2 comments/ 2205 views/ 1 favorites The Tina Trip 02 - Egypt By: risgrynsfisk CHAPTER 5 - CAIRO FOR BEGINNERS A one dog night with a semi-tantric morning. It was my first time on an airplane. Tina had flown about a million times before and tried to scare me with blatant lies about the horribleness and danger of flying. I knew she was lying but was a little nervous anyway until the guy behind me started to loudly tell his neighbor about how terrified he was every time he was on a plane. I calmed down right away. Someone else took care of the fear, leaving me free to fulfill some other task. These tasks were mainly to feel Tina up, reenact Hamlet and eat rubber chicken. The rubber chicken eating task took great persistence but I prevailed, not wanting to throw away food that I´d bloody well paid for, however rubbery. Tina laughed at me and very magnanimously gave me her chicken too, to see if I´d eat hers as well. I did. OCD? Who? Me? The heart of the matter is not the part about having paid, by the way. It´s a matter of basic respect shown to food, which after all is a thing there´s a world-wide lack of. We have an old folk tale in Sweden about a vain girl who stepped on a loaf of bread to get over a mud-puddle without soiling her new shoes. The loaf turned into red-hot iron, stuck to her foot and dragged her down to hell. Served her right, right? The Hamlet game was fun. We knew the basic story, but only about three actual lines. We made up the rest, it worked out something like this: "Begone foul spirit down unto that pit Where evil pikes abound and giant farts Disturb the strangling seaweed" And so on, over an increasingly southerny Mediterranean. The next game was trying to get into Egypt without changing money. You get a much better rate for your currency by people in the street than by the government and legal changing of what to us was a hefty sum was therefore required before entrance. Tina didn´t even have to try, she got her stamp in the passport right away. I did not. Tina jumped up and down with triumph when I finally passed the border, Egyptian pounds and a receipt from the changeplace in hand. I pretended to be upset and accused her of cheating, waving her tits at the passport guy. This was an accusation she was proud to confirm and she bragged about her unsecret weapons conquering the Arab World. Then she waxed philosophical; "My eyes are the window of my soul, right? But my tits are the mirrors of other people´s souls. Male others. As you can see these mirrors are convex and distort whoever mirrors himself in them. Turns them into pigs, in fact. Except you, of course." We were approached by Hans from Hannover. Hans from Hannover wanted to share a taxi into town. Hans from Hannover had been in Cairo before and knew that a cab was the best way to get there and how much it should cost. Hans from Hannover was happy to haggle for a good price, we were happy to let him do it. Haggling was not a game that appealed to either of us. Hans from Hannover knew what neighborhood had the best hotels for travelers like us, the area round Tahrir Square. Hans from Hannover was happy to talk the whole way about what we must and must not do in Cairo. We were happy to let him. We were also happy to part our ways at the square. Hans from Hannover was probably not a bad fellow, but he sure was kind of boring. One thing we found fascinating during our ride into town was all the picnickers. There was a narrow strip of grass between traffic going to and from the airport. Hans from Hannover had explained to us that it was a holiday and that this narrow strip of grass was as close to a public park there was in Cairo. It was weird seeing all the blankets and people throwing frisbees just a meter from the busy traffic. Their cars were parked along the strictly no parking allowed roadside. We followed the Talat Harb Street and found a hotel called the Oxford Pension. This was almost perfect for us, being cheap, scruffy and filled with travelers like ourselves. The downside was that we could not get a private room, they only had dormitories with at least eight beds. Mixed sexes, which was good. We wanted to share a bed and got a bit knocked off the rate. We had brought my thin waterproof bag, the regular sleeping bag was too warm and in this thin one there was room for both of us. "This is a one dog night." I said. "Not too cold." "Woof!" "Zombie Woof?" "Easy. Zappa." We fell asleep in a heap of tired limbs and cute freckled tits. Next morning we proved to our mutual satisfaction that it was possible to bring each other off in a sleeping bag in a room full of strangers without anybody noticing. Tantric sex (I think) involves very little movement and a lot of spiritual connection. If so, this could be seen as a semi-tantric hand job. A good way to start the day. I recommend it. The Oxford Pension was a fun place. It had once been a very grand apartment, a large flat with big, stately rooms. These rooms now were filled with old lumpy beds with sheets that were never changed, as far as we could tell. The proprietor was a shifty-eyed little man who became our money-changer. He