An offer I can't refuse.

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On my second night an old friend flies in from Colorado. Paul’s made plans to meet me for three weeks in Egypt - enough time to cruise the Nile, take a dip in the Red Sea, and hopefully get at least one snapshot with his face buried in a belly-dancer’s cleavage. It’s an ambitious itinerary by anyone’s standards, even moreso for a certain travel writer who once spent twelve days marooned in Porto, hardly making it off his friend’s couch. Paul’s prescribed a regimen of multi-vitamins and uppers to get me through the first torrid, two-week stretch. As a kid training for his first triathlon, certain feats of endurance might not seem that improbable. But I’m still struggling to work off last night’s bowl of koshary - a carb-heavy meal of pasta, rice and beans that sinks in your belly like a brick in the Nile.

With little time to spare and a few million elbows to fight off, Cairo can be a daunting town. Already we’ve spent the better part of an afternoon braving the street traffic, each crowded intersection looking like a scene from the Watts riots of ‘65. You learn a lot about the human condition by spending a few hours in a place like this. Rickety old minibuses brush bumpers and swerve from side to side. A donkey cart comes barreling down the road, a young guy riding a pile of potatoes and onions like a float in the Macy’s Parade. Buses slow by the curb, engines sputtering; I’ve watched dozens pass and not one comes to a full stop. Old women hop off and make desperate lunges for the back door, their chadors and shopping bags fluttering behind them.

At the Egyptian Museum the tour guides are swimming in predatory circles by the door. We get roped in by a fast-talking old huckster with a scarf tossed jauntily over his shoulder. He introduces himself as Moses, claiming thirty-eight years of tours and baksheesh to his credit. To see him at work is alone worth the price of admission, his septuagenarian shoulders squared and bulldozing through 4,000 years of human history. Throughout our hour he works hard to renegotiate the deal, hoping to squeeze an extra few pounds out of us by tacking on five or ten more minutes. At one point he ducks into the W.C. for a cigarette break, puffing away on his Marlboro red just a few steps from the priceless treasures of antiquity.

What began as a tour of the Egyptian Museum has more or less turned into a tour of the Egyptian Museum’s employee lounge. Moses presses a whole lot of flesh around the Royal Mummy room, introducing us as his “friends from America.” When we meet other tour guides they pat his shoulder affectionately. “He is like my father,” says one young guide, with a certain star-struck glaze in his eye. That Moses is the best guide in Egypt has been affirmed by no less than a dozen of his co-workers, the implications of which aren’t entirely lost on the poor saps who got stuck with the cast-offs and rookies that apparently make up the rest of the museum’s staff.

Outside a light rain is falling. We duck into Abu Tarek for my second bowl of koshary in as many days - the slight paunch I picked up in Tunisia, after all, not likely to fatten itself. At night we check out the local entertainment, getting a few mischievous smirks around the hostel when we make our tepid belly-dancing enquiries. With most of Cairo’s top dancers appearing in five-star restaurants - to the approving applause of Saudi princes and Kuwaiti oil sheiks - me and Paul decide to set our sights a little lower. We find a string of low-end nightclubs down a dismal alley, the touts’ promises of the finest girls around being cast in a certain ironic light. There’s not much to choose between the places: the crowds are gruff and cheerless, the girls are done up like Cleopatra, and the music sounds like a 12-car pile-up on Mahmoud Bassiouni. Palmyra, about which we’ve been warned less than the rest, seems to be the classiest of this seedy lot. The manager greets us with a handshake that’s all business, his broad shoulders straining a jacket that’s been cut from the cloth of a Russian mafioso. On-stage the emcee is working the crowd with an odd, earnest intensity, and I can’t entirely tell if we’ve walked in on a night of belly-dancing or a telethon for multiple sclerosis.

There’s a sad processional of dancers to sit through: a plump girl with rosy cheeks clops around in a pair of thick, glittering heels; another wiggles her hips listlessly and struggles to hide her boredom, now and then checking the time on her wrist. It’s hard to fault these girls if they’re lacking for inspiration. Though there are many words one might use to describe a night in Palmyra, you’d have to go pretty far down the list before you come across “erotic.” Half of the audience looks like it’s waiting for the 10:15 to Zagazig; more than a few cast wavering glances toward the stage, as if something on the evening news distracted them from a serious round of Sudoku. A hundred years ago, before the advent of low-rise jeans, MTV and the cast of Laguna Beach, the titillation at work here must’ve been enough to knock your fez off. But though me and Paul have spent all of 60 Egyptian pounds - US ten bucks - for the entry and a pair of overpriced beers, we’re still struggling to decide if we’ve gotten our money’s worth.

It’s a question we’ve been asking all week. While much of the Egyptian economy hasn’t progressed an inch since the days of Tutankhamen, it takes a second income to work your way through all the main tourist sights. At the Pyramids, you get shaken down from the minute you leave your car: the guides, the touts, the poor luckless kid selling brass replicas of Cheops. Whatever mythic picture you have of this engineering triumph gets buried by the sandstorm of sales pitches blowing across the desert. Saddest of all is the once-noble Sphinx, his front paws all but stretching onto the congested road out front, his time-ravaged face staring forlornly at the crowded viewing platform and the remains of civilization as he knew it.

It’s an exhausting couple of days. At the hostel me and Paul are putting together our plans for the next few weeks. Atef, the smooth-talking owner, sits us down in the common room over mugs of mint tea. That we’ve managed to shake him off for this long suggests some remarkable wiles. Since our arrival he’s been pushing his “welcome drink” - a euphemism for the fierce pitch he’ll make trying to sell us a package tour. I’ve watched him at work all week, flipping through a binder crammed with glossy brochures. One night he cornered a bleary-eyed couple from Canada - fresh off of 20-plus hours on the plane - their heads rocking as he made his case. They sipped at their tea and nodded wearily, Atef pushing pictures of Karnak and Abu Simbel across the table, punching figures into his calculator and scribbling in his pad.

But for the time we have and the sights to see, it’s hard to resist the plan he’s laid out for us. And who am I kidding? For the past five months, in six countries and as many tongues, I’ve been scrunching my brow over train schedules and haggling with cab drivers, trying to make sense of paper currencies and exchange rates and remembering, now and then, to call home. If someone’s offering to do the grunt work for me, I’m willing to suck it up and pay the price. We shake over the table. The next morning one of his men drives us to the ATM, warily standing guard, as if a stack of 50s and 100s were the only way to get my son released from a basement in Khan al-Khalili. Back at the hostel, Atef makes a gesture of gratitude as we fork over the money. He pats his chest lightly, his face saying “I’m a guy you can trust,” his hands saying “Tonight, folks, the first round’s on me.”

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