Before long, though, my pace improves. My feet feel better, my pack falls just right across back, and my lungs stop working so hard. I stop fretting about myself and start to notice the trees and the birds. I remember why I love hiking in the mountains.

I think Sarah and I are going through a similar adjustment here during our first few days in Egypt.

We had spent the last two weeks in Minnesota eating big meals (wow, that Thanksgiving dinner we made was good!) and generally being spoiled rotten by our parents. We slept on a big comfortable bed between crisp cotton sheets and woke each morning to beautiful silence -- no honking cars, no yelling, no roosters. Sure it was -20 Fahrenheit out side, but I didn't really care because I had my old comfortable slippers and the coffee was nice and hot.

Then, a few evenings ago, it was time to go. We drove through the frozen tundra to the Rochester airport, caught a quick flight to Minneapolis, then another flight to Amsterdam. For the third of fourth time on this trip, the in-flight movie was Charlie's Angels. We arrived in Amsterdam at 1:00 PM and I was tired. Very tired. Much more tired than when we flew to Australia. And we still had more than 12 hours of travel to go.

In an effort to remain in motion and thus awake during our 7 hour layover, we took the train into town and spent the afternoon wandering the streets. It was cold, so we took frequent breaks to eat lunch or sip coffee. We shuffled along like zombies, a little overwhelmed to suddenly find ourselves on these quaint European streets. Everything looked. . . well it looked so darn European with all the bicycles and the cobblestones and the railway station. Amsterdam is a beautiful city and I would have liked to have stayed to enjoy it (with a lesser degree of jet lag) but we had plane to catch.

We went back to the airport for our flight to Cairo. No Charlie's Angels this time, and we landed right on time at 1 AM. People formed a nice orderly line at Immigration, which was a nice surprise; I had expected Chinese-style pushing and shoving. Unfortunately the line moved ridiculously slow, the Egyptian officer paying more attention to his cigarette than to our passports. When we finally got up to the front of the line, the disorganized family of 5 ahead of us took 20 minutes to get through. This kind of thing is always annoying, but after 30 hours of sleepless travel it reached whole new levels of annoyingness.

Every country we have been in seems to have a catch-phrase, something the locals say again and again. In Australia it was "no worries,"" in Laos "Sabah-Dee," and in Thailand "No problem." Within an hour or two of landing in Cairo, I had a candidate for Egypt's phrase: "5 minutes." We had asked for airport pick-up when I booked our hotel, and after clearing Customs we saw a portly man in a sportcoat holding a sign with our name and a few others. He welcomed us then pointed to some chairs and said "5 minutes." We sat down, and about 10 minutes later the guy came back and said it again, "5 minutes." This went on for quite some time.

Eventually, he ushered us to his van, where we sat for another 20 or 30 minutes. The whole while, we received frequent reassurances: "5 minutes, 5 minutes."

We finally reached the hotel at 3:00 in the morning. Our guidebook had described it as a former British Officer's Club and said it "retains a colonial air, particularly in the reception area with its beautifully ornate lift." It also said that is possessed "an almost unreal individuality." Only after arrived did I realize that an antique elevator does not a nice hotel make, and that "individuality" is not necessarily a good thing, as in, no two piles of cow dung are exactly alike. I must learn to read these guidebooks as one reads real-estate listings, where words like "historic" and "cozy" are not the friendly adjectives we all know and love.

Our double room had a relatively clean shower and toilet, but our bed was a just a tiny little twin. Just one bed for the both of us and it was completely lacking any support in the middle so it sagged like a green bean from an elementary school cafeteria. When I first saw it, I assumed the porter had brought us to the wrong room. I pointed to the bed and asked, "Two people?" The porter left -- to get the keys to the correct room, I assumed -- and then returned a short time later with a second pillow.

