Did we or didn’t we stay in a houseboat on the Nile in Cairo?

December 6, 2014December 8, 2014 / Eric Brown / 1 Comment

We have a layover in Cairo. How do you think we spent it? A – in a spiffy hotel near the airport, or B – in a creaky houseboat on the Nile?

(Before I reveal the shocking answer, we’re not coming all the way to Egypt to spend one day in Cairo. We’re going to Luxor today and we’ll be back in a week, where will we resume our current accommodation.)

And now for the big reveal…we are staying on a houseboat on the Nile. It’s a bit rough around the edges, the shower is a strong trickle, it is definitely not in the chic part of town, but it has a terrace with a panoramic view of the river, and for the rest of my life I will get to say that I stayed on a houseboat on the Nile in the middle of Cairo.

Our view from the houseboat

There are many ways to travel. You can do it the easy way, you can do it the interesting way, or you can try to find some kind of happy medium. The easy way goes like this – you arrive at the airport, you are whisked to fancy hotel in the nice part of town, and you take tours in a bus with a guide who ties a bandana to the end of a selfie stick so that everyone can see her. You travel in a scrum and you move at the group’s pace. No dawdling, or you’ll keep others waiting (at best) or be left behind (at worst). Wanna check out that windy alleyway? Tough toenails. How about that cool café that you read about? Not a chance.

Don’t get me wrong, that way still has its merits. It’s more expensive, but you see a lot of stuff and your marriage stays strong. I would say that in her heart of hearts Janine leans ever so slightly in this direction, but bless her heart of hearts, she indulges me. Still, we both prefer something more than the vacuum sealed version. It can be really hard to break out of the bubble, especially in places as mystifying as Cairo, but it’s almost always rewarding. (Although when it’s not rewarding it can be a serious drag.) It can also be pretty exhausting, and there are things off the beaten path that can make people uncomfortable.

Our houseboat host is an American named Dan who has been living in Cairo, off and on, for fifteen years. Dan arranged to have us picked up at the airport and when we arrived at the houseboat he sat with us on the terrace and gave us the skinny on Cairo. He told us where to eat and what to see. He taught us how to deal with cab drivers and how to cross the street. (Don’t laugh – there are no crosswalks and no stoplights, but there are lots and lots of cars, motorbikes, minibuses, tuk-tuks, and donkey carts, among many other conveyances. Crossing the street requires equal parts confidence, telemetry, insanity, and a fervent belief in a pleasant afterlife.)

Dan works with a local guide who can give personal tours to the pyramids and other fun spots around town. He will negotiate for you in the markets and he’ll take you to the places that tourists don’t normally go. How cool is that?

Our houseboat sits between two worlds – a fancier section of town (fancy being a relative term, but still) called Zamalek, where you can find boutiques and cafés – and the decidedly less luxurious neighborhood of two million people called Imbaba. Dan then took us on a short walking tour of Imbaba, which brings to mind some of the poorer parts of Nairobi or Dar es Salaam that I’ve visited. Dan took us through a women-run vegetable market, and we saw a few live animal butchers, an ironworker artist, a bakery, and all manner of life in progress. It’s loud, dirty, smelly, and chaotic, but it was fascinating, and the sort of thing that tourists in Cairo rarely see.

Indaba. A part of Cairo not on most tourist itineraries.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner

A man and his dinosaur

These guys really wanted us to take their picture. Then the guy in the red shirt, the one who make the dinosaurs, insisted on approving the final result. Some things are universal!

These guys really wanted us to take their picture. Then the guy in the red shirt, the one who makes the dinosaurs, insisted on approving the final result. Some things are universal!

We attracted a lot of attention, needless to say, but people were friendly and we felt quite safe. At the end of one of the alleys, Dan led us to the Swiss Club, an interesting oasis in this gritty neighborhood. The Swiss Club was holding a Christmas fair, and we wandered in to check out the stuff and stayed for lunch at their very pleasant garden restaurant. The Swiss Club is not at all fancy. It’s more like a clubhouse than a country club, but it would have been impossible to imagine that even this modest space would be sitting beyond the wall of such a neighborhood. Nevertheless, it felt slightly like the days of the Raj (although without the pith helmets and gaudy facial hair).

