Anvil- and mushroom-shaped white rocks, as high as 40 feet, jut from the ashen ground. This desert looks like the moon.

The White Sahara Desert is hundreds of miles from civilization, and despite the specks of sand hovering over the horizon, the night sky still burst with stars. We could spot a different shooting star nearly every 15 minutes, sometimes more frequently.

After returning from the White Sahara Desert we had a spare day to spend in Cairo before needing to return to Mohammad’s house in Alexandria, Egypt to retrieve our backpacks. We spent the extra day in Giza, back at the Pyramids.

What’s strange about the Pyramids is that all photos taken of them are only taken from in front, so that the viewer sees the sand around it.

Take a photo from behind the Pyramids, and you’ll see a different story.

The Pyramids and the Sphinx gaze out over an urban cluster just a few meters away. Giza is a “suburb” of Cairo, which holds the dubious distinction of World’s Most Polluted City. Like most developing-world cities, Giza is teeming with honking cars, crowded streets, dogs and vendors on every corner, concrete buildings haphazardly shoved into every modicum of space.

The eyes of the Sphinx, unchanged for 5,000 years, have watched Giza grow from a desert to an urban headache.

We, however, were ready to leave Egypt after not 5,000 years but 5 weeks. We happily boarded an airplane bound for New Delhi, via Abu Dhabi.

We spent a few more days in New Delhi than we had planned, waiting for our luggage, which had chosen to stay in Abu Dhabi. We had been warned that India is a hard country to travel in, but we found it relatively relaxed.

In Cairo, you always have to be on guard, because a boy could run up to you on the street and grab your breasts. This happened to me four times.

Three out of four times, I was surrounded by a large crowd of men (as is ALWAYS the case when walking down the streets of Cairo) and couldn’t identify exactly who it was that did it. I know that it was always a little boy, under the age of 10.

The first time it happened, I thought it might have been an accident. There was a swarm of young boys around me, all reaching out with their hands, and I thought it might have been an accidental brush.

The second time, I felt uncomfortable. It was too firm a grab to be an accident.

The third time, I turned and chased down the entire crowd of young boys that had been following me. They ran away in terror. I don’t think they’d ever see an angry female screaming that she was going to beat them down.

The fourth time, a boy around age 10 who had been sitting by the side of a building stood up, ran to me, grabbed my right breast, and ran away. I was with two friends, one of which is a 6-foot, 2-inch tall man, and he chased the little kid down the block.

Meanwhile, some bystander witness apologized on behalf of Egyptians. The apology was directed not to me, but to my 6’2” friend. In Egypt, it’s customary for men to address only men. If they wanted to ask about me – what’s my name, am I also from America – they’d ask it to the male in the group, as though I wasn’t there.

India, or at least New Delhi, was much different. The only place I was ever grabbed was on my arm, by beggar girls.

The scams in India were more elaborate – people pose as (fake) authority guards and tried to convince us that the train ticket office was closed and they could escort us to an “after-hours” (fake) office – but the Indian touts are lazier. In Egypt, the touts stalk you as you walk from hotel to hotel; they refuse to leave you alone. In India, a loud firm “go away!” (“bhago!”) will get them to go away.

New Delhi was also far less crowded and polluted than Cairo. We all became sick upon entering Cairo; we immediately developed sore throats from breathing the air. Nothing like that happened in Delhi.

Perhaps best of all, India’s packaged products have “fixed pricing.” Anything manufactured in India – a bottle of water, shampoo, toothpaste – has the price printed onto the packaging, so we were assured that the shopkeepers couldn’t charge us triple the actual price.

Of course, they’d still try. I’d buy a box of apple juice and the shopkeeper would say, “85 rupees.” And I’d point to the label and reply, “But it says 70.” And – here’s the great part – the shopkeeper would reply “okay” and charge me 70. In Egypt, that would NEVER happen. A two-hour fight would ensue.

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 Luxor.

Abu Simbel is located far south, about 30 miles from Egypt’s border with Sudan, in an area that’s marred with dangers (or so they say). In order to visit Abu Simbel, we had to depart Aswan at 3 a.m. flanked by an armed police convoy.

To arrange this, we had to enlist the services of someone who could reserve us a seat in a microbus traveling with the convoy.

Enter: Sayid. He, like all the other trip organizers in Aswan, stood by the banks of the Nile waiting for tourist business. He promised us a trip to Abu Simbel, followed by a 2-night, 3-day felucca ride, for a price that was far lower than any of his competitors. (We had asked around, and knew that the prices could sometimes vary by a factor of 10).

