The Adventures of Dr. Moustache and the Egyptian Gentleman, Pt. I

An American traveler spends three weeks in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria.

Text and photography by Daniel Chamberlin

The full text of this article -- complete with B&W and full-color photographs -- can be found in the November issue of Arthur, available for FREE at over 900 locations across North America. You can also order a copy from Arthurmag.com.

It was on my second night in Egypt—a night of shotgun blasts and little girls throwing explosives at me—that I realized traveling in the Arab world was not going to be as dangerous as I had led myself to believe. My reasons for going to the Middle East were fairly simple: I was weary of hot and crowded Los Angeles. I was spending too many afternoons drawing correlations between my life and the characters of Six Feet Under. Then, a week before my 30th birthday, my car was stolen while it was full of precious book notes, my private journals and all the financial records on my laptop computer. I was now paranoid about identity theft in addition to being lonely, depressed and alienated. As the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz put it in The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, "The eternal desire for travel ripened in the flame of continued pain."

My younger brother Paul was spending the summer studying Arabic at the American University in Cairo (AUC). He invited me to join him on a three-week jaunt through Egypt, Lebanon and Syria once his classes were over in late July. As a graduate student studying the history of political dissidence in Arab countries, Paul would make for an ideal travel companion.

I had little interest in visiting any of these countries, and it wasn't exactly the safest time for Middle Eastern travel. In April, veiled women sprayed a tourist bus outside Cairo's Cities of the Dead with machine gun fire. Just around the corner, a suicide bomber killed three people in Cairo's Khan El Khalidi marketplace. The State Department maintains an advisory against travel in Lebanon, due in part to the car bomb assassination of prime minster Rafik Hariri in February. Syria, which was suspected of involvement in his killing, was hosting gun battles between police and Islamist insurgents in the suburbs of Damascus and contending with escalating tensions with the US. But the air of peril that comes with traveling under conditions better suited to a Graham Greene novel had its own romantic appeal.

The day I purchased my ticket, the Egyptian envoy to Iraq was assassinated in Baghdad and suicide bombings killed 52 people in London. Two days before my planned departure, there were bombings in a Red Sea resort town that killed 64 people. My parents called and asked me to cancel my trip. They called my brother and asked him to come home. My dad offered to buy my ticket from me, saying that our travel plans were not the plans of rational people. I tried to reassure him by recounting the perils of life in Los Angeles: the guy who got stabbed in the park around the corner from my apartment. My friend whose house was burglarized last week. The theft of my car. The automatic weapons fire that commemorates major holidays. The shoot-out between LAPD and a coked-up dad using his infant daughter as a shield. "You're not helping," he said. I promised him that we wouldn't take any detours to see how democracy was faring in Iraq. We'd stick to the safety of the authoritarian police states as much as possible. "At least we're not going to London," I reminded him.


Part I: Egypt
I gaze out the window throughout the Air France flight from Paris to Cairo, eager for my first glimpse of the African coastline. From 30,000 feet in the air, Cairo looks like a dusty brown rock garden.

The sun is setting as we touch down on the runway that cuts through the cracked dirt fields surrounding Cairo International Airport. As I gather up my bags, I think about the charred corpses being pulled from the blasted hotel facades in Sharm El-Sheikh and the machine-gun-blazing women and my stomach turns over. As I step off the Air France plane I am leaving the West behind. French flight attendants are my last connection to the European-American culture that I have lived in for 30 years.

A few minutes of standing in line to talk to the English-speaking passport control personnel is an explicit reminder that I’m not de-plane-ing into a Bedouin encampment, but a modern city with an economy based in providing services to eight million tourists a year. There are plenty of Westerners in the crowds of people making their way into the country. They are easily given away by their shorts. Most everything I read prior to departure warned against shorts: some of the more alarmist writing suggested immediate kidnap by jihadi fashion enforcers. The more realistic assessment just said that, to the locals, you'd look like you were walking around in your underpants. I am rocking fresh travel gear riddled with secret zippered pockets to keep passports and cash hidden from Al Qaeda pickpockets.

Paul spots me easily. He warned me in advance that being a six-foot-tall white guy with shoulder-length hair would make me stick out like a sore thumb. Though he's got close-cropped hair, his own pale skin shines Caucasiod in the arrivals lounge. He holds up his thumb and says "ouch." We embrace and administer manly backslaps.

"You want a cigarette," he says, as we walk through the parking lot.

"Nope, quit."

"You have to smoke or they'll think you're a tourist," he says. "Seriously, you're going to alienate a lot of people if you don't."

Our driver is maybe a taxi guy, maybe just somebody who was in the neighborhood and wanted to make some cash. He picks up a Korean couple to ride along with us. Paul and the Koreans got in the back and I get in front. "You'll like this," Paul tells me. The driver floors the taxi out of the parking lot as I grab the hand-rest. Paul laughs and the driver—ignoring the out-bound traffic lanes—goes flying around the oncoming traffic in the incoming lane as we pop onto the freeway.

A sea of automobiles, mostly '70s-era Fiats and Peugots, all coughing out clouds of diesel smoke and white natural gas fumes. No headlights, though it's 9 p.m. at night. No lane markers, and the drivers—none of whom would be caught dead wearing a seatbelt—make little attempt at maintaining the single-file processional-style driving common to most of the United States and Europe. When an opening presents itself, the gas is stepped on and the car jumps forward until another vehicle—automobile, troop transport truck, horse and carriage, moped—obstructs its path. This is when the headlights come on, to be flashed in tandem with some horn-honking until the way is clear and the gas pedal can again be floored. Lurching and braking we fly by huge murals depicting flights of Egyptian aircraft and battalions of tanks smashing over the Sinai in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. We narrowly miss hitting a moped upon which a family of four is riding comfortably. The mural switches from contemporary military victories to images of the pharaohs battling Nubian armies. The driver flashes his lights and lays on the horn as he abruptly swerves so as to not rear-end a donkey. A giant stone pharaoh sits on a grassy freeway median, towering over a scattering of families enjoying late night picnics. Traffic only slows when armed police are in the streets, but only so much that the drivers don't run them down. The intersections without armed guards bring to mind a southern Indiana automotive experience: the figure-8 race. It's a pre-or-post NASCAR treat wherein beat-up older model cars—much like those vehicles that comprise the bulk of Cairo's traffic—race at top speeds around a figure-8 track. Intersections here are like that, except nobody's ooh-ing and ah-ing but me. That, and there's no giant beers.

