Thou shalt dodge a Dromedary

It's 3:30 in the morning, and I dimly spot a large object lumbering towards me on the gravely path.

"Jimal! Left!," someone calls out, and I duck to my right to avoid being run over by a camel. These creatures seem as heavy as horses, and getting stepped on by one would be an ugly injury.

I wonder why camels are allowed on such narrow winding paths in pitch-black dark. Surely my headlight can't spot them coming from above.

But our paths cross, the camel and I, and he continues a steady saunter downward while I push on toward the summit.

I've been walking since 2 a.m., and I need to reach the top by 5 a.m., in time to see daybreak over the mountains.

I have no trouble doing so, and I find a narrow stone ledge at the summit of Mt. Sinai.

It's here where (according to Christians, Jews and Muslims alike) Moses recieved the 10 Commandments from God. I had read about this mountain millions of times in Catholic school, but never did I imagine it to be so desolate.

Life is impossible in these mountains for plants, trees -- for anyone other than camels and box-lunch tourists on air-conditioned buses.

I try to imagine 40 days of solitude on this mountaintop, as Moses spent when he talked to God. Once the sun rises on these mountains, they become scorching hot and unbearably dry. Anyone would start hearing voices, it seems.

As the sun rises, the only voices I hear are hymns in German, in Korean, in languages I can't identify. They're sung by the pilgrims sharing the crowded summit with me.

As I start my descent back down, I hear the gurgles and groans of camels. 40 years from now, the camels will still be on Mt. Sinai.

Even in a tropical paradise, sometimes its the strange people you meet -- not the sunny place you're in -- that sticks in your mind the most.

This is true of Dahab, Egypt.

This beach town on the Sinai peninsula, near the Gulf of Aqaba, boasts some of the bluest, bluest waters in the world, and an elaborate seascape of coral reef.

It's my first time snorkeling and my first glimpse of coral reef. I'm identifying an entire new world underwater of puffer fish and parrot fish.

The town feels more like a Thai island than Islamic Egypt. We can freely swim in bikinis while staring across the gulf at Saudi Arabia. It's amazing to realize that a tiny stretch of sea separates a beach where women can deep-sea dive from a country where women can't drive.

Of course, snorkeling, coral reefs, reflections on freedom -- blah blah blah. None of this is as colorful as Mickey.

Mickey is a middle-aged Danish woman who's been living in Egypt for the past 7 years.

When I call her "colorful," I mean it literally. She's bright red, head-to-toe. Her color might come from sunburn; it might come from her excessive alcohol consumption. We suspect it comes from both.

She looks old for her age, with saggy, wrinkled skin and an incessant cough from a lifetime of cigarettes and hash. Her cough sounds like water hissing as it hits a pot of hot oil.

She's our neighbor at Camp Sabry, a Bedouin camp overrun by cats.

None of the Camp Sabry residents can sit in our musty, unclean rooms in the evenings, so we all converge under the woven canopy in the center of the campsite.

This space has become our "living room." The cats outnumber the people at least 3-to-1. They seem to multiply hourly.

Sitting in Camp Sabry's "living room" last night, Mickey -- in her usual drunk state -- tried to tell us a story. She made it through "Once upon a time," before devolving into a coughing fit. She sounded like the muck of ancient earth was lodged in her lungs.

All the other guests began laughing at this old woman's failed state. She looked around angrily, then tried again. "Once upon a time -- " she began, before her words dissolved into fitful coughing.

She managed to tell the story -- a fictional tale about a fish with a golden head -- though she told it in a rambling, convoluted way, like Sarah Palin trying to answer a foreign policy question.

Then she walked off, defeated.

Half an hour passed. It seemed like the night was calming down. Even the cats had disappeared.

Then I noticed everyone staring at me. What? Wait, no, they're not staring at me. They're staring at some spectacle behind me.

It's Mickey, completely topless, drunk beyond her skull. Her body is as red and saggy and wrinkled as her face. Her breasts, somehow, are perky and creamy milk-white.

She walks past all the practicing Muslim boys, who are vacationing in Dahab to celebrate the end of Ramadan fasting. They glance, look away, glance again, then look away with vigor.

She stumbles toward the bathroom, then back toward her room. But she walks through the wrong door.

We watch as she enters someone elses' open bedroom door. We wait for her to realize her mistake and leave. She does not.

After some hesitation, the guests crowd the doorway. Mickey is passed out asleep on someone's bed. Four feet away from her is an innocent man, sleeping, oblivious to his intruder.

