Inhuman Swill

I was going to catch up on more of the week at the workshop yesterday, but Michael Jackson died and took Farrah Fawcett and most of the internet with him. You live on earth. You know.

On Tuesday, Brad Beaulieu made us all eggs benedict with crabmeat for breakfast. This was somewhat suspicious, given that he was first on the critique schedule for the day, but I don't think any of us actually changed our comments because of the fantastic food. Most of us joked about it, though.

My first-fifty was the fourth and last to go under the scalpel that day. I got a ton of very helpful feedback. There were elements of the book that I was very happy to hear that people were responding to, I got confirmation that the bits I suspected were big problems really were big problems, and then I heard just oodles of impressions and misimpressions that helped me see where I was setting the wrong expectations, where I was being unclear or vague, or where I was just being silly. Leaving the critique session, my mind was already whirring, working on how best to integrate the feedback I received into the next draft. I was very happy with the way it all went.

From this remove, some of the days begin to blur together, but I think I'm pretty safe in saying that we returned to the balcony at the Zane Grey Ballroom to enjoy beer in the open air at an even greater altitude than that of street-level Flagstaff. That happened almost every night.

On Wednesday, we began convening in smaller groups to do dissections of full novel manuscripts—or, at least, of whatever portion of those manuscripts does exist. That's been going on in groups of three or four ever since. Each of us was assigned two full manuscripts to read, and in turn had two participants read our own full manuscript. My session took place this morning at Macy's Coffee. Eugene Myers and Rob Ziegler gave me an incredible thorough, helpful, and encouraging critique of my 70,000 words so far. When this book sells, I will owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

To hop back a couple of nights, now, on Wednesday evening we had a group viewing of Cloverfield. The movie was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. I found it well-made and effective for what it was, and of course it's always fun to see a city you know well get destroyed by a giant monster. It shared a lot of plot elements with one of my favorite little movies, the 1988 Anthony Edwards thriller Miracle Mile, but of course was a very different film. I jumped when the first explosion hit.

For Thursday evening, which would be last night, Sarah Kelly set up a Meet the Authors event at the Wine Loft in downtown Flagstaff. gregvaneekhout was featured prominently in an Arizona Daily Sun article promoting the event, in fact. Six of us sat on a panel of sorts and answered questions about our writing that we had come up with ourselves and given to Sarah. The audience actually outnumbered the panel, and they had good, solid questions for us when we had run out of our own questions. From there we shifted our base of operations to the Beaver Street Brewery.

This morning before my critique session, Greg and I rounded up what equipment and food supplies we had in our apartment and hosted a banana pancake breakfast for the women staying in this same building with us. (Most of the men are staying in another place across town.) This was greatly aided, and in fact suggested, by the two boxes of pancake mix we found in our cupboards, and by the bottle of imitation maple syrup in the fridge. I think the pancakes were a hit!

Around noon (actually a bit later because on my way back from my critique session at Macy's I realized I had left my leather coat on my chair and ran back only to find that the coat was gone and hadn't been turned in but thank goodness Rob Ziegler had grabbed it for me before he left), we convened as a group briefly so that Mike Kelly could photograph us for the obligatory Locus workshop pic. There is melancholy in the realization that things are winding down, but I'm starting to miss home a lot, and I can't wait to see my wife and dog tomorrow night. I'll be internalizing the stuff I learned this week for a while, and I'm really glad I was able to come.

P.S. Greg van Eekhout is best roommate! And his novel Norse Code rocks. Buy it.

The first official day of Starry Heaven went very well, I thought. We critiqued the first four of our twelve first-fifties. (For those curious, we spend the first three days looking at the first fifty pages of everyone's novel, on the theory that those pages have to be strong when they go to an editor or agent as a proposal.) Many helpful comments were offered and received, and there was a satisfying and comfortable lack of drama. Everyone here knew at least one other person prior to the workshop convening, and some of us knew a lot of the other participants. It looks to me like everyone is managing to fit in, which is good. (And we were all glad that E.C. Myers, who had the worst travel luck of any of us, finally managed to make it here late Saturday night. It was too bad that he missed dinner, though.)

Lunch yesterday was catered. We had delicious little baked burritos, spicy tomato soup, and chips and salsa. After the afternoon session, a few of us hauled our stacks of stuff still to read down to Macy's and sat around chatting as much as reading for a couple of hours. Then the whole gang convened the Zane Grey Ballroom at the Hotel Weatherford and milled about on the balcony listening to reggae from the festival down the street, and later watching police, fire, and ambulance converge on the crowd. I hope whoever had the emergency down there was okay. Also, we saw a few trucks equipped with snorkels pass by in the street below. (I wish I had one of those for my car in Chicago on Friday. The water in the depression under the Metra tracks at Foster and Ravenswood was well over my axles.)

A highlight for me at the Zane Grey was getting to meet Mike Kelly, our organizer Sarah K. Castle's husband. Mike is James Patrick Kelly's brother, and since I also (entirely coincidentally and unconnected to the science fiction world) know Dan Kelly from Brooklyn, I have now met three of the Kelly brothers. My new goal in life is to collect all four! But quite apart from his Kelly family connections, Mike is a charming and fascinating fellow in his own right, a textbook-writing geologist who also designs interactive museum installations.

Oh, and the Zane Grey also had Lagunitas IPA on draft! $2.75 a pint!

After Zane Grey, we schooled over to the Black Bean Burrito Bar & Salsa Co. for a late dinner. Then it was home, where I crashed disappointingly early. Maybe they stay up later and drink more beer over in the other house. Going to have to find that out tonight.

Okay, now I'm going to put on the 2006 FourPlay String Quartet album Now to the Future (which frogworth kindly sent me) and get another critique written.

In other news, I arrived today in Flagstaff, Arizona, to attend the Starry Heaven novel workshop! I'm here with my poor half-finished novel Technomancers, which I hope my fellow workshoppers give a swift kick in the ass. I was hoping that at 70,000 words I'd be close to finished, but as it turns out I'm only about halfway through the first draft.

But anyway, Brad Beaulieu and I ended up on the same flight from Chicago and rode together in the 90 mph shuttle van from Phoenix. Sarah Kelly picked us up with Gary Shockley and whisked us off to lunch at the Beaver Street Brewpub where we met up with Sarah Prineas, Sandra McDonald, and Greg van Eekhout and Lisa Will. A pitcher of Lumberjack Lager couldn't get to our table soon enough!

Then we checked in at our B&B, where the room Greg and I are sharing pretty much boggled our minds with its palatial dimensions. Blue Heaven will henceforth have a lot to live up to! A trip to the supermarket and our fridge is stocked, although it was pre-stocked with bagels and cream cheese and milk and OJ and coffee and syrup and the cupboard with cereal and pancake mix and stuff when we arrived.

Okay, I'm starting to gush. We hear via Twitter that Eugene Myers is having extreme travel complications, but with luck he'll be with us late this evening. I'm now drinking a Four Peaks 8th Street Ale and signing off. The week begins!

