It is never too late, I suppose, to learn a new lesson - or dispense one. Especially if it means being tossed out of a Cairo hotel. No, there was no bad behaviour, no drunkenness, raucousness, nor trashing the joint, no Keith Richards, Keith Moon or Sid Vicious behaviour.
Winding down my Cairo days, contemplating a long haul into the desert, the manager's wife owes me some small change for a cup of coffee, says she'll pay me later, and asks rhetorically whether I trust her.
"I would (foolishly) trust anyone with eyes like yours," is my cheap, though appraisingly honest reply.
This is not any kind of fancy establishment, you'll understand. Just a little downtown joint recommended as a cheap doss-house, perhaps somewhat overburdened with its Regent House appellation.
It's a family-run ramshackle first-floor establishment, where a $5-a-night dormitory includes Indian and Pakistani UN workers, a Cuban drifter, a fuzzy red-headed Canadian intent on saving the world with his vow of silence, and a sensitive, soon-to-be-published Indiaphile French poet.
The manager and his wife seem bored with their jobs, and take pleasure in teasing their foreign guests.
I simply join in. Saunter around, as one does in Cairo for the day, and return after sunset to pay for a few more days preparing for my exit, after having already received a little bruising from an intransigent Libyan embassy - no sir, though shalt not enter our country without dumping a healthy wad in our laps.
"Sorry, sir, the establishment is full from tomorrow. Tonight will be your last night here. Go and find another hotel." Whaaaa? "We have just received confirmation of a booking that will fill the room."
You can reek the balderdash, camel shit and pharaoh fart, but cannot discern the truth as manager sits behind his desk, avoids my eyes and sticks to his humbug.
Hubber-hubber, and grey beard must head out into the Egyptian night to trudge the lone dark alleys in search of tomorrow's bunk.
Up early for a pavement cuppa or two before having to drag my bag through the foyer-cum-TV room-cum-prayer room, and bump into "ze poet" who tells me Mrs Pink (the manager's wife only wears pink skin-tight sleeves, a looser pink blouse, and pink scarf - and sports startlingly large, perfectly almond-shaped eyes) had told her husband I had complimented her, and he had taken umbrage... at the fact that I had even dared to cast such an eye over his chattel.
I had fallen foul of the "thou shalt not covet my wife" commandment, and paid the price of the gutter.
Yes, punished for kindness. The kind of thing you could learn to live with.
What else is one meant to do but go and drink off the sully? Hidden down some of Cairo's little, friendlier alleys are a thinly scattered series of "men's bars". They are more like small coves for weary ships than anything else. No glitz, sheen, leather or chrome.
Honest wooden chairs and tables, offering only Egyptian Stella beer, and Balanouchi brandy, to which greybeard takes a gentle liking, never having been over-fond of the bloaty, frothy stuff.
The taverns, that do not dangle exterior neon, and surreptitiously - though in no way guiltily in this Islamic society - cosset their obviously regular clientele, are around 8m by 8m. Little cosy holes for contemplation and civil conversation.
The perfect places to throw off insults and pay smiling homage to the muses of the long road.
I forgive Mr and Mrs Pink, self-proclaimed Muslim ideologues, for forgetting that the holy text is explicit on how foreign guests are gifts of Allah, and should be treated as such.
Egypt's diva of divas, Om Kalthoum, wails through the room, incessantly, her songs repeated and repeated, just as they are heard through the city and across the country, floating and drifting out of shops and cafes. Heart-rending sounds emit from her famous throat, wrenching at emotions, but beloved absolutely. A tea-house pays homage, two 2m busts flanking its doorway, playing her songs only, 24/7.
I venture along earlier with my trusty Turkish guide to Cairo (wondering how apt an Egyptian guide to Istanbul would be), and we peek in the window.
She baulks at the dowdiness, and the lack of femininity. But the kindly barman saunters out to invite us in. A meagre, polite flicker of interest from the men at the foreign, let alone female, intruders into their parlour, and polite conversation and retort continue.
