Dok Dok Felucca Dock

Thanks to a glitzy hotel casino in Vegas, Luxor inspires images of wealth and grandeur in the mind of the uninitiated. As we disembarked from our coaches into the dirty streets reminiscent of Indian standards of cleanliness, the illusion rapidly faded from our minds. Nevertheless, we fought to conserve what fantastic imaginative imagery we could in every attempt to give this heinous town - complete with injured horses laying in construction holes while owners try to beat them up onto their broken legs - the benefit of the doubt. After all, there's a casino named after it, right?

Yet here a single piece of felafel atracts the price of one pound when an entire sandwhich should be 0.50. A bowl of Kushari receives a 100 percent markup, and touts drag us from the dingy crowded streets of vegetables and meats that they claim is the "tourist bazaar" to the well-lit, comfortable den of papyrus-arts and tacky souvenirs that they deem the "Egyptian Bazaar" where vacationing Brits think we must be extremely wealthy to afford such an adventure as ours. Even out of town, the Valley of the Kings does not live up to the wondrous glories that the name had come to inspire in my mind; mostly as a result of just how unfathomable it is to comprehend the age of the colored hieroglyphics adorning cavernous walls. That, and as is common among traditional arts - they all look the same. To wander an ancient hallway of life symbols and figures walking "like egyptians" is to wander a hallway covered in French text when one does not speak French. Without a knowledge of the ancient egyptian written form, the wonders lose much of what their wonder must have been.

Likewise, the temple of Hatchetsup (or some other variation of an inevitably incorrect spelling), where 58 tourists were massacred a few years ago, lost much of its allure to the 100 plus degrees of hot desert sand. The ampitheater of desert cliffs provides a fantastic setting, to be sure, but we were glad we paid a guide to push us along rather than suffer the heat in our usually fog of sketchy navigation.

The heat caused a second day full of laziness and lounging, whereupon we met a christian arab wholly distraught by his situation in life. When one's dreams are formed around a utopia caused by the US driving Mubarak and his cronies out of power here, as in Iraq, one can indeed be deemed apathetic. This occasion proved a marked contrast to the usual pleadings to tell all at home that not all muslims are terrible people, or terrorists, as instead we take on the roll of persuaders toward peace and he the defender of the offensive.

But even the wonderful temple of Karnak with a forest of stone papyrus pillars could not salvage this Nile Valley settlement and all of its sleazy men offering the most intrusive comments regarding my "wife" as we have yet experienced anywhere on the planet. Perhaps the Vegas creators were instead implementing their own form of irony: you would indeed have to offer the prospect of winning millions to get us to come back here.

A night journey brought us back to the bustling town of Cairo, which has essentially defined our Egypt experience. Here, I was afforded the opportunity to reflect on the recent bombings in Dahab - on the very bridge where I walked, and the supermarket where I shopped only a few days past. The reaction I have is somewhat bland - I feel for the new friends I know there, and I feel for the devasting effect on the economy and lifestyle of the place, but I do not find extreme fear - or a crushing realization that it could have been me. The invariable truth is that traveling in the Middle East has its risks, and to be unable to recognize them would involve shoving one's head so deep in the ground he'd drown in the Pacific. It is not entirely surprising that such an event occurred, and for all the complaints about Egyptian security forces, the next one is seemingly inevitable. No number of metal detectors or security checks will stop that (see: Tel Aviv's most recent attack). So, to think of the incident in Dahab inspires first sorrow for those affected (all of us, in our own way); and second a feeling similar to hearing about a fatal car accident on a familiar stretch of highway. The risk was known, and the choices have been made, and, alas, it wasn't us this time.

Cairo afforded us the opportunity to settle back in on the floor at Miles and Colter's apartment, to dine well on Koshari at normal prices once again, and to nap frequently and blissfully. It also has afforded some excellent traditional Nubian music, and tournaments in the national past time: Backgammon.

