Amsterdam

Schiphol, the airport that feels like one long corridor.

Decided what I'm really proud of this trip: my gear. Packed and planned everything that was useful and nothing that wasn't. This little XDA has connected through GSM in the desert, GPRS in Egypt's cities, Wifi in hotels, and now 3G in the Netherlands. It's kept me in contact and on the web, just enough to matter. And I've taken over 400 photos with it, too.

Clothes: right again, lightweight travel pants with pockets and sportswear that dries in minutes and keeps me sweat-free in the heat of the summer. Add to these a few essentials - like my sheet sleeping bag, Leatherman tool and folding knife / fork / spoon set - and my gear has just never been a burden.

And I've decided now that I want another international role. International business and capital flows, the airborne infrastructure of skills and people, the intermeshed ideas and executions that drive economies. I just like being part of this stuff too much to let it go.

So: the 'pump is going international again. Not just clients in other countries; I mean pan-regional accounts where I can affect decisions and strategy across borders, nation-states and languages. With some things, you just don't realise how much you miss them until they stop for a while.

Shadows and dust

Revisiting Saqqara, one of the oldest sites in Egypt. Five thousand years since the first stone was laid here. In its heyday, it must have looked magnificent: Djoser's stepped pyramid overseeing halls, streets, temples, apartment complexes, plazas...

...and now, Saqqara's magnificence has gone the way of all things. On my last day in Egypt, I feel sad. But it's a good kind of hurt. A pain that keeps you humble, knowing nothing we create can truly endure, and that to think otherwise is arrogance.

Several of the many pyramids here are barely recognisable as manmade. The vague etchings of Ti's tomb and the odd remaining bit of pigment on stone testify that all we can ever build will eventually crumble.

All is just shadows and dust.

And on that note, I take my leave of Egypt, for now.

It's an amazing place, Egypt, the verdancy of the Nile Valley contrasting with the hardscrabble hopes of the desert and the hardline fundamentalism of Islam with the friendliness and tolerance of its people. And Cairo is a worthy capital. Like Tokyo and Paris rolled into one with the technology drained out, architecture and infrastructure creaking and patina'd but kept functional by twenty million pairs of practical hands, hands permenantly dusted with the oil of an engine, the flaky crust of a warm pita, or the sand that laughs at our attempts to keep it back.

This city in the sand contains a million little adventures, and I've enjoyed every one of them, from Fahti's little metre-square museum to a shop selling nothing but pepperpots, from the contemplative moments over a mango juice in the Excelsior coffee shop to the frentic cotton and carats of the souqs.

Even Cairo will, one day, be just shadows and dust. But until that day, it's a little bit *my* city too.

The Arab Merchant's Operations Manual

So you've decided to become a merchant selling to tourists in Egypt? Wonderful! Welcome to an exciting international life of bonhomie, interesting conversations, and the possibility of great wealth. Here are the rules yoù must live by to make a success of it.

1. Talk to them. Every obvious foreigner must be stopped on the street, by force if necessary (standing in their way and grasping an arm, leading into a firm hanshake, is the preferred method) and engaged in conversation. You must ask their name, although it is not necessary (or desirable) to remember these; addressing the tourist as "Hello Mister', or better still by nationality ('Hello Mister English') is much better. Remember: they get stopped 100 times an hour, but they secretly love it.

2. Learn their national idioms. Most tourists only stay a few days, so when you say 'Lovely jubbly' to a South Londoner they will not realise that 100,000 Egyptian tour guides have been taught this phrase. Nor will they question the fact that you have a friend in Yorkshire and that your wife's family is from Surrey. On the contrary, they will adore you for it.

3. Tea. You've got to have tea. Carry cheap Lipton teabags everywhere and invite tourists to tea at the drop of a hat. It is amazing how often a 2p teabag can produce the sense of obligation needed to separate a tourist from the $100 in his pocket on the spot.

4. Hide your merchandise in hard-to-reach places. When a tourist expresses interest, this enables you to demonstrate great effort in giving customer service: you will appear to be reaching up to high shelves, diving under tables etc, all in an apparent desire to give the best possible attention to the tourist.

