With your permission, I'd like to share a few vignettes of our travels in Egypt of Jan. 7-16. I think that experience, Susan's and mine, might have some value to you in the decisions you make in sensibly examining your travel plans this year and possibly in the years to come. By coincidence, I received a phone call earlier today from a member of our travel club, a venturesome and popular fellow who has traveled several times in our tours and enjoyed the experience. He said he is interested in one of our more distant destinations this year. He knows he would be
thrilled by the journey and the sites, and  by the sounds and the faces that have always attracted him. But flying today, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, he said, still raises some questions for him. Is it really safe? Does it make sense if it isn't absolutely necessary? Is it worth the anxiety that loved ones at home might feel?

And then he asked one more question?

"How do you feel about it?"

    I said I wouldn't try to minimize his concerns if he had them. Among the people who fly today, including people who fly in adventure travel or discretionary travel or simply to get from here to there, I know very few who credit themselves with any particular bravery. But if you're stirred by an occasional leap into adventure, or a vacation on a seacoast or to a land of spectacle, let's face it: The best and possibly only way to get there is by air. Before Sept. 11, the traveler was faced with practically no private dilemmas about flying or not flying. The attacks on Sept. 11 created those dilemmas for many Americans. They have subsided materially. But many still grapple with them. Flying since Sept. 11 has been largely uneventful and safe. And yet when my
friend inquired, I said I understood his lingering discomfort about flying. Respecting that, I don't share it. I have flown a half dozen times in the last few months, escorted a group to the Mediterranean one of those times, and most recently traveled in Egypt, an Arab country, with my wife. I think it should be said--and you're going to have to forgive this horrendous pun--that
we didn't walk around with our heads in the sand. We were aware that in years past there'd been political violence there. But there had also been recent violence in a half hundred other countries in the world, unrelated to Sept. 11,  including the one in which I live. We were also aware that some militant groups have committed themselves to violence against Americans. It's why this country is involved in Afghanistan and elsewhere. And yet if you wish to travel to the absorbing places of the earth, the ones that have a special allure to you, you may simply have to make a personal judgment: How much genuine hazard is there, if any? How much am I being influenced by the fallout of the travel freeze that gripped America after Sept. 11. Or will I be doing the smart thing by just packing it in for a year or two?

    It's clearly your choice. There isn't any right or wrong to it. How you feel is the way you'll probably go, and nobody with any perception is going to argue with you. Those who retain an urge to travel sensibly can only tell you about their own travels. To Egypt, for one. 

    In midwinter, we  looked out above our hotel balcony in first streamers of sunlight and stared into one of the most celebrated sights in world travel, the massive but elegant monument to the ages, the Pyramid of Cheops. A few hours later we walked around it, mulling its mysteries and jabbering with the postcard hawkers and the camel herders and the miscellaneous bearers of "pure turquoise" scarabs at 50 cents per sacred beetle, my friend.  It was fun and diverting and the pyramids were vast and enigmatic and the Egyptian cops kept shagging the young daredevils who wanted their pictures taken 50 feet up on the stones, but the cops accepted a little baksheesh to ignore  the ones who could afford it. We rented a pair of camels and rode out into the Sahara. dismounted and walked for an hour or so, glimpsing a caravan a long way off and then getting mildly convulsed by the raindrops that fell on us, in all seriousness, in the Sahara Desert.

    We flew to Aswan, rode in a one of those creaking but tireless little sailboats called feluccas and sat for tea and cakes on the terrace of the Old Cataract Hotel, Agatha Christie's haunt in the days of her "Death on the Nile." But for us there was life on the Nile, the swishing feluccas, Nubian villages,  the monologues of the guides at the temple of Phillai, and then the cruiser Esadora, five stars if you don't mind, a picture window facing the great blue river, cabin boys who made fanciful creatures out of the cabin bedding and whatever clothes you left lying around,
and more.

    It was midwinter, and there were no tourist hordes to grapple with. We read and talked and soaked in the sun and watched the sugar beet farmers for more than two hours from the sun deck, deserted except for us. Midwinter, yes. But this was no ordinary year on the Nile, or anywhere. There would be no hordes this winter.

    And that was a condition that could not be ignored. Yet we experienced no feeling of anxiety. When the camel hustlers asked if we were English, we said no, we're from America. And they said, hey, hey. Hi Ho Silver. You're OK. Thumbs Up. They were peddlers and promoters and politicians, sure. They were also ordinary people we met. And it wasn't much different on the streets of Cairo, or around the swarms of gold necklaces and endless mounds of spice and the hookah water pipes of the huge Khan el Khalili market downtown. Or, in fact, in the Casablanca dining room that resembled the set of a technicolor movie of the 1940s. It was full of waiters looking like Turhan Bey in their turned-up Aladdin  slippers and gold and crimson tunics. Mobiles in 15 colors of painted glass hung from the ceiling, and the sandpaper scrapings of the violin player cued the relentless solemnity on the faces of the quartet playing Moroccan music.

    But from the balcony, we looked down on the River Nile flowing rather immortally. I know of very few sights on earth that can bring you face to face with the sweep of the ages, that can immerse you as magnetically in the beauty and power of a world that was and yet lift you to the vitality--and the suspense--of what is. The river Nile does all this, magically under the stars, and mercilessly in the heat of the desert sun.

Was it worth it?

    It was and is, each tick in time, including the ones when the scarab peddlers horn in and on days when it rains in the Sahara, which even Aladdin never wrote home about. 
 

Cordially,

Jim Klobuchar