The Muslim men aren't sure what to do. One grabs a towel and places it around her, covering her skin. They try to pick her up.

She wakes up, falls over. Shoots a look at the innocent man asleep in the next bed.

"WHAT'S he fucking doing in my fucking room?" It begins as an angry bellow, then falls to a mumble. By the end of the question, she's asleep.

The sleeping man wakes up from of the commotion. Screams.

Just another night in tropical snorkeling paradise .....

Crossing the Sahara

We crossed the Sahara on a bouncy bus, gazing for hours at the endless sea of sand in every direction. The Sahara is barren, empty, desolate.

We drive for an hour. Flat sand. There is no life here, no mercy. Leave someone in the sands without water, and they'd die quickly.

We drive another hour. And another. And another. The scenery never changes.

Then, suddenly, trees. We rub our eyes. Is it a mirage? No -- it's truly an oasis.

The Siwa oasis, which worshipped the Ancient Egyptian god Amun until (relatively) not too long ago, is a solitary small town close to the Libyan border. Donkey-carts outnumber cars. The stones give way to dwellings carved into the stone, which gradually give way to modern dwellings made out of stone and mud-brick.

Women are rarely seen, not even at markets. They are cloaked from head-to-toe, with a mesh veil hiding even their eyes. By contrast, women in burquas in cosmopolitan Cairo look exposed.

So on our second night at the Siwa oasis, when we had the opportunity to visit a woman's house, Laurel and I lept at the chance. No man other than her son could accompany us; women can only be in the company of other women.

Their privacy is so fiercely guarded that her son wouldn't even reveal her name.

But we did get to see her face: smiling and shy. The left side of her mouth had large yellowed teeth, the right side had no teeth. At home she wore a simple beige tunic and a blue headscarf over her curly black hair. Although she was slender, she had an unbelievably large booty.

She brought us tea and cookies; applied henna to Laurel's hands. A television, her only contact with the outside world, played in the background the entire time. It had satellite stations, most of which were in Italian, and for awhile it broadcast images of women in thong bikinis sunbathing on the Italian Riviera. I wondered how television rocked the Berber (nomadic north Africans who settled in Siwa) way of life; I wondered if shows like these were the equivalent of porn.

She couldn't speak any English. She didn't want her picture taken. She didn't ask for any money for the hours she spent applying henna to Laurel's hands; Laurel had to forcifully press 10 Egyptian pounds ($2 U.S. Dollars) into her palms.

Her son drove us back to town on his donkey-cart. We realized he's probably the sole breadwinner of the family, as his father, whom we met, is blind. Even without eyesight, though, the father can expertly manuever the TV remote.

Salaam alaykum

“Is salaam ‘alaykum!,” we’re greeted at the train station in Alexandria. The man who says it, Mohammad Abdallah, was born and raised in the Sudan but lives in Egypt and holds a U.S. passport.

In the early 1990’s, when he was a young immigrant studying in America, he lived with my friends’ family in Broomfield, Colo., and when he discovered we are in Egypt, he invited us to stay with him, his wife and their three daughters, ages 9 months through 9 years.

We’ve been spending the past few days at his apartment in Alexandria, a coastal city bordering the Mediterranean Sea.

Outside the famed Library of Alexandria, we met an Egyptian-born guy from Los Angeles named Mustafa and his crew of Egyptian “homies” – twentysomethings with sideways baseball caps who listen to hip-hop all day and stay bored because its cool. We’ve spent the past two afternoons hanging out with them by the sea. They smoke cigarettes, rap Ludacris and Bizzy Bone lyrics, and complain about how none of the Egyptian girls will get naked for them.

All day long, we’re hot and hungry. We sleep late into the afternoon – it’s too hot to move much while the sun is out – and stay awake late into the night, when the temperature cools. We’re usually still awake by the 4 a.m. morning Call to Prayer.

At night, the city erupts with characteristic craziness. Horses pull wagons piled with eggplants down narrow, trash-strewn streets. Children ride tricycles past sheep and goats tied outside butcher shops. Men weld chicken cages as the animals cluck inside. Pedestrians dance around microbuses driving within an inch of bodies.

After breaking fast with Mohammad at sunset, we ventured out to buy a watermelon from a midnight melon cart. Someone had carved “Allah Akbar” – “God is Great” – into the melon skin.