5. The 'camel gambit' - offering camels in exchange for the tourist's wife / girlfriend / sister - has lost currency recently, owing to heavy inflation: offering less than 200 camels seems to produce no interest these days. Only engage the camel gambit if you're a) a really credible liar, or b) you're really bored of your camels.

6. Remember: if you really want to make a sale, it is vitally important that your daughter is getting married tomorrow, and that today's shop profits will all go to offset her wedding costs, so the tourist will be saving an entire family with his purchase. It is not necessary to have a daughter for this gambit.

7. Making a sale is just the start. If the tourist walks away with his purchase, you have failed. He must be persuaded to visit / take tea with / contribute to the daughters' weddings of all the other merchants in your souq, and if possible other souqs as well.

8. Remember, any comment at all from the tourist indicates desire to purchase. Utterances such as 'The papyrus is very colourful / the perfume smells wonderful / the model Tuthankamen mask isn't really right for my lounge' should all be taken as synonyms for 'I would like to pay you a great deal of money right now.'

9. Refusal to buy from you is of course extremely rude, and must be met with loud cries of hurt indignation, which should continue down the street, following him if necessary, until he is out of earshot. This of course signals the presence of a target to your brother merchants, giving you credos in the absence of profit.

10. And if all that doesn't work for you, your mosque has some excellent preachings that will focus your mind wonderfully on what we should really be doing with Westerners. Allah akhbar!

The depths of the souq

Few retail experiences are as intense as an Arab market.

Alexandria's souq takes up dpzens of streets around my hotel, and as night falls, further streets materialise: vehicles and spaces co-opted to define fresh little passageways filled with merchants. I plunge in to explore.

The outer layers of the souq are still street vendors, the retail underclass, but as I press in I climb the social strata quickly. The most important merchants are those owning actual buildings within the labyrinth, their shops at the centre of the commerce, stores with the highest footfall and the most determined customers. The shops at the centre of the souq even sell to other merchants: their homespun jewellery is on sale in a dozen places closer to the souq's edges, from wares-on-a-rug hawkers to smoky emporia thick with gold and perfume. Little franchise operations with licensed territories just twenty metres in diameter.

I'm among such jewellers now, 18k gold and silverware shining in windows. Unlike Cairo's Khan-al-Khalili, few merchants call me out; this isn't tourist territory, and they have no time for those not buying. I press on.

Whole interlocking economies exist within this maze, raw materials exchanged and processed into finished goods. Fluffy cotton bols and finished tailored shirts exude from neighbouring stalls like squeezed toothpaste, fat rolls of textiles lolling flabbily on shelf stacks four metres high. Perhaps the business-to-business sector is where the real action is in a souq. Perhaps this Arab version of just-in-time logistics works as efficiently as any Western conglomerate, complex software and supply chains replaced by the simple action of... Listening to what's happening in the alley outside your shop.

A tray of eclairs sits on the pavement, thirty centimetres from the traffic that somehow stop-starts through the seething crowds. Teamen thread past, urns shouldered.

I realise I'm lost, lost in the maze of gold and perfume. Unsure of retracing, I strike out for the market's edges, and fight my way onto the Corniche I breathe in the Med and look around.

I'm a long, long way from my hotel; it takes nearly half an hour to walk along the seafront to the landmark I recognise. Heading for my hotel, the souq beckons again, even as I catch sight of my third floor window. Maybe one more time...

Beat

Today I got tired, and I think it has something to do with... Breakfast.

Left the hotel (a cheerful brownwood-floored and whitewashed block) at ten after an uninterrupted eight hours' sleep, and fo the first time in weeks decided breakfast would be a Good Idea. There are three famous cafes on the Square in glorious Art Deco, the Athenios, Delices, and Trianon, and I'm determined to have a coffee at each one.

Some pastries and caffeine later, I search for the Graeco-Roman Museum. The map's awful and when I find it - two hours later - I discover it's been closed for renovating since Sep 2005. Deflating.

And as I walk back towards the seafront, I start feeling oddly tired, as if the accumulated sleep debt of the last few weeks has suddenly kicked in. Instead of walking around the harbour to Fort Qaitbey - built with stone salvaged from the old Lighthouse at Pharos - I cut back to my room and finish the last of my holiday reading, Kerouac's 'On the Road', in a slight fatigued haze. It's 5:30 before I'm ready to hit the streets again. But at least breakfast this morning has taught my body how to be hungry again.