As travelers here, and in the world as a whole, we have come to wholly despise discussions of visa-acquisition, which inevitably become a battle of wits. Who waited the longest, or got screwed over the hardest, or paid the most, or had the most creative method? Who wins? So, I will spare you our saga, though I do implore you to know that it has been a heinous process from which you should learn, if nothing else, that bureaucracy is wholly unnecessary and, in Africa, magnified. Oh, and it's fun to note that this particular fiasco was not Bush's fault, but Clinton's. And, depending on your viewpoint, Osama's.

Tomorrow night I will head southward solo. On Sunday Jenny will fly to Addis Ababa. In a few weeks, we will rendeszous anew.

Behold the glories of Franklin

To plan for travel includes all the necessary immunizations that lift the visitor well above the average level of local in terms of susceptibility to microscopic assassins. That is, to turn the visitor into something of a wholly unnatural fortress to at least some of the powers that be. That is, again, to say that to plan for travel should include all such miniscule moat-building exercises.

Unless, of course, you fail to get the most necessary of them all before travel: the yellow fever vaccine. Without such manipulated immunity, one is not only susceptible to the forehead warming coward, but will moreover be denied access to various prone regions of the world. Poor planning, it would seem, landed my travel companion in such an ill-prepared situation.

As we emerge from the Taxi, we can't help but notice the lack of significant signage upon the building towards which we have been pointed - we can't tell at first glance if this building is truly the hospital said to be described in the scribbly jibberish of Arabic inscribed on our little notecard. A random stranger on the street, however, calls to another random stranger, and soon we are weaving to the back of said building, though a dingy courtyard, past a mosque, and into a back room with no english sign, a one foot square arabic sign, two women, one man, a refrigerator, and a desk inside.

The process involves an overemphasis on the filling of necessary customs forms for safe passage between countries, and a decided underemphasis on the actual vaccination. The solitary male, in fact, nearly forgets entirely that a shot must be administered after having told Jenny to put her Birthday where her signature should be, and placing several postage-style stamps over the actual prompts for her Birthday and other pertinent information.

But, alas, the shot was summonsed from the kitchen-sized chilly bin, a fresh needle produced from packaging, a much too large test shot fired skyward, and an attempt to jab the western oddity right through her clothing was engaged in. Upon prodding, the white curtain screen was implemented, a shirt was removed, and the needle passed directly from air to melanin-impaired skin and muscle. All the while, these three stooges were obviously convinced that the terror on Jenny's face was inspired by the prospect of a temporary silvery addition to her body, and not to the blatant chaos of the clinic. But, at least her shot cost a fifth of what mine did in a nice, clean, orderly clinic back home. And, with a little luck, we're both equally immune.

Perhaps that experience does justice to the existence that is Cairo - a bustling center of chaotic community, uncaring and yet effective (somewhat) in living out lives. Here, the music scene thrives (as we learned from a hillarious 6 foot 4 white boy living out here playing Arabic music), variety of culinary divulgences actually exists, and, overall, travelers can somehow mingle in the madness without going as insane in the sea of humanity as in, say, Delhi. The latter, I should say, is attributed to some mysterious aspect of interaction. I have no idea how 14 million people can unwaveringly make existence downright miserable in India, while 16 million in Misr can be so refreshingly uplifting. Geography, it seems to me, has much more effect on being than my pre-trip American mentality of modernity and, with it, forsaken roots could have fathomed.

And Geography simultaneously seems to dwindle in its importance as the newest bit of travel advice rushes from a fellow adventurer in the Pitts (burg) named Franklin. Non-major college courses can, it seems, lend a bit of usefulness in one's future endeavors. Or, in the future endeavors of foreign-bound friends.

