Across the Sea

If you're like me, many's the time you've smelled a bar of soap/lip balm/fabric softener so sweet that you wished you could eat it. And again, if you're like me, you learned early in life that pursuing this goal never ends well. So you can imagine my surprise upon popping into my mouth a candy that looked for all the world like a toffee rolled in potpourri, only to discover that the Jordanians have conquered man's ageless desire to eat something that tastes as good as good as perfume smells.

This has been just one of the delights that have greeted me in my few minutes on the ground here in Aqaba, Jordan's second-largest city after capital Amman. Clinging to the elbow of the Red Sea, Aqaba is near enough to be able to see Egypt, but between the two lies Israel. Lebanese immigration (who I expect to meet in a few days) will refuse entry to anyone with an Israeli stamp in their passport, so the simple option of traveling through the Chosen People's land was unavailable. Instead, I took a bus from Cairo to Nuweiba on the Egyptian coast, then a ferry from there to Aqaba. It took a solid 24 hours of travel time, over half of it spent killing time and swatting at flies in the Red Sea Port Authority, but having Jordan has already more than made the time spent worthwhile.

I met a friendly Scotch-Gaelic cartoon translator on the boat, and we killed time discussing scuba diving and humanity. At the port in Aqaba, she lit out for Amman to meet her tour group, and I braved the familiar swarm of over-eager cabbies outside the terminal. At first, I took this as a sign that, at least so far, Jordan and Egypt had something in common. "No more bus tonight! Bus to Petra, tomorrow morning. Taxi to Petra, how much?" One driver follows me as I head to the parking lot to see the bus situation for myself. A bus to Petra should be four dinars, my Lonely Planet says, so seeing that he was truthful (gasp!) about the buses being gone, I began there. "No, fifty dinar, five-zero, taxi to Petra." No thanks, I'll take the bus in the morning. "Okay. Seven o'clock, buses start." Really? Just like that? "What's your name?" I'm Ben. "Amben. Nice to meet you. Mahmoud." And the rest of the drive into Aqaba proper we spend in pleasant small talk. "Jordan, Israel, Egypt," Mahmoud points out across the gulf. Three countries in one glance, I exclaim. Mahmoud smirks. And drops me off. And doesn't even grumble about making change for a ten dinar note!

I'm already walking on air as I saunter through downtown Aqaba, poking my head into hotels and inquiring prices. I'll keep looking, I say when the quotes start at 30 dinars, and get a warm smile that seems to say, "no sweat, come on back if you don't find anything cheaper." And as I walk, Lonely Planet map in hand, rucksack behind and little backpack over my chest, not a single tout grabs my arm to direct me into this or that hostel. "Welcome!" a few headwaiters announce as I pass.

After finding a nice, albeit expensive room, I set off on a short wander, picked up a sack of assorted potpourri candies, and poked around a little to more calls of "welcome" and smiles abounding. One kitchen worker, holding two aluminum bowls over his shoulders like trays of h'ors d'oeuvres as he swung through an alley, noticed me peering curiously. He swung one bowl down low and grinned, "hummus!" And sure enough, leveled off at the rims of the bowls like icing on a cake, were what must have been three or four kilos of rich, creamy hummus.

And it occurs to me now that I'm sitting in an internet cafe while there are two huge bowls of hummus waiting for me. Petra tomorrow, seven o'clock, buses start. Thanks, Mahmoud.

Benchmarks in Cairo, or, How NOT to Travel

Continents: 5/7

A notch in my belt for Africa, as well as my first Arabic country (if you don't count the layover in Kuwait city).