Old man: "Where are you going?"

Waitress: "India."

Old man: "Have you seen Slumdog?"

Waitress: "No."

Old man: "You need to see Slumdog."

Waitress: "I'm not going to that part of India."

Old man: "Every part of India is that part of India."

Having a great time. Have seen fjm and secritcrush and grahamsleight. Now at crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. More later, and photos.

The morning I found out about the AC/DC ticket snafu, I was very upset. Finding replacement tickets on StubHub helped, but didn't lift my (back in) black mood. It took a special delivery to accomplish that.

What arrived in the mail was a Sinclair Edwardian club collar shirt and a red Baker City vest. I tried them on immediatetly, and they fit perfectly. I looked like Deadwood had ordered me up from Central Casting.

Together with the black tuxedo jacket Laura found me on eBay, and this facial hair I've been cultivated, my getup for the "old timey" wedding in London this weekend is complete. And what's more, I have my Halloween costume too. No, you're never too old or too male to play dress-up.

So, if we were going to London next week on the cheap, what sorts of things should we not miss that guidebooks would not tell us about?

Just when you thought it was safe to come back to my blog, I'm going to start talking about Egypt again. I've been uploading more of our Flip Videos to YouTube, and here's one Laura took of me just after (as I've mentioned earlier) I emerged from my journey to heart of the second pyramid. She, of course, is conducting the interview from off-camera:


A few new video playlists are also available, including five short videos from around the pyramids and the Sphinx, and four videos from our overnight train to Aswan. (But not that video.)

We knew that Friday, May 30, as another long travel day, was going to suck. We just didn't know yet how badly it was going to suck.

Over dinner the evening before, Ra'ed had broken the news to us that there would be yet another change in our travel plans. It seems the tour company had not booked our return tickets on the morning ferry to Taba soon enough, and the earliest ferry with berths still remaining would not be until 7:00 pm. That would get us to Taba far, far too late to make any bus that would reach Cairo at any remotely reasonable hour.

The solution foisted upon us—dreamed up by that same favorite benefactor of ours in Cairo who only days before had failed to get us from Hurghada to Sharm al-Sheikh by boat—was overland travel. It seemed fairly straightforward, if tedious, on the face of it. Ra'ed would drive us back to Aqaba, hand us seventy American dollars, and drop us off at the border crossing to Eilat, Israel. Once in Israel, we would take a cab to the Egyptian border, where a driver would be waiting to spirit us south to Dahab to catch our bus.

It sounds so simple, doesn't it?

As it turned out, the crossing into Israel went just fine. There was only one dicey moment, when a large and scary immigration officer demanded to know the origin of my family name. ("I—I don't know," I said. "We're American or Canadian on both sides going back two hundred years." Now, I do know that my roots stretch back to England, Scotland, and Wales, but who can recall that when confronted by a hulking Israeli who probably thinks your name sounds Aryan? Laura, obviously French in extraction, had no problem.) This, by the way, was the only man among all the border personnel we encountered on our adventure in Israel. The women were generally much more pleasant.

Once we made it through passport control, a border guard hailed a taxi for us, and we were on our way. The cab driver sped us through Eilat, pointing out with pride such consumer temples as Zara and Club Med. He seemed a little offended when I asked him if his accent was French, but I think I managed to smooth it over by saying we knew Israel was like our home in New York City, full of people who've migrated from all over the world. At the Egyptian border, the driver charged us $25 American. I gave him a fifry, and he gave me back 50 shekels in change. (Two shekels to the dollar!)

Our exit visas ended up costing us, much to the amusement of the woman at the exchange desk, 50 shekels plus 20 dollars plus 2 dinars. That meant our transit had cost us, thus far, approximately three dollars more than the travel company had spotted us at the outset. And there was still one more border left to cross.

Leaving Israel was perfectly pleasant. We crossed the long barren stretch of pavement between Israel and Egypt and entered the Taba border station. In all innocence, we strolled right up to the Egyptian passport control officer, handed him our passports ... and were denied entry to Egypt.

Let's back up over a week, to the day we flew into Cairo. The very first person to meet us there was a travel facilitator from our tour company. His job was to provide immigration with a "guarantee" for our stay in Egypt—proof that our travel was all prearranged and would be supervised by the company for the duration of our time in country. This allowed him to purchase our fifteen-dollar entry visas for us. Without such a guarantor, the only way for us to enter the country would have been for us to acquire visas at an Egyptian consulate before leaving the U.S.

The passport officer at Taba pointed to the visas in our passports, which had been closed out when we left Egypt for Jordan two days earlier. "If you don't have a company here to purchase your visas," he rather impatiently explained, "then you can go back to Eilat and apply for visas at the consulate there."

Of course, it was a Friday, and in that region of the world the weekend is Friday and Saturday. The consulate in Eilat would not be open until Sunday.

"We were probably in a rush, and missed our tour guide," I said. "We'll go back and find him. Sorry."

It turns out that in our hurry to reach passport control we had strolled right past a small group of tour guides inside the border station. We went back to them and asked which of them was from our company.

Ahem. None was.

The tour guides were as helpful to us as they could be, though. They got on the phone to our accursed travel agent in Cairo, who, when the cell phone was passed to me, seemed utterly mystified that we hadn't been able to waltz through the border like Fred and Ginger. "You don't need another visa," he said.

"Um, yes, we do. Now, where's the guy who can get it for us?"

I won't detail the further phone calls and mounting anger and frustration we experienced over the next couple of hours, stymied at the border as we were. A driver was waiting for us on the far side of the crossing, but he wasn't authorized to make the kind of guarantee required by Immigration. A helpful and friendly tour guide explained to us apologetically that there were guides who could be bribed to provide such a guarantee, but that his was a reputable company which could not assist us in that regard.

Eventually our nimrod in Cairo called with a brainstorm. "Do you have e-tickets for your flight out of Cairo?"

"Yes."

"You have your flight itinerary handy?"

"Yes." I had taken to a certain measure of curtness in my dealings with him.

"Take it to the passport control officer. Explain that you've been in Egypt already, and you need to enter again in order to leave."

Next to the currency exchange, there was an office marked "Immigration." The door was open. I shrugged, and Laura and I walked over to peek through the door. Inside was a tall, stern-looking man in an immaculate white uniform seated behind a desk. His hair was steel-gray and receding, and his nose was a thin curving blade. I sat down, laid the itinerary before him, and explained the situation—adding that our travel agent in Cairo was an obvious loser with a camel and a donkey for parents. (Okay, maybe I only said I didn't know why their man wasn't there.)

The immigration officer said, carefully, "I am only immigration officer. I am sorry, I can do nothing. But perhaps I have possible solve for you."

He went on to explain, as the reputable tour guide had, that certain companies would provide guarantees to tourists for a fee of $35 American. He pressed a button and went to the door. After a moment a fellow appeared in the doorway. The immigration officer raised his hands, palms forward. "I am only immigration officer. I know nothing of these things."

