It’s not that I don’t wear it.

You wouldn’t see me dead in a posh bar without makeup; I applied slap daily for a blogging conference I went to; and, of course, I did my damnedest for this travel blogging calendar thing.

But my application skills are more Krusty the Clown than Bobbi Brown, and, whether cause or effect, this makes cosmetics a very occasional thing for me.

It’s also hassle. Ya know?

You need to take it off at the end of the day.

Although… Now that we’re back in the kind of climate that leaves one tending towards the pale and interesting (read: blotchy and purplish), I’m seriously contemplating reintroducing a bit of slap.

If only to lose the zombie look around the eyes.

That said, there are contexts in which I simply don’t get wearing makeup.

The beach, for example…

Wearing makeup with a bikini is like wearing heels with a bikini.

It just seems, well, wrong.

Unless you’re a video ho on a hip-hop shoot in Miami, a Victoria’s Secret model on board P Diddy’s yacht, or, ya know, Courtney Stodden – I have a cold! I’ve been on an intellectual diet of internet famous people, YouTube fail videos, Cheezburger and social media! — a bikini is for swimming in, no?

You don’t swim in high heels.

And unless you’re a synchronised swimmer or RuPaul, you don’t swim in makeup, either.

Ergo: bikini plus heels, or bikini plus makeup, equals wrong.

Not, however, as wrong as makeup plus trekking gear.

Yep. Trekking in makeup.

The boy and I were in one of our posher local Pokhara eateries t’other day, where an all-female group were celebrating completing the Annapurna Circuit that morning, still in their hiking boots and Annapurna 2012 fleeces.

Now, that’s a bitch of a trek, no question of it.

Well worth the celebration.

Which made it all the more surprising that at least two-thirds of the women in that (I repeat) all-female group were trekking in makeup. And full makeup, at that — foundation, lippie, blusher, eye couture, the works.

How DOES that work?

You get up at 5am for breakfast at 6am before your 6.30am start, allowing an extra half hour to apply makeup…

You crawl into your teahouse’s unheated bathroom…

Nah. You don’t, surely?!

You MUST, surely, stay in bed with your makeup bag beside you and a mirror balanced on your lap, grabbing that last half hour of warmth as you work on finetuning the stuff around the eyes?

Do you?

Or do they have, like, centrally heated teahouses with elaborate bathrooms at every night’s stop now?

And, further… why?

You’re not going to be meeting many mirrors on your thigh-straining series of ascents and descents. You’re still less likely, I would venture, to meet the man (or woman) of your dreams.

And, does it really, really matter what you look like in those temperatures?

Or is it just that you feel so vile anyway that it’s worth carrying a full makeup bag up to 5000-odd metres just to improve your mood?

Still, gentle readers, if any one of you has successfully applied makeup while negotiating high altitude trekking, I’d love to hear.

Truly, I would.

We head off for Everest Base Camp on Monday.

And I’m seriously considering bringing my lipstick.

The post Best Face Forward? appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

For you are all, every one of you, men.

Here are a few things I do not want.

• A camel ride
• A donkey ride
• A horse and carriage ride
• A taxi
• A boat ride

I ESPECIALLY do not want to buy a boat ride masquerading as a public ferry, or a horse and carriage ride that takes me to every commission-paying shop in the souk.

Should I require transportation, I will break step, look around and hail the relevant vehicle. Should I require a boat, I will go to the waterfront, inspect some boats, and open negotiations.

Furthermore, I do not want to buy:

• Papyrus – banana leaf or genuine
• Alabaster – wax and stone chip or genuine
• Pyramids – plastic or otherwise
• Scarabs – of any kind
• Headscarves
• Postcards
• Jewellery
• Perfume
• Kohl
• Plastic Tutankhamun masks
• Antiques — even genuine ones!
• Fake Marlboros
• Tour tickets

Since in Egypt as elsewhere career professionals have other things to do than hang around outside tourist attractions claiming they are shut, I will switch off when you claim to be:

• An Egyptologist
• A museum worker
• A teacher
• A lawyer
• A doctor

I will wait politely until you propose a trip to the government bazaar, or perhaps an antique shop, and then exit the conversation promptly.

If, and only if, you are school-aged, I will give you a pen or a pencil. I will not give you money or sweets.

Why? Because I am a bitch.

And because sweets are bad for your teeth, and begging is bad for your future.

