Even locals sometimes get it wrong

Jerusalem

In her book Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff, Rosemary Mahoney recounts the following:

The French naturalist Charles Sonnini had witnessed a clitoridectomy while in Egypt in 1778 and reported that the woman who performed the surgery had told him if the clitoris was allowed to grow unchecked “by the age of twenty-five the thing would exceed four inches in length.” Sonnini believed this and attributed the phenomenon to an “Egyptian ethnic development.”

Sonnini, God bless him, made the mistake of accepting as truth something which locals had no doubt told him with absolute conviction. And so Sonnini, more than 230 years after his travels in Egypt, finds his way into this blog to illustrate an important lesson: locals aren’t always right.

While travelers seldom have conversations with local residents regarding clitoral measurements, we frequently converse about – and I’ll stick to just one example – how to get from Point A to Point B. This month, for example, I am visiting Israel and Palestine, and I have no guidebook. This means that at some point each day I’m asking someone how to get to someplace.

Last week I was traveling by bus from Jerusalem to the Palestinian city of Ramallah, and about half way there I asked an old woman beside me if this bus – bus #18 to be precise – went all the way to the center of Ramallah. She said no, it didn’t, and I’d need to get off shortly after the Qalandia checkpoint and catch a smaller yellow bus. She was confident. She was also kind, calling her daughter who worked in Jerusalem and handing me the phone so I could hear a second person say the same thing. I got off the bus with the old woman and she made sure I got on the next yellow bus passing by.

Ten minutes later I was standing in Ramallah. And as I looked around, there down the block was bus #18, the very bus that wasn’t supposed to be here. I turned to a few more locals and asked if this bus always come to Ramallah’s center. “Yes,” they all said. I stood there just a moment pondering the mystery of why the old woman seemed to have gotten it wrong.

I’ll never know. All I know for sure is that it is a mystery found frequently in travel, an exception to the rule that locals generally know best.