On the shininess of other places

A few thoughts on the joys of exploring other lands

Jerusalem’s Western Wall (photo Michele Bigley)

It’s after 11pm in a Cairo airport hotel. The cafeteria’s packed. Women in a rainbow of hijabs and niqabs carry roasted chicken and kefta, rice, tahina and fruit from the buffet to husbands and children studying smartphones. A gaggle of drunken Russians in tank tops showing off hairy midsections spit laughter across a pile of cakes.

Two African girls in purple hijabs shepherd younger cousins and siblings to tables laden with what Egyptians call Oriental cuisine, but westerners commonly know as Mediterranean. Mothers in black niqab and gloves carefully insert hunks of chicken into their hidden mouths. One covered woman must yell requests to be heard in the loud room. Next to her, a matriarch in a deep blue hijab and matching dress takes slow small bites of an apple. She savors eat bite as if she’s never meditated on the particular sweetness of this fruit.

Nearby a man scoops rice into his mouth with his fingers; a thick gold watch on his wrist. Another man untangles is large frame from his small seat, lifts his T-shirt to show an abundant belly, pokes a needle into his fleshy middle, then sits back down to his platter of desserts.

Me and the penises I travel with are struck silent by the elaborate chaos of this cafeteria.

Presumably, the selling point of this hotel is both proximity to the airport and 24-hour food, drink, gambling and general debauchery. Or maybe it is the befuddled bedazzled woman crooning about lost love in French, English and Arabic near the pool, while men smoking shisha (hookahs) stare.

Whatever the case, other than the streets of Cairo, this cafeteria might be the most happening spot to be at midnight, I decide just as the power goes out, blanketing us in a darkness so complete it’s laughable. One woman lets out a little yelp, then it’s as if the volume was turned up in the room. A Korean couple alights their table with a phone and continue hacking into a chicken leg. Just another disturbance on what must be a travel day for all of us here in this airport hotel.

As we feel our way to the door, the staff bustles around us, guarding the exits to make sure no one escapes without paying, even though without electricity, they cannot run the credit card machine attached to the big computer.

When the lights flash on again, and I notice how comfortable the majority of diners are with this slight hiccup in their midnight meal, I tingle with a complete sense of gratitude to be here right now. Here, we are all outsiders. And when stitched together, we make a curious tableau of otherness. Here we are struck by the shininess of other places.

The problem of travel in 2023

Much has been written lately about the problem of tourism. This fantastic New Yorker piece and Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s novel Grand Hotel Europa both make compelling cases to add to the arguments about over-tourism in Europe and Hawaii and the obvious intersection of our climate crisis and travel.

I too have been grappling with the role of travel in my life for awhile now. How can you be a climate activist and a world traveler? How can I justify the emissions of flights, or my ecological footprint on a destination?

How can I continue my career as a travel writer when it contributes to the hastening of our climate crisis?

I’m not alone.

Many of us feel guilty about boarding a plane to join the hordes at Giza’s pyramids, or the Eiffel Tower, or Waikiki Beach. I’d even go so far as to call it a syndrome of our time: Traveler’s guilt.

Yet, guilt is not stopping us from going. Most destinations are equal to, or above, pre-pandemic numbers of visitors.

Obviously, we can make the case (and I do!) for more mindful travel, or a more regenerative approach. But no solutions truly address the larger issues of global tourism.

If we’re boarding a plan to an over-touristed destination, we should feel guilty. Guilt shows we care. It shows we’re thinking about our role as citizens of a hot planet.

The case for otherness

In spite of the guilt, this summer I too joined the masses and boarded a plane. Leading up to our trip, I itched with the desire to rekindle my wonder and awe. I’d felt that my sons needed another perspective to American culture’s gun toting capitalist system. So we jetted off to Israel and Egypt to fulfill my father-in-law’s dying wishes to return to Israel.

It’s not enough, but we did offset our flights with a reputable company; I am in the process of planting native trees and shrubs in Israel’s heat islands, and I am volunteering to help out Egyptian climate organizations as an offering of my skills to the future of these destinations. Though, I repeat, this is not enough.

But…

As my wise friend Ali recently said: there is nothing more humbling or awe-inspiring as the shininess of other places.

Cliches aside, the true power of travel is that is forces us to pay attention. For five hours we drove from Luxor to Hurghada and instead of reading or looking at my phone, I stared out the window. The three kids riding a tiny donkey, the guys with machine guns smoking shisha by free water stations. The women in full niqab carrying huge bags of grains on their heats. The egrets complaining from date palms. The brown Nile and all its bird-filled reeds. My biggest asset at that moment was my focused attention. My openness to what was here now. To being here, now.

Friends, our attention has been hijacked. Getting outside our lives allows us to return to that sense of attention. Some may spin deeper into themselves. But others may take the time to marinate on a world bigger than our little lives.

My sons both had moments of clarity that are not mine to share, but I will add that they found a new relationship to their place in their world, both at home and in Egypt and Israel. Eddie also found moments that changed him in some way, even momentarily.

Throughout this journey, I met an awe that mingled with the guilt, cross-pollinating until there a murky complexity remained. There is a great privilege to our jetsetting and we have grossly taken this fact for granted.

There is no true solution to the issues of over-tourism. Just like there is no way to undercut the ways in which travel is destroying the places we visit and the planet.

And yet…

That night in Cairo’s Le Passage Hotel, it was clear that at home, I probably would not have been entertained by an all-night buffet at an airport hotel—I would not have been at an airport hotel. And if I were, I might have been hangry and annoyed by how ridiculously long it took for a waiter to take our order, or how scary Nikko’s kefta looked.

But instead, outside our day-to-day lives, that cafeteria becomes a curiosity. We become a curiosity too, another element to the otherness and strangeness of that place. As much as we may aim to evoke this sense of shininess at home, we do not often succeed. Instead we are sucked into our ecosystems of sameness, and routine. Our attention is too easily lost, unfocused, blurred.

This is not a call for us all to jet off to Egypt in search of lively airport hotels, but instead a challenge not to wait until the lights go out, or until we board planes to open to (and curate) strange environments. Travel enables our curiosity. And sometimes we need a little reminder of how to integrate the wonder into our lives at home too.

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Friends, hope you are having a great summer! I’d love to hear from you about the shininess of your explorations. Where have you gone this summer? What are some things you noticed? And how are you dealing with your travelers’ guilt?

If you happen to be in San Diego on the second Wednesday of the month, I host a reading series called Wandering Words. Come say hi!

As always, thanks for reading and being my community.

~Michele