We head over the bridge to the island of Zamalek, where my brother lives. The Nile shines with the lights of the high-rise apartment buildings and telecommunications towers on its banks. The island was swampy marshland before it was drained by the British and converted into a quiet embassy district. Paul lives in an AUC student dormitory, a big brown tower in the middle of the island. AUC has been in Cairo since 1919, and as one of the most prominent places for Americans to congregate, it has a relatively high level of security. In fact, all of Cairo seems to have a high level of security, with an entire police division devoted to looking after foreigners. Despite their dashing black berets and white uniforms, they're most likely to be seen picking their noses or napping with their AK-47s balanced between their knees. The difference with AUC security is that they're quite awake and alert. Paul thinks some of them might be CIA, there to keep tabs on the next generation of diplomats, petroleum executives, military intelligence officers and foreign aid workers. AUC is the Arab equivalent of the Ivy League all rolled into one campus. It's a prohibitively expensive private institution whose students are either wealthy Arabs or the cream of American Middle Eastern Studies departments. That, and of course, the oil law students, of whom Paul and his cohort seem less than fond. The dormitory guards carefully check all bags for weapons and alcohol. Another guard sits by the elevators to the men's tower to make sure that nobody's getting laid on school property.

After dropping off my bags in his room, we head out for food. We order magherita pizzas, mango juice and water-pipes—sheeshas—with cantaloupe-flavored tobacco. Paul suggests I order liberal amounts of food as it's cheap, and it's unlikely that everything we order will arrive at the table. The sidewalk patio is lit with green party lights and it looks out over the Nile where kids and their fathers are fishing and old men in worn blue gibbayehs and head wraps stare into space. A cool breeze comes off the water, soldiers snooze next to a truck and horse-drawn carriages canter by blasting Arab pop filled with manic percussion and sugary professions of devotion to "habibi," best translated as "my baby."


--

The next day I am on my own, left to navigate Cairo. My goal for the day is to head to the Islamic quarter and the Khan El Khalidi marketplace, but I start by wandering the quiet, tree-lined streets of Zamalek. Zamalek reminds me of the crumblier edges of New Orleans' Garden District. The architecture is of the damp, decaying British and French colonial variety. There are muddy tropical gardens that encroach on the embassies and foreign schools that sit behind stone walls and wrought-iron gates. Plenty of Arabic graffiti. One set of English graffiti reads "Mahmoud is bysexual." The heat and humidity are overwhelming and I am already glistening with sweat. Visiting the air-conditioned Egyptian Museum seems like a good plan.

The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities has 136,000 exhibits, none of which have informative displays. Egyptians need jobs and while the government helps them out with an array of subsidies it also gives the tourist-catering industries a subtle boost whenever it can. Thus most of the exhibits in the museum are not labeled at all. Hamdy, a portly guy in his 40s, asks me if I need a guide.

In the course of our tour he shows me the first recorded image of a moustache on a 4,000-year-old stone statue. "He is my great grandfather many times over," he says, pointing to his own moustache. Hamdy lives in 6 October City with his wife and two kids. He has a degree in Egyptology from Cairo University. He spent a few years working on archeological digs, but says that the directors of those expeditions paid incredibly low wages. He found he could make more money offering freelance tours of the museum.

The meal that closes my first day in Egypt is the Egyptian staple koshari. It's a carb-heavy feast of macaroni noodles, fried onions, mushrooms and rice all slopped together in a giant Styrofoam container. It comes with tiny plastic bags of clear garlic sauce and red hot sauce and it's delicious. With our nap-inducing dinners in hand, we join a group of Paul's fellow students for a felucca ride at sunset on the Nile. The felucca is a graceful sailboat that serves as a place for couples to go on dates or for families to host birthday parties. The men renting and sailing these ships are old and gnarled in their turbans and robes. They rely on younger guys in track suits to do the negotiating. The particular dock we choose is adjacent to a riverfront TGI Fridays. This might've spoiled the whole affair with the air of corporate franchise if it weren't for the Pepsi logos that grace the sails of the entire fleet of ships.

After dinner we adjourn to the Grand Café, a swanky sheesha place in the relatively well-to-do neighborhood of Mahdi. It's a mellow scene: an open air Nile-front patio with rattan tables and couches; the peach-colored walls are lit with low-level lights. I'm enjoying more cantaloupe-flavored tobacco and feeling fine until "ka-chuk POW!" Shotguns are going off. All those news reports of suicide bombers and lady assassins in hijabs flash back as I jump out of my seat. "Aigh!" I say. Everyone laughs at my reaction, of course, because tonight is clay pigeon shooting night at the Grand Café. Exploding shards of clay are splashing into the Nile to the cheers of the water-pipe enthusiasts.

As we enjoy another harrowing taxi ride home I feel like I'm finally relaxing a little bit. Everyone is friendly and I'm with people who really know their way around. I glance out the window at a cab running alongside our own and a little girl smiles at me from her mother's lap. She raises her arm, as if to wave, and launches a small projectile in my direction. It falls short of the cab and explodes in the street with a loud bang, which causes me to jump out of my seat and hit my head on the car's ceiling. Despite the mother's black veil, I can tell she's laughing and a little embarrassed. She admonishes her daughter who is totally lost in giggles. "Welcome in Egypt!" she hollers at me before we speed off again.