The City of the Dead, topic of just one of Mr. Braffets literary works, is now a permanent slum, where the destitute of Cairo settled down for an existence alongside tombstones and mausoleums of the city's surrounding cemeteries. Though images conjured through various author's depictions of clotheslines between headstones perhaps exaggerate the case in a very obvious sense of writers traveling to see what they already have planned to see, the area nevertheless provides stark contrast to the colonial architecture and more monetarily sound regions of Cairo's interior. Moreover, in keeping with the lesson on this trip that less economically sound humans tend to have the most welcoming hearts, we had not walked 2 blocks before our first invitation to tea - this one with a family of 5 women, infinite children, and two men variously peeling garlic, painting windowframes, and just rolling around in laughter. Three more blocks, another invite. Two more, and we play soccer with dirty children in the street. Two more steps, we smoke sheesha with a nearly blind man who keeps yelling "Fayoumi!" and laughing as we echo his calls. Two more, another invite. Three more, we're in a broken down van with more tea witnessing the attempted repair as they take turns holding live wires to random screws in a heinous disobedience to common sense (but, alas, it seems to work). And finally, mostly because we had to choose a destination to provide for an excuse for departure, we arrive at a nearby mosque. This worshipper haven is prominently displayed on the one pound note, it comes clear, and a trip to the top of its minaret provides a spectacular view of Cairo, and of the pharaonic monuments pointing skyward in the distance. From our perch, we also saw the big ball moving toward the skyline once again, and knew it was time to move back across the highway and back to our normal Cairo existence.

On this side of the tracks, we've seen the museums, we've wandered the Nile, we've smoked our share of Sheeshas, we've drank our share of tea. We've mingled with our share of travelers, we've mingled with our share of Egyptian Arabs, we've dodged our share of Papyrus-vending stalkers. We've seen sleazy belly-dancing, we've seen whirling dervishes. We've had our share of Stella, and we've certainly put in our time with Koshari and Tamiyya; not to mention Fuul and Abergine. So today as we awoke, we were free to relax and wander in a now more familiar arena of the present; and to ponder the odd culture shock and instigated thoughts from Hollywood's contribution to American thought, which we witnessed last evening: Syriana.

As comfort sets in, however, our minds refuse to settle and ache somewhat for the discomfort of the unknown once more. Southward....soon.

Triangularities

A sea of 16 million people abruptly halts at the cliff's base as it juts skyward toward grandeur. The cement ceases to be as if in involuntary reverence, as the human-induced grayness of civilzation gives way to a natural tan of the desert. It is there, on the plateau stuck in the corner of the Sahara, that the ancients' ancients' understandings of nature beckon on.

The great pyramids at Giza outlast every other monument that mankind has aspired to build. These structures, and these alone, have withstood every quest for their demolition by nature and overzealous caliphs alike. Even after their limestone facades have mostly decayed into eternity, they eminate an aura of perfection even today. They sit in their magnificence indifferent to the predictable hoards of tour busses and school kids; nonchalantly brushing away the camel drivers and donkey riders - for these stone structures have their own great story. And they contain more wisdom in their stationary stone blocks than in all the great minds swarming in the sandy ocean in their midst. They know what we do not.

For 5000 years they've stood - and in them have remained buried the mysteries of the Egyptians' relationships to the stars. In them has remained alive, but incomprehensible, the power of triangles on energies that modern science fails to understand. And in them has remained all of the wonderous remnants that their builders intended to reside therein for all eternity.

