.…”

  By then the money changer had vanished.

  “You know, guys,” I said, “this can be a great place if you’ve got the right attitude. What a wild bunch of likable crooks. It’s my kind of town. I have to come back here someday.”

  Two men approached and wanted to know if we had any jewelry or foreign perfume to sell.

  I sold them five bottles of our sponsor’s OFF! insect repellent and unloaded that “watch” Woodrow had purchased.

  Manu returned with a bottle of whiskey, shouting that he’d gotten a good price on Cutty Sark.

  “Cutty Sark, my butt. That’s colored water,” I told him after I examined it.

  “How can it be colored water? The seal’s intact.”

  “Sure, and so is the press where they printed it.”

  I took the bottle from him, slipped it into our case of bourbon in the Cruiser, and waited. Within ten minutes a peddler came along hawking “Chevas Regale” [sic] for one Egyptian pound.

  “Come off it, man,” I told him. “You can’t sell us any of that colored-water junk. We only drink the real stuff. See, we have a full case of real whiskey we just smuggled in today.”

  “Real whiskey?” he exclaimed.

  “Sure thing, man. Here, have a sip.” I poured him a straight shot of Wild Turkey.

  The peddler drank, sighed, and smiled. “You want to sell some?”

  “Sure, I’ll let you have this bottle for eight pounds.”

  “No, too much.”

  “Okay, you can have a sealed bottle of Cutty Sark for only three pounds.”

  As we drove away, I chuckled that Alex was definitely one of a kind, and the kind of which one was enough.

  We weren’t quite sure where to go. Our plan was to camp outside of town, away from the crooks, and to come back the next morning to visit Pompey’s Pillar, the Little Sphinx, and the Catacombs of Kam el Shuqafa. But it wasn’t easy to find a place outside of town because we’d entered the delta of the Nile. Gone was the empty desert where we could open our camper and pitch our tents anywhere. Every bit of land here was either under cultivation or under water. It was here that the Nile, as it neared the sea, spread out into a triangle
a hundred miles on a side, a lush green wetness that provided food and clothing and work and hope for most of Egypt’s 30 million people. Only 50,000 hardy (or harebrained) souls attempted to live in the other, inhospitable, 97 percent of the country; the rest depended on the Nile, around which there was no space left for a campground.

  After blundering down mud lanes and floundering through streams in the dark, we reluctantly settled for sleeping on the wide shoulder of a dirt road beside a stand of date palms abutting a cotton field. The mosquitoes, the first we’d encountered in Africa, were fierce and noisy, and the air smelled of manure, but at least Alex’s crooks and con men were unlikely to find us.

  The police found us instead. Just as we had the camper set up and were about to turn in, three policemen popped out of the field and indicated they wanted us to move. They spoke no English, but kept pointing around and saying “klefti” and drew their fingers across their throats accompanied by a sscccchhhttt sound, giving us to understand that cutthroats abounded who would slit us as we slept. At that point, we’d have been willing to believe anything anyone told us about Alex, so we broke camp and let a cop climb into each car to show us to a safer spot. For half an hour, we drove along roads a few inches above the waterline, crept over creaky bridges, and skidded down muddy lanes until we reached a spot not much different or far removed from the one we’d left.

  We thanked the boys in blue for their help, and for being the first honest people we’d met in Alex. They were like friends in an enemy camp, and we missed them when they left.

  We also missed a flashlight, a light meter, a wrench, half a seat belt, and the dashboard ashtray.

  Early the next morning, one of the policemen was back, banging on the camper door. He gestured that he wanted us to give him a toothbrush, something he’d evidently forgotten to swipe the night before. We were so flabbergasted we gave him one.

  We left Alex and cut through the delta toward Cairo on a new, paved expressway. The traffic was fast and heavy. The desert was gone, drowned by the river. Irrigated fields, stands of trees, mosques, homes, factories, and restaurants lined the road. It was a wholly different Egypt, mechanized and modern.

  Cairo went by in a rush, a jumble of impressions, eight days of work and sightseeing and confusion. I remember isolated things: three days spent getting visas for Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, India, and Pakistan; crowded streets; repeatedly getting lost on the wrong side of the river; mosques and monuments; the Cairo Museum, where the world’s most vital collection of archaeological objects was stuck in a dark tomb of a building, stacked like flour sacks in a warehouse; Woodrow sick with dysentery, and Willy and Manu with mild cases of Cairo colon; the Continental Hotel, a relic of Old World elegance, with cavernous, thick-carpeted halls and spacious rooms, where we slept between sheets for the first time since Benghazi, only the second time in 77 days.

  I remember our toiling all week to get the cars and equipment in shape for the long, hot haul across the deserts of the Middle East; answering several dozen letters from friends and sponsors who, not hearing from us since Spain, had given us up for lazy or lost; and the meals at Rex, a wonderful bistro near the hotel where you could get a delicious bowl of spaghetti with salad and bread for ten cents. But most of all, when I think back to our days in Cairo, I remember the stunning women, the totalitarian atmosphere, and one very special camel driver.

  Cairo was a paradise of women, bronzed, graceful, alluring—and unattainable. They were the sultriest in the Moslem world, having shed the veil and adopted such Western fashions as short skirts, high heels, and low necklines. On our first day I developed a stiff neck from watching them walk by. As good Moslem women, they did not fraternize with foreigners, not even a foreigner like me who can pass for an Arab when he tries. And believe me, I was trying.

