Vacation Memories : Friendly Welcome Wagon in Land of the Sphinx

A cynic would say Mohammed, a cab driver in Cairo, is a scoundrel, a clever merchant on wheels, a tourist-seeking missile.

In truth, however, Mohammed is a gentleman, a four-wheeled Chamber of Commerce, Cairo’s own Welcome Wagon.

For what hidden reason other than the goodness of his Mediterranean heart would he take two travelers who were 10,000 miles from their home into his home, bid them to rest on his monumentally overstuffed couches, feed them just-picked basketball-shaped watermelons and serve them teas of unexpected, exhilarating flavors?

There were no tips for doing these things, no bargained higher tariff, no admission charge to his home, to meet his wife and father and brother and to talk about such common topics as growing up, starting a family, building a future, East and West.

Daylong Odyssey

My daughter and I met Mohammed at our Giza hotel and later hired him to show us Cairo in an itinerary of his own choosing, a daylong odyssey. From the massively proportioned hilltop Citadel to the mystifying streets of the Old City to the Khalil Bazaar to the Cairo Tower to the Great Pyramids he whisked us artfully through legendarily frenetic traffic.

He always allowed us time to sightsee, ask questions, examine museum exhibitions, all the things tourists tend to do, but we seemed to do it as friends, not as partners in a business transaction. At the end of the day came his invitation to meet his family at his home near the Sphinx to share some tea. (In the Middle East you do not ignore, reject or refuse an invitation to tea. It is a rudeness of the lowest order.)

Mohammed said he’d call for us at the hotel and get us back at a proper hour. No charge, of course.

A Different Side

Therefore, Mohammed’s name is offered up to some future Traveler’s Hall of Fame. For actions beyond the call of a taxi driver’s duty, he showed us a side of the world no slide show, tour guide or travelogue could. For one evening we were not part of a herd going from a Sound and Light Show to a City at Night tour. We were taken home.

In six weeks of travel in West Africa, the Middle East and France we visited or found shelter in private homes in almost every country we visited. In looking back, these visits stand out far stronger than any hotel, bus tour or programmed outing. Almost none of the visits had been planned. We simply saw opportunities and took them.

Our first home visit was in Senegal, that bulge of West Africa that reaches westerly into the Atlantic, so far westerly that it is two time zones closer to the United States than is Paris far to the north.

My daughter, Eden, was completing her two-year Peace Corps assignment and, of course, we had to experience village life. The first home was in the Wolof tribal village of Keur Sadaro several kilometers outside of Senegal’s second largest city, Thies, in dry central Senegal. It is a lonely way station against the earth-destroying Sahel (drought area) moving south from Mauritania.

Protests Translated

Because I was a visitor and therefore a guest, the home of one of the village chief’s wives became our residence, despite our translated protests about unsettling anyone.

(In some regions of Senegal the government has developed tourist facilities at certain villages. Some American travel agencies that specialize in African tours and such airlines as Air Afrique and Air France can supply material on West African tours.)

The interior of our home had space for two beds and a pair of wooden cabinets. The baked-earth walls and aluminum roof provided coolness from June’s feverish temperatures, and the house’s one window opened onto my host family’s courtyard by day and a concert of stars by night.

Water for washing was drawn from a well, and we drank Celia, West Africa’s Evian. We washed out back, behind a low screen of palm fronds. Because we were guests, meals were served indoors, on floor mats, around a bowl where we were instructed to use our right hands only (a Moslem sanitary tradition).

Holy Month

Because Islam’s holy month of fasting, Ramadan, was coming to an end (as soon as the uncertain new moon would appear) city-dwelling relatives started arriving in Keur Sadaro to celebrate. At night, visitors and villagers sat or sprawled on mats casually arranged on the swept-earth clearing while a portable radio in the background was tuned loudly to Koranic prayers.

Toward midnight a traditional tea ceremony was conducted. With simplicity and minimum ceremony a young man poured the boiling, sweetening tea from a constantly greater height, forming a head on the tea a brewmaster would have relished.

The next day, Ramadan was declared ended. Now it was time for fete, to visit at each household and to share gifts. It all seemed ironic and sad, for not far from this yellowish, dusty, drying land was the tragic drought.