On the lawn at the Swiss Club

The houseboat itself is a trip. Evenings are delightful. Last night (Friday, which in Islamic countries is the first day of the weekend) a parade of neon-lit party boats floated past, thumping Egyptian technopop (imagine if Britney Spears woke up one day in a Bedouin camp in the Sahara and started singing without her autotuner). We sat on the terrace, sipped duty-free gin and watched the parties glide past. (You probably already know this, but we just realized that duty free shops will take all your excess local currency, charge the rest to your credit card, and you will be well provisioned for sundowners! This is particularly useful in countries that don’t sell booze.)

Mornings aren’t so bad either. This morning, as we had our coffee, a couple in a small wooden post paddled by – the wife was working the oars and the husband was pulling in a simple fishing line that had been set with hooks and bait every five feet or so.

Gone fishing on the Nile.

We then watched boat after boat from the rowing club on the opposite bank slip into the water for a morning training. In the middle of one of the loudest, craziest, most chaotic cities in earth, there is another city that moves at the decidedly more leisurely pace of the Nile. Also, we have been regularly reminded that we are afloat – every so often a speedboat will whiz by, leaving a wake that rocks our world, literally. It takes a bit of getting used to.

We are now off to Luxor, where we will nod toward reality and take a boat tour down the Nile. Short of renting one’s own vessel, this seems like the best way to visit some of those famous sights that we’ve always dreamed of seeing. My guess is that there will be plenty of ancient relics on the boat as well – I have a vision of doing the hokey pokey with a few hundred elderly pensioners, dining with Captain Steuben, and dancing the foxtrot with a dowager from Notting Hill Gate, but we shall see.

The ultimate Thanksgiving destination – Abu Dhabi!

December 4, 2014December 4, 2014 / Eric Brown / Leave a comment

Let’s just say you have a week to kill and you decide to fly to Abu Dhabi to spend it with people you barely know. It’s your wife’s friend and her husband. You’ve had dinner all together exactly once. What could possibly go wrong?

It is impossible to plan a nine month journey with too much precision. Things happen. Plans change. When we drew up our around the world wish list, Abu Dhabi was probably not in the top fifty, and yet, here I sit, poolside, in Abu Dhabi. In the words of David Byrne, “How did I get here?”

Allow me to explain.

Through nobody’s fault at all, we had a hole in our schedule.

Somewhere along the line, Janine’s friend Kathy invited us to visit her, her husband Brian, and their dog Rupert in Abu Dhabi. I think she said something like, “You should come visit us in Abu Dhabi sometime,” which Janine interpreted to mean, “Please invite yourselves to Abu Dhabi for a week when you have a hole in your schedule.”

It’s a relatively short flight from Istanbul and we were hoping they’d say yes.

Kathy graciously accepted Janine’s proposal, but let us know that she and Brian would be leaving mid-week for a vacation to Sri Lanka. Even so, they encouraged us to stay at the apartment after they left, which worked out well for us and allowed us the opportunity to take care of Rupert P. Kleiver, their loveable, five year old Black Mouth Cur.

Think about it. Janine and Kathy met at a conference and stayed in touch, but that was about it. They have really only seen each other a couple of times. We all had dinner together in New York once, but I doubt Brian or I could have picked each other out in a lineup of one guy. And now we were signed up for a week of close contact and we were also on the hook to make sure that their beloved dog didn’t run away or wreck the place or bite some kid.

As I look back, if you will pardon my French, this had the makings of a real shitshow.

And let this be a lesson to you people.

Every so often a truly bad idea has a happy ending.

This could have been the week from hell, but as it turned out we had a terrific time. There were many boy-boy/girl-girl Men are like Mars, Women are Like Venus moments. While the four of us are all fabulously modern with regard to gender roles and such, it is also true that the boys played golf and the girls had their toes done.