We thought we had everything in the bag, but when we went shopping with Sayid for food for the falucca tour, the situation began to unravel. With him accompanying us, the prices of food seemed to triple.

We were a bit confused — after all, food was included in the cost of the falucca ride, so everything we were paying at the store would be deducted from the final price we paid to Sayid. If this was a scam, we reasoned, it worked AGAINST Sayid’s favor.

Later that same evening, Sayid told us that the trip to Abu Simbel was cancelled. He claimed the microbus that we were supposed to take had been in an accident. An unlikely story, but it was already 10 pm and we were scheduled to leave at 3 am. It was too late to book a different tour.

We shrugged and went to bed, figuring everything would get delayed by a day.

At 3 am, there was a knock on our door. The microbus driver had shown up. Sayid had lied about the bus crash. Our trip to Abu Simbel hadn’t been cancelled after all. But why had he lied? We hadn’t paid him in advance. Cancelling the trip meant cancelling his business. We wondered if Sayid was a very stupid scammer.

Deciding we could no longer trust him, we met him the following day and told him we wanted to book our felucca ride with someone else. Standing at the Nile’s edge, on Sayid’s motorboat, we asked Sayid for our food back. He claimed it was stored on a different boat, and that we’d have to go to a different dock to retrieve it.

He drove us in his motorboat to another dock, where we sat for an hour, waiting. Then he unlocked a compartment underneath where we’d been sitting. The food had been there all along.

He demanded 40 Egyptian pounds from us, for the motorboat ride. We screamed at him for wasting our time and demanded he return us to our original dock.

With much hassle, we booked another tour for the following day. Our felucca ride was better than we had imagined: scenic sunset views on the sapphire blue Nile; the hilarious company of British and Australian travelers who soon became our new friends. We fell asleep under a starry sky, docked on the Nile River banks.

We were shocked, however, when the first morning after camping out on the boat, we opened our eyes and saw Sayid looming over us like a character from a B-grade horror movie. He was stalking us. Our falucca driver’s face turned red, his hands clunched into fists, and he lunged off the boat towards shore. We had to restrain our felucca driver from punching him out. Apparently, Sayid has quite a nasty reputation among felucca drivers. Even his own family, we hear, despises him.

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 Mount. A couple millennia ago, Romans destroyed the Jew’s holiest temple, and this retaining wall is all that remains.

Three of us — two girls, one guy — washed our hands and began walking toward the wall to pay our respects.

On the way, an old woman began yelling at us in Hebrew. We ignored her, figuring she was a beggar, a vendor or just plain crazy. We kept walking. She kept yelling. Walking. Yelling. Walking. Yelling. Finally we figured out what she was trying to tell us — the Wailing Wall is gender-segregated and the guy was supposed to be on the other side. Oops!

SCENE TWO: THE SITE OF JESUS’ CRUCIFIXION

When Jesus was nailed to the Cross, the scene must have been unglamorous: an angry mob, some wood, and a hammer.

Now, the site where He died is festooned with silver and gold. It looks like a hip-hop video. The site of the crucifixion is some shiny bling-bling.

The angry mob, however, hasn’t disappeared. They’ve just converted into priests.

At the site of the crucifixion, a long line of devout Christians, who are undoubtedly making one of the most important pilgrimages of their lives, wait for their chance to kneel and pray at the location of the Cross. Many of them are elderly and have probably scrimped and saved and waited and prayed for their once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the place of Holy Passion.

But their moment in God’s presence is probably ruined by the priests.

These guys have spent too long watching Christian pilgraims, and have lost their patience for crowd-control. They stand next to the worshippers, yelling “hurry up! HURRY UP!,” and fly into a tizzy once a worshipper has been at the Cross for longer than a few seconds. Most of the time, the priests begin screaming before a Christian has even had enough time to bow.

One particularly angry priest physically shoved an old lady out of the way. Security rushed him, demanding to know what he was doing. “I asked her to leave!!” he bellowed. Security apologized to the old lady and allowed her to get to the front of the line. “NO!!” the priest yelled, and rushed in for interference. Another priest caught wind of this and ran over, trying to calm the first priest down. Suddenly people are screaming in different languages. Commotion ensues.

Even all the bling-bling in the world can’t make the site of the Crucifixion sacrosanct.

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 Tel Aviv.

It’s amazing how a border — an arbitrary, imaginary line — changes everything.

