Around and Over There

I woke up early, before the heat burst and floods the plazas, streets and alleys of Luxor. It is like this in Egypt, especially in August at the peak of summer. I walked down the riverside in order to kill some time before breakfast. There I met Bakr.
One of the reasons I will never forget this man is because he was the first Arab I met who spoke Portuguese. The other, less immediate but more indelibly, will keep this Egyptian forever in my memory: he travelled all around the globe and visited what remains of the places that define our history, often de-constructing what he saw and picturing what there once was. He travelled the ancient world, the cradle of our civilizations.
He saw the lost city of Ani and visited its 1001 churches, sat with the Anasazi people at Mesa Verde on their cliff dwellings in Colorado, journeyed on Mesopotamia from Nuzi to Ur, climbed the lost steps of the Ciudad Perdida through its dense jungle, smiled at the Akrotiri fresco's painters and saw them using their bright and swooping colours, and gazed at Sanchi’s temples and monasteries. What other city would be better to meet this man than Luxor, the ancient city of Thebes, the great old capital of Egypt?!
The 84 years old Bakr was a true Argonaut! Cruising through the centuries with the virtuous precision of eternity.
He learned Portuguese in Brazil, as fruit of his love with a Carioca woman, but he made sure he told me about Portugal, the ancient land of the Andalus, about Lisbon and its caravels leaving for the New World. He knew it all!
He told me how it was to travel when he was young, before the armies of cameras started invading every historical place, before the low-cost trivialized the concept of travelling, before wonders became tourist must-sees, before great destinations turned into weekend getaways and before the plague of souvenir shops that together with fast-food chains are leeching the uniqueness of the places and transforming them into tourist packages for the masses, which ultimately are destroying his country precious heritage.
Bakr journeys were unique because he perceived the world as a continual stream of different historical periods, interconnected in such a way that it made no sense to look at ours disregarding those that preceded it.
We sat there for hours, and then he left me with a compassionate farewell and with new eyes to see the world. I stood there realizing how different it was to travel at his time and how pleasant it must have been.