gave us competitive street rates and did not try to rip us off. Apparently some of the street-changers were experts at making you think you got more money than you actually did, making the government rates seem pretty good. There was also a large black man in a white jellabiah, which is one of those long dresses that many of the men wear. His life´s task was to slowly walk around with a broom which he never used and with a very deep voice say aaa-iii-ooo-aaa, which means yyy-eee-sss. A few ratty chairs, and that was it. Oh yes -- a few toilets, which worked well enough, and an almost-shower. It almost had running water which was almost warm. You got almost wet and almost clean in it. If you wanted to hang out and talk to other guests, the roof was the best place for that. We learned that rooftops were very important to Cairo social life. They were the only un-congested and comparably peaceful places you could find. There was a constant background noise, which made me think of waves by the ocean or the sound of living close to a big waterfall. It was the sound of traffic. Remember, we had found Athens car-infested, hectic and polluted. Cairo took these qualities to a new level, a level where they transformed from annoying to awe-inspiring. The sound of honking horns was literally constant. Traffic was perpetually congested and the response to that was to sound your horn. It didn´t affect the congestion but that´s the way things were done here. Everyone seemed to be a parking artist, too. I had never seen such nimble parking in tiny spaces. Crossing streets was an adventure. The rules were clear -- cars do not stop or even slow down for pedestrians. The cars keep their speed and it´s up to you to not be run over. And there were people. Peoplepeoplepeoplepeople. People everywhere. Every space filled with people and cars. No empty areas. No parks. No place to rest, except for the rooftops. We wanted to move further south in Africa. Further south meant Sudan. We were informed at the Oxford that it took a month to get a visa to Sudan. No one knew why, it was just a stamp in your passport, but we had to spend at least a month in Egypt. The first thing we did was to hand in our applications for a Sudanese visa. Our passports were inspected for signs that we had been to Israel and we had to solemnly swear that we´d never. Our applications were put in a pile on a shelf and I do swear that they were in the exact same spot, probably never looked upon, a month later. CHAPTER 6 -- GETTING "MARRIED" No more wounderland, no more hate. So. What to do in Egypt? First, of course, explore Cairo. We walked and walked and got lost and found our bearings and got lost again, the way it should be in a really big city. My dogshit shoes were killing me. They stubbornly refused to soften or conform to the shape of my feet. I think whoever made them knew that they would be purchased by a tourist and had made it his life´s work to make tourists miserable. I hated the fucking things with a passion and my story right then was almost as much a hate story about the bloody shoes as it was a love story about Tina. My heels were raw and Egyptian dicks apparently were just as small as the Greek ones since we found no shoes that fit me. We never saw the pyramids, except from a distance in a bus. Nor did we visit the archeological museum in spite of the fact that both of us were interested in ancient cultures. None of us even suggested it, probably because such activities could be considered touristy. And tourists we were not, nononono, we were travelers. And travelers did much more genuine things than visit pyramids. Like having coffee in a small, scruffy backstreet café and pat each other´s backs for not being in a tourist oriented place. We were self-satisfied jerks, but young enough to be forgiven. One good thing about avoiding the places where tourists gathered was that you avoided the locals who made their living from tourists. Many had warned us that Egyptians were pushy, obnoxious to women and tried to rip you off all the time. This was not our experience. As long as you kept away from tourist traps and perfume shops. Whatever you do in Egypt -- don´t go into a perfume shop unless you have a burning desire to purchase perfume. We made the mistake once of accepting a perfume-sellers friendly invitation to just come in and have a cup of tea and a chat. For a moment I thought we would have to use violence to get out of there. Apart from that, we met a lot of friendly people. Sure, they were intense and sort of in your face. At least in Cairo, a city which did not promote introversion or the need for a personal space. If we were not up for that intensity we stayed at the hotel and recharged, talked, read or made out. But when we were in the right mood we had a lot of fun with those friendly people we met. Particularly after following Maud´s advice. Sometimes you had to re-frame a situation to enjoy it. One example of that is buying stamps, which in my part of the world is a very orderly activity. In Cairo buying stamps was something else. They were sold in a special window at the post-office. In