When I first arrived at my remote hotel outside Luxor, I was told they were full and that the only available room would cost me extra because it was a little nicer. I was also told they offered meals in their beautiful courtyard. As there was really no other place to eat nearby, I planned to have a snoop around the area, take a nap, and return that evening for dinner. Oddly enough, the full hotel always seemed pretty dead and empty to me, and the courtyard restaurant they claimed they had never seemed too busy either. It must have been another scam, I concluded.
I came out to eat at around 6 PM on my first night and found the courtyard deserted. The hotel manager was sitting around and socialising with some of the locals who stopped by for their daily chat. He was very friendly, offered me tea, and proceeded to talk with me in his fractured English. A local taxi driver, obviously friends with the manager, walked in and joined us for tea and conversation. He appeared to be a dead ringer for Libyan leader Omar Khadafi, down to the threads and all. A big guy, about my age.
I was told the kitchen wouldn’t open until after 7 PM. When the manager stepped aside for a few moments, the taxi driver said he would be happy to have me over to his place for dinner if I was hungry. Trying to be culturally sensitive to such offers (as I had to be in Fiji) and not wanting to offend, I agreed to accompany him to his house for dinner — putting some weight on the fact that he seemed to be known and trusted around the hotel. My biggest concern, as always, was getting food poisoning. He seemed thrilled to have a guest and insisted it was all his treat. I figured it would be interesting to experience a Middle Eastern meal with a local Egyptian family.
We hopped into his modern taxi van, and he told me he had to run a few errands to complete the meal. I just waited in the van while he popped into a few neighbourhood shops to get chicken, bread, and some drinks. It became apparent that he had no family and that we would be eating alone together. It was getting dark when he turned down a dirt road that led to his home: a mud shack near the border of some agricultural fields. As far as I could tell, there was no one else living around the immediate area.
Needless to say, I started to feel a bit uncomfortable and a bit vulnerable in such a remote, darkened location. I wasn’t even sure how to get back to the hotel. The house was very basic, with cracked mud walls painted over, few decorations, and sparse furnishings. He was nice, smoked like a chimney (like all good Egyptians), and desperately tried to communicate with me using his broken English. He told me that he had learned the language from conversing with tourists at the hotel over the years. He seemed thrilled to finally have a visitor at his house and retreated to his kitchen to whip up a meal for us.
He brought out a simple spread of barbecued chicken, a vegetable soup, and flatbread. We would try to talk about things, but it wasn’t always easy to understand what he meant. After eating, he seemed eager to sit down next to me on my side of the table. He told me he wanted to hold my hand while we talked.
Now, as odd as that may sound, it is actually quite common to see Egyptian men holding hands and walking arm in arm in Cairo. Nothing is meant by it, but I still didn’t like the idea. Some of the conversation we had also had me a bit concerned. He went on about how he hated women and didn’t believe men and women should be friends. He told me he was divorced and his wife had moved to Cairo with the kids. He seemed quite bitter towards her. He also mentioned having once met some married men. It was hard to decipher what he was saying with his poor English.
My alarm bells were starting to go off, and I began making excuses about how tired I was from not being able to sleep on the overnight train from Cairo the previous night and how I really needed to get back to my hotel room for a good night’s sleep (even though it was only about 7:30 PM). He suggested giving me a massage to help me relax. I started insisting that I really needed to get back to my hotel, trying to be nice, but also quite adamant about getting out of there.
He finally complied with my wishes and took me home, but not before insisting on arranging to meet me the next day. Still wanting to be polite, I agreed to allow him to ferry me around the local sites in his taxi. I was very relieved to get out of there, and vowed (to myself) never to return.
For the rest of my time in Luxor, I had a very difficult time getting rid of him. He kept trying to get me back to his home, and I kept making excuses not to go. He was taxiing me around, as he was doing for other hotel guests, but he was also refusing to charge me any money. “You pay me later”, he would always say — forcing me to arrange another time to meet with him for another taxi ride.
At one point, he failed to meet me at an arranged time to transport me to my next chosen tourist attraction. After being twenty minutes overdue, I thought for a moment I was finally free of him and jumped into another taxi. On the way back to the hotel, he managed to spot me in this other cab. He whipped his taxi around, flagged down the other taxi driver, and got into a huge argument in Arabic with him over me — insisting that I was his customer and that he be allowed to transport me for the rest of my journey. He was quite upset. It was all very unnerving.
The unfortunate thing about this odd encounter is that it made me feel uncomfortable enough to leave Luxor a bit earlier than I had wanted. I could have easily spent another day in the area touring the fascinating ancient ruins. I finally told him that I was going to Aswan, a town farther south. I had to assure him I would return a few days later even though I had already booked my train ticket straight back to Cairo from Aswan with no intention of stopping back in Luxor again. This seemed to be the only way I could make an easy break free of him.
When he drove me to the train station on my last day, I pulled him out a generous payment that was more than enough to cover all his taxi service and the meal he fed me. He seemed very pleased and quickly tucked the cash into his wallet, with no hesitation or suggestion of giving me any change.
The experience left me wondering… he was probably one of the world’s greatest hustlers — but I will never quite be sure what exactly he was hustling me for!