Hunger for knowledge

So I'm having a latte at the Library of Alexandria, looking out into the harbour where the Lighthouse at Pharos once stood - and that sounds so freakin' hilarious I think I'll just say it out loud, twice - and wondering why I'm not hungrier as I blog into my PDA's thumbboard.

Dinner last night was the first meal in 30 hours; I haven't eaten since then, and it's now 7:30pm. Nor do I feel I want to, and after three weeks off the wine I'm not craving for a glass of the red stuff, either. I thought things would change once I hit the nice cool temperatures of Egypt's north coast*, but they haven't.

I wonder if the intensity of experiences I've had is substituting somehow? Maybe I'll become a "fifth level Vegan" as in the Simpsons episode, eating "nothing that casts a shadow."

Time for some fish. I'm sure I'll enjoy it when I get there.

*34 degrees C.

If I could just see...*

It strikes me as I fall asleep that I'm within of km of at least one, and am within a day's travel of at least three more, Wonders of the Ancient World.

Not sure without googling if the Library at Alexandria was a wonder, but if so my hotel practically sits on its site, while the brilliant version 2.0 is a short walk along the seafront. A ride across the Med and I'd be sailing over the pile of rubble Formerly Known as the Colossus of Rhodes, or overland towards Iraq and I'd soon be in Babylon's dusty garden memories. I can see into the harbour where the Lighthouse at Pharos once stood, and and of course I was galloping horses around the Pyramids a few experiences ago. It's a nice thought to fall asleep to.

*Ref: Fleetwood Mac

Ice cold in Alex...not

Out of the desert, having failed (so far) to find a route into Libya.

So I've ended up in Alexandria, which feels less Egyptian than Mediterreanean. The people sway along nonchalantly rather than hurry frenetically, the air is flavoured with salty humidity from the nearby sea (just a street away) instead of sandy dryness, and there are far fewer headscarves.

(On those accursed headscarves: after three weeks in the Middle East, whoa, how I'm missing the sight of female flesh. I don't mean nudity, just the sight of bare legs or arms, maybe the occasional canyon of cleavage. It'd just be nicer. I mean, do Muslim builders wolf-whistle girls in burkhas, with "C'mon darlin', get yer *face* out for the boys"?)

My Cairo booking agent screwed up badly, though: instead of an aircon room with bath I've got a box with a fan. This almost defeated me earlier; felt really down. Couldn't understand why; I've slept in far worse. Until I realised my frustration resulted from not having eaten in 36 hours; I was running on empty. (In the desert you drink so much water that you don't feel hungry, and you forget about little things like taking on protein.)

Remedied that just now at Nasser, a seafront seafood see-and-be-seen place, where the fish platter has to be seen to be believed. I think I've found my dining option for the next three days.

My God! It's full of stars!*

The night owns nothing prouder than its desert sky.

I'm standing here among the White Desert's fantastic calcite forms at 1am, a klom from the two 4wds that make up camp. I can hear my nine campmates laughing as they settle into their sleeping bags; sound carries here. (Earlier an enterprising fox stole someone's shoe, perhaps PO'd he wasn't thrown the campfire chickenbones, and the group's been giggling ever since.)

I've trekked out here to watch the stars.

I've been lying on my back on the still-warm sand. Gazing up I see a sky unlike any other. In the total absence of surface light I'm not just seeing stars; I'm seeing galaxies. Not a single canopy studded with cookie-cutter sparkles, but onion layers of thousands of suns each, wrapping tiny Earth in a millefeuille of tissues, its infinity of possibilities reassuring that whatever's out there, we are not alone. It's just statistically impossible.

Watch the skies.

The Milky Way coruscates along a quarter of the sky over Egypt, its vast white fold encasing ten million suns. The first onion layer is just the pre-match show; looking beyond I see reds, yellows, in the far distance patches of fuzz that I know are whole galaxies, with millions of suns of their own Every few minutes, some pebble in the stratosphere becomes a shooting star.

I decide on impulse to strip off. Naked in the blackness, the contrast between the sand on my back and the infinity above is poetic.