front of that window was, not a line of people, but a shapeless crowd. I soon found out that just standing at the edge of the crowd and hope to gradually get closer to the window was an exercise in futility. For a moment I judged the situation by how I had expected stamp-buying to be and was quite irritated. Then I realized I had to view the situation like a game. If it was a real-life strategy game I could deduce the rules and eventually win the price of buying stamps. Open violence was out, you could not push people out of the way. But you could slyly put your foot in just the right place so that someone couldn´t get past you without pushing, or you could discreetly put a bit of pressure in with your elbow to halt someone´s advance. It was fun, and soon I had my stamps. "You better be married," Maud said. "If you want to travel together and meet ordinary people and not just those who make their money from tourists, then you better be married." Maud should know. She had lived in Egypt for fifteen years, having come here to study the traditional textile techniques of the area. She was still studying away, having fallen in love with the country. Me, I had fallen in love with Tina, and of course I would like to be married to her. " Married or "married"?" Tina asked. Both were fine with me so I proposed right away. "Dearest Tina, love of my life -- will you marry me? Or at least "marry" me? "Both!" Tina said. Guess we´d better start with "married"". We found a goldsmith named Omar, a name I´ve always liked since I read some children´s books with an Omar in them, the perfect oriental gentleman complete with a flying carpet. This Omar had a very nice carpet but far as I know it didn´t fly. He definitely was a gentleman though, and he was quite understanding about the "married" situation. He winked conspiratorically as he demonstrated rings. They all looked the same to me but apparently not to Tina. I admired his shop/workshop instead. He had some jewelry on display, some of which he´d made himself and some he sold for other craftsmen who did not own their own shop. It smelled of hot metal and the chimney was an obviously home-made metal contraption that guided the smoke through an obviously home-made hole in the wall. Tina showed me a pair of rings she liked. They were not the highest grade of gold purity whatever you call it in English, twentyfour something -- carats?- but pure enough for us. Tina said she was sure there was no nickel in the blend which apparently was important. She said that she wouldn´t want us to get allergic to the symbols of our oneness, that would be a lousy omen for our future together. My ring fit perfectly, hers needed a bit of fiddling. The price was good, Tina said. Of course we didn´t know it was a good price for Egypt, but by European standards it was cheap. OK. I wouldn´t know. But I sure knew that it was a bargain for being "married" to Tina. Omar congratulated us and we made a toast for our eternal happiness in sickeningly sweet tea. I particularly enjoyed the fact that Tina now, being "married" to me, had a last name she couldn´t pronounce. We then proceeded to celebrate by going to a real restaurant with a menu. Most often we ate from simple food stalls that offered one thing only, or in the very cheap eateries that served basic fare for the not too well-off. It was basically free, at least to us comparatively rich folks. Anyway, after dinner we went to the movies. That was a peculiar experience. We went to an outdoor cinema that played "Conan the Barbarian", dubbed to Arabic. This was like the traffic in Cairo, something that was usually perceived as bad but taken to such an extreme that it became a worthwhile experience. The incredible silliness of the movie, plus not understanding a word that was said, plus standing on a sandy outdoors backyard with a very enthusiastic crowd cheering Conan on as he and his mates slaughtered the bad guys was together such a masterpiece of silliness as to become profound. We cheered with the rest and had a good time, trying to parrot the encouragement shouted by our neighbors, to their vast amusement. Tina thought that I would look very handsome in a Grace Jones squarehead hairdo, especially if you took it a step further and squarified the beard as well. Maud had a lot of useful information. The last few days I had tried to pretend that my feet and their pain was not part of me. The feet were down there, far away in their own private wounderland. Nothing to do with me. When we mentioned this to Maud she led us down some backstreets to a sandal-maker who made a pair of sandals in my size in twenty minutes. Soles made from car-tires, a few leather straps and, voilá -- no more chafing. We wanted to throw the detested shoes in the Nile, but the sandal-guy wanted them so he got them. I pity the poor fellow who eventually got to wear them. The Nile was a very wide river. Wide but domesticated, running between stone walls. In the middle was a big island filled with rich-people private parks. Tennis-courts and so on. Domesticated, too, in that there were no floods anymore, like in the old days when