To truncate a long story, the man at the door wrote out a travel guarantee for us, purchased two visas from the bank, walked us through passport control where the same officer who had denied us entry stamped our visas with a cynical smirk, and walked us outside to the parking lot beyond. That's where I forked over 380 Egyptian pounds, the equivalent of 70 bucks—30 for the visas, 40 for the grease.

And that's what it took. We were back in Egypt.

And hopping mad.

We met our driver and set off south in his van. It was now 1:00 pm. We had missed our 12:30 bus from Dahab. The next bus would leave Dahab at 2:30. It was a two-hour drive from Taba to Dahab. By now we were impervious to terror on tortuous, twisting desert highways. Our driver got us there in ninety minutes. We barely had time to pee, and then our bus was off and rolling.

It was a large, comfortable coach-style bus, but with no restroom on board. We tried not to drink much water for the duration of the ride. We'd been told the trip would take six hours. Actually, it took eight. Having traveled south down the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba, we then drove west across the Sinai Peninsula, back north up the coast of the Gulf of Suez, and then through the tunnel back underneath the Suez Canal. There was one rest stop in the middle of all this, but it was only a quickie so the men on the bus (Laura was the only woman) could have a smoke and pee in the sand. I held it, in solidarity with Laura.

Here, Laura interviews me on the bus:


We reached Cairo at 10:30 pm. Our guide Shiko was there at the bus station—had been, for a couple of hours—with a van driver. Our dear friend the travel agent was waiting to meet us at the hotel. Believe me, when you haven't peed for eight hours, the man who put you in that situation is is the last person you want to find standing between you and the nearest plumbing.

The idiot didn't even realize that we had another full day in Cairo ahead of us. He tried to tell us that our van would be there at five in the morning to take us to the airport.

Okay, let's fast-forward past the discussion that followed. It was past midnight by the time we managed to get rid of the tour people and get settled in our room. That's when Laura and I set out in search of food. All we had eaten since breakfast seventeen hours earlier in Jordan was a banana apiece and some of those crumbly chocolate-creme sandwich cookies that come in a tube. I had spotted a sidewalk cafe a couple of blocks away on the way to the hotel that looked inviting, and it wasn't difficult for us to walk there. Our waiter was funny and nice, and I ended up eating a dish called koshary, sort of a kitchen-sink affair built from lentils, chickpeas, tomato sauce, rice, pasta, chunked meat, and assorted other ingredients. It damn well hit the spot. Laura had chicken shawarma, and we took turns feeding bits of meat on the sly to the two stray cats that prowled up to our table from beneath a parked car.

It was a good way to close out an interesting but ultimately shitty day.

Petra is an ancient city established in what is now Jordan in the 6th century B.C. by a tribe called the Nabateans. The city inhabits an extensive valley defended by a narrow canyon called the Siq. The Nabateans carved open channels into the canyon walls to bring irrigation water into the city, and covered channels for drinking water. In this way they were able to defend against numerous invaders over the centuries, establishing Petra as an important center of commerce on the trading routes between Arabia and the Mediterranean. Petra finally fell to Rome in A.D. 106 after a lengthy siege, but continued as an important population center until being crippled by an earthquake in 363.

The most notable archaeological feature of Petra is the proliferation of elaborate tombs or temples, and smaller shrines, carved into the faces of the area's sandstone cliffs. The best preserved example of this beautiful Greek-influenced architecture is al-Khazneh, or the Treasury, which has survived as long as it has thanks to the protective overhang beneath which it was carved. The Treasury may be most recognizable in popular culture as the exterior of the temple containing the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The drive from our hotel to the entrance to the Petra site took all of two minutes, first thing on Thursday, May 29. We had been told that we would be riding horses in as part of our tour. I pictured us arriving at the Treasury like Indy Jones, riding out of the Siq in a thunder of hooves. This turned out, disappointingly, not to be the case. Instead, our grand horse ride took us from just inside the site entrance to near the upper end of the Siq, a distance of only 200 meters. Our Arabians were led by their grooms. There was no free riding. Well, Laura somehow managed to convince her groom to let her take the reins from him. Me, I completely failed to communicate to my groom that I could ride a horse all on my own, or even that I knew how to mount and dismount by myself.

That turned out to be the only disappointing thing about Petra. No, there were two disappointing things about Petra. First was the horse ride, second was the fact that the battery of our borrowed digital camera (as it so often did on this trip) died just as we were getting to the good stuff. Everything else was spectacular (although when you imagine how a site like this is going to be, you rarely picture the proliferation of tourists and merchants cluttering it all up).

Fortunately, we also had a little Flip Video camera with us, so I'll just offer a quick rundown of our visit before letting the shaky footage we shot do the talking.

We walked the kilometer or so down the narrow Siq, studying shrines and irrigation channels and the remnants of statues as our temporary guide Hamad explained the history and religion of the Nabateans. Our first glimpse of the Treasury, a sliver of rosy sandstone architecture between jagged cliffs, was heart-stopping. After a goodly amount of time exploring there, we continued along to the Royal Tombs, the Amphitheatre, the colonnaded Roman road, and beyond.

After a visit to a small archaeological museum, Hamad left us to our own devices. It was 11:00 am by now, so Laura and I figured we had time for the optional hike up to al-Deir, or the Monastery, before lunch. The climb, along a winding route of 900 stairs cut into the mountain rock, took us about 45 minutes. I don't think either of us knew what to expect from the Monastery, but even if we had it would have exceeded our expectations. Much larger than the facade of the Treasury, the Monastery is more weathered and not so elaborately carved, but is still overwhelming in its size. Like most of the structures in Petra, there's only really one big bare room carved out behind the facade, but that facade is amazing.

After climbing further to overlook the vertiginous mountainous vista of the "Sacrifice View" (which came complete with a Bedouin merchant tent at the tippy top of its narrow promontory), Laura and I hiked back down to the Basin Restaurant in the center of Petra, where we had a reservation. We loaded up at the lunch buffet, going back time and again for the fresh falafels, which were the best we'd ever had. From the point, the hike back out past everything we'd already seen, scorning the frequent offers of donkey rides, took about another hour. All told, we spent over seven delirious hours at Petra. (And when I say "delirious," I sometimes mean it literally. It was hot out.)

To supplement our dead camera and Laura's iPhone, we shot 26 short videos at Petra, which I have arranged into a YouTube playlist to help give you an idea of what we saw. If you'd rather watch just one, I would recommend the eighth here, which offers the clearest shots of the Treasury, with our temporary guide Hamad almost audible lecturing about its history and design:


But if you want it all, give our complete Petra playlist a gander.

Anyway, we got back to our hotel, on foot, at about 3:30 pm. We cooled off with a couple of Petra lagers in the bar, while watching a disquieting television documentary/recreation of the Air France Flight 358 runway overshoot in 2005. Then we returned to the room and passed out until evening.

