Camel Ride

Used to have this somewhere and can't find it now.
I guess it's time to rewrite the short about my only camel ride ever.

Alexandria is a fascinating city on the Nile.
When we put in there for some days the most popular excursion was to grab a bus tour to Gizeh. Tours started before dawn and everyone was bitching until the driver passed out quarts of beer to us all on the bus. After drinking about half the bottle I realized why they gave it to us in the dark. There's something in Egyptian beer that should've been filtered out. I've no idea what it was but I do know it didn't belong there. The beer was so strong that I didn't care about the foreign substance by the time I noticed.

We got to Gizeh and climbed out of the bus. There were bedoin dudes hanging around there who had Arabian robes and beards and sundried desert things. Some wanted to sell us souvenirs. Some wanted to sell us something that sounded like "Abu Ablie". It was hashish. Some were offering tours or foods or whatever they could use to get money from tourists.
I stayed away from people like that because it took all my money just to get on the bus.

Gizeh is where they keep the pyramids. And they also have this huge half Egyptian pharoah, half lion of the desert. They called him the Sphynx. He has holes in his nose. Well most of his nose is gone. Blown off they say, by Napolean's troops when they used him as target practice.

There were three pyramids there. Well three big ones and then some smaller ones lying around the neighborhood too. Frank walked right up to the big one and began kicking and stomping on the rubble that lay around the bottom of it. He broke a bunch of it off and we all pocketed a mess of it. Pocket full of pyramid. Years later I slept with it under my pillow hoping to be filled with some sort of ancient power for use with making my world a better place. A gal who stayed with me a few days made off with my chunks. For her I hope there was an ancient curse of tooth decay or athlete's foot or something associated with it.

Jay (my shipmate writer friend) and someone else actually climbed way up past the sign that said in both arabic and english "It is forbidden to climb on the pyramids". They got clean up to the top of one of the smaller ones and took a picture. The picture shows them standing on a lesser pyramid and in the background is the great pyramid Cheops. Cool pic.

So while I was down there wandering around through the desert things and ancient things and bedoin dudes a man came up to me with a huge smile and an even huger camel. He had control of the beast with a tether that wrapped around the monster's nose like a horse's reign. The smell reached me long before the two creatures did. At first I wondered which one the smell actually came from. It was a smell just like a horse corral that had pigs and goats spending the weekend inside. When they got closer I realized just where the smell actually eminated. From both of them.

"Good day", he said. "You may ride my camel".
No thank you, no. Said I. I had no money and told him so.
"Oh, no no". He told me. "I ask not for money. You are American, you are a sailor. I ask no money for you to ride".
Bull hockey I thought. No way I'm riding that dang thing whether I have money or not. And I don't. So there. No camel ride for me.

No thanks, I said. Again and maybe even again. I was very insistent. Very decisive. Very precise. No money. No love of camels. No fascination with Arabs or the desert or the things that they ride.

This creature was much too much for my desires. Those camel things are extremely large. They have large feet. Large knees, large ears, large eyes and a hugely large nose. With two large moveable holes stuck in it that seemed to be the only source for their aggressive monumental breathing. It was apparently the practice for the bedoin dudes to use a stick and smack the camels in the balls, butt or knees to coax them to kneel down. Once the sand monster finally buckled onto the ground the customer, who this bedoin wanted to be me, was supposed to climb aboard and hang on while the camel resurrected itself.

Once you were up there it was nearly impossible to get down. A camel - or at least this particular camel - is much larger than a horse. Closer to the height of a giraffe than an equine. Getting off would be a long and uncomfortable fall, and if you try to raise your leg over so that you can slide down you just exposed yourself so that the camel can have the fun of biting you in the leg.

I sat up top for a few minutes in order to impress on my bedoin that I, for one, was loving my desert exposure and that I was very thankful to him for the unexpected pleasure of the camel ride. But now I decided that it was already time for me to alleviate any stress on the poor creature by removing my body from its perch and getting myself back down to the ground. I felt that it was very much time for me to get back into the safety of the planet earth so that we could eliminate the dreadful possiblility that Mr Bedoin might accdidently ( or not) let go of the camel leash and (God forbid) the creature escape off into the desert with me permanently and horrifyingly clinging on board.

Thank you sir, I said. Thank you very much for this ride. But it's time now, I think, for me to get down.

"Ah", my pleasant Mr Bedoin said with such a warm smile. "You enjoy my camel and his ride. You enjoy enough", he said. "One dollar now, to be taken down".

DOLLAR HELL, I said. You told me it would cost me nothing to ride the camel.
And just to be smart, I decided to swing my leg around and jump right down from the damnit beast. I might even show this Arabian fellow a thing or two about manners while I'm at it.
I grabbed hold of the pommel and raised myself up. Took my leg and dragged it back from the far side of the monster. Ready now to jump, I raised myself once again to do just that. And out of nowhere that snotty snorty snout smacked me on the butt. A warning, it seemed, from the desert ogre as it seemed to say I was about to get my ass chewed in quite the literal way.

Get me down from here dangit.
I demanded of the bedoin creep.
I don't have time for this you know. You said it was free to ride and now I'm finished riding and now it's time to go.

Ali Baba only smiled up at me and held more tightly on the reins. "Yes", he said. "Free to ride". Then his smile grew even larger, broken and missing teeth were visible now. "Dollar", he said, "to not ride".

WHAT!?
I screamed. I cussed. I kicked that damned monster cow. Well I acted as though I might have kicked it. I had no intention of aggravating the thing and seeing what sort of destruction it was actually capable of rending.

He had me, the thief did. I was very efficiently kidnapped by this desert man and his desert THING.

It was hopeless.
I was trapped.
I was stumped.

It was then that Larry Davis. A shipmate of mine from St. Louis, came to my rescue. He paid the dollar ransom to the desert mobster and bought my release from the doom.

Another lesson learned in the wild of the world.
We were soon enough loaded back onto the busses and returned to the safety of our warship, never to risk the wrath of desert dirties again.