the Nile flooded everything every year. Spread a lot of fertile soil though, the floods. They care of salinity build up too, which is becoming a problem now. Tina felt sorry for the Nile, no longer allowed to be wild and free and too much, still big but defeated and old, longing to get to the sea where it could be wild again. Tina could sympathize -- not being allowed to be too much would be terrible to her. I suppose you are curious about the rape. I was curious, too. But I had decided to wait and not press the issue. You know that AA prayer about having the courage to change and the wisdom to accept. Well, I lean heavily to the acceptance-side. If that makes me wise or wimpy or both I don´t know, but I find that not being pushy often works pretty well for me. I do think it was the right policy with Tina. She gave me increasingly sized crumbs of information about the rape. She had been seventeen. She had been stupid. She had been drunk. They had been three. She had not told anyone else than me. After the rape she had continued to be sexually active. Sex had been a way to be in control. She felt that boys, then men, got stupid and maneuverable if the possibility of sex was there. Sometimes it had been fun, sometimes not - but she always felt in charge. None of us had ever heard the word contraphobic. Our sex-life had not widened, but deepened. There were few things we could do in our sleeping bag, surrounded by people, but we did them better and better and more deeply felt. We were better and better at keeping it discrete too. We could have moved to another hotel, of course, but we liked the Oxford and I sensed that Tina was comfortable with the level of sex we had now. I was curious about actual screwing, of course, but not unbearably impatient. I regularly felt deeply happy, laying there entangled with a sleeping Tina, her hair tickling my nose. She was a restless sleeper and woke me up regularly. I didn´t mind, it gave me an extra opportunity to smell her ear or squeeze her tit. CHAPTER 7 -- ALPENBLICK ACTIVITIES Two virginities lost. No regerts. The bus passing in the vicinity of the pyramids was going to Bawiti, an oasis in the middle of the desert. There was nothing there worth seeing, so it was a safe bet if you wanted to avoid doing touristy things. The bus was very full, like Egyptian buses always seemed to be. We were lucky enough to have seats, though. We drove for a very long time and then Cairo started to grow less dense and then we drove for another long time and then Cairo was beginning to look like not-Cairo and then we passed the pyramids in the distance and then came the desert. The desert was ugly. We were disappointed, we had a romantic notion of sand-dunes in decorative hues of brown and red but the desert just looked like a dirty, messy back yard that went on forever. Oh well, never mind and on we went for some hours and then the front window exploded. There was glass everywhere, particularly on the poor driver, but the shards were not sharp fortunately. He was not cut, but driving without the windscreen proved to be very tricky. Sandstorm in the bus and most of it on the driver right in his face like people in Cairo but much worse. One of the passengers tried to help him by holding a newspaper in front of his face and shout an occasional instruction when he seemed to leave the road. It didn´t matter all that much, by the way, since the difference between road and not-road was minimal. I did think of my ride with the Danish hearse, though. This was in some ways a more fitting vehicle for dead people than the hearse, which was so nice when alive. As dead you wouldn´t worry about the sandstorm, and you would arrive already half buried. We did, thick layer of sand everywhere. Passengers sand zombies, driver super-buried extra sandy psychopomp to us walking dead. Newspaper sand-blasted and finished. The place to stay in Bawiti was, absurdly, called Hotel Alpenblick (view of the Alps). The architecture was stark. A concrete box with concrete walls and a concrete roof. Inside were more concrete walls making concrete rooms. Floors were not concrete, though, it was just the good old sandy ground. In each room two beds, a naked lightbulb and a window with no glass. There was a shutter you could close in case of sandstorm. We had our own room here. Exciting... The owner of this fine hotel was Salah. He was a very friendly and gregarious person who loved to chat with his guests in crappy English. He often asked guests to come visit him at his home and have dinner, and he often took us and his other guests on outings and excursions in his jeep. For these activities he charged nothing, and he was very trusting when it came to what we ate and drank. He had a book where we were supposed to write down what we had and we could pay whenever we wanted. Very nice, and very embarrassing when one of the guests stiffed him and left on a very early bus without paying. The rest of us chipped in to make it good, but still. The Tina Trip 02 - Egypt Next day Tina didn´t want to get up. Nor did she want breakfast. "You go," she said. "I need a bit of rest." OK. Fine