Our guide Ra'ed picked us up at the hotel at 8:00 pm. He drove us out of town into the hills, to the spring that issues from, tradition has it, the very rock that Moses struck with his staff, "and the water came out abundantly" (Numbers 20:10-11). The rock has since been enclosed in a simple domed structure to keep the elements out, but anyone can enter and have a drink. The spring has produced fresh water continuously for millennia, and the water is damn good.

We drove back into town where Ra'ed took us to a little cafe for coffee, tea, hummus, tahini, and so forth. Over dinner, he talked to us about Islam for two hours—pretty much everything a Westerner might want to know but was afraid to ask. Fascinating conversation, though I'm naturally suspicious of fourth-hand accounts of scientific findings that prove the divine origin of the Qu'ran (or the Bible, or the Book of Mormon, or Dianetics). Yes, folks, it turns out there is1 a valid reason that if a fly lands in your food you should dip the little beastie in it before flicking it away. At least if you trust hearsay.

Nonetheless, it was an educational and encouraging evening, and we were sad to see our trip's last major day of sightseeing end.

[Now that we've been back for more than a week, maybe I should get cracking on these last few trip updates.]

Wednesday, May 28, was another travel day, though we did get to enjoy another fine hotel buffet for breakfast and some more relaxation on the Dahab shore before the next van came calling for us. We loaded up at 11:00 am, then rushed north up the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba to Taba.

Our ferry was supposed to leave for Aqaba, Jordan, at 2:00 pm. At the appointed hour, however, it hadn't yet arrived, so our guide and driver Hassan suggested we retire to a nearby cafe and have some coffee while we waited. From the open-air cafe, we had a perfect view of the ferry's long approach, so we were back to the dock in plenty of time to get run through customs and have our Egyptian exit visas stamped in our passports.

In the process, an X-ray machine detected the presence in my suitcase of a fancy multi-tool pocketknife, and I discovered that the word "Leatherman" is one of the unexpected words in the lexicon of Egyptian immigration officers. As in, "Your Leatherman must stay with the captain of the ferry during your transit."

I never did get it back.

Even from out in the middle of it, the Red Sea has water of the most incredible, pure, deep, inky blue that I have ever seen. Still, I don't like water very much, so by the time over an hour and a half later when what we had been told would be a voyage of forty minutes or so was over, I was more than ready to put that incredible color behind me. The trip was not without its excitement, though. At one point Laura and I were staring aft from the passenger deck (otherwise crowded with a Brazilian tour group) when suddenly a flapping Egyptian flag went rocketing into the water from the deck above. Obviously you can't sail into a foreign port without your colors flying, so the ferry circled around so a young hand could try to fish the flag out of the sea with a boathook. Unfortunately, the flag became waterlogged and sank before it could be retrieved. No worries, though. There was a spare flag belowdecks, and soon we were on our way again.

A lot of countries are clustered there around the north end of the Gulf of Aqaba. Egypt has the western coast and Saudi Arabia the eastern. In between, both Israel and Jordan have a few miles of coastline. For Jordan, Aqaba is its only port city, and it's not hard to make out which port it is, not with a giant Jordanian flag larger than some ships flying from a towering pole on the shore. If that flag had gotten loose and landed on our ferry, we would have been in serious trouble.

Our Jordanian guide and driver, Ra'ed, met us at the port, helped us clear immigration, and then took us for falafel sandwiches at a sidewalk cafe in the city. The first thing you notice about Aqaba is how much cleaner and more entirely modern it seems than any city in Egypt. You can spot the poverty if you look a little closer though; most of the menial workers, kitchen help and the like, are Egyptian.

We had a tense few minutes when the first and second ATMs I tried in Aqaba refused to give me any dinars. Laura and I were afraid our bank had finally gotten sick of seeing all these Middle Eastern transactions and cut us off. Then I realized that the error message I was getting said "Invalid amount." So instead of trying to withdraw 150 dinars at a pop, I withdrew 50 dinars twice and 100 dinars once. So glad transaction limits are in place.

As evening fell, Ra'ed drove us north through the Wadi Rum, the spectacular desert valley where Lawrence of Arabia based his operations during the Arab Revolt (and where David Lean filmed the movie). We saw many Bedouin encampments as we wended our way into the mountains. (Certain Bedouin tribes are allowed to wander at will across the Jordanian–Saudi Arabian border.) Many fancy Bedouin pickup trucks, too.

At last we reached the city of Petra, where we were installed in the Petra Palace Hotel. After settling in, Laura and I descended to the bar for a couple of pints of the locally brewed Petra lager, and a couple of games of foozball. We struck up an acquaintance with a local named Ibrahim, a horse-handler at the ruins who regaled us with the tale of how he met and wooed his British tour-guide wife as he kicked my ass at foozball.

As excited as we were to see the famous ruins the next day, it wasn't difficult to get to sleep that night.

[Writing in Cairo hotel room, hoping to stay up all night in preparation for sleeping through our 7:35 am flight to Paris.]

According to the original plan, we shouldn't have been on that overnight train back to Cairo at all. This was the first leg of our two-day journey from Luxor to Petra, and it was supposed to have started first thing Tuesday with a drive east to Hurghada, a resort city on the western shore of the Red Sea. From there we were to take a ferry to Sharm al-Sheikh, another Egyptian resort city, this one on the western shore of the Gulf of Aqaba. We would spend the night in Dahab (yes, another resort city), and then continue on our way from there.

We had been informed of the change in plan on Friday evening, our first evening in Cairo. We were sitting at an outdoor cafe near the train station at the end of our sightseeing day with Shiko our guide and our three new Australian friends. I was smoking a shisha, and Shiko was favoring a distinctly reluctant Jemima with a rather flirtatious palm-reading when the Egyptian agent of our tour company showed up. He had some news for Laura and me.

It seemed he had just learned that the ferry from Hurghada to Sharm al-Sheikh would not be running the day we needed it. It seemed, also, that he had known this might be a possibility, but hadn't let us know any sooner. His alternate plan would be for us to take a train back to Cairo from Luxor, then ride a bus from Cairo to Dahab. He said the bus would take six hours.

Let's just say of the very calm argument that followed that it is an unwise man who gets on Laura's bad side. Especially over poor planning. And doubly especially when the unwise man is trying to tell her a bus ride will be a good thing, when bus rides make Laura carsick.

To make a long story short, we arrived back in Cairo on the train Tuesday morning only an hour late. Shiko and the travel agent were both there to greet us, together with the news that the company had decided to offer us a private van instead of the bus. And that fast, we were hustled into the van and the van was on its way.

What is there to say about a seven-hour van ride across the Sinai Peninsula? It was no Death Race 2008, though it did have its harrowing moments. We were becoming more accustomed to the idea that Egyptians regard lane markers and dividing lines as little more than interesting suggestions, especially on empty two-lane desert highways, but we hadn't yet come to terms with it fully.