As soon as we crossed into Israel, we faced a new language, new code of socially acceptable behavior, and new standards of health and hygene.

The hummus here — as opposed to in Egypt — is sold in a safety-sealed plastic package, without flies. The prices here have quadrupled. It’s acceptable to wear short skirts here. Instead of people fasting for Ramadan, public transit shuts down for the Sabbath.

We seem to have arrived in both Egypt and Israel exactly in time for their annual religious holidays. We spent Ramadan in Egypt; now we’re spending Yom Kippur and Sukkot at Zohar’s kibbutz in northern Israel.

I never took the time to describe the “iftar,” the breaking of the fast, that happens every sunset in the Arab world. The bustling, crazy, traffic-choked streets clear out. The loud panic subsides to a whisper. For a brief hour, the streets are completely quiet. All you hear is the Call to Prayer singing “Allah Akbar” and all you see are groups of men sitting together on rugs, eating their first meal of the day.

We’re in Israel to witness Yom Kippur, the day of judgment. Everything shuts down on that day — no public transit, no jobs. Everyone fasts.

Maybe the more countries change, the more things stay the same.

Zohar invited us to stay at his kibbutz — a communal village, population 650 — in northern Israel.
We leapt at the prospect of seeing a communal village, although Laurel was a little hesitant. Should she spend Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, at the kibbutz? Or should she try to spend it with Israeli relatives she’s never met before; family with whom she shares a common great-grandfather?

Thanks to strange serendipity, she didn’t have to choose. As it turns out, Laurel’s relative lives on the same kibbutz. In fact, he’s Zohan’s next-door neighbor!

This relative, Yani, is extremely friendly. He wholeheartedly greeted Laurel when she knocked on his door, and he hosted us for three consecutive dinners. Today he and his wife drove us to Mt. Carmel, took us to a Sufi market, and bought us an amazing hummus, dolma, and lamb kebab lunch.

Devout Jews fast on Yom Kippur, but the kibbutz is populated with kids in their early 20’s who care more about fun than fasting. We spent The Day of Judgment hanging out at a campfire with about 25 Israeli youth. We cooked pizzas over the fire, munched on cookies, and enjoyed an unconventional, fasting-free Yom Kippur.

In general, we’re better-fed in Israel than we ever were in Egypt. During Ramadan in Egypt, there simply was no food available. We’d get hungry, and climb onto the roof of the hostel, and shake a palm tree until dates fell out. We’d munch on the dates and call it lunch.

We were poor and hungry, and we all lost weight. Here in Israel, we’re promptly putting those pounds back on, one scoop of tahina at a time.

The landscape here looks dry — rust-colored soil, stone settings — but amazingly, this kibbutz is brimming with fruit. Our days consist of picking pomegranates out of trees, watching quails, walking past the sheep pastures, picking wild herbs to make tea.

“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 wonder why camels are allowed on such narrow winding paths in pitch-black dark. Surely my headlight can’t spot them coming from above. 

But our paths cross, the camel and I, and he continues a steady saunter downward while I push on toward the summit.

I’ve been walking since 2 a.m., and I need to reach the top by 5 a.m., in time to see daybreak over the mountains.

I have no trouble doing so, and I find a narrow stone ledge at the summit of Mt. Sinai. 

It’s here where (according to Christians, Jews and Muslims alike) Moses recieved the 10 Commandments from God. I had read about this mountain millions of times in Catholic school, but never did I imagine it to be so desolate. 

Life is impossible in these mountains for plants, trees — for anyone other than camels and box-lunch tourists on air-conditioned buses. 

I try to imagine 40 days of solitude on this mountaintop, as Moses spent when he talked to God. Once the sun rises on these mountains, they become scorching hot and unbearably dry. Anyone would start hearing voices, it seems.

As the sun rises, the only voices I hear are hymns in German, in Korean, in languages I can’t identify. They’re sung by the pilgrims sharing the crowded summit with me.

As I start my descent back down, I hear the gurgles and groans of camels. 40 years from now, the camels will still be on Mt. Sinai.

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 world, and an elaborate seascape of coral reef. It’s my first time snorkeling and my first glimpse of coral reef. I’m identifying an entire new world underwater of puffer fish and parrot fish.

The town feels more like a Thai island than Islamic Egypt. We can freely swim in bikinis while staring across the gulf at Saudi Arabia. It’s amazing to realize that a tiny stretch of sea separates a beach where women can deep-sea dive from a country where women can’t drive.