  But one of our group—let me call him X—thought he might overcome this problem and hit the jackpot—with Iftitani, our beautiful chambermaid at the Continental. She was everything plus: bewitching and desirable, with flashing blue eyes, shiny black hair that fell to her shoulders, flawless olive skin, and a body that would make even the Sphinx cry out in envy. We were all captivated by her, but Iftitani didn’t speak a word of English. Yet X was so sure that she was attracted to him that, when she came to straighten his room on our third day in the hotel, he invited her to dinner. Using pantomime, he pointed to her, then to himself, and then to his mouth as if he were eating. So what did Iftitani do? She called room service for him.

  X decided to try a direct approach. After she had dusted his room, he pointed to himself, then to his bed, lifted up the thin blanket, smoothed the sheet, then pointed to Iftitani, then back to the bed. On his third attempt, she understood. And nodded her approval! He’d been worried that she might be angry with his bold approach, but she smiled.

  Then she turned to leave his room. X rushed after her and pointed to the bed. Iftitani nodded reassuringly and pointed to his watch, then walked over to the wall calendar and pointed—and thus, without a spoken word, the lovers agreed to consummate their relationship at two o’clock the next afternoon.

  X was deliriously happy the entire day, but the rest of us were unsportingly, albeit secretly, jealous and rather depressed by his good fortune. The next forenoon, all but X left early for lunch at Rex, not out of any sense of discretion, but from an inability to bear to see this romance unfold.

  At two o’clock Iftitani, wearing her tight blue uniform, entered X’s room and closed the door behind her. X could barely contain himself. She went right to the bed and pulled back the blanket. She wasn’t wasting any time, and X was fine with that, so he started hurriedly pulling off his clothing.

  Which is when Iftitani screamed and ran out.

  X was utterly puzzled and totally frustrated because he’d been sure she liked and desired him. When the others returned they commiserated with him, but hypocritically, wallowing happily in schadenfreude.

  Later that afternoon, the irate hotel manager came up to complain about X’s behavior. It seems that our innocent Iftitani had thought he’d just wanted his sheets changed.

  From their misunderstanding, I learned valuable lessons that helped me through years of foreign travel: If you speak a different language than the other, make sure—unmistakably sure—you and the other person are in agreement. Be sensitive when you’re in a position of power, as a hotel guest is with an employee. Never assume that a member of a foreign culture will readily undertake an act that is proscribed in her society. And avoid presuming that just because a person is poor or working class, they’ll do anything you want—even if you’re the head of the IMF.

  It was hard to move around Cairo without encountering the indicia of a police state: army camps, ordnance depots, and communications installations ringed the city. All bridges and many factories displayed signs banning photography. When we picked up our mail at the American Express office, most of it had been opened by the government censors, and we later learned that the letters we’d sent home had also been opened and then resealed with the censor’s stamp. When we’d checked in at the Continental, our passports had been confiscated and held for several days while the secret police checked us out. When our film came back from the processing lab, the photos showing the poverty of Egypt had mysteriously vanished. When we made large purchases, the merchants demanded proof that we’d acquired our Egyptian pounds at the official rate, and signs warning of penalties for changing money on the black market were omnipresent. The newspapers and radio carried the official government line, and we saw no evidence of freedom of the press or speech. When the Algerians overthrew Ben Bella, Nasser’s main ally, a shock ran through Egypt’s hierarchy, which deployed troops discreetly—but not too discreetly—around Cairo to discourage the spread of anti-regime revolutions. (Those revolutions occurred anyway—but not until the Arab Spring, 46 long, harsh years later.)

  But you can’t dislike Egypt when it has people like Lamyi—Lamyi Ibrahim Ghoneim—the world’s greatest, most charming, most c
harismatic, most cinematic camel driver, as he himself would confirm.

  Steve and I drove to the pyramids late one afternoon to scout locations for sponsor photos we’d committed to take. As we looked around, a chubby, grinning, sixtyish Arab in a bright-green galabeya bounded by on a camel, shouting at us, “Howdy, kids. Dig me, baby. It’s colossal. Twenty-three skidoo and away we go. Wowie!” He thrice circled us, then trotted back exclaiming, “Wasn’t that the most, man? Isn’t this camel the living end? Dandy, just dandy. May I present myself? I’m Lamyi, and this is Canada Dry.” He pronounced it like the soda pop and handed Steve a multiply misspelled business card:

  CANDA DRAY

  camel for hire

  Poprietor: Pyramids Post, Giza

  LAMYI IBRAHIM GHONEIM Giza, Egypt.

  We were still wary after being misled by the touts in Alex, but Lamyi won us over as he enumerated his credentials in what he thought was the latest hip Hollywood lingo. “I’ve been making the tourist scene here for forty years. My daddy-o taught me the trade. No other cat in the sport savvies it the way I do, kid. Whenever any bigwig pays a visit, the govmen’t has me show him around on Canada Dry. He’s the most, gentle as a lamb, comfy as a couch. Go ahead, you want to sit on him? Why, the last king and queen of Sweden said Canada Dry was super colossal. See, here’s a snap of the queen on him. He’s getting old, but he’s the best in the business, kiddo. Prime Minister Churchill rode him. All the European princesses and counts who come out here ask for him. Even your President Roosevelt said he was the smartest-looking camel out here. And you know those tourist posters, the ones with the pyramids and the camel? Well, baby, that’s us. Everybody takes our picture. I’m very photogenic. Even Cecil B. DeMille said so; I was his favorite of all the camel drivers. Oh, certainly I know CB, and all those other producers, too. I made a lot of pictures with old CB, Ten Commandments and dandy stuff like that. I’ve been in 30 movies, kid, 30. Now how can I oblige you?”