There were cool moments, too. Did you know that one crosses the Suez Canal by taking a tunnel under it? I didn't. And did you know that camels enjoy hanging out at filling stations? Well, here's proof:



Dahab, when we reached it, was a revelation. The Sinai Peninsula juts south into the Red Sea, splitting it in two at its north end. The western arm is the Gulf of Suez, while the eastern arm is the Gulf of Aqaba. That's the one our hotel in Dahab looked out on, and the water had a pure, deep, inky blue color I have never seen the like of. If we had to have a way station on the journey to Petra, this would definitely do.

Laura and I spent the afternoon walking along the beach, lounging with books under umbrellas, and napping. For dinner, we enjoyed a sumptuous and delicious Egyptian buffet in the hotel restaurant, looking out of course at the water. And that night, after dark, we took the hotel shuttle into Dahab proper, strolled along their equivalent of the Boardwalk looking at souvenirs and dive shops, tarried a while at an internet cafe, and sorta kicked ourselves for eating at the hotel and not saving ourselves for one of the cabanalike restaurants serving tropical drinks on the water.

We stopped in at a T-shirt shop for some souvenirs specifically because the owner didn't hassle us as we strolled down the street. Laura picked out three shirts, then proceeded to haggle for them like a pro. She managed to work the price down from 150 LE to 125. My favorite line of the whole exchange came from the young merchant, as he sliced beneath his chin with an extended finger: "Seventy-five pounds?! That is cut-my-throat price! One-forty."

And then we rode the shuttle back to the hotel and turned in. It was the most relaxing day of our trip.

[Writing in our hotel room back in Cairo again. I have an internet connection, but can't seem to reach the mail relay server that will let me send email.]

After about four hours on the train Sunday evening, we reached Luxor. It was not exactly a comfortable train ride, since we didn't have a private sleeper car and we were hot and cramped. But we were determined to put the bad and discouraging aspects of our trip behind us.

As soon as our new guide Ibram met us at the station (and, by the way, I am certain that I am massacring even the loose art of transliteration with all our guides' names), we felt the tide had turned. Young, short, and rotund, Ibram was nonetheless filled with a contagious enthusiasm about Luxor. Laura asked him if we could stop for fast food on the way to the hotel, and he and our driver were more than happy to accommodate our wish. We scored some tasty falafel and shawarma sandwiches from a walk-up cafe, and we polished them off long before reaching the hotel.

The hotel itself was beautiful, and from the balcony—yes, balcony!—of our spacious fifth-floor room we could see out across the Nile. When we awoke on Monday, colorful hot-air balloons were drifting through that view, over a glistening, glimmering green landscape on the far side of the river. Our morning itinerary was set, but the for the afternoon itinerary we had three options to choose from, one of which was a balloon ride. Seeing the balloons there in the morning light made me a little sad that we hadn't selected that option. But not too sad, because I really had no desire to see Laura huddled in an acrophobic lump on the floor of a gondola.

We had chosen to start our tour bright and early, and the hotel provided boxed breakfasts for us to take with us. Our first destination was the Valley of the Kings, where we entered three of the sixty-two tombs that have been discovered there and excavated: the tombs of Ramses I, Ramses III, and Ramses IV. Next stop: Hatshepsut's Temple at Deir el-Bahri, a magnificent site that can be seen from the city of Luxor, miles away up a mountainside. After that we hit the Valley of the Queens, where we entered the amazingly colorful tomb of Nefertari, wife of Ramses II. We also saw the tombs of two of the sons of Ramses III, which also meant seeing the mummified baby or fetus that was found near the sarcophagus of Amun-her-khepeshef. I felt like I was seeing something from "Ripley's Believe It or Not." Laura was just creeped out.

We closed out the morning with a stop at the Memnon Colossi, then broke for lunch. Ibram deposited us at a riverside buffet restaurant where we, once again, gorged ourselves. Then he took us to Luxor and Karnak Temples, which was our choice of afternoon activity. Let me say that neither of us was prepared for the scale of Luxor Temple, and triply unprepared to have the scale of Karnak Temple dwarf that. "Blown away" would be putting it mildly. I can only hope that the awe in our voices comes through on the video we shot, which I'll try to get uploaded to YouTube shortly after we return.

After that, we whiled away a lazy afternoon and evening. We wandered a few blocks from our hotel, fending off unusually aggressive merchants (and this in a country of aggressive merchants). While Laura read on the hotel's back patio, I slipped over to the next hotel to spend an hour on a computer in their business center (since the Lotus's own connection was down). I then joined her on the patio, where we drank mineral water and read. Eventually we wandered down to the railing at the edge of the Nile to watch the sun slip below the horizon. Then we wandered back up to our table on the patio to read peacefully and—

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

It was a noise like a giant lawnmower, coming from the direction of the water. Suddenly employees of the Lotus wer hurrying out to the patio, urging everyone to get inside, shouting a word I couldn't quite grasp. Laura and I didn't know what was going on, but one of them was reaching for my water glass and bottle, picking up my backpack.

A roiling cloud of white smoke suddenly appeared between the patio and the water, rising up like a wall, dramatic in the dusk light. Then men burst through the wall, men crouched low and running, carrying what looked like personal cannons slung low at hip level.

The white smoke was issuing from the barrels of the cannons.

That's when the word the hotel staff was shouting clicked: "Mosquito!"

Some group or another, official or not I don't know, was spraying for mosquitos—and they had turned the effort into the charge of the light brigade.

Laura and I scooped up the rest of our stuff and ran inside, trying not to breathe. In the dining room, with the door secured behind us, we watched through floor-to-ceiling glass as the blurry shapes of the men rushed past. Even inside, we could smell the foul stuff, that poisonous taste that lodges in the back of your throat and won't cough loose. We were horrified to see that the men doing the spraying were not wearing masks of any kind.

We could still smell the gas even inside the dining room, so Laura and I ascended one floor to the lobby and watched the white cloud dissipate. I felt sick for a while that evening, but I don't think there was any permanent damage.

At 8:45 pm, Ibram and our driver showed up to drive us to our train. We liked Ibram a great deal, and apparently our non-English-speaking driver liked us, because not only did he give us banana Chiclets, he also pulled over at a sidewalk cafe on the way to the station and bought us each a glass of his favorite drink—raw cane sugar juice. Well, it's better than mosquito spray.

Our train left at nine. It was a sleeper train again, this time north to Cairo. Dinner was served in our compartment, and this time we turned in early, looking forward to a 6:00 am arrival.

No time for a long post, but Laura and I are having an utterly relaxing day in Dahab, which is on the Sinai Peninsula, on the shore of the Red Sea. Our hotel is amazingly beautiful, and the water of the Red Sea is the most amazing blue I have ever seen in my life. (asphalteden, the diving here is supposed to be amazing, although according to the book in our hotel room, almost everything in the water is poisonous.)

You can see mountains directly across the water, ten to twelve miles away. That, I am told, is Saudi Arabia. Tomorrow we drive north, then cross the water in a catamaran, landing in Aqaba, Jordan.