with me. I had breakfast by myself, enjoying the view of sand, rocks and a broken-down truck. She still didn´t want to rise. I took a walk. She still didn´t want to rise. Nor was she hungry, but a cup of coffee in bed was ok. I played chess with John from Brisbane and won. She still didn´t want to rise. At this stage I started to worry a bit. "No." she said. "No, I´m not hungry. No, I don´t want to get out. No, I´m not angry. No, you have not done anything wrong. No, I don´t want to be cheered up. No, I don´t mind if you do things and leave me alone." So I did. I decided to do my acceptance-thing again. When I was low I preferred to be left alone, and apparently Tina had the ability to get about as low as she could get high. I just hoped that her lowness was not connected to the fact that last night we´d been really close to actual fucking. She seemed to be happy with what we did and as yet I had found no evidence that Tina hid her feelings from me or said things she didn´t mean. But I could not rule out that what felt good then felt bad now. Well, wait and see. It had become apparent that we re-met a lot of travelers. Several people who had been in the craphotel in Athens turned up in the Oxford, and some also turned up here in Bawiti. Quite a few of them would appear and reappear several times all through the journey. There was John from Brisbane, who was in his third non-stop year of travelling. He was a friendly and nice guy in many ways. He was also, shockingly, a non-apologetic racist. He would make loud comments like the aborigines were the world´s most useless blacks or how stupid the bloody Arabs were with their fucking bureaucracy. To a PC Swede this was...strange. Not that Swedes can´t be racists, but the ones who are just don´t move in my circles and are thus comfortably far away and easy to label as the enemy. John was, as I said, in many ways a nice bloke. John was travelling with Dieter from somewhere tiny in Switzerland that I´ve forgotten the name of. Dieter was very mellow in the way that makes you think he´s smoked a lot of pot, maybe fallen into the pot-pot as a baby, like a modern day Obelix. He was a carpenter, very good with his hands, could fix just about everything. He fixed a few things in the Alpenblick for fun and Salah loved him like a son. Another recurring fellow traveler was (I kid you not) Marcel from Marseille. He was one of those people who are immensely socially gifted. He was obviously interested in everyone he spoke with and everybody liked him except Salah, who was pissed because Marcel didn´t live in the Alpenblick, but the Other Place. If I hadn´t had Tina I may have found Marcel irritating in his have-it-all social competence likeability. He could juggle, too. As it was, I didn´t mind. I loved everyone. Well, perhaps not Hans from Hannover who turned up, spent a day boring everyone with long stories about other people´s stupidity and his own competence, and left proclaiming Bawiti a shit-hole. Exit Hans from Hannover. Again. This time for good. Tina now agreed to eat some soup. Salah was very worried about Tinymisstina, and his wife had made special soup for her to make her feel better. I ate most of it, eventually, but Tina had some of it and we told Salah she ate it all. He predicted that she would be well tomorrow and by and large she was. She now told me that she had these depressions now and then. They were usually worse, but she thought that my leaving her alone when she wanted to but checking now and then was a good thing. She had felt un-intruded upon but loved and not abandoned. Then, of course, there was the power of the soup! She made sure to thank Salah and his wife, as did I. They embraced her with all that love you feel towards someone you have saved and Salah invited everyone to come take a bath in a hot spring. Yes, there was hot spring water surfacing in several places around, which is why this was an oasis in the first place. There were concrete tubs/ponds where you could immerse or wash yourself. This time we took the jeep and went to a spring a bit away from the village. We managed to pile on eleven people. It looked impossibly full to me but according to Salah they had once managed seventeen. While we bathed Salah and his wife collected donkey-shit for fertilizer. Some people worked in fields by the spring, some of them looked very young. It was enough water for them to grow rice, which seemed like an odd crop in the desert. When we were about to leave a man started whipping his dog. He was looking in our direction, smirking. The dog hadn´t done anything wrong, far as we could see. He was screaming and crawling on the ground, submissive as can be. It was clear that the man was beating it for our sake, because he knew that it would upset us and we couldn´t do anything about it. Reasoning obviously was out, that was easy to tell from the look in his eyes. Threatening or shaming him was out, he was on his home ground and his rules were in effect and according to those rules he was in his full right to do what he did. Killing him had worked, but none of us was quite ready (or indeed capable) of