In them has lived on, that is, everything that the Egyptians intended to live on...until the modern times. Until the times when sufficient photographs could be taken, sufficient stories could be told, and sufficient human interests could be provoked. The mummified corpses that modern science would find it difficult to preserve with such perfection were never intended to be stripped of their jeweled coffins, or their servants, or their mummified cattle or pets for the afterlife. The Pharaohs were never to leave their eternal resting places inside - they were never meant to be transmitted into a square museum building and given plastic boxes so that backpacker Joe could pay 7 dollars to disturb their eternal rest; so that Backpacker Sally and group-tour Apple could drag their souls back from their intended destination and place them in the center of mortal spectacle. The tombs themselves were never to be reopened, and yet today I stood and looked at the eternal resting place in the heart of Khufre's Great Pyramid, and saw sadness echoing between the empty walls that were stripped of the millenia of seclusion and sit now as black-walled empty space. Where a gateway to the immortal once resided, now I find only darkness. And it strikes me as bizarre that even as onlookers read and understand the purpose of the eternal resting places, to them (us) 5000 years seems plenty of time to let the souls pass through to their destinations. We deem the ambitions of the Pharaohs unnecessary, and we will gladly pay 10 more dollars to impose, if it means we get to walk through a really cool ancient hallway.

And so it became that as I sat on a hilltop wondering at the humanity needed to layer the perfect limestone facade over Khafre's tomb; and as I pondered the mysterious elusive reasons for the existence of the Sphinx, I wondered also at man's capacity on this Earth. These stacks of bricks are perhaps the most perfect monuments ever constructed, and have survived elements, nature, and man for longer than my mind can conceive. And in the end, they stand here today permeated, altered, partially, at least, destroyed not by malice or vengeance or jealousy or nature, but by man's overbearing curiosity to pry open the doors of the unknown, and to disturb it.

There are only a few things man has ever created that stretch on for five millenia, and even then with the aid arguably of the mysterious power pyramids contain. Aid, that is, from something non-human. Man's power to bring into being something so revolutionary as to be called "new" is nearly non-existent. For us to create outside of the parameters that nature allows is a wholly elusive goal, and so every novel building, idea, concept, reality is merely a reflection of the old. No amount of further exploration into technology, or into the soul, or into the mind will alter that reality. Man's power to create is confined by something outside of man's understanding.

But man's power to destroy seems without boundary.

A different kind of Rouge

Time space and being are back on my mind - this time far removed from the himalayan proportions of Nepal, and placed instead in the tiny sliver of sea called Aqaba. This finger of the Red Sea is pathetically narrow as evidenced by the view of the mountainous shore of Saudi Arabia from our post in Dahab. However, in an attempt to stretch their sliver of access to the grand blue planet, perhaps; or perhaps just in an effort to keep tourist dollars domestic, the Jordanians seemed to be determined to drag out the border crossing process as long as humanly possible.

That is, when they said it was leaving as the sun hit the top of the sky, they meant it was leaving when it hit the horizon. And when they said that just after dinner we would be on our way, they meant just after the evening had turned to morning. And when they said that, they really meant as the sun hit the horizon on its way back toward the apex. And when they said that, they really meant two hours after the sun hit that apex. Which is to say it took us 36 hours of waiting, sleeping on the not-so-clean floor of the wonderfully confusing port office building (where we got to go downstairs to pay our exit tax, upstairs to buy our tickets from guys who openly admitted that they had no idea when the boat would really go, across the way to get that ticket stamped with the date, and down the hall to get our passports stamped with exits), and finally sitting in the sun on the vessel to cover the 40 km journey to Egypt. And all this just to avoid the bureaucracy that Arab nations have created for us as a result of the embargo on Israel - after all, with a few land border crossings, we could have been in Nuweiba in about an hour. That stamp, that infernal stamp of the country where, after all, we've already been is the source of all of our 36 hour woes.

The wait did, however, afford the opportunity to meet and grow old with a couple of brits well into their third decade of travel stories. As we finally rolled into Egypt, the sight of trash blowing through the fields around the port and a feeling of tropical disorder - no walls, no worries for warmth, the anticipation of fresh fruit - struck us with relief at a genuine feeling of travel again. We were out of modern arabia and on our way to Africa - and all it took was a 36 hour boat ride.