Because I am not stupid, I will not:

• Change your “euro coins”, lavishly admixed with Egyptian pounds, into euro notes.
• Or, for that matter, Egyptian notes. Sorry!
• Or English ones!
• Mistake a 50 piastre note for a 50 pound note, which has 100 times its value
• Take change without checking it
• Allow you to identify the correct note for what I am purchasing in my wallet
• Establish a price for anything in pounds without establishing whether the pounds are Egyptian or English

In fact, if you make change for a note larger than 50 Egyptian pounds without performing the local equivalent of the death aria from Tosca, I will become instantly suspicious of you.

Nor will I:

• Believe you when you say you can get me into tourist sites for free.
• Accept your assertion that my hotel is no longer open.
• Believe you when you say anything has moved.

Further, I will not enter your shop to:

• Transcribe the yellowed address with which you have been pestering tourists for the last decade
• Write a text message to your Italian girlfriend
• Get your business card. I have been trying to lose you for the last three blocks. I DO NOT WANT TO STAY IN TOUCH.
• Drink tea
• Enjoy “traditional Egyptian hospitality”
• Or “just look around”

Nor, for that matter, will I be patronising your restaurant.

“WHY WHY WHY lady?” you say?

BECAUSE I DO NOT WANT TO BUY ANYTHING.

Well, actually I do.

I would like to buy some cigarettes, some water, a soft drink and some flip-flops.

I have found a nice supermarket which, after brief and civil initial negotiation, allows me to buy commodities at a tourist tax only 10p or so above the Egyptian price, without hassle, and with no touts. Therefore I will be patronising them.

He is a nice man. He is helpful.

Whereas you, the gentleman who bodychecked me out of the road and into his pavement kiosk with “Best price!”, are not.

You might remember me.

I’m the one who said: “Best price? That needs to be Egyptian price. 14.”

Now, I don’t normally get hung up on pennies. I know I’m wealthy compared to you. And so I’m happy to pay one Egyptian pound as a tourist tax. This is standard.

Still, if you are going to bodycheck me into your kiosk with “best price!” you need, as I explained at the time, to deliver that. Not charge me 50% over the local rate and 33% over basic tourist rate.

Because that, as we say in England – where we DO NOT, for the record, say “lubblay jubblay!”, or even “lovely jubbly!” – is taking the PISS.

In fact, “English?! Lubblay jubblay!” is up there with “you have beautiful eyes” and “you look like Princess Diana!” on the list of phrases I REALLY, REALLY NEVER WANT TO HEAR AGAIN.

But, back to flip-flops.

I believe that there are streets downtown where I can buy such luxuries unassailed by “helpers” in search of a commission, and, for that matter, walk for maybe as much as a minute unmolested.

Perhaps even two minutes. Or maybe as much as five.

“Where am I going?” you ask.

I am going for a WALK. I am having a look at stuff. I am going to the shop. I am going to my hotel. I am going to the temple. I am going to a restaurant. I am going to meet a friend.

Where I am going is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS and I do not need your help.

You see, I have a map.

I checked the map before I left the hotel, to avoid the kind of unwise pause which will bring a barrage of helpers on me like the time the chap left the lights on in 28 Days Later.

Should I require directions, which I don’t, I will ask a woman. A nice, normal woman, with her kids, and perhaps her husband. Or even the husband.

A nice, normal person. Of whom there are SO MANY in Egypt, and of whom I meet so very few.

Or possibly a police officer, given he, with the stars, will not require bakhsheesh.

Now, I fully appreciate that you live in a desperately poor country, with soaring unemployment and a tanking economy, and I represent riches beyond your wildest dreams.

I appreciate that tourist numbers in Luxor are down 75% – though has it ever occurred to you that the unrelenting hassle may have something to do with this?

Further, I understand that, despite my efforts to adopt a dress code that suits your cultural standards, even in temperatures well above 100F, despite the fact that I am walking with my young son, because of the colour of my skin (and the behaviour of some of my Western sisters), you consider me a whore.

I don’t like this. Few women would. But I do understand the hows and whys.

And, mercifully, I know that you are not the real Egypt.

But none of this, gentlemen, makes your behaviour any easier to deal with.

Much as I try to maintain a sense of humour, which I use routinely when negotiating with men whose services I wish to purchase – Sales Tip 101: These are not the men who bodycheck me, get right in my face and yell at me! – I find you, collectively, wearing in the extreme.

A few of you have asked why I am afraid. Some of you have correctly identified the relevant emotion as anger, which, much as I try not to display it, does occasionally slip out.

“What is your problem, lady?”

“Why you no want my carriage?”

“Why you afraid? You think I am terrorist?”

Let me try and explain to you, again, WHY, WHY, WHY I DO NOT WANT YOUR CARRIAGE.