I gave a masterclass on how to make a perfect horse's butt out of oneself on my arrival. Not having known that India doesn't like people to take their currency from the country, I debarked onto the tarmac without a single Egyptian pound, but a maharaj's ransom in rupees. The bank wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole, and neither ATMs before immigration would give me a dime. To the rescue came a Dubai-ite who unhesitatingly forked over the $15 I needed for my tourist visa, and almost ran off before I could pay her back. The peak of my stupidity was not yet reached, though. I found a working ATM and withdrew a few hundred Egyptian pounds, then hit the exchange counter to ask what fifteen US dollars equaled in pounds so I'd know what to give her. Paying no attention to the rate and making no attempt to do the math myself, I accepted foolishly the clerk's response: "fifteen" USD = 287 EGP. The Dubaite was halfway to Luxor before I realized that the clerks misheard my fifteen for fifty, but you couldn't ask for a better person to accidentally repay a loan 300% the original balance. I eventually found an English couple on their way to Delhi, with whom I exchanged my rupees for pounds, taking a 13 dollar loss. I also left my bag behind in a museum cafe for 30 minutes and on a bus station counter for 5.

On the packed bus from the airport to Cairo, I suffered the rolling eyes of the other passengers as I clumsily navigated the aisle with my huge rucksack and apologetic, self-effacing grin. On the streets of the city, I've suffered a barrage of insults from overbearing, limpet-like tour company touts for refusing their service. The transaction usually goes something like:

TOUT: Hey, where you from?/Hey, you look like Egyptian!/Hey, you got the time?
ME: USA/Ha./Two-thirty
TOUT: (having broken the ice, he now follows like a dilligent puppy making small talk) I been to USA many times. My brother/professor/girlfriend lives in LA/Boston/New York. Where you staying? No, that place very dirty, don't stay there. You need tour? Taxi? Shopping? Bar?
ME: (at this point, I refuse to return any conversation, and attempt to wave them away with a palm-outward "no thanks" and a head lowering)

And this continues for anywhere from 20 seconds to 20 minutes, ending in a venomous epithet that could be as tame as "piss off!", or something considerably more colorful, or something muttered in Arabic.

Egypt's wonders, the pyramids, are more than enough to make the follies worthwhile, though. The feeling of my skin crawling from the descent into a 3 foot by 3 foot shaft for minutes on end to reach the inner chambers of Khufu's memorial monument is something I don't think I'll ever forget. Tut's swag, on display at the Cairo Museum, wasn't bad either. And the lamb at Felfela Restaurant, rippling with shiny seams of fat on a bed of fluffy rice and tomato, was enough to ensure my return tonight, upon completion of this post.

Also tonight, my overnight bus to Aqaba, Jordan, and my faithful, if fleeting, return to the continent of Asia. Miss me?

Kathman(over)du(e), Rishikesh

Nepal turned out to be more of a visa-run than a true destination. I stayed in the capital for the whole five days it took me to arrange my India travel documents, wandering around buying souvenirs and eating whatever caught my eye. I got my visa on the fifth afternoon and bused to the Indian border overnight. The Suanuli frontier was a dingy arch over a mud road painted with the words "Welcome To India" where, wandering past the cows and rickshaws, I managed to slip past the nondescript Nepalese immigration office and slip into India unofficially. Once the Indian immigration officials saw I had no Nepalese exit stamp, they simply pointed back to the arch, where I got stamped out of Nepal.

So, technically, I've been to Nepal and India twice.

From the border to Gorakhpur on a three hour bus, I spent the day at the train station and caught a sleeper to Delhi, arriving at 5:55 a.m. I woke up at quarter to seven the next morning, thoroughly befuddled by the freezing air conditioned night after having spent 24 hours on sweaty, jolting buses. By a stroke of luck, the train had only just pulled in to New Delhi Station, and I collected my bags in a daze and stumbled onto the platform. After spending another day stalking around the filth of the station, I caught an evening train to Haridwar and a trampoline-suspension bus from there to Rishikesh, collapsing into a hostel after scarfing down my first non-muesli meal in 48 hours.

The next morning, after a bitterly cold shower, I shouldered my bag and hiked a few kilometers through town along the Ganges to the Anand Prakash yoga ashram. Arriving a few minutes before lunch, I clomped through the door, met Britt in a procession of hugs, got assigned a room and a lunch tray, and settled in for what has become a week of yoga and vegetables.

Rishikesh, being a holy city, is entirely meat- and alchohol-free. On top of this, the ashram cafeteria serves only "satvic" meals, which excludes, among other things, garlic and onions (too "lusty"). In spite of this, the fare is delicious and plentiful, and the communal setting is a welcome relief from having a whole restaurant table to myself.