But, alas, it was not to be. The bamboo huts and gorgeous, relaxing backpacker bay the couple had enjoyed 18 years ago has become a fiasco of "want to eat in my restaurant" after all. Despite the BishBishi camp manager's claim that no piece of beach is private here, we have yet to find so much as a sliver of sand without a restaurant plopped down on top of it. A local journalist spend most of the words in his restaurant review sarcastically condemning the changes here, including the waterfront walkway made of fake stone crawling with money-driven leeches. Obviously, his subtleties were lost on the restauranteur who plastered it up on his wall.

But more than the disappointment that our time on a beautiful beach on the Sinai Peninsula would be tainted by, well, the lack of a beautiful beach, the severely debilitating realization that change is creeping in here too hit hard. It's not that I didn't know before of the Vail Resorts that dominated nature, of the drive of mankind to change all that is natural to fit his mood, or of "development" as a sharp-on-both-sides fighting implement. But now, half-way through this trip, the lessons have begun to take effect on changing my outlooks long before I had expected them to. Long before I arrive home.

The photographs of Damascus Gate in Jerusalem and of Martyr's Square in Damascus decades ago combine with these travelers' descriptions of the old to create one realization: it is not human nature to destroy or to dominate like this. Hundreds of thousands of years passed without a shred of such destruction on these sights before technological advances created a luxurious style of living never before experienced. Today, it is true, thousands or millions live at the standards that the Maharajas enjoyed in their most affluent times. And yet, we still want more.

In the past 100 years, the Wright Brothers made movement unnaturally easy. They created a new world where an 18 hour journey is considered prohibitively long our of a world where true exploration required real commitment. They created a world where tourists have not to pass through culture or to understand or to care - where tourists have not to have traveler traits - before ordering up their heated floor in Vail or their pizza on the hermit crab's old home in Dahab. In 100 years, western technology has been dropped into foreign cultures wholly unprepared for it, and it has ruined much of what was. Perhaps what will become is equally magnificent a la Lao Tse, it is true. But for now, I think its silly and stupid. The question of "would I still be here if not for these same advances" remains on the table, and wholly valid, and unanswerable.

But, while I'm not pondering the detrimental effects of the revolutionary ways of thought of the last few generations, I'm spending time being annoyed at the salt water pouring from every tap in this town.

That, and I'm visiting the gods the way the gods intended to be visitied. I'm donning my technology and skipping the step of growing gills. I'm floating above a world that may as well be more foreign than the furthest planet. Lion Fish flaunt their venomous sails, needle fish dart through the currents, giant clams chomp on watery nutrients, conchs look like rocks below trying to hide their magnificence, and the corals flaunt their reds, yellows, greens, blues in a technicolor dance as if to taunt, "you thought your world was beautiful?'' And all the while I marvel at how little my mind touches, at how little I actually see, much less comprehend, as I float over the unknown surreal, which seems simultaneously oddly normal. Just how many camouflaged crusaders did I skip over, how many fish missed the auditions? A few meters west, and a few meters towards the center of the earth from a land so wholly disturbed by humanity's quest to control and dominate change, lays this perplexing magnificent world of the sea. And I, thanks to the Wright brothers, get to throw my desinty of the dry to the wayside and become a part of it all.

So, it seems, there's a benefit to all this beach-ruining business. A very selfish benefit - I get to see a little more of what I know nothing about. This time, with a tank on my back in the Egyptian Red Sea.

I'd rather have a liter of Rum

On through the desert heat of Petra we find ourselves amidst another onslaught of ruins. Except that this time few of them actually deserve to be called ruins, as some are perfectly preserved without the aid of humans since they were constructed, some 2 millenia ago. Not-coincidentally, they are also all carved straight out of sandstone cliff faces, and serve perfectly as the backdrop to Arabian camel rides - though the 20 elderly Brits on the back of donkeys did seem slightly misplaced. While in my hangover haze in Cappadoccia, Turkey I had likened the scene to Canyonlands in Utah; I now fully realize the err of my perception. Desert skylines in Petra jut hundreds of meters from the sandy foundations. They erode irregularly to create a weaving pattern of seeming randomness through their grainy facades.