Of course, snorkeling, coral reefs, reflections on freedom — blah blah blah. None of this is as colorful as Mickey. Mickey is a middle-aged Danish woman who’s been living in Egypt for the past 7 years. When I call her “colorful,” I mean it literally. She’s bright red, head-to-toe. Her color might come from sunburn; it might come from her excessive alcohol consumption. We suspect it comes from both. She looks old for her age, with saggy, wrinkled skin and an incessant cough from a lifetime of cigarettes and hash. Her cough sounds like water hissing as it hits a pot of hot oil.

She’s our neighbor at Camp Sabry, a Bedouin camp overrun by cats. None of the Camp Sabry residents can sit in our musty, unclean rooms in the evenings, so we all converge under the woven canopy in the center of the campsite. This space has become our “living room.” The cats outnumber the people at least 3-to-1. They seem to multiply hourly.

Sitting in Camp Sabry’s “living room” last night, Mickey — in her usual drunk state — tried to tell us a story. She made it through “Once upon a time,” before devolving into a coughing fit. She sounded like the muck of ancient earth was lodged in her lungs. All the other guests began laughing at this old woman’s failed state. She looked around angrily, then tried again. “Once upon a time — ” she began, before her words dissolved into fitful coughing. She managed to tell the story — a fictional tale about a fish with a golden head — though she told it in a rambling, convoluted way, like Sarah Palin trying to answer a foreign policy question. Then she walked off, defeated.

Half an hour passed. It seemed like the night was calming down. Even the cats had disappeared. Then I noticed everyone staring at me. What? Wait, no, they’re not staring at me. They’re staring at some spectacle behind me. It’s Mickey, completely topless, drunk beyond her skull. Her body is as red and saggy and wrinkled as her face. Her breasts, somehow, are perky and creamy milk-white.

She walks past all the practicing Muslim boys, who are vacationing in Dahab to celebrate the end of Ramadan fasting. They glance, look away, glance again, then look away with vigor. She stumbles toward the bathroom, then back toward her room. But she walks through the wrong door. We watch as she enters someone elses’ open bedroom door. We wait for her to realize her mistake and leave. She does not. After some hesitation, the guests crowd the doorway.

Mickey is passed out asleep on someone’s bed. Four feet away from her is an innocent man, sleeping, oblivious to his intruder.

The Muslim men aren’t sure what to do. One grabs a towel and places it around her, covering her skin. They try to pick her up. She wakes up, falls over. Shoots a look at the innocent man asleep in the next bed. “WHAT’S he f***ing doing in my fucking room?” It begins as an angry bellow, then falls to a mumble. By the end of the question, she’s asleep. The sleeping man wakes up from of the commotion. Screams. Just another night in tropical snorkeling paradise …..

Then, suddenly, trees. We rub our eyes. Is it a mirage? No — it’s truly an oasis.

The Siwa oasis, which worshipped the Ancient Egyptian god Amun until (relatively) not too long ago, is a solitary small town close to the Libyan border. Donkey-carts outnumber cars. The stones give way to dwellings carved into the stone, which gradually give way to modern dwellings made out of stone and mud-brick.

Women are rarely seen, not even at markets. They are cloaked from head-to-toe, with a mesh veil hiding even their eyes. By contrast, women in burquas in cosmopolitan Cairo look exposed.

So on our second night at the Siwa oasis, when we had the opportunity to visit a woman’s house, Laurel and I lept at the chance. No man other than her son could accompany us; women can only be in the company of other women. Their privacy is so fiercely guarded that her son wouldn’t even reveal her name. But we did get to see her face: smiling and shy. The left side of her mouth had large yellowed teeth, the right side had no teeth. At home she wore a simple beige tunic and a blue headscarf over her curly black hair. Although she was slender, she had an unbelievably large booty. She brought us tea and cookies; applied henna to Laurel’s hands. A television, her only contact with the outside world, played in the background the entire time. It had satellite stations, most of which were in Italian, and for awhile it broadcast images of women in thong bikinis sunbathing on the Italian Riviera. I wondered how television rocked the Berber (nomadic north Africans who settled in Siwa) way of life; I wondered if shows like these were the equivalent of porn.

She couldn’t speak any English. She didn’t want her picture taken. She didn’t ask for any money for the hours she spent applying henna to Laurel’s hands; Laurel had to forcifully press 10 Egyptian pounds ($2 U.S. Dollars) into her palms.

Her son drove us back to town on his donkey-cart. We realized he’s probably the sole breadwinner of the family, as his father, whom we met, is blind. Even without eyesight, though, the father can expertly manuever the TV remote.