Later in another area of Senegal, in the Basse Casamance district south of the country’s capital, Dakar, we found other shelter with the Diola people of Djimande village. This time we did not dislocate any villagers for we settled in my daughter’s hut next to the chief’s home. Here, too, the homes held the basics: an earthen water jug, a bed, mosquito net, some mats.

Village’s Oldest Man

We were invited to visit the village’s oldest man where we saw our first Diola porch. In California terms you might call it an atrium, a portico, an enclosed entry. In local terms the porch is an outdoor room indoors, a large room built as part of the house’s exterior walls and roofed over with the rest of the house with large openings as windows.

Our next invited stop was the home of the village’s marabout, the ranking Muslim religious leader and son of a revered marabout. We moved from room to darkened room, rooms that were cool and a welcome change, even at night, from the constant heat.

In another Diola village we visited the home of a chef du village . This large building of multiple rooms had concrete rather than brushed-earth floors, a sign of affluence, plus a true rarity, a window screen built by a former Peace Corps volunteer.

Most interiors of the village huts we visited were sparsely furnished, for they are designed exclusively for shelter.

Volunteer House

At other times in Senegal we visited residences maintained for Peace Corps volunteers either as rest and recreation pit stops or as overnight travel stays. In Thies the volunteer house is tucked into a residential neighborhood behind a wall of bougainvillea, its broad French colonial porch a sometimes gathering place.

In Ziguinchor to the south there was a relatively modern upstairs apartment in the “suburbs,” but another Peace Corps residence in town was above a main street that seemed by day or night to be filled with shoppers, mopeds, pitchmen and assorted vehicles.

Inside we discovered the most decorated bathroom possibly in all of West Africa, walls that were plastered with colorful advertisements for Leona M. Hemsley’s Park Hemsley Hotel. The proprietor of that upscale New York hotel paradoxically had become a pinup favorite.

A few weeks later, far from Senegal’s rural home life, we made connections with another time, another people as we traveled to Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. There came the kind of peripatetic luck the uncommitted traveler dreams about, one of those calls to a friend of a friend of a friend who had pressed upon you a name and number to look up before you left. In this case the name and number led to an unexpected offer of a weekend apartment in the center of the Old City.

Old Roman Center

Our “home” was in the multilevel Cardo, the old Roman center of Jerusalem. Three levels beneath us we could see excavated Roman columns, walls and artifacts 4,000 years old. Below us was a rebuilt commercial district, planned and constructed following the Six Day War: art galleries, restaurants, museums and other historic landmarks.

And above all of that, an assortment of two-level apartments of Jerusalem stone and a flat roof with a 360-degree view of the whole region--Mt. Scopus, the new city, the rest of the Old City.

On our first morning in the Cardo we were awakened by the amplified call to Muslim prayer from a mosque. An hour later a church (was it the Armenian one, the Scottish one?) sounded its chimes.

You could stand on the roof or open the metal shutters and hear thousands of years of history or live in the present by walking one road to an Arab bread merchant or an Armenian kebab stand or a kosher dairy cafe. Archeology is a religion in the sector and religion a living, diverse preoccupation.

Programmed Conveniences

Next time in Jerusalem we’ll pass up the hotels with programmed conveniences and take our chances again in a home or an apartment. We’ll take as many names and numbers as our fists can hold.

On this trip we made Paris our final stop; we had the name and number of a news colleague now firmly enmeshed in French life with husband, daughter and a top-floor apartment near the Bois de Vincennes. In the lingering light of a long Parisian evening we drank wines while watching Paris become bathed in light.

The scene called to mind an earlier evening in Cairo when we stood on the roof of Mohammed’s house. Our taxi friend signaled toward the illuminated Sphinx less than a kilometer away. The night was warm, with an occasional breeze.

“That is my Sphinx,” Mohammed said. “Sometimes before the day begins I come up here and watch the sun awaken the Sphinx. I have my first cigarette and think and we are as one person, my Sphinx.”

Mohammed drove us back to our hotel and we thanked him for the evening, the visit and the special meeting with his Sphinx.