You see, sir, here’s the thing. I walked for 40 minutes through Luxor today. To keep my son and myself amused through the constant onslaught of attempted petty fraud and hassle, we kept a running tally.

You were, as I explained to you, the 21st of 23 horse and carriage men to approach us over those 40 minutes.

My son and I differ as to whether it was 14 or 16 men who approached us offering boats – my fault, I know, for having the temerity to walk along the Nile – and either 7 or 9 men offering us taxis.

I would like to have kept a physical tally, but unfortunately this would have involved breaking step and then we really would have lost count.

We agree, however, that there were 10 men inviting us into shops.

That is, averaged over the course of 40 minutes, approximately one approach from one of you every 40 seconds.

I am pleased to report that, thanks to wardrobe efforts which leave me hot and sweaty, only three gentlemen made audible, English comments on my appearance.

Although, as I endeavoured to explain to you, sir, the man who appeared from a baying mob of horse and carriage vendors to request a kiss, IN FRONT OF MY YOUNG SON, “If you said that to an Egyptian woman, she would slap your face.”

I may, I confess, have raised my voice.

Still, at least today not one of you has grabbed at me, offered me cigarettes for sexual favours, masturbated at me or adjusted his genitals at me.

Further, as far as I registered, the only man who swore at me in Arabic did so while smiling and pretending to say something nice rather than as a blast of whispered filth while checking me up and down. A pleasant change for both me and my young son.

So, I guess, things are looking up.

Or something.

“Why you afraid, lady?”

Yes! You are all men. And I am a woman. My male escort is only 11, though more of a man than all of you already, but, yes, many of you are larger than both of us put together.

That does not make me AFRAID of you. I am not awed by your masculinity. I am not terrified by your male power. I am, frankly, f*cking pissed off.

One more time!

I am not AFRAID. I am ANGRY.

“Why you angry, lady? No hassle here!”

Now, I try not to get angry.

But when you get within a foot of my face, right into my personal space, and yell at me “No hassle!” I find it hard to immediately feel the humour in the paradox.

Further, when I see the sheer aggression some of you display to a passing foreign woman on the street, I dread to think how you behave to the wives and daughters you keep at home while you are out harassing strangers.

And, for that matter, your sons.

Grabbing my young son physically to drag him into your shop is NOT, actually, OK. Though I guess you don’t slap him around like you do the beggar children. Another plus!

Gentlemen! For you are all men!

Much of this stuff is, simply, not OK.

You have an ancient culture. You have an old and venerable religion, whose name means peace. Your capital was once one of the world’s great cities. Your landscape is awe-inspiring. You have four Nobel Prize Winners among your ranks.

I don’t expect you to live up to these exalted standards.

I don’t even expect you to be nice.

All I want is that you, please, please, please leave me the F*CK alone! For once.

And, yes, that means you too, “tour guides”.

Tour Guiding 101: The phrase “Dancing, cha cha cha!” does not illuminate my understanding of a tomb relief showing people dancing which I am already discussing with my son.

Even if you say it four or five times. ESPECIALLY if you say it four or five times.

Nor, for that matter, does pointing at headless statues with a cartouche round their hieroglyphs that shows they are pharaohs, and shouting the names of gods at random, help progress my understanding of a site.

“No guide! No money!”

You are no guide, that’s true. But you will want money.

I am more than happy paying an Egyptian pound to take a photo in the tomb. I am happy to pay an Egyptian pound for you to take my photo with my son.

In fact, I will pay an Egyptian pound to dispense with your services altogether.

I will, of course, tip you if you provide covers for my shoes in a mosque or a museum, and pay the requisite fee to use the toilet.

Should you unlock tomb doors for me, escort me up the minaret of a mosque or provide me with useful information, I will tip you higher. In fact, I have a special pocket in which I keep my tipping change and tipping notes.

I am also happy to give all and any of you cigarettes. Because you have a tough job and no education with which to do it.

But, here’s the thing!

Your random guiding interjections spoil my day.

Not as much as your toutly cousins, granted.

But I do not like you breathing down my neck. I do not like you shouting random names from history. I do not like you pointing at pictures when I am trying to look at something else.

And I especially do not like it when you grab me to escort me somewhere, because I know, that at your level of Egyptian society, you would never touch an unrelated woman in that way.

Dear touts! And guides!

In the words of Oasis, “There are many things that I would like to say to you, but I don’t know how…”

But I think what I am trying to say, gentlemen, is that I like to look around at things, and walk around, and appreciate what’s around me, as I have done on six continents to date.