Monkeys scramble acrobatically across the two footbridges that span the Ganges here, and cows are omnipresent. The power fails regularly, and the afternoon heat is oppressive. But in the mornings, torrents of wind pour down from the Himalayas over the town, and in the evenings, the stars are in full view. It's not a bad place to spend a week, recovering from the harrying anxieties of travel, soaking up masala tea, reading, and swinging into downward facing dog a few times a day.

But Egypt and her pyramids await, so tomorrow I'll return to Delhi for a day of sights, then fly to Cairo early Monday to scratch a fifth continent off of my to-do list.

The Terror-cotta Army

Emperor Qin Shi Huang is credited unifying China for the first time. Two hundred years before Jesus came around, he was hard at work commissioning the Great Wall and other enduring projects. For this, the Chinese generally regard him as a pretty great guy. They acknowledge only as an afterthought that his mercury-addled fits of rage reportedly could end with random subjects being pulled apart by horses.

He also had the idea that a massive army of clay soldiers should be built to protect him in the afterlife, possibly from all the people he had randomly drawn and quartered.

This army was discovered in 1974 by a farmer digging a well. He now sits in the souvenir shop at the end of the tour and grins behind a pair of Ray-Bans, seemingly still bewildered by his luck, three decades on.

Fifteen tourists I were led by Zha Zha (ja-ja), a beaming tour guide whose energy never faltered. On her call of "hellohiexcuseme!" we would rally to her for guidance and info. She punctuated most sentences with a self-assured "hmph" and a quick nod, and after asking the busload of us to say our names and nationalities, introduced herself thusly: "I am Zha Zha, easy to remember, "Lady Zha Zha!" Hmph! 26 years old, still single! (huge grin) I want you all to stick together today! My first day!, I lose one person! This time!, I don't want to lose any person! Hmph! So stick together okay!"

Zha Zha led us around the three "pits," doing her best to speak above the din of the millions of Chinese on holiday for National Day week. The heaving masses yearning-to-stand-in-front-of-your-camera-as-soon-as-you-framed-up-your-shot would have completely ruined the day, were it not for her endless enthusiasm and self-aware humor, and the best part of the experience ended up being her impromptu song on the bus ride back to Xi'an. She suggested a sing-along to pass the time. The group of us immediately requested that she sing a Chinese song to start things off and, after some coaxing, she proceeded to deliver a sweet rendition of a traditional number "Ma," "Mother" in Chinese.

The unearthed terracotta warriors number in the thousands, but it was an exercise in social awareness to see such astonishing numbers of living, breathing, shoving people crowding around the sites. You hear about China having lots of people, but you can't really get the full effect until you turn up at a big tourist attraction during a week-long Chinese holiday.

Pictures will follow when internet speed permits.

Cheating, Pumpkin Eating

After weeks of agonizing about Tibet travel permits, group tours, inflated fees and overbooked trains, I made the healthy decision to remove the plateau from my itinerary. A flight to Kathmandu cost me a fraction of the cost to make the trip overland, and will afford me more time in cheaper destinations (read: India). This will, hopefully, free me from the anxiety of scraping the bottom of the bank account barrel by the time my trip reaches its final leg in costly Europe.

So here I am in scenic Nepal, gateway to the Indian subcontinent, having a fairly easy time figuring out my visa and travel arrangements onward to Delhi and then Rishikesh. There, I'll meet a friend at a yoga ashram and try my hand (legs?) at the ancient art for a few days and figure out my next moves. Fifteen days after that, I'll be on a flight to Cairo.

It turns out I was a little naive to think that most of this epic westward journey would be doable overland. If I had a little more time and a lot more cash, I wouldn't think twice about hiring out a Land Rover and hauling around Tibet, or paying for the 24-hour guide/escort necessary for a U.S. citizen to get an Iranian tourist visa, or chartering an amphibious vehicle to navigate Pakistan's unfortunate Swat valley. For now, those will have to sit on the back burner.