Inside of the tombs, ceilings swirl with purples, reds, yellows as the observer unfailingly expresses his ignorant awe that rock could look so magnificent - especially rock that's been all messed up at the hands of man.

The night brought the vortex of danger that is the satellite television in this town, but I break away long enough to mingle with the shopkeeper next door. He pours tea down my throat, as usual, while watching women with barely any clothing singing not-so-pure-hearted songs on television. "These people aren't Muslims, they're Lebanese. Muslims aren't like this." It was all I could do not to inform him of his hypocrisy in viewing the sacrilege - after all, what's the point? Locals from Pakistan to Jordan all enjoy the same quality programming with the convenient outlet that they can blame their diversion from the one true path on somebody else. Can't we all...

In Wadi Rum, big plans for rock climbing turned to a full day of slogging across the desert sand between rocky massifs; past camels and organized jeep tours; and through canyons up to the summit of a nearby geoglogical wonder a few thousand feet up. We lay in the warm sun on that rock in the sky for an hour or so, allowing our minds to boggle at the familiar memory of freedom - freedom from chaos, from pestering touts, from pestering locals, from locals who mean well but "what's your name you want take tea" end up pestering, from pollution (we reminisced of black snot and gringy lungs in the Subcontinent of India), and from concrete. How wonderful.

The climbing never got quite off the ground as prospects of repeating "The Thailand Incident" while leading a 5.10 trad climb up 6 pitches of sandstone after 8 months of dormancy seemed downright looney. That, and I didn't have any gear. The latter, obviously, was the kicker.

So we dismissed ourselves from the camp in paradise and from locals who didn't recognize the beauty in which they lived until a foreign climber escaped from neon pants, new coke, and rubix cubes back home to come tell them. We ended up in Aqaba, where the torrent of confliciting information, amidst claims that the ferry will leave either at 6, 7, 10, 11, and 2 am, seems to only have one thing in common: the God of wind is pissed, and he's taking it out on Aqaba. Only a mysteriously one-fingered hand will tell if we can make it out of here today or not. At least, though, they sell ice cream in liter quantities.

I Felafel my Pita

As it turns out, a three hour drive in Israel is not only considered long by the locals, but is pretty much as far as we can travel without hitting Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan. So Roie, Hila, and we pile into the car for an excursion up north into green mountains, and a cliff-enclosed canyons. Hiking around, R and H made us fully aware of how little we know about botany by spouting off the names of every plant that we passed.

We then ventured into a Kibbutz, which for those hippies fully tacked into the green or grassroots movements of the US of A is similar to the Chatauqua movement - and appears to be heading to the wayside as the latter has long since done. However, the hippie-ness seems to morph into hard-core Zionism somewhere between arts and crafts strewn sidewalks, communal farming activities, and pushing Arabs off of this strip of Holy soil to create a space for the Jewish Homeland. Which, by the by, is very very confusing in and of itself.

The Jews were exiled some 2000 years ago. Now they're back. Simple enough. Except that much of the population here fits nothing in the list of stereotypes pondered when one pictures the ethnicity, "Jewish." Here, the Hebrew Israelite Community adds a little color with their dark african skin, the Eastern Jews add the brown flavor, and the Anglos add the pale blandness that is more of a Judeo portrait. However, to boot, not all of the country is composed of practicing religious Jews - indeed, Tel Aviv provides the ultimate counterpoint to Jerusalem's Holy sites; with clubs, bars, scantily clad women, scantily clad men, skyscrapers, and overwhelming modernity. I, in short, don't get it - and if anyone really does get it I'd love to hear more.

Negating this lack of understanding, though, I can philosophize somewhat about the existence of the place and its parallels to the American land. Here, people escaped places where they felt persecuted in the name of religion, only to form a secular state and openly allow those of other religions. The land was occupied, so they killed off a few people (a lot of people), and they pushed the rest away. They changed the culture by dominating not intermingling, and then they create an uber-nationalistic psyche to remove association to the places from whence they came. The extreme desire to differentiate the immigrant from the land of emigration is not a purely American phenomenon, apparently.