And, call me what you will – and I know you have and do! – you guys really are not helping!

Thanking you,

THE SWEATY SHOUTY LADY WITH THE SMALL BOY IN TOW
Currently hiding in her hotel

And, to my regular readers, thank you for listening! We’ve been doing some AMAZING things which make Egypt well worth the hassle, and I do appreciate I’ve been a bit ranty of late. But there’ll be more lovely stuff coming soon. I PROMISE!

The post An Open Letter To The Touts Of Egypt appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

“Well,” I say. “I’m British. The 1800s were our century. The 1900s were America’s century. And the 2000s will be China’s century.”

This isn’t, as my ma points out when we talk on Skype later, precisely accurate. A better system would date Britain as a world power from the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, after 1815, the US from the end of World War I, the last and most disastrous of a series of costly wars (sound familiar?), after 1918.

And China — well, I’m wondering quite when people will date the Chinese century from. 2020 has a nice kind of symmetry, though I don’t know how auspicious it is in Chinese astrological and number terms.

But Z, a child of the new millennium, thinks we’re already in it, here in 2011, his eleventh year.

“Everything’s made in China now,” he says. “Nothing’s made in America. They have more American money than America does. They’re buying up most of Africa and they have a monopoly on virtually everything.”

In the short time we’ve been here, there have been moments that feel significant. We watched the launch of the first module of China’s space station.

The guys at state TV set the montage to the tune of America the Beautiful. A sense of humour? Or just the knowledge that the hundreds of millions who tuned in would neither know nor care?

Still, as a friend observes on Facebook, there’s a poetry to it. China launching their first station as the American space programme goes down — and playing an American anthem…

An innocent mistake? It could have been. Since the Deng Xiaoping era in the 1980s Chinese schoolchildren, who put in punishing hours of school and homework, have learnt not only the geography of Asia, Western Europe and Latin America but every state of the US and its capital. They don’t, however, learn American music.

Over green tea, we talk with James for a bit about debt, the downgrade, the fact that China holds more dollars than the US, now.

“But we’re poor people,” he says. “China is poor! This is what we can’t understand. Why are we poor people lending these rich people money?”

But, I think, this was how it went with America. There’s a Gilded Age in China now, when the rich are super-rich, and consume to bust, the poor are poor and work incredibly hard to get richer.

And, as America got rich lending and selling into Europe — proceeds made off the back of its hardworking poor — China is getting rich selling into the US and Europe. Funding, in effect, as America did for us, wars that our country could not afford.

Another turning point? Back from our trek in Tiger Leaping Gorge, I check the Guardian to see what’s been up with the world in our absence.

A headline leaps out at me:

“US and China Call for Eurozone Action”

“The world’s two economic superpowers,” the article states — matter-of-factly.

How long, I wonder, before there’s only one? A decade? I’ve been reading Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree, a book that strikes me as on some levels strangely prescient and on others a wild misfire.

He praises Enron. The new modes of financing, the miracle that means you can slice up a bundle of mortgages and they become (deep breath now!) risk-free.

The things that the 99% are now Occupying Wall Street for. Will it change anything? Probably not.

When Z was a toddler, we marched with over a million others through London against the Iraq War. Our government went in anyway.

In China, you can see the growth. The new roads. New railways. New buildings. New stores. New cities. Everywhere you look. Even the supermarkets are bigger here.

You see the hot chicks in their designer labels, the politicians in their luxury watches — graft features here, as it did during the American Gilded Age — tiny jade abacuses, an executive toy, selling for tens of thousands of pounds.

You can also see the grinding poverty. A mentally ill woman gathering medicinal herbs, dressed in rags, in the mountain.

Is it a good thing, this handover of power?

You could argue that it’s bad. China executes slightly more people per head of population than the US does; it tortures slightly more; its people are much less free.

You could argue that it’s good. China’s interventions in the outside world to secure its interests are more mercantile than military — buying up water for hydro-electricity rather than bombing the Middle East for oil.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing, or a good thing. It’s, well, a thing.

Empires rise and fall. They always have, and until humans find a better way to get along, they always will.

And I’m curious to see how this great nation, a mother of invention with the longest continuous history in the world, adapts to its position centre stage.

That said, by the time Z’s children are old enough to explore, I don’t think it will be Westerners exploring China.

There will be millions upon millions upon tens of millions of Chinese exploring the West. We won’t, most of us, be able to afford to do the return journey.

The first person on the moon was American.

The first person onto Mars?

My money’s on Chinese.

But what do you think?

The post When Does the Chinese Century Begin? appeared first on EscapeArtistes.