We venture further, and find a sister bar (no, not a women's bar), this one triangular, tiny, maybe six paces to each wall. A little more foreboding, rather more close-up. Guide finds the need to unburden some beer, and heads for the head. All heads are raised. Something seems afoot, but being the only woman in the place, she aptly steels herself, eyes forward.
I sit back and watch heads swivel, fractionally. The little "washroom" is tucked into a corner. Door opens, enter, and... retreat, door closes. Low mirth chuckles across the floor. This simple men's bar offers only a pissoir. Guide takes it with the panache to which I had become accustomed, sits down and takes another swig of Stella. Bar defused, face saved.
McDonald's will soon receive another non-paying visitor. Cairo begins slowly, in the morning, winding itself up into full pedestrian and traffic flow between 7pm and 11pm. This feels marginally odd in the cool of winter, but doubtless carries great logic in the sapping day heat of summer, or most of the year.
Crossing streets is not for the easily unnerved. Traffic lights are few, and de rigueur is to cross where you like, taking on the oncoming cars.
Good manners mean cars will slow down and allow you to pass. But there is the constant potential of intimacy between bumper and bone. It is all well and easy with one or two lanes - but the four and five lanes around Midan Tahrir (Tahrir Square, even though it is a circle), in the centre of town, takes more than a fair degree of pedidexterity.
The art is nonchalance. Own the road. The driver must take appropriate action. Little hunched ladies look neither right nor left, and walk, or shuffle, slowly. Cars hoot and hunker down in polite frustration. The trick is to tailgate one of these amblers, until you have worked out the rhythm. Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City offer parallel challenges.
Thousands of small motorbikes and scooters, three, four and five lanes across, hundreds of metres deep, cruise in packs. If you do not venture into the pack, you will never cross the road. Here, walk slowly, purposefully, and at the same speed. The drivers predict and dodge. Jink and dash and all is lost. Have faith, for that is all you have. Black and white taxis speckle Cairo's intermittently flowing lines of cars. Hail one with your bargaining quiver full and ready.
Ask the price and know that a foreigner will be quoted double, instantly, unhesitatingly, with complete authority. Know you must slash this immediately, severely, or be screwed.
The old British-style heavy steel, square meters mounted on dashboards have been jammed since the previous millennium.
Don't ask the price, so long as you have some kind of forearmed knowledge. Instruct destination. Get out and pay with the same off-handed authority that the cabbie is dying to play out on you. Get out and walk. Asking the question opens the door. Don't ask if you don't want to be lied to.
Newer white taxis offer surprising, honest relief. They carry new electronic meters. Take one, discern the going rate, and you are vitally armed for future forays.
Head to the pyramids, take the obligatory three-hour camel ride around the big obelisks. Discover why photographs portray desert camel riders hooking their legs around the post at the head of the saddle, and lounge with both feet to one side of the large beast's neck. Sit on it as you would a horse, and feel tender, intimate tendons stretch in ways and wheres that are not fit to be described in family newspapers.
Venture beyond upmarket Zamalek, embassy centre on a verdant island in the middle of the Nile, and stumble into Imbabi. Hidden from the casual visitor and museum gawker, the stench and filth of rotten, weeping vegetables seeps down the roads, dusty footpaths and byways of the market area.
Cairo seems most closely matched to the large Indian cities. Flaking 19th century British architecture, browned, mottled, and a century of disrepair, most not higher than five storeys. Large populations, infrastructure stretched to its limits, the swaddlings of the women are similar, the headgear of traditional men not very unlike either.
India sits in pretty pole position, however, when it comes to rank poverty. Cairo's pavements are not permanent squatter sites to millions. Perhaps the city should take heed of New Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, lest similar fate befalls. Thinking ahead, and book a train south, to Luxor, Nile port to Valley of the Kings, Queens and a flotilla-load of seriously well-heeled pith helmets.
Since the advent of tourist-targeted bombings and attacks around 1994 (the most recent in Kahn al-Kahlili, in the middle of Cairo in February last year) foreigners have been strictly herded into very specific daily trains. Of course the target profile is thus seriously highlighted for the gelignite junkies, but one supposes the guardianship is as well appropriately raised.
