Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Travel

Daily Planet
Lip hair OK in Disneyland
In a radical gesture of modernity, the Happiest Place on Earth has lifted the ban on mustached employees.
By J.A. Getzlaff
[04/10/00]

Out of the Blue
Cockpit assault
Since July 1997, over a dozen passengers have attempted to breach cockpit doors during commercial airline flights. We've been lucky so far.
By Elliott Neal Hester
[04/08/00]

Daily Planet
Belfast businesses sell terrorism to tourists
A private bus tour and a T-shirt shop have found a way to squeeze profit from violence.
By J.A. Getzlaff
[04/07/00]

Wanderlust
Climbing the coconut tree
These foreign men are beautiful, brazen and as young as my son. I want something they have, but it's not what they think.
By Kathryn J. Abajian
[04/07/00]

Burt Wolf
Magic beans
How the Trieste dukes got the dough and we got espresso.
By Burt Wolf
[04/06/00]

Complete archives for Travel

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Rolf Potts

April 11, 2000 |  Eight hours into the train ride, a boy in a blue jacket comes up and taps me on the shoulder. "Come," he says solemnly, nodding toward the back of the train car.

I'm not sure what he wants, but since the blue jacket gives him a vaguely official air, I just assume he's a train worker. He doesn't speak or look back as I follow him into the next car, which is largely empty and quiet.

Stopping in the middle of the car, the boy motions me over to a window. "Look," he whispers, gesturing outside. "Beautiful!"

I see that he's talking about the sunset. Just above the horizon, a red sun streaks the surrounding sky with bars of pink and yellow. Beyond the train tracks, the mighty Nile glitters with orange spangles of light. It is indeed beautiful.

As I gaze out, taking in the quiet colors, I wonder why the boy has gone to so much trouble to show me such a simple moment.

I don't have to wonder for long. Leaning in confidentially as the sun slips below the horizon, the boy rests one hand on my shoulder, as if he has some fatherly advice to share with me.

"Please," he whispers to me, holding his other hand in front of his face and rubbing his fingertips together. "Baksheesh."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Westerners have long had difficulty understanding the Eastern practice of baksheesh -- a hard-to-define courtesy system that rewards small services with token amounts of money. Basically an improvised blend of tipping, bribery and almsgiving, the baksheesh trade has a time-honored reputation for bewildering and befuddling foreign visitors who venture into Egypt.

When Mark Twain visited the pyramids in 1866, for instance, he reported that he suffered "torture that no pen can describe from the hungry appeals for baksheesh that gleamed from Arab eyes." One hundred years before that, a certain Monsieur de Thevenot complained that he had to shell out 8 piasters just to be shown to a mummy pit near Saqqara. "The villagers are very greedy of money," he wrote, "and spare nothing to come by it. And as they fancy that we Franks always carry a good deal of money, they squeeze us all they can when they have us in their clutches."

These days -- though it's no longer legal to rifle through mummy pits or be carried up the pyramids on a litter -- baksheesh is still a thriving racket in tourist areas. The sunset ruse of the boy on the train, while certainly creative, is by no means the first time I've been hit up for spare change in an unorthodox manner.

Among the tombs and temples on the west bank of Luxor, for example, I discovered that the valiant quest for baksheesh had resulted in all sorts of dubiously useful innovations. In the tomb of Tuthmosis III, I saw a man in a turban doing a brisk trade by skulking around and fanning sweaty tourists with a piece of cardboard. In the tomb of Userhet, an enterprising Egyptian had angled a set of mirrors so that he could refract sunlight into the inner chambers with a big sheet of aluminum foil -- the tomb's electric lighting system, I noticed, had been mysteriously unplugged. In the temple of Hatshepsut, a self-styled tour guide had staked out a set of cow-themed murals near the second colonnade. "This is a cow," he'd say in an authoritative voice whenever people strolled by. Every so often -- perhaps out of weary habit -- someone would tip him a few piasters.

Next page | A couple of coins, a little closer to God