When we stepped out of our hotel onto the streets of Cairo the next morning, we were hit by a wave of culture shock stronger than any we had faced since Beijing. Maybe even stronger. Directly across the street, I saw a several turban-headed men sitting at small tables outside a coffehouse. They were smoking tobacco out of sheehsas, those big water pipes that sit on the ground. A boy walked by balancing a 10-foot long rack of pita on his head. To our right, someone had tied up a cow in front of a grimy apartment building. Stray cats prowled the gutters. Policemen with serious looking automatic weapons stood on every corner. The writing on all the signs was in Arabic.

Whenever Sarah and I get to a new town we try to spend the first day walking. We hit the streets without a particular destination in mind, and just wander. We try to get a feel for the place. Traffic here was absolute chaos. Cars flew through red lights without so much as a sideways glance. Sprinkled here and there in the throng of downtown traffic were donkey's pulling over-loaded carts. Crossing streets was madness, and we quickly resorted to our old trick of tucking ourselves in behind women and children. The sidewalks were packed with a great crush of people. This was more crowded even than Beijing on National Day. All the women wore at a least a scrarf on their head, and many were completely cloaked from head to toe. Some men wore western attire and others wore traditional ankle-length brown or white robes.

We slept barely a wink the next two nights. Worse than our miserable, narrow, saucer of a bed was the noise which didn't even begin to die down until around 3 AM. There was yelling and screaming and honking and drum-beating. Just when you've fallen asleep at that almost-quiet hour between 4 and 5, the loudspeakers on the street blare the cry of the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer.

This morning we hopped a train to Alexandria, an ancient sea-port on the Mediterranean about 2 1/2 hours northwest of Cairo. We thought we might escape some of the noise and pollution, but we were in for quite a surprise.

Sarah and I have an unfortunate habit of hitting countries during the big holidays. You might think this is a good thing -- all smiling families and sparklers -- but sadly it usually just means huge crowds and closed shops. This time, we had managed to find ourselves in Egypt to Eid al-Adha, the three day feast that marks the haj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. Businesses were closed, kids were out of school, and there was even more pandemonium than this pandemonium-ful country usually has.

Whereas we Americans like a clean little baked ham for our holidays, the traditional Islamic meal on such occassions is freshly slaughtered sheep. The streets of Alexandria were literally running red with blood. On the walk to our hotel we passed piles of viscera on the sidewalks, and I saw a man dragging a grisly sheepskin -- heavy with wet blood -- down the street.

All the kids, thousands of them, hang out at the waterfront park near our hotel. Alexandria doesn't get many tourists, making us quite an attraction. We couldn't step outside without amassing huge mobs of kids. Most were nice and yelled "Hello" or "What's your name?" Their favorite was to say with a sort of Ricardo Montilban flourish, "Welcome to Egypt!" Others would come from halfway across the park, dodging all their watch-wearing friends, to casually ask, "What time is it?"

At first this was sort of cute, but within minutes it became extremely annoying. I guess I can understand now why celebrities don't enjoy all the attention. The teenage boys were they worst. At best they would yell insults in Arabic. They made a hissing sound like "PSSSSTHTHTHTH" that I'm guessing can be roughly translated as "Yo, Baby." Sometimes they'd get especially creative and yell "Sex Sex Sex" over and over again. At their worst, they would run from across the street to try to pinch Sarah on the butt.

I have never punched anyone in my life, but I actually wanted to smack some of those kids. And what stopped me wasn't any sense of guilt over punching a malnourished third world kid 1/4 my size, it was knowing that punching them would just egg them on further. Now, lest you think I'm being unfairly harsh, read what Mark Twain had to say about his visit to Egypt 100 years ago. He was so bothered by the young men's pestering that he offered one of them $100 to jump off the top of the pyramid of Cheops:

"He pondered for a moment, and would have done it, I think, but his mother arrived, then, and interfered. Her tears moved me -- I never can look upon the tears of a women with indifference -- and I said I would give her $100, too."

During my travels in Asia, I learned never to judge a place during my first 24 hours there. I was usually tired from traveling and grumpy from the busride. I was confused about where I was and how I was supposed to cross the street. After a day I would begin to feel more comfortable. I could enjoy myself. I could look around and notice the good things. I needed to get warmed up, to get over the hump, just like those hikes back home in the Cascades.