Does it really go on forever? Whichever version of string theory turns out right, the universe is close enough to forever for me. I'm easily pleased. Maybe it'll end the way it began, an inflationary fireburst in reverse. Oe maybe a slow crashing collapse that'll give us a billion-year warning. Or - my personal favourite - a phase transition, some infinitely improbable quantum event (but probable, given infinite time) that converts a dying universe into a new one, waves of vacuum energy rolling over ancient space in another big bang, for planets and life to evolve afresh.

Or maybe we'll gain the powers to choose which way happens.

Lights closer to ground level. Giggles. Five of the camp, including the ultracute Taiwanese, are following my footprints and have been doing so for hours. (I made several large circuits of the area in the darkness.) I toy with the idea of remaining as I am and inviting them to join me naked, then think better of it and pull on my clothes. I walk into the small pools of light from their torches and re-enter the human realm.

*Dave Bowman's line, from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Bahariyya blues

Bahariyya Oasis is turning into the first duff experience of my trip. It's not *that* duff, just duff compared to everything else in the last two weeks. Galloping horses around the 'mids and taking a slow boat up the Nile are hard acts to live up to.

First off, the at the hotel crowd isn't gelling - a bunch of young international med students who don't seem that interested in anything plus assorted others and couples. Second, the hotel isn't exactly the Friendly Arms; these are the slowest-moving, least friendly people I've met in Egypt. Third, there's no information on what times to gather for the 4wd'ing, so everyone's milling around a lot. Not good.

Finally, there's an unbelievably gorgeous Taiwanese girl of 26 here chaperoning her med student sister, who I chatted to for an hour on the mastaba verandah last night under the stars, with the slimline body of a hungry teen and all lustrous black hair and lips like strawberries. An hour of chatting, before she casually mentioned that she's 'married already' and lives with her husband in central Taiwan. Gaaahhh. The desert oasis, a brief flowering of green hope before everything withers and dies in the emptiness, seems a particularly appropriate metaphor tonight.

Hmmmmm....

....I recognise the bus I need to take as it pulls into Cairo bus station. As I start walking towards it, it crashes into another bus. Hmmmm....

Out in the desert

Five hours west of Cairo, at the Bakariyya Oasis. After the jihad of a coach ride the resort is soothingly white and peaceful, and while isolated it still, amazingly, has GPRS reception.

Temperature according to my HAC4: 44 degrees.

Soundtrack to the desert

I was right about the crash being an omen: an hour into the journey cars start honking and it turns out the bus's luggage door is flapping like a djelleba on a breezy day.

The driver solves this by removing the door and stowing it inside the bus.

Far worse than the possibility of my belongings being strewn along a 300km stretch of desert, though, is the driver's taste in music: apparently 'Now That's What I Call Manic Koranic 50', a selection of ranting Islamic chants that's far frm easy listening. I quite like the lilting singsong of much of the muezzin crowd, but this is something else, brimstone-breathing shrieking that can only appeal to your average jihadi society. And he's playingit loud. Really loud.

Templed out at the Winter Palace

I'm all maxed with ancient architecture: after Luxor, Karnak, and the Valleys in the last 48 hours I'm getting my Amunhoteps confused with my Hatchepsuts. So time to recuperate with a pot of tea in what must be one of the great hotel experiences of the world: Sofitel's Winter Palace, on Luxor's Corniche-el-Nil.

Stepping inside - after ascending a *carpeted* outdoor staircase; it doesn't rain here - is like entering a time capsule sealed by Agatha Christie (who stayed here while writing 'Death on the Nile'.) The corridors are strewn with yellowing photos elegantly framed, standard lamps and sofas outside every suite, steamer trunks and billiard tables among the overfussily cushioned furniture... the same faded grandeur as a Mayfair gentlemen's club. It's easy to imagine a brace of retired colonels polishing their elephant-guns just around the corner in the Rendez-Vous bar, and the toilets are just awesome, brassy contraptions straight out of a Heath Robinson drawing. By keeping the original pieces in place, rather than a simulated recreation of them as at Singapore's Raffles, the place has a patina of authenticity that's simply thrilling, dahling. Not a bad experience for the price of a pot of Earl Grey.

