Bend Don't Break: Or How Egypt Taught Me to Travel
EGYPT | Thursday, 15 May 2014 | Views [249] | Scholarship Entry
It was all a mistake. I grabbed the boy by his collar and dragged him kicking and screaming back inside the Aswan train station. “I don’t have your money,” he was shouting, but I was sure he did. A dozen Egyptians crowded around the ticket counter as I held the boy to the window, shook our train tickets at the startled clerk and pushed them through the window. As the boy and clerk argued loudly in Arabic, I interjected hopelessly in English, understanding nothing. Suddenly the clerk snatched my tickets, dropped 400 Egyptian pounds on the counter—the 400 pounds I thought the boy had stolen from me—and shouted violently. “Go! Go!”
My heart dropped and I released the boy, realizing my mistake. Ten minutes earlier he had offered to take our money to the clerk and return with tickets; I assumed he had scammed us by giving us bogus tickets and pocketing the 400 pounds. But I was wrong: the money was right there on the counter, and I had completely overreacted. How did I end up like this—how had I become so distrustful of everyone around me?
Travel changes you, and not always for the better. When I arrived in Egypt, near the halfway point of a one-year backpacking trip to Asia, I was a different person from when I began. I’d had some of the greatest experiences of my life and also some of the worst. I was hassled by touts in India, spit on by beggars in Romania, and subject to the pranks of Turkish children and their air rifles. And there was always over-charging. Food prices were inflated, taxi fairs tripled, and the cheapest hotel rooms and bus seats were oddly unavailable.
I resisted the cynical notion that everyone is a cheat and a liar, but facing this treatment day after day certainly took its toll. By the time I arrived in Egypt I was nearly defeated by it, and I saw myself swinging through a range of behavior that I never exhibited back home. I ignored beggars, cursed touts, and threatened taxi drivers who demanded inflated fairs. Things got ugly—I got ugly.
That year I found my way in and out of a lot of challenging situations, but the struggle with myself was the most difficult. I began to overcome it in Aswan, when I apologized to the boy in front of six of his friends and two of my travel companions. Most importantly, I came to realize that ultimately I had no control oven these situations except for how I chose to react, and that would have to be enough. I had a lot of travelling yet to do, and I wasn’t going to let this ruin it.
Tags: 2014 Travel Writing Scholarship - Euro Roadtrip
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