--

One of Paul's fellow grad students, a documentary filmmaker from New York, puts the students at AUC into what he calls "Team A" and "Team B." Team A are the people who want to learn Arabic in order to return as aid workers and diplomats interested in offering a helping hand; Team B are those who intend to come back in military uniforms or as part of the intelligence services. Paul, meanwhile, goes on about how much he likes Egypt as is, how he's not interested in finding ways to fix things. He cites how messed-up everything is as part of Cairo's appeal, that life continues despite so much chaos. It sounds like the early stages of the fever for expatriation, the creeping sensation that living in Cairo is not so crazy. That it's the people who stay in places like Los Angeles who are the crazy ones. Paul, it seems, may become a member of Team Egypt.

By the third day of Cairo pollution, I'm not so sure. On our way back from the AUC campus near downtown, I start to have trouble breathing. The cab driver is fascinated by my appearance, and discusses it loudly with my brother. It starts with an explanation of Egyptian cuisine. The dish which Egyptians seem most proud of is fuul, an oily mess of fava beans and garlic. "Egyptians eat fuul!" says our cab driver, a big man. "We get so sleepy! But Americans! You eat hamburgers!" Talking to my brother, he points at me. "Your brother, his hair is long like a woman, but he has a beard! And he is big like a man because he eats so many hamburgers!"

My brother is laughing. I feel like I'm having the first asthma attack of my life. As my lungs cry out for a clean breath, my head gets light and I can see the dirt hanging in the air.


--

Though the bomb attacks in the Khan and at Sharm El-Sheikh are dominating international news coverage, the newly emergent political protest movement is what people are more interested in talking about. Hosni Mubarak has been president of Egypt since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. There's no doubt that Mubarak will win the upcoming elections this fall, but it's the first time opposition candidates are allowed to run. Illegal anti-Mubarak protests by an ironic alliance of left-wing groups and conservative religious parties are tolerated in the run-up. We spend the next afternoon looking for one of these demonstrations with Paul's friend Blake, a 26-year-old writer who follows the Cairo political scene.

Blake has a vague set of directions, but we find no signs of gathered dissidents or the government thugs who often harass them. We're still courting danger though, as navigating downtown Cairo requires plenty of street-crossing. Pedestrians do not have the right-of-way and generally speaking, the traffic doesn't stop. This means that in order to cross the street one must summon a Zen-like confidence in the alertness of all drivers and simply step into the traffic. As the pedestrian, you rely on the driver to watch you and calculate the pace at which you're moving—Frogger-like—through the lanes of buses, trucks, bicycles, taxis and livestock moving around you. Dash too quickly and you'll throw the whole thing off as the three lanes of oncoming vehicles are all assuming you'll keep moving at a walkers pace and they'll swerve just slightly to avoid you. This will put you in the path of a moped leaden with boxes of corn and you'll be toast. Everyone has to watch out for everyone else, all the time, or the constant flow of anarchic traffic will become gridlock. It's also useful to wait on the corner for Egyptians to cross, and follow their lead.

After a few hours of wandering past book stalls and through street markets, no protest can be found. We see a lot of bootleg DVDs and VHS of American movies, Disney cartoons, Egyptian belly-dancers and shark attacks. The books range from torrid-looking romance novels with Western women on the cover to religious books and non-descript tomes with Arabic titles. There are also copies of Mein Kampf and books either by or about Osama Bin Laden. Blake tries to translate one cover. "It's asking something like 'Hey, what's this guy been up to?'" he says. And Mein Kampf? Something about Nazi discipline, the cult of the leader appeals to the Arabs, Paul and Blake both guess. The obvious resentment held by Arabs against Zionists—though not always all Jews or even Israelis—seems to jibe with der Fuhrer's anti-Semitism. Of course one could also generalize about Americans based on History Channel buffs’ appetite for documentaries about the Nazis. My favorite book cover features a sketched pair of crossed legs with a line in between denoting a vague vulva-like space. These lead up to a detailed skull for a head. It reminds me of how sexless this trip is likely to be.

On the cab ride back from our failed attempt at finding the protest, the driver offers to take us to his cousin's brothel. We decline. Instead my companions talk about how Middle Eastern strip clubs are full of desperate women from the former Soviet Union.

Later that night Blake takes us to The Greek Club, a rooftop bar in the Talaat Harb or "Third War" neighborhood. The place is above a massive pastry shop in a falling-down building on a large square full of late night foot-traffic. On our way across the square two young men approach us. There are thousands of Western tourists visiting Cairo on any given day, but we're far from the resort hotels and ancient Egyptian rock piles. White people stand out, and my shoulder-length hair continues to draw stares from adults and laughter from children. Very often it's people looking to sell things, but these are just two guys who want to know where we're from. We tell them we're Americans and they're stoked, which is an increasingly common reaction. They want to know what we think of Egypt. Paul enthuses about the city and how much he likes the people here. "You see we are not all Osama," the Egyptian man says. He gives me his phone number and an open invitation to call him for assistance while we're in the country. Or if I just want to help him practice his English and drink tea.

The Greek is an established gathering place for Western ex-pats. Lately it's also been a place where journalists mingle with members of the leftist and secular protest movements. We're headed there with a friend of Blake's who's clearly on "Team B," a scrawny white man-child who uses words like "intel" and talks about a trip he took to one of the oases in the Western desert like it was some kind of Special Forces operation. I'm particularly disdainful of him because I recognize in his fetishization of Arab violence my own fascination for the same thing.