But I take solace in the thought that in 2006 I was sitting in a cramped office in a double-wide trailer-office in Florida listening to the slow, monotonous progress of the scanner copying ancient slide photographs into a computer database. It was then that I would turn to the BBC news website to fantasize of visiting far off lands. I wondered glumly if the Nepal Maoist insurgent situation would calm down to the point that tourism could resume. And now, four short years later, I'm blogging from Kathmandu with a bellyfull of lentil soup and curry.

And my book exchange luck is holding up, to boot.

Nanning High Rollers Club

The hard sleeper was anything but. It's no featherbed, but there is some padding, and they give you plenty of sheets which make the platform even more comfortable. The berths were air conditioned and quiet, and aside from the four monotonous hours clearing customs, the experience was teriffic.

Nanning is a nice change of pace, as I'd hoped, but after the weeklong quagmire in Hanoi, I succumbed to my impatience and bought a $215 airfare to Xian. It will, however, replace a 33 hour train with a two-hour flight, for only about $80 more. The trains are all booked up for the National Holiday week, so I would have been stuck here for a while if I wanted to wait for another hard sleeper. Keeping to the high-end trend, I booked a night in a $21 hotel and actually paid for laundry service instead of washing my unmentionables in the bathroom sink. All of my penny pinching, I think, has been contributing to my anxieties, so I'm trying to loosen up the pursestrings a little.

So far, China's supermarkets are a delight. Full of interesting and intriguing products like "ONION COMPRESSED BISCUITS" and tupperwares full of vacuum-sealed rice and entrees that you heat up using a charcoal-chemical handwarmer kind of thing. The people here are a little friendlier and more laid back. I feel like I'm making progress. I even ran into a gang of Romanians who I impressed by thanking them in their native tongue for offering to show me around if I come through their neck of the woods on my journey (and I hope to).

Onward, Upward

I have in-hand my Chinese visa (kind of drab: I'd hoped for a little more fanfare considering the $170 price tag, at least a hologram or something, but oh well) and a ticket for a hard-sleeper from Hanoi to Nanning tonight. Hopefully the term "hard-sleeper" won't be a double-entendre, but even on the face of it, it's a little daunting. I asked Giang (pronounced 'Zang,' like from "Wayne's World 2" when Wayne inexplicably knows the Mandarin word for 'excellent!'), the daughter of the guest house owners, if she could describe for me what the hard-sleeper was like, and she reached over to the wooden bench I was sitting on and rapped it disappointingly with her knuckles. Pictures on seat61.com tell a different story, but I suspect the company that runs trains from Hanoi to Nanning may not be the same as the companies operating entirely within China.

I also have a secondhand Lonely Planet China guide, which warns that Chinese customs officers sometimes confiscate the guide on the basis that its maps represent Taiwan as a separate country. They reccommend putting a cover on the book to make it "less noticable," but don't specify what the average Chinese customs agent considers noticable. For lack of direction, I've taken my usual approach of reckless whimsy:

Lonely Planet's guide to The Moon: 100% researched and updated! A convincing facade if ever there was one? We'll find out.

Into Nanning by tomorrow morning, I will hopefully have left behind the incessant honk and buzz of motorbikes for a friendlier, more laid-back atmosphere, but in anticipation of more of the same, I have no less than 6 (six!) paperbacks: LPs for 'The Moon' and The Middle East, an exhausting Noam Chomsky tome, and three new aquisitions, Stieg Larsson's "The Girl Who Played with Fire," Howard Marks's "Mr. Nice," and Aravind Adiga's "Between the Assassinations." Book exchanges are one of my favorite kinds of human interaction. Left behind: Pullman's "The Subtle Knife, Chrichton's "Pirate Latitudes," Keillor's "Lake Wobegon Days." If the book turnover continues apace (and this hard-sleeper issue goes well), the many long-distance trains in my immediate future (Nanning-Xi'an: 33 hours) should be very pleasant.

Only three and a half more hours in Hanoi before the migration resumes.

For those interested (mom), I posted a final farewell to Korea in the other blog, to which I'm adding pictures now.