I wouldn't have minded an extra couple of days in Luxor; it's relaxing here, and my hotel (the one I'm actually staying at, not this one) is surprisingly upmarket for $9 a night; I've had worse four-stars. But I'm heading out into the desert for a few night's camping on Monday, which means hopping the night train to Cairo tonight. And so the adventure continues.

Aspects of immortality

Living forever is something I have a vested interest in, since I plan to be around for a good few centuries myself (nanotech, biotech, and speeding red buses permitting) so mummies - like the two royals in the Luxor Museum - have always fascinated me.

The audacity of those ancient kings - in a world where lasting to your fortieth year with some teeth left made you the luckiest mofo in town, the pharoahs dreamed of living forever and *actually did something about it*, preserving their bodies in the dry desert heat and gathering their belongings around their sarcophagi in prep for the next life. All for a single, rather selfish goal: that they'd live forever.

And of course, they succeeded.

Thanks to the skills of those ancient embalmers, the faces of people who last drew breath over 4000 years ago can still be recognised. Not as abstract assemblages of bones, but as who they were in life, facial expressions and features clearly visible. You can tell what kind of people they were, whether they smiled or frowned a lot, written into their brown-papery crinkles of dried flesh. You can even tell family resemblances: this dead king is unmistakeably a close relative of that one...

And now their faces are on the plates of a thousand textbooks and seen by millions, they are living again, after thousands of years buried under the sand. Alive in our imaginations, never to be forgotten.

Nile Felucca blues

There's nothing like floating up the Nile to relax.

Back in Aswan after a side 'excursion', I joined a Felucca - a flat, triangular-sailed boat captained by an Arab crew of 3 and filled with an assortment of thirtyish backpackers on adult gap years. The boat's accommodation consists of a single huge mattress shared by all, with bathroom and washing facilities of the behind-a-bush and over-the-side persuasion. Two full days down and dirty on the Nile, eating simple vegetarian meals on board and laughing in that instant-friends way you do on the backpack trail, where people become friends in minutes because they know they'll never see each other again and making friends now just doesn't involve much risk.

It's been 72 hours of utter relaxation, detoxing (tomato stews and gritty Egyptian bread, with sweetened tea the strongest drink on board) sleeping under the stars gently swaying; I've even swum in the Nile, fighting against a 4km current and winning for a short distance before getting carried back downstream, laughing. Now in the touty tourist trap of Luxor, I'm feeling strangely annoyed with the world for chipping away intrusively at the inner peace I gained onboard Mohamed's little boat.

It'll pass. But I think I've found what I came here looking for. On that little felucca two important life realisations hardened into truths, big ones, and both require some concrete actions on my part to make them happen when I get back to London. It's just that the answers weren't in the place I thought they'd be.

(Answers like these usually come from the blood and fire of utter chaos, not the tranquility of a river. For me, anyway.)

The realisations? Let's just say there's a business plan I need to write, and a lady I need to talk to.

Over the border

Well, it took some arranging, but earlier this week I spent an adrenalin-packed 36 hours in... a country bordering Egypt, where a lot of young men take a lot of drugs and wave AK47s in your face. And the aid workers are nearly as bad. That's all I'm going to write about that little episode, since it was one of the few times my wanderlust might have landed me in real trouble.

The Egyptian Way

Somehow I thought Egyptians would be the last people on earth who'd be punctual. I spent some time with my Cairo hotel manager booking the closest thing I've ever had to a 'tour' - a pile of Post-Its with the hotel names, departure times, and guide's phone numbers that let me travel independently without the hassle of queueing at ticket windows. Yet despite this scrappy paper trail, there's been the right person/ vehicle /event waiting for me at every stop, right on time, every time. All for something I paid in cash and have no receipts for. It's great being a tourist in the low season.

Night train from Cairo

There is no chaos in the world like Cairo's train station.

There is one teller window open of a possible 19, and the queue in front of it stretches to half the local postcode. Families are yelling and luggage, great galumphing cubic metres of luggage that resemble small shipping containers, is everywhere, swathed in recycled cardboard and great whiskery fronds of string. Tea sellers do a brisk platform trade, their huge urns slung diagonally over their backs and cups dangling from their belts, human tableware. Children and leathery old women sit on the platforms, forcing other travellers to traverse their lengths in a series of brief arcs.