Thanksgiving was brilliant. Kathy made a stunning sweet potato and apple soup, and Brian made a turkey roulade, mashed potatoes, roasted Brussels sprouts with pancetta, stuffing (on top of which he roasted a turkey leg and thigh – I must try that someday), a pecan pie, and a pumpkin pie. I made an apple pie (although Brian had already made the crust, which was excellent).

When I woke up on New Year’s Day 2014, I would scarcely have imagined that I’d be having Thanksgiving dinner in the United Arab Emirates with people I barely know, but that’s life for you, isn’t it?

(By the way, if you’re interested in reading more cultural fish out of water in Abu Dhabi-type stuff, check out Kathy’s terrific blog, Blonde in ‘bu Dhabi)

Thanksgiving, Abu Dhabi style

I didn’t have much of a mental picture of Abu Dhabi. I know that its next door neighbor Dubai is famous for its tall buildings and Vegas-y vibe, with a Middle East twist, but I had no sense of what Abu Dhabi would be like. Abu Dhabi is much different. It has tall buildings and a Miami vibe with a Middle East twist.

Sometimes it seems that there are more cranes than people.

The weather is lovely this time of year, topping out in the low 80s. (Don’t come in summer, when it gets up to 130. No, that’s not a typo). After flatlining during the downturn, there are once again cranes everywhere. It’s a city of outsiders – only about a third of the population are from the Arabian peninsula.

But it is nevertheless a very Arabian Muslim city. Many women are fully covered and wherever you look you see men in the familiar white robe called a thawb.

The call to prayer emits from speakers around the city five times a day. The workweek is Sunday through Thursday.

In the UAE you have to go to a separate store to buy alcohol (Wait! That’s also true in New York and Maryland.) and it’s only served in hotels. Certain supermarkets sell pork, but to get to the pork products, you have to enter the “pork room,” which brings to mind the curtained-off section of the video store (remember them?) that had the dirty movies.

Behind this door is a world of pork.

At the same time, the supermarkets are chockablock with familiar foods, from taco shells to Hellman’s mayonnaise. The malls (and there are tons of them) have just about every western product you can think of, including a Shake Shack (or, if you will, Sheik Shack, har har). You can live here indefinitely without having to learn a word of Arabic.

Sheik Shack

There is no shortage of national pride here. Our visit coincided with National Day, which celebrates the unification of seven emirates (including Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and five others that I hadn’t heard of) into one administrative body independent of the British, who ran the place until 1971.

The UAE flag was everywhere, and people have taken to draping their cars with those vinyl wrappers that you normally see on buses and trains. Most incorporate the suave if slightly grumpy visage of the UAE’s George Washington, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, who was the federation’s first president.

National pride, UAE style.

The UAE’s version of the Blue Angels flew overhead, streaming the national colors in their contrails. We watched a fireworks display that would have impressed the Grucci brothers. It was Thanksgiving and Fourth of July rolled into one.

We did not do a ton of sightseeing, but what we saw was impressive.

The Grand Mosque, which was completed in 2007, is the eighth largest mosque in the world. It took eleven years to complete, and it’s full of notable features. The Persian carpet is more than 1.3 acres and has more than 2 billion knots. Its largest chandelier (there are seven) is the third largest in the world. The list goes on. In short, this is a big, brash mosque.

Inside the Grand Mosque, Abu Dhabi

We also toured the Grand Mosque’s secular counterpart – the Emirates Palace Hotel. This is the building that oil built, like much the rest of the great structures of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Where the region once produced fish and pearls (and sand), by an accident of prehistoric happenstance, this place is now fabulously wealthy. The decision to make the UAE a tourist and shopping destination represents a realization that the wells will someday run dry. For the world’s rich and famous, the Emirates Palace is as good a place as any to efficiently relieve yourself of excess capital. The three room sultan’s suites (there are a bunch of them) are more than seven thousand square feet, they rent for about $16,000 a night, and they are regularly occupied. In the lobby, you can have a cappuccino topped with gold leaf (I opted for the humble camel’s milk version) and there is a vending machine that dispenses gold necklaces.

