By Ann Joachim
20th Annual Solas Awards Gold Winner in the Cruise Story category
An early morning on the Nile, our cruise ship travels from Cairo to Aswan, moving through Middle Egypt, nearly 200 miles south on the river. For two weeks, twenty tourists share ten cabins, confined on this small floating world. As tour manager for one of the world’s premier travel companies, I’m responsible for their well-being, knowing that things might go wrong.
My elite group of travelers are affiliated with a top U.S. research center and can afford this extended luxury cruise. Along the ancient waterway, we’d visit the major antiquities in the river valley and view scenes of Egyptian life that most tourists miss.
I awake before my clients and walk the upper deck. When the sun begins to rise over the east bank of the river, egrets like white origami birds pluck in the grain, and smoke from dung fires hangs over the sugarcane fields. Even though our boat has a shallow draft, the crew pole and test the Nile for sandbars, measuring the depth of the water and yelling out their findings, like something from Mark Twain’s river tales. Our boatmen are ensuring that our watery path was safe for navigation; the Nile riverbed is a dynamic environment, with changing water levels and deposits of sediment that could damage our vessel.
I feel calm, breathing in three-quarter time, until I hear loud voices coming from the dining room. Even the most sophisticated travelers are stubborn when it comes to what they eat.
“I want my eggs poached, and these are not poached. The bacon is not crisp.”
“Don’t they know how to make an omelet here?”
“Where are the croissants?”
Time to intervene before the Ahmad, our cook has a meltdown. Americans expected their breakfast cooked as they might find it in a hotel in the U.S. This was a small riverboat, and our tours were tightly scheduled so that we could see the monuments in the morning, then catch a bus ride to the boat before dark. Twenty customized breakfast orders were beyond the capacity of the tiny kitchen. But I couldn’t tell this privileged group that.
Though breakfast is not my meal, I enter the dining room and order a continental plate with a crisp baguette, rosy oranges, fresh squeezed juice, bananas, blue cheese, white Egyptian cheese, dark honey, and quince preserves. My clients take notice.
“That looks delicious. Why did you get something different?”
“Well, in this heat, with a big trek ahead, it’s better to eat light and local.”
After that, they all began ordering the continental breakfast, praising the kitchen. Ahmad, thanked me by brewing me a small cup of Arabic coffee scented with cardamom. Dear God, I needed that coffee because breakfast quickly turned into a question-and-answer session.
“Will we see any water buffalo?”
“Do you think we will have lamb for lunch?”
“Will we see scorpions today?”
“How about cobras?”
What was I, a freaking oracle? Each night, I briefed the group about the next day’s tour—what they would see, what they should bring with them, and how long the excursion would last. I tried my best to inform them, but still, the questions kept coming.
The craziest requests related to travelers’ intimate health problems:
“Can you get me some antacids? This food is killing my stomach.”
For that, I had an easy answer: “If Tums or Alka Seltzer work for you, I’ve got it in my cabin.”
Now the question became scatological.
“I’m constipated, so can you delay the tour by an hour every morning? I need to go to the bathroom at a certain time and the tour doesn’t conform to my schedule.”
Bowel habits are not my preferred breakfast conversation. Yet, from time to time I would have to procure laxatives from a local pharmacy when traveler’s systems got sluggish. The older tourists frequently had problems.
Holy shit, I thought, looking at the constipated lady before me. The ship’s schedule was tight and coordinated with the buses, so we couldn’t change the timing. We were deep in the countryside and far from any pharmacies.
My advice was sympathetic, but brief: “Please get up earlier, try to stretch, and drink a cup of coffee to get your system moving. We’ll put the entire ship, crew, and passengers at risk if we leave late and are forced to navigate the river in the dark. When we reach a town, I’ll get you some relief.”
Looking at the miserable woman, I considered a few of the thornier questions from earlier that morning—interrogation by nosy travelers who wanted to probe my personal life.
“When you were married, what kind of china and silver pattern did you choose?”
China or silver? Mike, my husband, and I were graduate students when we married, and we now shared an apartment with mice and roaches. Entertaining guests with Limoges or silver service wasn’t an option.
“Why are you working in tourism if you pursued an academic career?”
My company had told them I had a graduate degree in Near Eastern Studies, with a focus on Arabic. Could I say that tourism was a second choice, a way to make money until I figured out a real direction for my life? That many colleagues with advanced degrees had left the field for professions such as law and business because they couldn’t secure academic positions?
Then there were the most intrusive of all: “Aren’t you interested in having children? Doesn’t all this travel put a damper on your family plans?”
“Sure,” I laughed and snuffed out that one quickly. “I could just put the kids in a pouch on my stomach like a kangaroo and carry them from country to country.”
Sometimes the sheer gall of my own countrymen amazed me. The notion of American exceptionalism—and our straightforward, entitled, curious, and open national character could turn naïve, intrusive, and disrespectful.
At times, I’d found my fellow Americans to be rude, much more than citizens of other countries. The expatriate writer James Baldwin’s words came to mind: “Once you find yourself in another civilization, you’re forced to examine your own.”
Then I put my breakfast bad temper aside, because we were nearing our destination: an ancient site called Tel el Amarna, the city of legendary Akhenaten—the king, who elevated the sun disk, the Aten, as a focus of worship—and his wife, Nefertiti. To the east of the city are tombs of the officials and the royal family, hewn into the limestone cliffs.
Logistically, the tour relied on flatbed trailers to transport our travelers because the city was about half a mile into the desert. The site was seldom visited by tour groups, though it was strangely attractive, deserted, and eerie, particularly if you imagined how it might have flourished more than three thousand years ago.