doing that, although Tina was close to try. We left as quick as we could, feeling angry and helpless, loathing him and ourselves. Salah was real down about it, being caught in the middle. But most of the villagers were friendly. An elderly man who was the village tailor often invited travelers to his home. He was into learning English and had a lot of small paper notes with words and phrases. He had trouble with the word "regret" when we visited. "Regert" he said. "Regret" we said. "Regert" he said. And so on. The village idiot made an appearance. He was deaf. Maybe that was enough to fill his position, maybe there were other, less obvious problems. But deafness probably was enough to be considered an idiot if there was no training, no sign-language, no nothing. But our friend the tailor was quite kind to him and he obviously found us exciting, so I guess this was a good day for him. That night I was told to lay on my back, keep quiet and not fucking move. That way, with full control, she braved her demon memories. I was no longer a virgin and she said that in some ways she got rid of her own virginity as well since this was the first time ever that she´d been fully there when having sex. Compared to later this was mediocre sex, but I had no later to compare with then so it was glorious. We both cried for joy. Tina had carefully chosen a condom of the "Crocodile" brand for our first time. We were in Egypt after all. It was not ridged like a crocodile, but it do was green. CHAPTER 8 -- GIGGLE AND FUCK At least we´re not Tasmanian devils. Back to Cairo. Tina had another bout of depression, moping in our bed at the Oxford. I was used to the idea now and was not upset about it. In fact I could see some advantages. Tina was intense, in the long run probably a bit too intense for me. Her periods of depression were perfect to get me some rest. I took it easy, read a lot, went for walks, cuddled with Tina. Books are a big thing in the traveler community. There´s a lot of book-swapping going on. Quite a few good books are being circulated, too. I´m talking serious literature like Dickens, DH Lawrence, Dostoyevski. And a lot of less serious reading too, of course. In my meanderings I found what in Cairo passed for a park. It was a small grassy hill with a bench on top. I thought I´d sit on that bench and read for a bit, but was approached by two street urchins. They started with begging. Begging was hard to deal with, we didn´t have that back home in Sweden. What was the correct thing to do? It´s the same thing with tipping, we barely have that in Sweden either. Strange system, tipping. I never felt sure when to tip or how much. Anyway, the urchins got a few coins but, probably sensing that I was uncomfortable with the situation, wanted more. I declined, feeling that I had paid enough to have purchased the right to sit and read in peace. The urchins disagreed. One of them tried to interest me in buying sex. I told them no and pointedly looked in my book. And the little unbuggered bugger peed on my foot. Peed on again! Urchins ran away, laughing. I walked off, shaking my head, thinking about the life they led and how it formed them. Thinking also that, apart from Tina, the world persisted in offering me disgusting sex that I didn´t want. Far as temptations went, they were really crappy. No need to tie me to no mast, that´s for sure. Tina laughed when I told her, first time in three days she laughed. Made me feel the incident was worth it. "Everything happens in series of three." She said. "Let´s see who´s the next to pee on you." This was a good example of things that are true because you want them to be. It would of course be easy to think of a zillion things that did not happen in a series of three, but it was more fun to think of things that did. Like trilogies. And eastern kings. Or world wars. If there is a third there won´t be any world left to have a fourth war about. A word about juice-stands. They were everywhere. You pointed at whatever you wanted pressed and they made your juice on the spot. We were fond of carrot-juice and sugar cane-juice. Orange is fine but you can have that everywhere. In the ones aiming for tourists they got mighty pissed if you didn´t tip. In the simpler ones in the market, where the locals went, no one expected tipping. I think. As I said, tipping confuses me. We now had waited for a month and went over to the Sudanese embassy to hopefully get our visa. We could tell that the official was not too keen on it. He searched my passport again for signs of Israeli taint, which would have given him a reason to deny us. But when Tina gave him her best smile he gave us the stamps we needed and Sudan was now open to us. It felt a little like a TV-game when you unlock the next level. New possibilities. New bats throwing strawberry cake on you until you shoot them down with marshmallow guns. Or whatever, let the cake-bats beware -- we were ready for them. Travelling along the Nile was easy, there was a train-line going all the way to Assuan. From there you went on by boat on Lake Assuan, aka Lake Nasser. We spent the train trip talking almost