We went on to dip our hands in the Sea of Galilee and watch an overzealous local repel off of a stone arch in the hills not for enjoyment of the event, but for exploitation of the interest shown by the Detroit Jewish Community in attendance. We hopped by a central-Israeli community so that Hila could vote in this election, which most of the population with whom we interacted seemed wholly apathetic about.

In fact, some people went so far as to complain that all polititians do is show prowess and power over the Palestinian issue, while ignoring local economics, social programs, etc. I was stunned, slightly, to see this apathy towards a cause that the mere existence of Israel as a state precipitated, and which dominates the international media in the rest of the Western world (and, truly, aside from Shawarma and a lonely chaotic market in Tel Aviv, modern Israel can only be said to be Western.)

We bid adeu from our inspirational hosts with yet another unexpected tinge of regret for having to leave. Close bonds can be forged in days or hours - a lesson that we will no doubt repeatedly learn in the future as well.

Then, just as we were to leave Jerusalem again for Eastern locales, the clowns emerged. 6 of them. Without so much as an introduction, "are you coming?" as they walk out the door of the hostel towards the nearby booze-dens. We hop on board, obviously. After a few hours, several shots, and a nargileh or two we find that they are a traveling show, fresh out of Iraq with the sole goal of putting smiles on the faces of children in places where external forces are heinously exerted on them with absolute injustice.

So, in the morning we roll over a few times to get our hangovers to leave (we were unsuccessful), and chase them. We cross the very bizzarrely incomplete wall on the eastern end of Jerusalem, and emerge in the Westbank. We could actully feel the cultures shift in the course of maybe two inches. Two inches, that is, along a fenced corridor smack through the middle of what used to be a roundabout, and on into a no-longer parking lot. It is as though fourth graders were in charge of setting up this check post. Again, I don't get it.

Onward, our Shared Service Taxi weaves around perhaps the entire West Bank avoiding as much as possible the Israeli humvees and armored teenagers in this children of the corn land. At points, we drive through makeshift roads in olive groves, through holes cut in barricades of razor wires, and around hills and "mountains" to avoid the pestering occupiers. We safely arrive in Jenin many more hours later than we had anticipated.

There, we cozy up in the city from which the highest number of suicide bombers has come, and watch the circus. Kids here are the same kids we've seen throughout these regions - some more interested in pestering Jenny and I than in watching the show, and most smiling much more than any of the adults I see around. Nevertheless, it may have been the first time they've seen a clown pull 20 ping pong balls out of his mouth; and I'm glad they had the opportunity.

By the time it was all over, the sun was heading toward the horizon. We quickly realized that our plan of returning to Jerusalem the same day was obviously a distant hazy daydream formed primarily from remnants of booze in our system; so we hopped into the hotel with the clowns (also very hungover). Dinner brought pizza and great discussions, and afterwards a movie about the theater at which the show had unfolded; and whose original form had been deliberately demolished by the Israeli Army some years back, in the battle of Jenin. It seems, though, that any good intentions Arna (the freedom theater's founder) had were drown in apathy somewhere along the line, as more than one child in this after-school-esque program went on to kill himself, and others, in the streets of Tel Aviv.

Even so, the volunteers remain committed to the cause of re-building, and re-constructing the effort - including some mystery mafia-man up top by the name of Juliano. My reaction to their overwhelming dedication in the face of such dismal results is, once again, "I don't get it." Eventually we did make it back to Jerusalem, and eventually we got back to Jordan. Eventually we arrived in Petra, where we are now, ready to blow our minds with amazing desert-scape and more old, but cool, caves and tombs.

And that's where I'll leave you.

Oh, and Mom and Dad - April Fools.