Steam and smoke rise from... Everything. The bittersweet clouds of sugared Liptons, the grit crunched to dust on the sleepers. The tobacco that pumps skywards in strange synchronicity with the murmurs and yelps of the travellers. Everything is wrapped in fug.

When crossing between platforms, Egyptians cut to the chase: not bothering with tunnels, they simply jump nonchalantly down onto the tracks and stroll over, pulling themselves and their vast crates of belongings up. The few platform markings are in Arabic of course - even numbers aren't decipherable - and more than one train can stand on the same platform. Tickets (non-steerage, anyway) quote train, carriage, compartment and seat number, and while I'm getting okay at numerals; the handwritten ticket just looks squiggly. But as always in Egypt, there's no shortage of people with a little English and a lot of heart. I don't just pointed to the right platform: I get led there by the hand, and it's the same when I board, people directing me all the way to my appointed place.

And once there, the chaos subsides. First class reminds me of BBC costume dramas; like much of Cairo, it's shabbily elegant, proper compartments with curtains, and I'm sharing with a doctor from Asyut and a smocked tribesman who looks like he knows eight ways to kill with a rolled-up papyrus. I settle into the journey, smilling once again at the kindness of strangers.

Fear and self-loathing in Al-Qahirah

The tug on my arm comes from a lower angle than any of the previous thousand hassles I've had on Cairo's streets today, so instead of shaking it off with a forced smile I look down. To see a boy, small and dirty and curly-headed and beautiful, no more than seven, rubbed black with the besmirch of downtown.

Then something odd happens. He grasps my forearm while I'm texting someone - I've learned five minutes previously that a girl I've been seeing is leaving London before I return, so no feminine welcome home for me in September - and *kisses* it. Not a child's kiss, but the sort of moist, lingering suction normally available only from a trained professional.

I shoo the yearning-eyed child away and cross the street, still texting.

Hours later the scene replays itself in my mind, and I realise what was really happening there. Child prostitution, the kind born of a poverty so desperate that a foreigner's sweat-and-sunblock-soaked arm represents the end of the rainbow. I shiver involuntarily, and swallow thickly.

Because of course, 'swallowing thickly' is probably what that boy is doing to some fat euro right now. I just hope the boy gets a *lot* of fat Euros for doing it.

Name me a better feeling...

...than the one you get from galloping a huge black Arabian out into the desert with the sun at your back, the magnificent beast straining against your chapped leather reinwork and sweat flying off you both...

...and then wrangling it around 180 and racing back, this time with the Great Pyramid itself as your sightline, isoceles of an Old Dead Male standing proud of the feminine dunes.

I saw Sakkara today too, but somehow even the 'prototype' stepped pyramid of Djoser - the pyramids the Egyptians built before they got good at them - can't compare to the horse thing.

Brushing with Death

First brush with militant Islam.

Cairo's City of the Dead is more than just a cemetery; families have built homes on the graves of their ancestors, and the living outnumber the dead, although I'd bet title to the land is disputable. The City takes up a quarter of the city's land area beyond the old walls, and the sense of joy among the children just - just - outweighs the unease I feel at the inevitable, yet toxic, combo of overwrought religion, zero schooling and extreme poverty.

I always trust my instincts. I trusted them when the local guides home in on the lone Westerner, and trusted them to find me the right one (in the end, a 65yo Bedouin named Fahti.) He took me into the heart of the dead, dirt streets and wood shacks, where whole dead cows hang from hooks in the midday heat and physical deformities are this season's fashion hot trend.

There are a lot of little mosques here.

Ten streets in I get the first jostle. Two streets further, someone spits. One turn on, I clearly make out 'bin Laden' in an staccato babble of Modern Standard Arabic. Instincts screaming. My guide is cool, but being challenged by onlookers a little too frequently. I start thinking: what happens if you get attacked in a place like this? A klom outside law, where family and religion is all and there's an unfortunate number of convenient pre-dug graves? I wouldn't even be news; I'd simply disappear, encased in the oral histories of no more than five extended families.

I start to genuinely speculate how far I'd get if I just... Ran. I can just about see the old City wall in the distance. A kilometre? Three minutes, outrunning yelled jihads with a daypack on my back? It can't all end here, surely?