non-stop. One thing we talked about was different kinds of love. We agreed that we had reached stage giggle-and-fuck, a predominantly teenage kind of love. I loved the thought of having a second go at adolescence, since I had been much too serious the first time around, reading the classics to educate myself. Our version of giggle-and-fuck was, we were certain, more long-range than the typical teen-age romance, but probably a lot of teen-agers felt that too. Difference is, we were right. So there. I asked Tina why she still was with me, given her previous pattern of short flings. "Easy," she said. "You are the only guy I´ve been with who may be smarter than me. And you are the only one that doesn´t treat me like I´m stupid." My clever darlinglass with shining clever darlingeyes, of course she wasn´t stupid. And she could balance almost anything on her nose, too, which she demonstrated on the train, to the edification of our fellow-passengers. The Heathcliff brand of love was another kind of love we identified. Cold and windy, but a lot of fresh air. Low on giggling and communication, though, and on the whole not our cup of tea. But we still preferred Heathcliff to the Gordic kind of love, where you are so entangled and symbiotic that it takes a cleaver to get a little breathing space. But anything is preferable to the Tasmanian devil kind of love. Tasmanian devils are solitary creatures who hate everyone because they are all fucking idiots. Anger is the only emotion they know and understand and if a devil male meets a female in heat he attacks the fucking bitch and gives her what she fucking deserves. After raping the angry female he angrily throws her into his fucking house where he keeps her prisoner. She´s seriously pissed but he doesn´t give a fuck, he keeps her there until he is sure his jizz has done its business and no other fucking bastard is going to get her. Then he kicks her out on her fucking ass and lets her fend for herself and her fucking brats. Serves the bitch right. The train stopped for no apparent reason, the way trains do. We were in the middle of a large field of sugar-cane. Everyone except us hurried out in the field to steal sugar-canes. When offered a share in the loot we accepted and happily chewed cane with the rest. Sugar cane tastes like a mix of grass and earth and sugar. It´s sweetish, but not as sweet as you would be led to expect. You tear away the outermost layer with your teeth and chew the core. You get a lot of waste-products -- that outer layer and the cud you get left when having chewed. I was happy I didn´t have the task to clean our compartment afterwards. If it had been a stomach it would not have gotten constipated, that´s for sure. Lots of fiber, and eventually it un-constipatedly unloaded us in Assuan. CHAPTER 9 - BOATING Tina has a lot of teeth. We liked Assuan. It was smaller, cleaner and prettier than Cairo without being (God forbid) touristy. We found a nice hotel, the first time we slept in a proper bed with sheets and everything since the Dionysian. Here, we had our best sex yet. Wow. Myself, I am bored with descriptions of sex. I skip them automatically when I come to them, like I do with lengthy descriptions of scenery. Or car-chases in movies, shit, I wish there had been a way to skip those. Since I write to amuse myself I will not include a blow by blow report of gasps, heaving chests, delicious shudders, orgiastic roars and diverse emissions of bodily fluids. But they were all there, I assure you. Tina was on fire, having seemingly conquered her demons. She wanted more but I was tired. "Come on," she said. "The faster you do me, the faster you can sleep afterwards." "What Jefferson Airplane song?" "I do intend to ride your Milk Train, but no, I don´t know. What?" "Never Argue With a German When You´re Tired" "Of course. Good! Stop arguing and come here." I came there, and soon we both came, there. The Assuan dam is one large chunk of concrete. Everything man-made looked tiny beside it. The not man-made was too superior to even notice the challenge. What beside the dam looked like a tiny little boat lay beside a tiny little shed. A lot of tiny little people with tiny little pieces of luggage waited to get through the shed and on the boat. The bus stopped and let us out. The vastness of the dam was no longer in view and we could see that the boat was not so small after all. Nor were the pieces of luggage. We were told there were a lot of goods that could not be bought in Sudan or was much more expensive. Almost everybody was bringing a lot of stuff. A lot more than they could carry in one go. They were waiting for the gates to open, so they could get to the customs office. There was a fence with a gate. An open area. Another fence with a gate. Another open area, and then the entrance of the building. When the gates opened, pandemonium broke out. People gathered as much luggage as they could carry, sprinted for the first gate, left their stuff there and came back for the rest of their belongings. Meanwhile others left their stuff at gate one, building a huge mound of goods that you had to climb over to get