Yep, a gold vending machine.

Abu Dhabi and Dubai may seem gaudy and excessive, but who are we Americans to judge? After all, Business Week says that Americans spend over forty billion dollars a year on weight loss products. I won’t be making a habit of gold leaf cappuccinos, but this place is similar enough to our own part of the world to be familiar but different enough to set your cultural gyroscope spinning just out of control enough to make you pretty dizzy.

I like places that do that.

Speaking of spinning cultural gyroscopes, our next stop is Cairo.

What do you do when you’re just not feeling it?

November 29, 2014January 1, 2015 / Eric Brown / 4 Comments

Every so often you just don’t feel it. You do all the things you’re supposed to do, see all the great stuff you’re supposed to see, but something is just missing.

Now that I have placated (I hope) the food readers (the food posts are by far more popular than anything else I write), I’d like to take a moment to explain the ebbs and flows of travel and expectation. For those of you who have been following along, when we arrived in Istanbul, we did the standard tourist stuff and stayed in the popular tourist neighborhood. We saw the big three – the Blue Mosque (really quite impressive), Hagia Sophia (good and interesting but a little messy) and Topkapi Palace (a fascinating look at the Sultans’ life). We tolerated the Grand Bazaar, but loved the Spice Market, which is basically the Grand Bazaar for spices. It has a jillion indistinguishable spice shops, but I had the time of my life once I picked my shop and started buying. As it turned out, my spice guy is a Turk who was born in Germany and lived in Japan for eleven years. Who knew? I am now the proud owner of lots of spice.)

Guenther, me, and spices

Still, Istanbul felt like it was missing something, or more accurately, we were missing something. All those places are just fine, but they’re packed with tourists, especially in the summer, and after a few days of being hounded by touts and jostling with a small city of touring Europeans, you’d be forgiven if you just threw your hands up and raced to the airport.

We needed to shake things up.

We decided to get out of town for a bit and explore some of the other famous regions in Turkey. We booked a tour that would take us to Cappadoccia (where you can stay in a cave), Pamukkale (a place full of natural hot springs and a very cool old Roman ruin), and Ephesus (once the third largest city in the Roman empire after Rome and Alexandria). We’d get out and about and expand our sense of the country. What could go wrong?

That little expedition reminded me why travel can be so much fun and so ridiculous.

We took a balloon ride over Cappadoccia, which was exhilarating, although for a moment there I thought I might need an adult undergarment.

Right before I almost soiled myself.

Later that day, we explored caves that had been used for churches by Christians, and we visited an underground city that had eleven levels that was carved out of lava rock. The city was constructed so Christians could flee the Romans, and later the Persians. People will go to a heck of a lot of trouble in order to pray. There, we had those fine meals at Fatima’s restaurant, Shirahne.

So far, so good. After our second day touring Cappadocia, were scheduled to take a night bus to Pamukkale. These buses are supposed to be quite nice. “Like an airplane seat,” someone said. Oh, it was like an airplane seat alright – a Cessna. This ride was just wrong from the beginning. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that the overnight bus had no bathroom. Amazingly there was wifi, but the password didn’t work. There were American movies at each seat, but they were dubbed into Turkish. Janine was convinced that she could crack the code that would play the movies in English, but she never did (and I suspect it’s because they’re just in Turkish). We couldn’t tilt our seats back because the couple behind us had a baby bassinet on their laps. Sleep was impossible because the bus stopped every hour, ostensibly to use the bathroom, but I think the driver just wanted to smoke. (You haven’t lived until you’ve spent time in a Turkish truck stop, though.) Sometimes the bus stopped for two minutes, sometimes twenty. Repeated attempts to communicate with the bus attendant proved fruitless.