Our ride home features a wild-eyed taxi driver who manically dabs the sweat from his round pale face. It's not uncommon for drivers to pull out of traffic and dash into bodegas for a drink, or better yet grab a slug of water or tea from the many communal jugs and dispensers left on corners, and he does this repeatedly. While he's in the cab he holds forth with proclamations and conveys in sign language what Hosni Mubarak would do if he found out his political views—cut his throat and put out his eyes! "Aggggh!" he says, taking his hands from the wheel and clawing at his eyeballs. He'd like to drive a taxi in America eventually, but the American police would have an unpleasant reaction to his driving: They'd cut his throat and put out his eyes! "Aggggh!" he says, drawing a finger across his throat. The Egyptian police don't pose the same threat. Each time the cab slows for snarled traffic and there's a cop around he hangs his head out the window and shouts something Arabic that Blake translates as: "Hey lazy guy! Why don't you stop napping and fix this shit!" This is an opportunity for Blake to practice his favorite Arabic phrase; he follows our driver's insults by asking the cops, "Where's the party?"

--

Paul's classes are winding down and he's eager to get out of Egypt for a little while. We have plane tickets for Beirut and one more day in Cairo before our departure for Lebanon and then Syria.

"We should definitely go to the pyramids," he says. While there are over 90 pyramids spread across Egypt's 40 kilometer-long pyramid field, the Pyramids at Giza are the largest and most accessible. The hotel-and-nightclub-strewn Cairo neighborhood of Giza runs right up to the plateau where Herodotus (450 BC), Napoleon (1798 AD) and Jerry Garcia (1978 AD) have basked in the heavy vibes that, in addition to bringing millions of dollars into the Egyptian economy, have inspired goth rock tattoos, Egyptian Lover's old school electro jams and American currency designers.

In an effort to engage with Egypt and not just interact with its old rocks, we're happy to chat with most anyone who talks to us, which out here means the Egyptian camel guys looking for clients. Every camel, every horse and pack animal upon which a tout wishes to place us is named Michael Jackson. When Paul challenges one of the camel wranglers—"But I thought that camel over there was named Michael Jackson"—he doesn't bat an eye. "That camel is his brother," he says. "Just sit on the camel and take a picture for free!"

I join a crowd of sweaty tourists for a trip into the Pyramid of Chephren, the second tallest pyramid at Giza. It was blown open in 1818, by Giovanni Battista Belzoni, an Italian weightlifter turned amateur Egyptologist. In addition to exploding his way inside, he signed his name in giant graffiti in the burial chamber. Elsewhere in Egypt, this Hulk Hogan of temple desecrators stole a bust of Ramses II from the temple at Thebes and shipped it to England, where it is still on display at the British Museum. The Pyramid of Cheprhen is hot and crowded inside; its mystique is dispelled by the press of Western flesh all around me.

The other big draw in Giza is the Sphinx, the mysterious evil man-lion-pharoah sculpture that used to dispense riddles and now serves as the narrator for the nightly cheeseball light shows. To the east of the pyramid field there's nothing but sun-baked sand and hot wind until the Siwa Oasis and the Libyan border, but to the west sits a complex of tourist-oriented businesses; the Sphinx gaze rests upon the local two-story KFC/ Pizza Hut duplex.

We get a bit off the path and end up in an off-limits area above the Sphinx. Fat British people with sunburned thighs amble around in front of it. Italian tourists in short-shorts and pink cowboy hats force their video cameras on tour guides. Two tourist police ride their camels over to us, to direct us down a long, circuitous path to the on-limits Sphinx viewing area. Paul asks them a question in Arabic. "You speak Arabic!" one of the officers says, obviously tickled. He lifts up the barbed wire. "You don't have to go all the way back around," he smiles. "You are an Egyptian gentleman and you may pass where the Egyptians pass."

We spend the afternoon in Islamic Cairo, in the large Khan El Khalidi market, an area frequented by tourists who wish to be immersed in gold, silver, spices and shabby pyramid paintings. It's also where a lot of Cairenes come to shop for food, bras, sandals and bath towels. The streets are crowded and narrow, with piles of donkey shit slowly liquidating in runoff wastewater. Guys pushing carts charge through, hissing at people to let them know that they're not slowing down. More polite are the men and boys running between coffee houses and shops with trays of Turkish coffee and tea held high to avoid the jostling crowd. Blake, Paul's friend, moved here on a whim earlier in the summer and said he spends a lot of time wandering the Khan just to get a sense of the city. "There's always dudes doing weird shit there," he says.

And this is true. We see closet-sized offices with nothing inside but a TV and a tray of coffee where exasperated looking men sit staring into space. In the jewelry district, ancient, jerry-rigged furnaces burn metal inches away from the passing crowd. In the back alleys animal carcasses hang in unrefrigerated glass cases, gathering flies. In other places men cluster together making repairs to noisy, unrecognizable engines. Homosexuality is officially illegal, but platonic man-on-man affection is found everywhere. Young boys walk by tangled up in each other's arms, while hirsute men hold hands and whisper into each other's ears.

After a few hours, we make our way over the freeway and into the Cities of the Dead.

Though their existence predates the arrival of Islam in Egypt in the early 600s, the Cities are basically Islamic cemeteries inhabited by hundreds of thousands of squatters and tomb-watchers, a funerary sprawl that spreads out southeast of Cairo until running up against the Muqattam Hills. There are several well-traveled walking tours where one can take in dozens of famous gravesites. We wander in and start poking around on our own.

The tombs house rich and poor alike, some of the crypts seem indistinguishable from houses; cinder block structures where apparently someone is buried, but also where families live and raise their children. Others look like abandoned churches or temples. A crusty-eyed puppy growls at us from underneath the blackened chassis of an ancient Fiat. Kids play in a pile of burning garbage.

Professional mourners nod at us from their perch at the front of freshly occupied chambers. Theirs is not an enviable job—they help coordinate the mourning for the bereaved or in a worst case scenario, sob and wail as stand-ins for absent relatives—but it must be convenient to live and work in the same neighborhood. "Welcome in Egypt," is the stock phrase. It's quiet here, and though the Cities are a tourist attraction there are absolutely zero other Westerners about the place. We're a spectacle. A woman dressed in full black robes and head scarf sees us from the window of her squat and comes running out of the front door to holler "Welcome in Egypt!" It's the first time a woman has approached us since I’ve been in this country. We smile and I mangle toddler compliments. "Thank you! Egypt pretty!" Shokran! Misr gamil!