through. The chaos was incredible, what with people moving in different directions, carrying heavy loads, searching for their belongings in the mound, trying to get through while stepping on other people´s valuables. We hesitantly moved closer, not wanting to step on stuff. As we got there, a small side-gate was opened for us and we could get in without any hassle. Nor did the customs people look through our backpacks, they just waved us through. We could see that they were very thorough with the locals, though. They went through everything. We realized that it would be quite a while until the boat left. We also realized that us travelers had much higher status here than further north. The boat was really two boats. One was a proper boat, made out of metal and everything, with an engine. Tied to this boat was a large wooden barge. Since we travelers were so privileged in custom we were also privileged in being first to choose where to sleep and mark our territory. All this privilege business felt a little weird, but it was easier to live with it when we realized that the spots chosen by us travelers were not much in demand by the others. We wanted to be on deck in the fresh air, the locals preferred to be below deck where it was warmer. Down there was a simple kitchen where you could buy food. They had an open fire down there and it looked rather risky to me. Indeed I read in the paper a few years later that one of these boats had caught fire and everybody aboard had died. The crocodiles were reported to have looked happy for weeks afterwards. But this time, no crocodiles, no fire -- just unspeakably vile beans. There was a kind of brown beans that was very common in Sudan -- ful. Not the tastiest of beans but never again as terrible as they were on the boat. Ful and addes -- red lentils -- were the staples of our diet in Sudan, served with bread like small baguettes but drier. Sometimes there was meat in the mix, but most often not. Sometimes you could get fish -- grilled Tilapia. There were quite a few travelers on the boat, even some we´d met before -- John and Dieter turned up, as did Marcel, still almost offensively nice. Peter from Seattle was that rarity, a quiet American. We liked him, as did the Danish girls. Since they spoke Danish with me I never even got their names, but they happily chattered away with Peter. Manuela was equally taken with Marcel. She was German, really pretty. And nice. We were turning into quite the love boat. Romance under the super-dark, cloud-free desert sky. I had never seen that many stars before. An exception to this was Bruno from Berlin. No romance there. He was an Alternative Asshole who considered himself very free and open-minded and everyone who didn´t think exactly like he did was a total idiot. Since he (this is true!) was on his way to the mountains of Rwanda to join a gorilla family there were not an abundance of people that Bruno did not consider idiots. He aggressively advocated peace and tried to convict vegetarians to vegetarianism. He seemed happy with his journey this far in that he had been able to confirm that everyone in Greece and Egypt were just as stupid as the people in Germany. What the Sudanese were like remained to be seen, but he was not impressed this far. He had quite a bit of the Tasmanian devil in him, just not actively violent. The shores were very empty. We were told by a fellow passenger who spoke good English that the reason for this was the Assuan dam. When that was built a whole culture was submerged, the Nubians. Their villages and towns had, of course, been placed near the river, and when the water rose everything was drowned. The only thing saved was Abu Simbel, one of the great Egyptian monuments. It was grand, no denying that, even though we only saw it from a distance. This fellow with the good English, Ali, helped us to improve our Arabic. It´s a great help to know a few words and phrases in the local language. It´s usually appreciated that you´ve made an effort even if all you can say is where you´re from, that you like the country and that it is very hot for a northerner. I also wanted to learn a few appropriate phrases like "Help, I am married to a crazy woman." and "We are newlywed, when we get home we will start making babies like crazy." Tina practiced to say "My husband has his head in the clouds so he can´t even see his own nose." Strictly speaking this was not true. Having a big nose I could see it just fine, thank you. But it was true that I had a strange ability to not see what I was looking straight at, or fail to recognize what I saw. Like my sister, once. Long story. Another time. Or not, since it´s pretty embarrassing. "I have a lot of teeth!" (threateningly) was another of her learned sentences. People were quite amused by our eclectic Arabic. Thank you, Ali. The Tina Trip 02 - Egypt When we arrived to Wadi Haifa, the border town very far from the border, we quickly learned that we were "hawadia" and that hawadias were honored guests in the country. Standing in line or being checked at customs was not for us, we were waved through right away. We were now in Sudan.