My friend, who studied Arabic in college, read aloud from the watermelon rind. I practiced reading the Arabic numbers on license plates passing by. We began to sweat in the smoggy night humidity.

We're going to Siwa tomorrow, a small oasis town at Egypt's western border, next to Libya. More than a dozen tourists were kidnapped at the Egypt-Libya border a few days ago, but that was in the south. We're heading to the north, which (fingers crossed!) will be safe.

“Is salaam ‘alaykum!” – peace be with you.

Walk like an Egyptian

Day 2. 500 to go.

We spent Day Two at the Pyramids in Giza, which are both majestic and subtle. In a barren desert, with no buildings to compare relative size, the enormity of the pyramids is hard to grasp. Standing next to the pyramids, you lose all concept of space, distance and size.

Laurel and I rode camels across the sands, reaching a dune plateau overlooking all 9 pyramids: the 6 pyramids of Giza and 3 to the east. We pause to gaze over the stark landscape, then turn our camels in the direction of the Sphinx. I think of the empty desert the Sphinx used to look upon; how that space has now become a dense cluster of cement high-rises thick with smog and soot.

We dismount our camels by the Sphinx. Our legs are sore from riding. “You’ll be walking like an Egyptian,” says our camel guide Samir.

Back in Giza, Laurel befriends an Egyptian perfume-seller, Ismael, who is about to go to 1 out of his 4 homes to have dinner with 1 out of his 4 wives.

Laurel tells him we’ve love to experience breaking a daily Ramadan fast with a Muslim family; he invites us into his living room, where we recite the first verse of the Koran while breaking fast with sweet plum-colored juice. One of his wives cooks us the best falafel we’ve ever tasted.

We pile back of the street, bellies full, smoke a hookah on the sidewalk, drink a cup of tea, and catch a bus back to Cairo.

Arabian Nights

502-day journey, Day 1.

It’s my first visit to the Arab Muslim world, and I landed in the middle of the Holy Month of Ramadan, stepping out of the airport just in time to hear the Call to Prayer boom across the city from the mosque speakers.

From our hotel in downtown Cairo, we catch a birds-eye view of hundreds men outside the neighborhood mosque, kneeling in prayer along the sidewalks in neat little rows that stretch into the busy street. Above them, three stories above ground, five men unfurl a rug on a rooftop and break fast at sunset.

The streets are devoid of women during the day, but at night they come out in droves, crowding into markets and shops that pound with energy at midnight but fall asleep during the hot, hungry days.

The women are high-fashion, wearing cute designer tops over long-sleeved shirts and tailored, couture ankle-length skirts. They carefully coordinate their headscarves to compliment their shirt to compliment their handbag. A surprising number of stores showcase risqué lingerie. Burqa-clad women, covered head-to-toe with only a tiny slit exposing their eyes, will rifle through racks of fur-and-fishnet lingerie in the downtown shops. (Women in burqas, by the way, have incredibly expressive eyes. Making eye contact with them on the street can give you chills. They tell you a story in a single glance.)

In spite of its seeming conservatism, Cairo has a Burning Man Festival quality to it: the city is a sandcastle, built precariously on harsh desert land, and it comes alive at night, with bright flashy lights and loud music raging from sunset to sunrise. Party boats that resemble Burning Man art cars cruise up-and-down the Nile, and young ladies in sequin-lined headscarves hang out on the riverbanks, chatting (and occasionally holding hands) with their male counterparts. Egypt is “dry” in every sense of the word, and it is fascinating to watch a thriving alcohol-free nightlife in the city that never sleeps.

The interim

From Germany I fly home to Boulder and entertain my parents for their one-week visit to the Colorado Rockies.

The day they leave I travel with some friends to northern Idaho, where we watch a quintessential small-town Americana Fourth of July street parade and pick up a few hitchhikers in Canada as we drive to mountainous hot springs.

After a week I return to Colorado, spend six weeks starting and finishing a few freelance projects, move out of my house, then fly to San Francisco to hang out in the Bay Area for a week while preparing for the Burning Man Festival.

We ride a veggie-oil schoolbus into the desert, and experience the festival (which is a novel of its own). When its done I ride with a British woman to Reno, where we stay in a hotel that has its own movie theater, shopping district, six-lane entryway and restaurant row.

The next day I catch a flight to Atlanta, where I attend a four-day journalism conference and visit with my parents.

I then fly back to Colorado, pack my bags, and five days later find myself on a flight to Egypt. Thus begins a 16-month round-the-world journey.