We were in Aswan, Egypt; home to about a million sailboats. These simple wooden sailboats — called “feluccas” — carry people down the Nile River, toward Luxor.
We had two desires:
One, to visit Abu Simbel, a stunning Ancient Egyptian monument to Ramses II, carved in rock. Two, to take a felucca ride down the Nile to [...]

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SCENE ONE: JERUSALEM’S WAILING WALL.
Bring an engineer to Jerusalem, and he’ll be the first to point out that the holiest site in Judiasm is a structural retaining wall.
The “Wailing Wall” is an appropriate name — hundreds of Jews wail, sob and bow at this otherwise ordinary-looking 2,000-year-old wall at the base of the Temple [...]

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Zohar is an Israeli man who had a month’s vacation from his job in the military last year.
He spent that month traveling through California, Colorado and Texas, and found our house through Couchsurfing.com. We let him sleep in our basement for a few weeks.
Now, good karma comes into play. We’re staying at his apartment in [...]

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It’s 3:30 in the morning, and I dimly spot a large object lumbering towards me on the gravely path.
“Jimal! Left!,” someone calls out, and I duck to my right to avoid being run over by a camel. These creatures seem as heavy as horses, and getting stepped on by one would be an ugly injury. 
I [...]

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Even in a tropical paradise, sometimes its the strange people you meet — not the sunny place you’re in — that sticks in your mind the most.
This is true of Dahab, Egypt. This beach town on the Sinai peninsula, near the Gulf of Aqaba, boasts some of the bluest, bluest waters in the [...]

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We crossed the Sahara on a bouncy bus, gazing for hours at the endless sea of sand in every direction. The Sahara is barren, empty, desolate. We drive for an hour. Flat sand. There is no life here, no mercy. Leave someone in the sands without water, and they’d die quickly. We drive [...]

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“Salaam ‘alaykum!,” we’re greeted at the train station in Alexandria. The man who says it, Mohammad Abdallah, was born and raised in the Sudan but lives in Egypt and holds a U.S. passport.
In the early 1990’s, when he was a young immigrant studying in America, he lived with my friends’ family in Broomfield, Colo., and [...]

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It’s my first visit to the Arab Muslim world, and I landed in the middle of the Holy Month of Ramadan, stepping out of the airport just in time to hear the Call to Prayer boom across the city from the mosque speakers.
From our hotel in downtown Cairo, we catch a birds-eye view of hundreds [...]

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From Germany I fly home to Boulder and entertain my parents for their one-week visit to the Colorado Rockies.
The day they leave I travel with some friends to northern Idaho, where we watch a quintessential small-town Americana Fourth of July street parade, complete with lemonade and fireworks. The next day, we drive to a mountainous [...]

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