We round a corner and find an outdoor taxi garage that runs the length of several blocks. I have long wondered (well, since Tuesday) where the taxis come from, and now my questions are answered. Taxis in Egypt seem to be primarily French-made sedans from the '70s and '80s. They're all painted black and white with a taxi license number printed in Arabic numerals on the side. They're further customized with heart-shaped neon lights in the cabin and all manner of Islamic trinkets on the dashboard or hanging from the rear-view mirror. Mini-Korans seem to be the Muslim equivalent of the dashboard Jesus. By far the finest of the Egyptian taxi accessories is "musical brakes," a tricked-out brake system that plays a tinny electronic version of "It's A Small World After All" each time the brakes are applied.

We watch kids gopher, their arms blackened with grease, wielding wrenches or handfuls of nuts and bolts. A garden courtyard opens off this taxi lab with a domed tomb at its center. Lots of the mechanics have noticed us standing around gawking, and one approaches. He says a few things in Arabic that Paul doesn't understand. He gestures that we should follow him.

He takes us past a group of men sitting around a table and drinking tea, and delivers us to two old men sitting at the locked wooden door of the tomb.

The two men smile at us and put down their sandwiches. There's a homemade sheesha pipe in front of their picnic and the air smells of fragrant tobacco. They're both dressed in gibbayehs and the shorter man of the two talks to Paul in a gentle voice. The man smiles and unlocks the door. "I think this is a Mamluk tomb, but I'm not sure," he says as we step into the musty darkness.

His Arabic is extremely pleasant to listen to, but Paul doesn't understand much of it. His voice is too soft and his dialect unfamiliar. He thinks we're in the tomb of one of the sons of a Mamluk general. Mamluks were a class of slaves who were captured as children and raised to become warriors in the 11th Century. They eventually seized power in Egypt and occupied leadership positions both in military and civilian life until they were massacred by the Egyptian governor Mohammed Ali in 1811. Our guide shows us a framed manuscript, the entire Koran hand-written in script so tiny that it only takes up one 10 x 12 piece of parchment. There are chairs embossed with mother of pearl that he insists we take a picture of. He points us to a staircase leading down under the tomb. We have no flashlight, and decline his offer to poke around alone in the darkness. He laughs and leads us out of the building. We wind through a garden where a cat is shitting. He points us to an iron staircase leading to the top of the tomb. We ascend and survey the Cities of the Dead and the freeway that leaves a smoggy haze hanging over its domes and spires.

We end the day at Al Azhar Park, a newly renovated green space on the southeastern hills overlooking the city. "This is the first grass I've walked in all summer," says Paul. We watch the sunset. Flights of pigeons take off from roosts sitting on top of apartment buildings. Their keepers guide them in formation in the sky with red flag signals. Hundreds of mosques light up as the sun disappears and the muzzeins call to prayer echoes out over the city; an amplified cacophony of songs, chants and prayers from a thousand devout Cairenes. Young kids in the park are flying kites as we head down to the freeway to catch a cab ride back to Zamalek.

Tomorrow we fly to Beirut.

Part II: Lebanon

Arriving in Beirut is like arriving back in Europe. The airport is fresh, orderly and clean. No one is yelling. Beer is for sale in the airport concession stand. "Haram!" says Paul at the sight of the booze. Forbidden! Women are dressed in Western fashions and the men are hip and young and cool. It's the most dangerous place we've been so far in terms of the recent political violence, but I immediately feel comfortable and safe.

All the countries we are visiting on this trip border the Mediterranean. My dad is the one person who referred to our travels in "the Mediterranean region," which is probably the most accurate geographical terminology to describe our itinerary. I suppose Beirut is an easy introduction to the Arab world. But it's a hard sell after the Africa-meets-Arabia-in-a-haze-of-exhaust-and-donkey-farts madness of Cairo. Here, the cab driver rips us off after dropping us at our hotel. Cab drivers in Egypt ripped me off, too. But in Egypt the cab driver was a crazy old man blasting tinny dubbed Koranic readings and guzzling non-alcoholic Birell beer. He took me for a dollar, and I knew the extra money was going to buy a week's worth of fuul. In Beirut the driver is a cocky 18-year-old in designer jeans who’ll use his extra five bucks to buy more hair gel and fake gold chains. Beirut and I get off to a bad start.

Beirut harshes my Orientalist fantasy by being thoroughly modern and full of wealthy vacationing Saudis. The women dress like babes in Los Angeles. The dudes with them are Euro-trash Fonzies with expensive shirts. They drive Porsches and Ferraris, asshole cars, not the vintage French clunkers favored by Egypt's genius jalopy mechanics. True, we're not visiting the Shiite slums of the city, but we do cover a lot of ground on foot on our first day. It feels like the grossest parts of America, and that sucks.

Supposedly it's for this Western-ness that wealthy Arabs flock to Beirut to let their hair down. Even those women who choose to keep their hair up do so in haute couture hijabs. The city has a thriving nightlife of bars and clubs. The food is amazing. But the inklings of camaraderie that I felt in Cairo are gone. In Cairo we were well-to-do Americans who needed a hand finding our way around and were happy to spend some time sharing cigarettes in a cab, swapping American slang for Arabic phrases. Our haplessness with the language and culture, coupled with our openness to talking about politics or food or whatever meant there was a comfortable level of exchange going on with the locals. Here in Lebanon I feel like a scrub, a filthy traveler with sweaty clothes and an unshaved face. People scoff at Paul's Arabic and are pissed that his French isn't fluent. It's like all the trouble and strife of the Middle East rolled up with the snooty attitude of Europe.

