Photo credit, featured image: Sunset-over-Bahariya-Oasis-by-stttijn-is-licensed-under-CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0.jpg
In honour of Valentine’s day, here is a (mostly) non-romantic tale about making life-long connections with people you meet on the road. In this case, in Egypt. (See too our post on Europals!)
Once upon a time, long long ago, Laurel was traveling with a friend in Egypt (let’s call her Jane). They were visiting another friend, who lived and worked there. She was an excellent host and had put Laurel up in China years before. Jane and Laurel thought they should get out of her hair for a couple of days, and also see Egypt. So they booked a cruise along the Nile. It was fabulous and made them both want to give up their day jobs to become Egyptologists.
Incidentally, Laurel had tried to do her homework by learning Arabic. (Read more about our language learning adventures on the road.) Friends, Arabic is tough. But Laurel made good progress, or thought she had. It turned out she had been learning Syrian Arabic, which is fairly intelligible to Egyptians, but sounds goofy. Or so they told her. They being everyone she spoke to over the course of two weeks.
When they returned to Cairo, Jane and Laurel’s friend introduced them to another friend who also had a visitor. Let’s call her Kate. Jane and Laurel, although they have never been romantically involved, booked a ‘Romantic Getaway to the Desert for Two’. The trip involved three nights in and around the Bahariya Oasis, in the Western Sahara. (That’s not far from Oxyrhynchus, for you papyrologists out there.) Jane and Laurel met Kate, liked her, and invited her to join them. The tour company, being located in Egypt and run by very traditional men, was confused, but readily agreed to expand the trip to be a romantic getaway for three.
The trip was a fabulous one, all around. There was anti-American sentiment in Egypt at the time, so the ladies mostly pretended they were Canadian. Even though none of them were. They all got along astoundingly well, and discovered they had a lot in common, most particularly a love for international travel.
Their guides on this romantic getaway for three were two Egyptian men, Husani and Abdallah, with a van. The guides were young, and for most of the trip our heroines felt a little bit like their babysitters. But that wasn’t a bad thing: they were fun, and the group had a nice vibe together.
On the first night, after a day of hiking and then drinking a very small amount of beer (our heroines, not the guides; probably the guides didn’t drink), the ladies agreed to go out to a hookah bar in El Bawiti with the gentlemen, plus one Devil Mohammad, who drove them in his car. (A hookah bar is a place where you go to smoke shisha tobacco, often fruit-flavoured, through a water-pipe).
Probably, in hindsight, this wasn’t a good idea. Nothing bad happened. But, fairly soon, our heroines decided that they were matter out of place: there were no other women in the bar, and most of the men were much older than our heroines, or their intrepid but a little bit clueless guides. Everything seemed okay, but the ladies decided to follow their instincts and leave. Their guides soon came out and drove them home. It made the ladies realize that they felt very comfortable with each other, so comfortable that they weren’t paying very much attention to their surroundings.
The second day Jane and Kate and Laurel, plus Husani and Abdallah, went right into the heart of the Sahara. The dunes were gorgeous, and they sat looking at them for a long time, then had dinner and watched the desert foxes from their campfire. They agreed it was a night they’d remember forever, and so it was, but perhaps not quite for the reasons you’d think.
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Somewhere along the journey, they’d stopped off to pick up Husani’s girlfriend Mona. There’s some intrigue there, which our heroines didn’t quite get to the bottom of. They suspect that Mona (who wore a lot of jewelry and perfume) was either of a different class from Husani, or of a different religion. In any case, here’s your romance because, while Abdallah slept in the van, and Jane and Kate and Laurel had a tent, Husani and Mona were in another tent not far off. They seemed to coo at each other all night long, until Kate finally yelled at them to either be quiet or move their tent further away. Which shut them up nicely and made Kate Jane and Laurel’s hero for years to come. The heroines, terrible if unwitting chaperones, finally got some sleep.
They returned to the village for another night, were smart enough not to get into a car driven by a man nicknamed for the devil, and ended up safe and sound in Cairo, with a whole bunch of great memories.
But wait: the story doesn’t end there! The heroines separated, each leaving Egypt and going back to their homes. They kept in touch, painstakingly, by email and postcard and carrier pigeon and other old-fashioned means. Laurel took a new job which involved travel to the place where Kate lived and so, on one of her trips, she got in touch. It was probably going to be awkward; they didn’t really know each other.
Only it turns out they got on like a house on fire. That first reunion was just a quick cup of coffee, but went on for hours. They met up again the following day. Then Laurel began staying with Kate on some of her trips. Now they talk regularly and text all the time.
Laurel is very much hoping that Kate will pop over to stay with her one of these days. (Don’t worry about Jane, though – Laurel is still friends with her too, and she has already come for a visit.)
So: the moral of the story is that sometimes you find friends when you aren’t looking for them – and nothing brings people together like a trip to a new place!
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