Locals travel on dozens of trains at affordable prices. Foreigners must dig deep for the pleasure of their armed accompaniment.
Book well in advance, seats and bunks are relatively few. In the interim, head west, to Siwa.
An oasis lies close to the Libyan border, 300km south of the Mediterranean Sea,and flanked by one of the world's great sand seas - where dunes move like waves, only infinitesimally slower.
My misunderstanding of a desert oasis as a puddle 25m x 25m is quickly debunked. Two lakes inside the slow, sweeping curve of hills and low mountains stretch out around 2-3km each.
The ancient mud and salt-built town of Shalli stands rotting on a lone hill, lakeside, amid the current village of Siwa.
Donkey carts outnumber internal combustives by around 10:1. But there is a burgeoning cowboy mentality. Siwa is touted as a tourist stopover, and is also on a circular-ish 4x4 desert driving route - one of the few roads that drivers can take without permits, police escorts and assorted official encumbrances.
Euro-offroaders drag dust columns in from the desert. A motley assortment of "desert camps" rings the town - offering camel and 4x4 driving through the local sand, churning up and down the dunes.
It sounds awful. But it is a great place to sit down and watch a very slow procession of life. The lads are raucous, slowly switching camels and donkeys for motorbikes and pick-ups, the women are all - all - covered from head to toe to tips of fingers, but the pace is slow, as slow as a donkey can walk in the sun for hours and hours.
The sky is huge, 360 degrees, blue, hot, still. Mud and salt brick ruins are interspersed between low-grade brick buildings. Hillocks around carry the relics of ancient abodes, or are pitted with opened holes, honeycombed hills of old graves, long robbed, dug into the only hardness in the area.
Sunsets float in and out of focus through the red haze of settling dust.
Hot and cold springs litter the dry plains and dune valleys. There are no roads or signs. You either know where they are, or die.
It is Eid al Adha, commemorating Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son. Goats have been gathered throughout the Muslim world for weeks; they are sacrificed in place of little boys.
On the morning of the three-quarter waxing moon, the knives flash and the blood runs red down thousands of streets. The beasts should not see the knives, or know of their doom, out of kindness, and lest their meat seize up with adrenalin panic.
By mid-morning thin tendrils of smoke float upwards from different yards, mingling messages to the god Shalli at the site of an uber-oracle of old. A temple relic resides atop a flat, elongated kopje. So important was it once that even Alexander the Great deigned to tread the stairs to consult the local powers. The same steps that exist to this day, the only ones possible.
From Siwa to Pakistan he roamed and conquered. How easily most of the world tosses off the ancients as illiterate, savage, uneducated. Today the world powers are hard-pressed to press hard on even one country, let alone sweep a swathe of victory. Back to Cairo, en route south. Hear tales of single Western women pestered by frustrated local men. Bad-mouthing them, fondling them while supposedly posing for pictures. These tales are repeated, litanies of the same gospel, generally not discernible to male travellers.
On to Luxor, the southern capital of ancient Egypt. Crypts, burial chambers of reams of royalty, temples and assorted large edifices dot the landscape. Tutenkhamun's grave is the most famous, but dozens of the big cheeses were sailed down the holy river and entombed.
The temples are magnificent, many having been bandaged and plastered over time, but there is no denying the solidity of perfectly squared granite blocks dozens or hundreds of tons in weight.
I opt out of venturing down empty holes that once held the kings of old, long since emptied by tomb robbers, the artifacts now scattered across the world's museums or ensconced in Cairo's own magnificent showpiece.
I take a donkey ride across the western hills, looking down on the sites, venturing into temples, trotting through the back alleys of Nubian villages and along spindly paths through fields of cotton and sugar cane. Life feels rich, and poor, calm and comfortable, the pastures having supped of the Nile since man first carved a stone into a plough.
- Lance Cherry is travelling from Asia to South Africa by public transport. Contact him at [email protected]