We spend our first night in Beirut walking from dinner in the gentrified Achrafiyeh neighborhood to the Central District. During the Civil War this downtown area was bombed to rubble and occupied by PLO gunmen and rotting bodies of civilian casualties. Now it's been remodeled, retrofitted and rebuilt. We sit at the central square. The lack of explicitly foreign vibes reminds me how far away from home I really am. There are few Westerners here—there's still that worrisome State Department travel advisory—and we don't see many Africans either. There are soldiers and police in green and grey camouflage. They carry M-16s rather than AK-47s and, unlike the sleepy Egyptian teenagers that make up the ranks of Egypt's urban authorities, they look alert and on edge. It was only a few months ago and a few miles away that former prime minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated in a car bomb attack that killed 15 pedestrians and injured 120 more.

It's the nearness of the civil war that makes Beirut faintly terrifying. In the window of the convenience store next to our hotel there's a comical "Welcome to Beirut!" poster with cartoon renderings of dead bodies in the street, RPG-toting PLO militiamen drinking beer in the rubble and snipers hanging from the windows. That a place so orderly and civilized was home to such bloody anarchy that only reached its "official" end in 1990. The damage to the buildings is evident as we walk through some of the neighborhoods. Buildings are riddled with bullet-holes and walls are scarred with blast marks. The most striking evidence of the war is the Holiday Inn in the Ain Al-Mreisse neighborhood. New developments ring this high-rise, which is supposedly still structurally intact so that it will be remodeled, not demolished. There are cavernous artillery-fire wounds high on its east-facing wall. It seems this structure was favored by snipers, peppered as it is with hundreds of thousands of bullet-and-mortar holes. Our guide Kate Seelye, a friend from Los Angeles who relocated to Beirut and is now a freelance reporter and producer on PBS's Frontline, tells me that they used to toss people off the deck of the revolving restaurant on top.

From the handful of books written about the Lebanese Civil War, I've chosen to read Robert Fisk's 700-page Pity The Nation. Fisk is a war correspondent for the British Independent newspaper and his account reads both as a decent first draft of the historical record, but moreso as a first-person account of an outsider's perspective on the conflict. My brother thinks it's overlong and a little too personal; he recommends The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon, 1967-1976. Any way you cut it, the civil war is long and violent, its terribly confusing chain of atrocities extends back to power-plays made by British and French colonial powers in order to shift the balance in far-distant European wars. It's depressing to see how deeply fucked up this region is as a result of so much foreign meddling. How clueless Western leaders were then with the implications of re-drawing national borders, undermining tribal loyalties and ruthlessly manipulating ethnic and religious factions. It seems that history is doomed to repeat itself until the West runs out of cash to run ill-fated, impossible-to-win wars and occupations. It also seems like people in the American government are refusing to learn from history.

The one thing that remains clear is that Israel is the enemy, and this manifests itself in strange ways: They don’t even care if you have tourist money—if you have an Israeli stamp on your passport, or any other sign of having visited Israel on your person, you will be denied entry into Lebanon.

Humans are vicious animals and their civic and religious leaders, when given the right circumstances, only make them more so. But it's hard to see that in the faces enjoying the holiday atmosphere of this city. To see this up close, we’ll have to leave its limits.



--

We leave in the morning for the Bekaaa Valley, the last place Syrian troops were stationed prior to withdrawing earlier this year. Our destination is the Roman ruins at Baalbeck, the former Hezbollah headquarters. Hezbollah—The Party of God – is the primary armed Shia-Lebanese political party: formed in 1982 they drove the last Israeli forces out of South Lebanon in 2000.

We catch a mini-bus to Baalbeck in Cola, a bustling transportation hub in one of the grittier neighborhoods of Beirut. It's choked with taxis and the Russian-built mini-vans that seem to be the most common form of inter-city mass transit. We ride with a van full of furloughed soldiers through Beirut. A teenager in a white T-shirt hangs out the open sliding door barking our destination, trying to fill the vehicle before we hit the road.

The drive to Baalbek takes us through winding mountain roads. Our driver is Welcome Back Kotter's Gabe Kaplan and he has has no fear about passing slower vehicles on the freeway by crossing into oncoming traffic lanes. The soldiers pass a bottle of water around and laugh as we swerve back into safety. Nobody wears seatbelts except Gabe Kaplan, who only puts his on when we pass through military checkpoints.

We switch to another mini-bus for the drive up the Bekaa Valley to Baalbek. The young man I'm sitting next to in the back asks me if I'm American. I respond in Arabic—aiwa—yes. "Don't speak Arabic," he tells me. He introduces himself as Jaffar.

The Bekaa is a rich agricultural area. There are people working in fields and vineyards on either side of the road. The towns that continue in an uninterrupted chain out of Beirut look as if they are comprised of food stores, auto repair shops and clothing stores constructed exclusively with cinder blocks. "All these people," says Jaffar, "make their money from drugs." The Bekaa is famous for its cannabis production. According to Fisk's Pity The Nation, during the war the Syrian Army protected marijuana fields, the revenue from which was allegedly channeled through Damascus. Fisk tells the story of one farmer who installed an anti-aircraft gun next to his crops.

"My girlfriend in Beirut does a lot of drugs," Jaffar says, giving me a weird look. "She's an American too." I don't know if he's dropping hints here, but I don't feel like making drug deals in Hezbollah country. Jaffar is a little creepy, so I'm happy when our conversation turns to his relatives in Detroit. As he's getting ready to disembark he gives me his mobile number. "If you need anything in Baalbek, give me a call."

The closer we get to Baalbek, the more posters of Shiite leaders—from the ecstatically beneficent visage of Hezbollah's Sheikh Nasrallah to the reserved faces of various Iranian ayatollahs—line the streets. Baalbek is a quaint town with Hezbollah graphics everywhere. In addition to being an armed militia, Hezbollah is also a legitimate political party. They’re also in charge of the electricity ministry.