I've got so much to live for. Business is great. Prospects are excellent. Back in London there's a woman I really care for, and she doesn't even know it yet. And besides, there's NO WAY I'm dumping my cool new phone in this place (I'd call it 'godforsaken', except that's precisely what it isn't.)

In the end, I keep my nerve. And the crowd thins as we walk in a big C back to Cairo's gates and a taxi. As I pay off my guide, I speculate on what might have happened... And how if it had, I think I'd have understood.

The Bloodspumichino

Ever seen a live goat beheaded by Bedouin while you're drinking their coffee in a 'street' just a metre wide? Wandered off-piste in al-Khalili and an hour later - outside, but beyond daylight in the souk's crevices - some bored nomads tested my mettle by using their metal on an unfortunate ovine. Made me think differently about my falafel later.

Actually, 'denial' IS a river in...

Cairo!

Paris of the east, jewel of the Nile, city of a thousand stories!

Welcome back, adventurous spirit. I've missed you. You hid inside me so long. Watching. Waiting. And as I suck coffees black as the night and sweet as a virgin teen on the backstreets of downtown, in my first true solo pleasure trip in several years, I reflect on the city I landed in just twelve hours ago (with a hefty 2am bump before customs mayhem) yet which already feels familiar.

The heat. The traffic. The salesmen, whose brilliance has cost me $30 I didn't expect to spend today (but got an experience, drinking tea on the floor of a basement fragrant oils shop for an hour sniffing and bargaining, worth far more.). The utter, utter chaos that somehow just works, the discombobulated parts ebbing and flowing and creating the emergent persistent pattern that is Cairo. I'm already jaywalking across four lanes of traffic without a second thought.

And of course, now the global village has truly arrived, I can blog about this from my PDA with roaming 3G. Brilliant.

There's never been a better time to visit...

Oh great. I've just realised that not only am I heading for Egypt two weeks since nearby Israel and Lebanon started bombing the crap out of each other and two US generals and a British diplomat state publicly that Iraq's sinking for civil war, but this week is also the 50th anniversary of the Suez crisis. Something tells me I'd better not pack my Union Jack shorts.

Surreal blog of the day

Apparently, I've been downgraded to a tropical depression. At least soon I'll be just a memory.

Doomsday for Domesday?

Hmmmmm... when I tried to look at the just-digitised Domesday Book site, I got a blank page with the single word 'mango'. A overloaded web server... or, perhaps, a sad indictment of just how little value is left in the UK after eight years of the Blair government?

"We have conducted a full census of the United Kingdom, and concluded that the only item worth recording is a small piece of over-ripe tropical fruit in a Tower Hamlets branch of ASDA."

Britain has a new oldest woman

I feel strangely happy reading about Britain's new oldest woman. Annie Knight's lived through three centuries; fought for women's rights and was a suffragette. I'd guess from the lack of quotes that she's not quite lucid, but if she's still getting through a bowl of porridge every morning she's probably got some energy left in her yet. I fully intend to be around in a century's time if luck, health, and medical science smile on me; people like her are an inspiration. Good on you, Mrs Knight.

Castro on the rocks

There's one event the criminal world has been waiting for since the mid 90s: the death of Castro. And now, it seems, that moment isn't far away.

The moment Castro croaks, every carpetbagger, shylock, drug dealer and white slaver is booking a season ticket to Havana. Almost instantly, the calendar turns back to 1958. A free-for-all of gambling, prostitution, and drugs finds a home for its money, just off the US mainland. The Carribbean, Bulgaria, Russia: their past and ongoing corruption won't even come near to what Cuba sinks into, the day after Fidel's in the ground.

Yup, the world's about to gain its newest troublespot. Like we needed any more...

Because I can

I just can't stop blogging from my new phone. Which means of course this blog becomes (even) more boringly self-absorbed, while the Middle East explodes and people in Tel Aviv and Islamabad are thinking about nukes.

I'm being stalked!

Blonde. Red sundress. Pretty in an oversimplified, Nikki-from-Big-Brother kind of way. She was on the Tube into town this morning. I also saw her an hour later, walking past me on Oxford St. And now, she's buying coffee at the counter of Borders' top floor Starbucks! Worth a moblog at least.