A full account of yesterday in Luxor will come, as will an account of our adventures crossing the Sinai today. In the meantime, before Laura drags me out of this internet cafe, I will try to upload a couple of our videos to YouTube, especially the one of the baby camel wandering through our petrol station in the desert.

[Written Sunday afternoon in the Sara Hotel, Aswan.]

We awoke at 2:45 am today. Well, I awoke earlier to deal with the unsavory consequences of our delicious meal at Makka. Sorry, Ali! I promise my heart will never stray again!

The reason for the early hour was to meet our guide Ahmet at 3:30 am, and thence to meet the Abu Simbel convoy at 4:00 am. Access to Abu Simbel is restricted to certain hours of the day, so buses and cars collect at the entry point to the route in Aswan, then are released to proceed at either 4:00 or 4:30, depending on how many vehicles have gathered.

When we heard the word "convoy," we thought of a rather stately, sedate procession. What actually transpired was a road race. For three white-knuckled hours, Ahmet piloted our van through the desert like the utter fucking lunatic he is, using whichever lane was most convenient, overtaking other drivers, tailgating another van for miles at a distance of a couple of feet at I-shit-you-not what had to be eighty miles and hour or more. I'm sure there were times we hit a hundred. Laura and I were each locked in our own private hells. All we could do was try to keep our eyes closed and pretend to be asleep.

As Ahmet explained once we arrived, he had to drive fast to beat all the other guides, because he has to give us his history spiel outside the temple site because guides aren't allowed to accompany tourists into the temples because of the cacophony that produces and he needs to give us the spiel while it's still quiet on the cafeteria plaza.

Right, whatever. He's still an utter fucking lunatic.

Abu Simbel consists of another pair of temples rescued from rising Lake Nasser. The site, now on the shores of the lake, is 280 kilometers south of Aswan (a distance we covered in two and a half hours) and only 50 miles north of the Sudan border. The temples themselves are amazing, one dedicated by Ramses II to himself, with colossal Ramses II statues outside and inside, and another dedicated by Ramses II to his favorite wife Nefertari, with colossal Ramses II statues outside. Oh, and a couple of Nefertari statues, too.

It was quite startling to think that we saw the actual mummified body on Friday of the man depicted on those statues. Very weird and wonderful.

Another harrowing race through the desert followed this blissful interlude, only this time Ahmet gave a lift to an Egyptian soldier who was fairly careless with his automatic rifle. It was only pointing toward me from the front seat for a few moments before Ahmet sort of resettled it more to his liking, but now added to the thrill of the chase was the expectation that any moment a stray bump would send a volley of lead spraying through the van. Lovely.

We made it back to the hotel, though, shaken and stirred, and now are resting until our evening train to Luxor at 5:45 pm.

[Written Sunday afternoon in the Sara Hotel, Aswan.]

Saturday morning we slept in. Conveniently, our train had had some engine trouble during the night, so we wouldn't be reaching Aswan in the south of Egypt until after 11:00 am, which put us over two hours behind schedule. But this was good news for the exhausted lazyheads from Friday, who didn't have to be up at the asscrack of dawn.

In Aswan, at last, after more than fifteen hours on the train, our local tour representatives installed us in the Sara Hotel, a lovely hotel in a dusty, hilly neighborhood that's either half built or half decayed. Our guide that afternoon was a woman whose English was so thickly accented she was hard to understand for a while. (We were spoiled by Shiko's perfect English in Cairo.) She took us to the Aswan High Dam, rattling off facts and figures at a pace that was hard to follow.

After that, we drove a ways and then sailed by fellukah down the waters of Lake Nasser to the island site of Philae Temple. Philae is a temple from the Ptolemaic period, unmistakably Egyptian but with unmistakable Greek influences. It is one of the many temples and monuments that were relocated by UNESCO during the building of the Aswan Dam in the '60s. Otherwise they would have been flooded and lost.

Philae is a temple to Isis, and our guide took pains to point out the strong role of women in ancient Egypt. "Things are not so equal now," she said, the only political comment we would hear her make. (This is contrasted with hale, male Shiko, who took pains to point out to us on Friday how Egyptians still rever women.)

That evening, Laura and I took a shuttle from the hotel into town, where we had dinner at a small restaurant the desk clerk had recommended. Gorged ourselves, to be more accurate. Lamb roasted in vegetables, shish kabab, kofta, white beans, tahini, tabouli, rice, pita, mint tea ... we ate until we could eat no more, and then we ate some more. Sorry, Ali, but until later that night we were considering anointing a new Egyptian restaurant our favorite in the world.

After dinner we wandered through Aswan's souk, the market that extends blocks and blocks in every direction. We had become better at fending off pushy merchants, which is almost all of them, and then out on the main drag we got some more practice fending off beggars and hustlers. Our shuttle arrived at the prearranged location at almost the prearranged time, and whisked us back to the hotel for a few scant hours of rest.

[Written Sunday afternoon in the Sara Hotel, Aswan.]

What's most distinctive about driving the expressways of Cairo by night, at least compared to the cities I've visited, is the number of minarets you see, all lit up from within in eerie greens and oranges, or from without by gaudy neon. What impresses you once you enter heavier traffic is how Egyptians can turn a three-lane road into a five-lane road just by willing it so.

We were punchy when we came off the plane from Rome. A travel facilitator from our tour company helped us acquire visas quickly and pass through customs, then our first day's tour guide, Shiko, took over and bustled us into a van. At 4:00 am, we were settling into our room at the Zayed Hotel, and we had only three hours of sleep to look forward to before the day would begin.

At 9:15 am, we hopped back into the van with our luggage and joined three Australian travelers. Our first stop was the Egyptian Museum. I would like to describe and lovingly linger over everything we saw and learned there, but that would take days. With this, as with the monuments and temples and other sights I will mention over the next few days, you can generally assume an inverse relationship between how cool and awe-inspiring something is and how many words I spend on it. You know what most of this stuff looks like already, and otherwise I'll never catch up.

Among the big things we saw at the museum were Tutankhamen's gold masks and sarcophagi, the actual mummies of Ramses II and many other kings and queens of ancient Egypt, a collection of various royal jewelry, and a replica of the Rosetta Stone (the original being at the British Museum). What's staggering about the Egyptian Museum is not just the major pieces but the sheer size of the collection. There are rooms filled with arcane classes of objects only an archaeologist could love, but when taken together the number of artifacts boggles the mind.

We crossed the Nile to Giza, and suddenly there were the Pyramids, right on the edge of the city. Somehow I always pictured there far off in a remote corner of the desert, but no, there they are just west of town. The first view is breathtaking, but even moreso is to stand at the base, or a few levels up, and look up toward the apex. The angle is dizzying.