In the early 1990’s, when he was a young immigrant studying in America, he lived with my friends’ family in Broomfield, Colo., and when he discovered we are in Egypt, he invited us to stay with him, his wife and their three daughters, ages 9 months through 9 years.

We’ve been spending the past few days at his apartment in Alexandria, a coastal city bordering the Mediterranean Sea.

Outside the famed Library of Alexandria, we met an Egyptian-born guy from Los Angeles named Mustafa and his crew of Egyptian “homies” – twentysomethings with sideways baseball caps who listen to hip-hop all day and stay bored because its cool. We’ve spent the past two afternoons hanging out with them by the sea. They smoke cigarettes, rap Ludacris and Bizzy Bone lyrics, and complain about how none of the Egyptian girls will get naked for them.

All day long, we’re hot and hungry. We sleep late into the afternoon – it’s too hot to move much while the sun is out – and stay awake late into the night, when the temperature cools. We’re usually still awake by the 4 a.m. morning Call to Prayer.

At night, the city erupts with characteristic craziness. Horses pull wagons piled with eggplants down narrow, trash-strewn streets. Children ride tricycles past sheep and goats tied outside butcher shops. Men weld chicken cages as the animals cluck inside. Pedestrians dance around microbuses driving within an inch of bodies.

After breaking fast with Mohammad at sunset, we ventured out to buy a watermelon from a midnight melon cart. Someone had carved “Allah Akbar” – “God is Great” – into the melon skin.

My friend, who studied Arabic in college, read aloud from the watermelon rind. I practiced reading the Arabic numbers on license plates passing by. We began to sweat in the smoggy night humidity.

We’re going to Siwa tomorrow, a small oasis town at Egypt’s western border, next to Libya. More than a dozen tourists were kidnapped at the Egypt-Libya border a few days ago, which makes our decision to head in that same direction questionable. But the kidnappings took place in the south. We’re heading to the north, which (fingers crossed!) will be safe.

All I can say about our upcoming journey is “Salaam ‘alaykum!” – peace be with you.

From our hotel in downtown Cairo, we catch a birds-eye view of hundreds men outside the neighborhood mosque, kneeling in prayer along the sidewalks in neat little rows that stretch into the busy street. Above them, three stories above ground, five men unfurl a rug on a rooftop and break fast at sunset.

The streets are devoid of women during the day. Only men can be seen, hustling to and from air-conditioned offices or driving taxis or carrying heavy loads. But at night the women come out in droves, crowding into markets and shops that pound with energy at midnight. Without the women’s presence, these same shops fall asleep during the hot, hungry days.

The women are high-fashion, wearing cute designer tops over long-sleeved shirts and tailored, couture ankle-length skirts. They carefully coordinate their headscarves to compliment their shirt to compliment their handbag. A surprising number of stores showcase risqué lingerie. Burqa-clad women, covered head-to-toe with only a tiny slit exposing their eyes, will rifle through racks of fur-and-fishnet lingerie in the downtown shops.

Women in burqas, by the way, have incredibly expressive eyes. Making eye contact with them on the street can give you chills. They tell you a story in a single glance.

In spite of its seeming conservatism, Cairo has a Burning Man Festival quality to it. The city is a sandcastle, built precariously on harsh desert land, and it comes alive at night, with bright flashy lights and loud music raging from sunset to sunrise. Party boats draped in bright lights cruise up and down the Nile, and young ladies in sequin-lined headscarves hang out on the riverbanks, chatting (and, if they’re daring,  occasionally holding hands) with their male counterparts.

Egypt is “dry” in every sense of the word, and it is fascinating to watch a thriving alcohol-free nightlife in the city that never sleeps.

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 hot spring in Alberta, Canada, picking up a few hitchhikers along the way.

After a week I return to Colorado, spend six weeks starting and finishing a few freelance projects, officially move out of my house, then fly to San Francisco to hang out in the Bay Area for a week while preparing for the Burning Man Festival.

From San Francisco, we ride a veggie-oil schoolbus into the desert, and experience the desert festival of fire and art (which is another story for a different day). When its done I ride with a British woman to Reno, where we stay in a hotel so grandiose that has its own movie theater, shopping district, six-lane entryway and restaurant row.

The next day I catch a flight to Atlanta, where I attend a four-day journalism conference and visit with my parents.

I then fly back to Colorado, pack my bags, and five days later find myself on a flight to Egypt. Thus begins the next leg of my two-year round-the-world journey.