After ten thrilling hours, the bus spat us out in the bustling metropolis of Denizli at about six the next morning. I should note that these package tours involve a certain amount of magical activity. When you get off your bus, you hope against hope that some guy will be standing there with a sign with your name on it. If you’re lucky, then they take you to some place where there’s a reservation, a room, another useful conveyance, or some other proof that wheels are turning in logical and useful ways.

Sure enough, someone was at the bus to collect us to take us on another shorter bus ride to the town of Pamukkale, where we arrived at what could charitably called a backpacker’s flophouse. If you were feeling uncharitable, you might just call it a hellhole. For eight bucks we were able to attempt to take a short nap, shower, and leave our bags behind lock and key for the day before heading off for our tour. As ever, however, you get what you pay for.

Janine and I have stayed in scarier places, but not since the early Clinton Administration. I remember the time we stayed at a guest house in Kuala Lumpur in 1994. The room was a plywood and chicken wire cage. This was better, but not by a whole lot. The plaster walls were sloughing off matter like a leper. At first glance, the shower appeared to have a checkboard design. A second glance revealed the black sections to just be mildew. The room had an indescribable odor. It was a mix of mold and old food with maybe a bit of ripened socks thrown in for good measure. We slept in our clothes. The thing is, and this can’t be discounted, the people who ran the hellhole flophouse were really, really nice. They made us feel warm and welcome, despite the scandalous conditions. I liked them. Anyway, we were so tired that the conditions didn’t much matter. We used the checkerboard shower, changed clothes, rested a bit, then dubiously set out for our day of sightseeing, wondering why we would give up our nice, comfortable lives in one of the nicest cities in the fully developed world for backpackers’ hovels and moldy showers. Have we lost what little mind we had left?

We needn’t have wondered. Pamukkale was fascinating and beautiful. We wandered around the hot springs, which turn the hillsides white from the calcium content in the water, and from which they harvest travertine for tile.

The hot springs at Pamukkale.

The Hieropolis is a very well restored look at Roman life almost two thousand years ago. And we had a great time hanging out with other folks on the tour. Half of the fun of traveling is the people you meet along the way. Ben from Australia is in the middle of long trip, as is Shanti from Colorado. We compared notes about our journeys, and reminded each other how lucky we are to be able to do things a little differently. Melvin from Goa, India, reported that he slept well on the night bus, which reminds me that everyone’s experience is different. Either that or he’s narcoleptic.

That evening, we were deposited onto a train platform (I’m not joking – our minibus drove RIGHT ONTO the platform where the people were standing) for the train to Ephesus. After a day of touring Capadoccia followed by a night bus, a day of touring Pamukkale, and another five hours on a train, we finally arrived at a fancy, shmancy boutique hotel with a good shower, an actual bathtub (the first one we’d seen in Europe), and a glorious view of the sea.

A little better than an overnight bus.

Things were looking up.

After touring Ephesus and another blissful night at the hotel, we returned to Istanbul and repositioned ourselves across the river in the Beyoglu section of town. There we started to find the Istanbul that we had been looking for. That’s where most of the cafes and meyhanes and cocktail bars are. If we had more time we would have taken a cruise of the Bosphorous, wandered the junk shops and alleys in the Galatasaray neighborhood, poked through some art galleries, taken a ferry across to the part of the city that sits on the Asian continent, and eaten at more meyhanes, among many, many other things.

Sometimes it takes a little extra effort to find the essence of a place, but there are so many variables that go into your experience. If you give me a decent bed and a good meal and you smile every once in a while, I’m happy. If you put me in a neighborhood where real life is going on, I’m even happier. As we were hitting our stride it was time to move on, but better late than never.

Did I like Istanbul? Yes, eventually.

Would I go back? You betcha.

Eat, Bicker, Love

A loving couple travels the world

Sightseeing

Did we or didn’t we stay in a houseboat on the Nile in Cairo?

The ultimate Thanksgiving destination – Abu Dhabi!