We didn't enter the first pyramid—not enough bang for the buck, according to our guide—but three members of our little group, me included, ponied up the 25 Egyptian pounds to enter the second pyramid. Laura, who can get claustrophobic, stayed behind. I didn't think that I got very claustrophobic myself—I've been fine in caves like Timpanogos— but something about the exertion of duckwalking down an angled shaft for fifty meters or more with no room to straighten up and barely enough room for you to pass people going the other way, then arriving at a chamber in the bottom only to realize there's still a similar incline up ahead of you, and then to emerge sweating and gasping into the hot air of the bare chamber at the heart of the pyramid—well, despite the high ceiling and comparatively generous dimensions of that room, I could barely control the panic that had arisen toward the end of the ascent, and I couldn't stay in that room for very long. The shafts down and up were bad, but somehow not nearly as bad as that room.

Fortunately, the trek back out didn't seem to take as long as the trek in. I've never been so happy to see sunlight. Laura managed to snap a picture of me at just my moment of emergence, and you can tell.

We took a camel ride out behind the third pyramid. Camels don't look quite as huge when they're lying on the ground as they do when they stand up. I don't think I ever realized just how big the things are until I watched one rise to its full standing height. The process of standing is a fascinating one, too, at least from a position perched atop one's back. First the camel stands up, then it stands up again, and just when you think you're as high as you're going to go, it stands up one more time. At the end of all this elaborate unfolding of legs, your seat is eight or nine feet in the air.

There was some excitement on the ride when Laura's camel bit Holly's, but no bloodshed or injuries resulted.

After the Pyramids, we hit the Sphinx, which is smaller than I had imagined, but no less impressive.

One thing that makes all this sightseeing less than perfectly pleasant is the continuous hassle from merchants and entrepreneurs of all sorts. Like the one that comes up and takes your hat and starts wrapping his scarf around your brow so you can be an Arab in a photo. Or the one that wants you to change his British coins to dollars. Or the one with all the dancing camel dolls, and on and on and on. The constant harassment is wearying, and you learn some sticky lessons before becoming expert and ignoring their advances.

No less wearying is the constant need to tip this person and that. We don't really begrudge the money—well, not much—but the constant confusion about who deserves tips and who doesn't, and how much, gets to be a burden very fast. Oh, the difficulty of keeping sufficient single-pound notes on hand!

A less than thrilling aspect of our Friday tour was our stops at a parchment "museum," a jewelry store, and a perfume factory. Ostensibly these were all educational stops, but of course they ended with a hard sell to purchase their products (in the case of the parchment museum, very hard). Not that the demonstration of how papyrus was made, for example, was not interesting. Does the tour company get kickbacks from the merchants? I don't know, but by the time we reached the third edumerchant, we had a bad taste in our mouths. This is too bad, because the highlights of the tour are very high indeed.

That evening, our guide deposited us at the train station where we boarded our 8:10 pm overnight train to Aswan. We ate dinner in our compartment, enjoyed a whisky in the smoky, shabby club car (I'm not sure why I assumed we'd have no alcohol in Egypt), then summoned our attendant Mohamet to convert our seats to bunks. With the door secured, we joined that club I was talking about earlier, entry to which requires no small amount of gymnastic ability in the cramped space. There will be photos and videos to come later of some of the things we did and saw on Friday, but not of that.

[Still in the Sara Hotel coffee shop.]

Laura and I slept in Thursday and set off for the airport without benefit of breakfast. We were second in line at the Alitalia counter when it opened, and we got booked in prime seats all the way through to Cairo. For both flights, we were in the first row of the economy cabin, left of the aisle. Instead of three across, that row on that side had two seats with a baby-sized seat in between. We had plenty of elbow room between us.

This, for Laura, was the real beginning of the vacation. We landed in Rome at about 3:45 in the afternoon. Our flight for Cairo would leave at 10:15 pm. That gave us six and a half hours to play with. At Laura's suggestion, we spent it on a Roman excursion. It was probably ill-advised, but we managed to pull it off.

Once we found the airport train station, we learned that the Leonardo Express would take us from Fiumicino Airport to Termini Station in Rome in thirty minutes. We bought tickets for both directions. We made it into Rome at about 5:10 pm. We explained to a young man at a tourist information kiosk that we wanted to know what we could see nearby at still be back to catch the 6:52 train to the airport. He pulled out a map and quickly sketched out a route for us.

So, with only a little initial fumbling inside the station, we took the Metro's Linea B from Termini to Colossi Station, where we got out and gaped at the Colosseum. (This is what Laura, who has been to Rome before, most wanted me to see.) With stinging eyes, we continued past the Roman Forum to the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II. From there were zigzagged along back alleys to the Pantheon, to Trevi Fountain, and to the Spanish Steps. After climbing the steps, we descended into Spagna Station and took the Metro's Linea A back to Termini Station. We made our train back to the airport with ten minutes to spare. It was our Amazing Race, and we won.

I wanted to thank the man from the kiosk, but we didn't see him again.

After making it through passport control, we had a dinner of wine, meat, cheese, and salad at a lovely little wine shop in the terminal, then boarded our flight for Cairo. We landed there at almost 3:00 am local time, completely bushed.

[Still on the train to Aswan.]

Wednesday morning Laura and I again tried the room-service breakfast. Her bagels seemed fine, but I knew ordering my "American pancakes with syrup" would be something of a gamble. What I found when I lifted the lid from my tray were French crepes with a tub of honey. This was fine. At least the crepes were browned all the way through.

As an added bonus, every room-service cart (as opposed to the trays) comes decorated with a gerber daisy in a white stem vase. We now had three sitting around the room, including the one that came with our dessert of tirimisu and creme brulee on Sunday night: one red, one pink, and one orange. It made the cheerful room even more so.

Laura needed to be at the conference all day, so after doing some work in the morning, I set off on the nearly two-hour bus journey to the south shore of Malta and the ancient temple sites of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra. Malta is not that large, but to get most places you must transfer in Valletta and then wend your way slowly through every hamlet and burg along the way. This made for much rapturous gazing out the bus window at narrow streets, yellow-washed walls, startling churches in hidden plazas, and hills divided by low walls of rough fieldstone—when my nose wasn't stuck in my copy of Culture Shock! Egypt, that is, as I crammed for the upcoming phase of our trip.

The temple ruins at Hagar Qim and Mnajdra are far more modest that I think I was expecting, for structures that are, in part, as much as five thousand years old. The scale is very human, though many of the standing stones that form the walls are monoliths a good deal taller than a man. The roofs have long since fallen in, leaving open the central corridors with semi-circular apses to either side—something like two capital B's back to back. The apses were used for burial, with older bones pushed aside and sorted by type as a new body was moved in. Both sites overlook dramatic vistas of the rocky southern Maltese shore and the Mediterranean.

The scale of these ruins was too small to generate much awe in me, but as I hiked away I was trailed by a disturbing sense of how close in nature and time we are to those ancient stonemasons, how closely together lie our parchment sheets in the book of the earth's history, and how nearly into illegibility such a recent paragraph has been pressed.

Laura and I that evening, together with Cyndee, investigated and discarded several suggestions from the guidebook before defaulting to a fancy Italian place on another terrace over another bay. The wine and food were lovely, though every few minutes, it seemed, another drape was drawn across another of the dwindling number of open spaces around the terrace. By the time we left, we were enclosed in a plastic cave.

