Bethlehem, Palestine On Sunday, CBS's 60 Minutes aired film footage of San Francisco in 1906 . The footage, taken by a camera attached to a cable car going down Market Street, is less than 12 minutes long, and it is mesmerizing in a way a still photo cannot be. We see bodies moving, faces moving,...

Cairo, Egypt When I returned to the United States this past weekend after spending six weeks in the Middle East, I didn’t have all that much in my backpack. One thing I had almost packed but didn’t was a chunk of rock. It was one of thousands thrown outside my Cairo hostel, by Tahrir Square,...

Cairo, Egypt “Right now Egypt is like having a fast pass at Disney. People should come over.” These are the words of Rick Zeolla, the general manager of the Cairo Marriott, quoted last week in a New York Times article titled " Tahrir Square, Egypt's New Tourist Draw ." In that same article, the general...

Cairo, Egypt This past Friday, I was on a hostel roof talking with a Hungarian journalist when a tremendous roar, straight out of the lungs of tens of thousands of Egyptians, swept through the streets and over Cairo’s Tahrir Square . We stood and ran to a better vantage point to see if the sound...

Damascus, Syria "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," wrote Charles Dickens in the opening line of A Tale of Two Cities . He was referring to life in an area of Europe in the late 1700s, but one could also feasibly slap this line into a book about overnights...

Maaloula, Syria If passing through the Syrian town of Maaloula , particularly if you are passing by the slightly expensive restaurant some 100 meters shy of the entrance to Mar Thecla Convent , you might notice a young man with Aramaic writing tattooed on his arms. Curious, you might then walk over and ask, “Excuse...

Dead Sea, Israel There's something to be said about sitting at 3:00 o'clock in the morning on a rocky beach 1385 feet below sea level, gazing up at the Milky Way as your mineral-slimed body smells of the Dead Sea , that famous body of water from which you've just pulled your own not-quite-so-famous body...

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...

Damascus, Syria I had seen the ads for television extras in Bangkok hostels, and I had spoken with travelers about their Bollywood background roles in Mumbai. But I had never made an effort to pursue this myself. But last Monday at 9:00 a.m., while stepping out of the hostel to buy a bottle of water...

Cairo, Egypt The train rattling down the track as you lay awake in a sleeper car; the call to prayer sounding from a mosque as tropical birds outside your window also welcome the dawn; your name, so uneventfully and mono-syllabically said back home, suddenly turned into a two-syllable masterpiece by a cheerful lady at Lake...

Somewhere in Egypt The Patriarch of Constantinople may have spent some time at Al-Kharga Oasis , but I had to give it a miss. And I really, really hated to do that. Nestorius (c.386-c.451), to simplify a complex issue, was the loser in one of the great theological controversies in Christian history, and so he...

Cairo, Egypt It may seem incongruent to have a bar song come to mind while walking through the medieval mosques and alleys of Islamic Cairo. But so it goes. The bar song I'm thinking of is the theme to the old television show "Cheers." Here are the lyrics (and the one-minute youtube video , in...

Towers of Lalish. Photo by Lucina Kathmann The Middle East has always been one of those areas that intrigued me. I was surprised to read that there is even a nascent tourism industry in Iraq, of all places. Iraqi Kurdistan has been promoting itself as " The Other Iraq ," and with good reason. Kurdistan...

A reader named Jon recently wrote with some questions about traveling in winter. "What advice would you give for vagabonding during the winter in the Middle East and Europe?" he wrote. "Is it even advisable to travel during the winter months? Are there advantages to vagabonding during the "off-peak" tourist/travel season compared to the more...