mildly weird coincidence

Walking down the street in Cairo this evening, I was sure I recognized a woman on her cell phone as the mother of someone I know from London who works in Washington. And sure enough, it was the mother, and she was on the phone with her daughter. I got on the phone and said hi briefly.

They do have ties to Cairo, so it’s not among the very weirdest of my coincidences over the years, but it was still a bit jarring in the superstitious sense.

I’ve mentioned some of my other strange coincidences on this blog before, of which the simplest is the time I was the first guest of 2003 at a hotel in the Himalayas after the spring snow melt, and Alphonso Lingis was in the logbook as the final guest of 2002. (And the second to last guest of 2002 was the author of Lonely Planet’s India guide, which I happened to be carrying at the time.) I don’t dare to think of who came right after me. Perhaps someone who was equally surprised to see my name right before theirs. I was so early in the season that I never even saw a second guest. Had the whole hotel to myself.

That was my first time at very high altitude, and I found it rough. (I later had a somewhat easier time in the Peruvian Andes, after having been advised to drink lots and lots of coca tea, which worked.) My first day in the Himalayas (at the Lingis hotel) involved sitting motionless in a chair for 8-10 hours, stupefied. I wrote a few postcards in that state, and later saw some of the cards and found the grammar quite poor. There was no internal hot water; a nice gentleman would bring hot water in a bucket to your room with a bit of advance warning. But it was boiling hot, so you had to wait 20-30 minutes for it to reach hot bath level.

One of the great comfort moments of my travels… Walking into town that first night, a cold Himalayan night, and being served a deep, piping hot bowl of vanilla pudding by the Tibetan restaurant owners. I’ve rarely tasted anything that hit the spot so perfectly for its time and place.

The next day I wandered in an area of ruins near the center of town. I entered an abandoned building and remember seeing a shredded-up school textbook for English lessons. It’s always fun to look through the exercises in such books: “I throw the ball,” “Are you happy today?”, etc.

And then, one of the two most dangerous car rides of my life (a taxi in Albania was the other, and for the same reason– mountain roads with steep dropoffs and no guardrails). A couple of guys from the pudding restaurant agreed to drive me as close to the Pakistan border as one can go without a special permit; this was technically Kashmir, so there’s a large Indian military presence in the area. That was the highest altitude I’ve ever reached, but we turned around and returned to town pretty quickly. I was a bit ill by the time we returned. Whatever physiological characteristics you need for professional mountain climbing, I don’t have them. I’m a seaside person, in physiological terms.