The temple ruins here have been a draw for tourists and pilgrims since the first millennium BC. Most of them date from the Roman era and include a set of huge columns that change color from brown to pink in the setting sun. There's a nearly intact Venus Temple that dates from AD 150 and is allegedly one of the most ornate temples in all of Roman antiquity. The walls are rosy brown and covered in intricate carvings as well as graffiti dating from the 1800s to the present. The entire complex was used for of all sorts of fantastically decadent rituals in tribute to the pagan god Baal's consort Astarte. The temple orgies continued once the site was transferred over to the Roman goddess Venus. Of course, not so much horny partying goes down in the Hezbollah era. I’m late to the party by about a thousand years.

Hezbollah’s Museum of Lebanese Resistance is in the parking lot out front. Paul and I dip inside to check out diorama displays of blood-soaked Israeli and American flags and cases full of weapons and other military equipment stripped from the bodies of Israeli soldiers. As we cruise through the Hall of Martyrs, my first bout of dysentery—which I’d been holding off since this morning with a drug cocktail of Immodium, Pepto-Bismol and the napalm of anti-diarrhea medicines, Cipro—begins to manifest itself. The drugs are wearing off as I view the diaries and personal effects of Hezbollah suicide bombers and machine gun attackers. A video of bomb attacks plays in the corner. The museum's curator watches us closely, his attention aroused by my uncontrollable belching. Paul is trying to keep a straight face as I beeline for the door and dash back to our hotel.

My condition, kept under control by fresh drugs, gets more tenuous when we realize there's no late-night dinner to be had. So we subsist on beer and nuts at the Palmyra Hotel, a huge World War I-era stone building that has hosted military officers, archeologists and celebrities. The laidback proprietor shows us rooms where Nina Simone, Placido Domingo and the legendary Lebanese singer Fairouz have slept.

In the morning we eat delicious syrupy sweet-cheese-filled sesame buns from a pastry shop where it looks like everyone in Baalbek goes for breakfast. The shop falls silent as we enter. I realize that we haven’t seen any other Westerners except for a handful of French tour bus people at the ruins. Conversations start back up again but the regulars keep a close eye on us. We smile back and slurp our cheese appreciatively.

After breakfast we walk back to the hotel to make a phone call. We're headed to South Lebanon tomorrow and I need Kate's assistance with getting the proper military permission. The owner of the hotel was quite gregarious the night before, but this morning he is fuming. The army has parked a water truck in front of his sign and is refusing to move it. This will hurt his business, he says, and no we cannot use his phone. He's on the line with Hezbollah, asking them to join him in a declaration of war on the army, or perhaps just move this truck. In addition to coordinating martyrdom operations in South Lebanon, Hezbollah is also a social organization not unlike the Kiwanis Club.

--

Blake is due to fly in from Cairo today, and we meet up with him at the gates of the American University in Beirut after returning from Baalbek. The AUB campus, like every other place we've been in both Egypt and Lebanon, is crawling with cats. Apparently the prophet Mohammed was fond of cats and these animals, while feral, don’t seem to fear people. It's not uncommon to see people leaving out dishes of food, and I don't see a single mouse or rat during my journey.

Traveling to the south can be a bit complicated depending on the level of escalation between the Lebanese— more specifically Palestinian or Hezbollah fighters—and the Israelis on the other side of the border. Kate has placed a call on our behalf to a colonel in charge of some southern checkpoints, and it seems we're on the list of people who are allowed to pass. Just in case there's trouble, she puts us in touch with Hosni, a friend of hers who drives a taxi and hails from outside of Sidon, the largest city in South Lebanon. In case the checkpoints turn us down, he knows enough back roads and can likely take us on our tour of "Liberated South Lebanon."

The drive to Baalbek was a grim trek through denuded hillsides and mile after mile of drab cinder-block construction projects. The drive south along the coast is tropical and mellow. There are banana fields and vistas of the Mediterranean; there are also tank convoys and Palestinian refugee camps. We drive through Sidon and head southeast at the roundabout in the city center. During the invasion of 1982, the Israeli forces killed thousands of civilians in retaliatory strikes against PLO positions. Hosni points out the neighborhood where he is from. How many people did he lose in the war? Instead of trying to get Blake or Paul to translate such a personal question, I compliment him on the pin-ups of smiling women that he’s got on the dashboard's speedometer and fuel gauge.

We arrive at our first checkpoint and Hosni is flagged down. He pulls his ancient black Mercedes into the parking lot of a military office. We sit in the car while he talks to the officers in the building. Fifteen minutes later he rejoins us and we're off. Hosni speaks only Arabic and doesn't tell us what transpired inside. We drive on through a storybook Bible landscape of rock-strewn hills, tree-lined valleys and the occasional flock of sheep.

Our first stop is Beaufort Castle, a thousand-year-old military outpost on a desolate hilltop. From Beaufort there are views of northern Israel and southern Syria as well as all of South Lebanon. The castle’s crumbling walls have been battered in conflicts between Crusaders, Ottomans and Arabs. It was occupied by Palestinian guerillas until the Israeli invasion in 1982. When the Israelis withdrew in 2000 they blew up portions of the castle and turned it over to the Lebanese. A Hezbollah flag flies above a metal shelter pockmarked with bullet holes that has been erected on top of the rubble. Pieces of mortars lie in the grass and there's a large sign erected by "Hezbollah Military Media" in the parking lot. We are advised not to wander off from established roads, as the hillsides are mined. Blake, Paul and I confer and agree that this is where we would also build a castle: in this way, three America tourists validate a thousand years of military history by way of a thousand hours of video game strategizing.