After dinner we set off into the night on Gelato Quest 2. [I have now caught up with transcription of the handwritten journal, though the nearby intermittent wi-fi signal is not sufficient to let me post these entries. I am sitting in the coffee shop of the Sara Hotel in Aswan, with Saturday evening approaching. I just had some coffee and a bit of chicken shawarma to keep me going. It's very hot outside, but nothing like what it would be like in full summer. Strangely, the European Champions League game is being replayed on the television here in the coffee , with Arabic commentary. John Terry just slipped again on his penalty kick.] Laura wanted gelato again, and I wanted fig gelato. We made our way through the crowds spilling out of bars that were showing the European football championship between Manchester United and Chelsea, live from Moscow. Almost half the tourists to Malta, I've read, are British, and most of the rest come from countries that care about such things. We even found a public plaza showing the game on a giant screen, and stopped to watch for a while. It was hard not to get caught up in the excitement.

We had to visit two separate gelaterias to find the fig stuff. Actually, we found a shop that had it first, but we wanted to visit a second, larger shop we knew of to see if they had it too. The second shop did not, but that didn't mean we didn't stop there and gorge ourselves. I showed restraint in having only one scoop at the second shop—pannacotta—then a second scoop of fig at the first shop on the way back to the hotel. It was as good as I had hoped, by which I mean it tasted like figs and felt like gelato. Yum.

Back in our room, Laura and I watched the rest of the football match, biting our nails though we had no stake in the outcome. What a game! It was well after midnight when we got to sleep.

[It's Thursday afternoon, and we just boarded our Alitalia flight back to Rome. I'm writing this in a black vinyl-bound journal with a skull-and-crossbones on the cover that I got for my 40th birthday. When I next have the chance, I'll copy this back into my blog.]

Tuesday morning at the Intercontinental, Laura and I opted to have only coffee delivered to the room. My Monday morning order of French toast with cinnamon had been disappointing in the extreme. The four slices were all still soggy with egg batter in the middle. I had eaten around the edges and tried not to gag. The Intercontinental may be a 5-star hotel, but it gets no more than four, maybe three, in my book. The internet connection, via ethernet cable, is not very reliable, and neither is some of the concierges' advice.

I spent the morning working in the room while Laura attended her morning conference sessions. At noon-thirty, I ran into Laura and her colleague Cyndee in the lobby, just as I was heading to the hotel bar in hopes that I could sneak in a pint of Cisk (the local lager, pronounced chisk) before they arrived. They had to run to the rooms and change, so I gulped down a half-pint that looked larger than that. By the time I was done, they were back, and we all took the bus to Valletta.

Valletta on a weekday is far different from Valletta on a Sunday. Very crowded, every shop open, from the tiniest silversmith to McDonald's and Burger King. Our first stop was at a gelateria because our quest for gelato for Laura had ended in disappointment the night before. [Beginning to taxi.] Laura was very happy with her Valletta gelato, but I had already been served my two scoops when I spied the tub of fig gelato. I enjoyed my pistachio and "banofee"—banana toffee—but became fixated thereafter on finding and trying fig gelato elsewhere.

We next visited the Palace of the Grand Masters, where, faced with a choice between paying to tour the state rooms, the armoury, or both, we chose the state rooms. (I knew my vote for the armoury would count for naught against two state-room votes, so I abstained.) [Takeoff. Flying now over blue-green lagoons, and now out over the Mediterranean. The surface looks wrinkled somehow, with still blue veins running through it like cracks in a pudding skin. Currents?] The state rooms were certainly impressive, rich and baroque, together with the long galleries lined with portraits of all the Grand Masters of the Knights of Malta. Most interesting to me, though, was that past a velvet rope, through an archway, and up a short flight of stairs that curved around a wide column, you could read the plate beside the door that led to the office of the president of Malta.

We wandered around Valletta window-shopping for a while longer, then hopped the bus back toward St. Julian's. Laura and Cyndee debarked somewhere between Valletta and Sliema, hoping to find the Zara they had spotted on the way out. (Too soon, it turned out, and that was my fault.) I stayed on board, intending to find food in St. Julian's. Not just any food, either, but fish and chips, which I somehow had a hankering for. (The women weren't hungry. Having stuffed ourselves the night before, I think Laura's exact phrase, gelato aside, was "I never want to eat again.")

In St. Julian's, I walked confidently into a bar I had noted a few times earlier, the Scotsman Pub. Two different signs outside [pen starting to leak! ink disaster!] promised British fish and chips within. I strolled on up to the bar past the only two patrons, took a seat in a spot under a light [pens nearly impossible to use on plane—now Saturday morning on train to Aswan] where I could read in the dimness, and waited for the bartender to arrive to take my order.

"Guinness," I said.

"Aye," he said, having emerged from the back room.

"And a menu, please."

He looked at my oddly, already sliding the glass under the tap. "We've got nae food, mate," he said. He was Scottish and shaved bald.

Confused, I shrugged and said, "Then I guess it'll just be the Guinness."

Hey, it's a meal in itself.

Outside, I verified that fish and chips were indeed advertised, chalked it up to Malta, and continued in search of food.

Most places I saw didn't look very appealing, whether because they served burgers and pizza, or because of the young, rowdy, hip clientele and the improbably of reading in peace. I found what looked to be a fine little Turkish doner stand, but peering around inside I could locate no actual worker.

This is how I ended up, at last, at the Hard Rock Cafe, eating a damn burger and fries and drinking the worst caipirinha in the history of Brazilian commerce. I bought a T-shirt for my son in the gift shop, in part to justify my appalling lapse of taste.

Later that evening, I met Laura and Cyndee and we set out for beverages and light food. We sat in the far corner of the terrace at a place called Paparazzi, overlooking one of St. Julian's several small bays. I had a gin smash. When I ordered a silver cloud after that, the waitress commented that I must be out to try everything on the cocktail list. My mixed salad plate was loaded with capers, Maltese sausage, gbejniet, over-dried tomatoes, paté, olives, and more. I shared my bounty in exchange for pizza slices—good individual pizzas—from Laura and Cyndee.

We went to the tenth-floor hotel bar at the Intercontinental for one last nightcap (I was trying to tank up, I think, for nine days in the dry desert), where on the spectacular open-air plaza that even higher balconies look down on from three sides, the Welsh bartender and I had a laugh at our mutual inability to comprehend the other's pronunciation of "Laphraoig." He told us that the Maltese and Italians often ask him to speak English. Laura had a Johnny Walker Black, Cyndee a half-pint of Cisk, and we all jumped when the fireworks went off, out of sight, just the other side of the hotel tower, with a sound like artillery. It sounded like a war.

That scared us. What scared the cockroach making its way toward us across the plaza was two waiter dropping a table they were putting away for the night. That spurred the cockroach to flight. The scurrying kind of flight, that is, not the flying kind.

The bar closed at midnight. And that was Tuesday.