After clambering around the castle we head to the Kalaa Rest House, a family-themed restaurant just below the former PLO mortar positions. There's a small Ferris wheel and playground. It's deserted today, but apparently crowded on the weekends with families interested in surveying Israeli listening posts—the arrays of radio towers and satellite dishes used to monitor Lebanese communications. We eat shawerma and shanklich and Hosni teaches Blake and Paul some sort of Arabic phrases that nobody bothers to translate for me. He tells us there was trouble at the checkpoint because the Lebanese don't want Americans to get caught in the crossfire if there's any shooting with the Israelis.

The next stop on our tour is the Fatima Gate, a former border crossing with Israel that has been closed since Hezbollah's victory in South Lebanon. It's next to the town of Kfar Kila, a desolate settlement of half-built structures. At the site of the former gate, there's a blown-up Israeli troop transport, several stone pillars representing Israeli leaders that Lebanese tourists cast stones at, and a Hezbollah gift shoppe. The angry looking dudes at the shoppe eye us as we step out of Hosni's rusty Benz. They pop in a cassette and start blasting martial music out of an unnecessarily large PA. "This music makes me feel pumped up for some martyrdom operations," says Blake. There's a billboard detailing just such an operation, recounted in curiously militant broken English, "Hezbollinglish," if you will. It speaks of a guy who blew himself up "transforming Israeli soldiers into masses of fire and limb" and features an artist's rendering of the violence. We're told we can take pictures of the Israeli side of the border, but nothing on the Lebanese side for Hezbollah security reasons. Of course there's nothing but empty buildings all within view of the Israeli lights and cameras and listening equipment just a few dozen feet away.

Further down the path running along the border there's an abandoned house on the Israeli side. It's covered in protective grills and fences to deflect anything that might be thrown at it, and there are lights and other equipment protruding from its windows. There's nothing on the Lebanese side to see beyond a bit of graffiti that reads, in English, "Sharon is a dog."

On our way back we buy some keychains adorned with their striking green and yellow Hezbollah logo: an arm clutching a Kalashnikov raised defiantly over stylized Arabic script. My favorite is one shaped like a heart that has Nasrallah with an AK smiling wildly, Photoshopped underneath a picture of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. What are the ethical implications of spending our money with armed organizations considered to be terrorist groups by many outsiders, and especially by the Israelis? Paul suggests that we've already given plenty of money in income tax to the Israeli military by way of American aid, and they have inflicted far more civilian casualties than Hezbollah. Thus we're kind of evening things out between two vicious sides in a horribly depressing conflict. While I imagine that Shin Bet keychains would be just as much of a controversial commodity, there are no Israeli souvenir stands on their side of the fence.

--

Though I find the Lebanese civil war to be hopelessly confusing, one grand irony that sticks out in my mind is the Israeli alliance with the Christian Phalangist militias. The Phalangists were formed in 1936 by Pierre Gemayel after visiting Germany for the Olympics. "In every system in the world, you can find something good," he told Robert Fisk in a 1982 interview. "But Nazism was not Nazism at all. The word came afterwards. In their system, I saw discipline. And we in the Middle East needed discipline more than anything else." Of course Muslim leaders were not exactly opponents of National Socialism either. But in a cynical move during the war, the Israelis allied themselves with these militias against the array of native Lebanese Muslim forces and the PLO. Under the guise of the South Lebanese Army (SLA) these Phalangists perpetrated some of the worse civilian massacres of the war—particularly in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Chatila. They also administered the notorious Khiam Prison where Hezbollah guerillas were interred and tortured alongside Shia villagers guilty of little more than living nearby.

There's not much to the prison, which sits on top of a hill overlooking the town of Khiam. It serves as a memorial and what looks like a Hezbollah conference center. The prison itself is drab and white. The halls are empty but for a few signs indicating prisoner quarters in their tiny pre-Red Cross inspection condition, and the slightly roomier post-inspection state. If people died in a room, there's a sign indicating just where and how they were "martyred." Signs in Hezbollingish denote the rooms for "the boss of whippers," and "for investigation with the help of traitors." Though the museum is supposedly staffed by former inmates, the only people here besides a busload of French tourists are some guys lazing around in the shade in the main courtyard.

We ride back to Beirut and watch the billboards pass by. If one were to gauge the interests of South Lebanon based on roadside advertising, one would imagine a community concerned strictly with shampoo, Dutch Boy-brand paint and Hezbollah. Blake points out posters featuring the disguised swastika of the Syrian National Socialist party. Hosni takes a call on his mobile phone, then hands it to me. It's Kate on the line. She tells me that the colonel she was supposed to contact never returned her phone calls until we were well into Southern Lebanon. Hosni vouched for us as non-troublesome travelers and then bribed the guards on our behalf. She's warning me that he's going to ask for an extra 20 dollars or so, which we will of course gladly pay him.

We're leaving the next day for Damascus. I spend the night in our hotel room watching Melody Arabia, Arabic music television. The videos depict colorful parties with lots of dancing and occasionally a lonely man or woman pining for an absent lover. They play out on a screen where text messages from around the Arab world are displayed on a scrolling ticker. Most of the racy, fun videos are shot here in liberal Lebanon. Kate tells me they often challenge societal rules in subtle ways, with women falling for men not of their social class, or by sliding in a few explicitly gay characters in the background. Saudi Arabia's King Fahd died a few days ago and there are dozens of channels on the satellite feed commemorating his expiration by reading the Koran in its entirety in voiceover while broadcasting his picture.

Later, on my own, I head down to Rue Bliss, the main drag in the Hamra neighborhood. I’m hungry as my stomach is still instantly liquefying everything I eat. I get a shawerma sandwich and I stop in an Internet café populated by hyperactive Lebanese kids playing network games. I check my email as they stalk each other with machine guns through a maze of city streets. The wiser ones sit high above in sniper positions, picking off their fellows with ease.


NEXT ISSUE: The journey to Syria begins with a hijacking.

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This article -- complete with B&W and full-color photographs -- can also be found in the November issue of Arthur, available from Arthurmag.com.

© 2010 Daniel Chamberlin