About four years after Akhenaton’s death, the city was abandoned, and stones from its temples were appropriated for other construction projects, so not much remained of its former glory. Only broken down mudbrick walls, column bases, and temple foundations remained. The tombs themselves were mutilated after Akhenaton’s death, but still contained interesting and historically significant reliefs.
That morning, two tour boats were traveling together. The other tour manager, my counterpart on the second boat, wasn’t feeling well, so I accompanied both her group and mine—forty people. Fortunately, we had two local guides with us, Leila for my travelers and Amina, who led the other group.
We rode the trailers around the city site and started to climb the desert cliffs on foot to see the tombs. Suddenly, I heard a horrible groan and moaning, “Ahhhh, help me.” Looking down the cliff, I saw a man, not one of my clients, faint on the rock face.
Making it worse, he had a bout of explosive diarrhea in the heat. He’d looked peaked when the excursion started, but I had thought that was just his natural coloring. His face was now chalky white and wet with sweat. The problem could be heat exhaustion, dehydration, an intestinal infection, or something more serious, so he needed medical attention fast.
The poor guy was a large person, perhaps 225 pounds of deadweight, now conscious, but very weak. Luckily, three burly boatmen had escorted us that day. His tour guide Amina, got in gear.
“Can you carry him down and get him safely back to the boat?” she asked.
“Yes, madam, as you wish.”
They lifted him up by the arms and legs and moved him down the cliff, not so quickly, considering his condition. We continued the tour with the other travelers. Up and up we climbed, and I breathed easier as the trailer sped back to the river and the boat with the sick tourist.
Illness and embarrassment had marked the excursion, but still there was another event that set the day apart. From my high vantage point on the bluff, I witnessed a heartbreaking scene. Andy, one of my favorite people, a skinny, weathered, rough, and tough Texan, paced in circles at the bottom of the cliff.
At the outset of the tour, his wife Angela, had approached me, “Andy has terminal lung cancer, but he is determined to make this tour. Don’t let on that you know, but if you see him hanging back, you’ll know why.”
Andy was always game for anything, but he couldn’t climb the steep embankment. He kept looking up and circling, like a sick animal who had been deserted by the pack.
We entered the burial chamber of Meryra, a high priest of the Amarna period, one of the most well preserved tombs in the cliffs.
“Just look at that relief of the horse pulling the chariot; it’s so lifelike, the way it’s prancing, with the rays of the sun pouring down on it. And those men leading oxen, just like we’ve seen in the fields near the river,” exclaimed someone in my group.
Exiting the tomb and looking down at the plain, Leila described a lively city with houses, pottery kilns, Akenaten’s palace, the Great Temple to the god Aten, and the major thoroughfare running through it all.
“Just think, three thousand years ago, people were moving through this city, working, bearing children, going about their business. All gone. Once a vibrant town, now a ghostly metropolis.”
Yet I’d barely registered Leila’s narrative, my thoughts focused on the two sick tourists. The day was scorching but lovely. From east to west, the vast ceiling of the sky was aquamarine blue and cloudless. But it had been a hard hike in the heat, and it was time to return to the air conditioned riverboats.
Back on the boats, I checked on both sick men. A doctor who traveled on the boat with his group provided an update on his patient.
“He’s resting. His collapse was likely from dehydration but he should have more tests when he returns to the States. His heart rate is elevated, so he should check it out.”
Good God, his heart? Should he keep traveling if he thought he had a heart problem? Apparently so. While some people might immediately book a flight home, he would eventually recover, kibitzing at the ship’s bar and joining most of the excursions, even the most difficult ones.
I considered all the limping, sick, and elderly who nonetheless took risks to experience the splendor of ancient monuments. They had consistently demonstrated doggedness, perseverance, and curiosity, even when faced with significant physical challenges.
Then I climbed to the upper deck of our boat, where Andy was seated, peacefully watching the shoreline go by.
“How’re you doing,” I asked. Are you O.K.? You need some water? It’s very warm today.”
An understatement. The thermometer registered about 105 degrees Fahrenheit. I was dripping with sweat and fanning myself, despite the breeze from the river.
He looked straight at me, sizing me up, and I noticed again how thin he was, his face like a skull covered with rivulets of leather.
Then grinning, he answered in a raspy smoker’s voice, “Darlin’ you don’t have to worry about me. I have to keep movin’ because who knows how much time I have left? Every step of this trip with my wife and friends is a bonus.”
I didn’t quite know what to do with this revelation, but it hit me in the gut just the same. I’d been hard on my countrymen, too judgmental, drawing conclusions about their character based on the behavior of the bad apples. Yet I felt that this trip had exposed a fault line in the American nature.On one side of the fracture was the trope of the ugly American abroad—demanding, intrusive, and rude. On the other side was courage, adventurousness, optimism, and doggedness. Persistence in the face of mortal illness, infirmity, and decay.
Like the destroyed city we’d just seen, old age is a destination for us all.
Then Andy and I sat companionably, quietly for a long time, watching the river flow by until the world turned from twilight into the deepest night.
~ ~ ~
Ann Joachim is a writer and recovering high-tech marketing executive who lives in Oak Park, Illinois. Chapters of her memoir about working as a tour manager on the Nile won Solas Awards for Best Cruise Stories in 2024 and 2025. Recently, she was named a finalist for her creative nonfiction essay in the Women on Writing Competition. Her business writing has been featured in magazines, annual reports, video scripts, and media releases. Ann holds a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Near Eastern and North African Studies, Arabic. When not writing, she loves boating on the Great Lakes and cooking for friends and family.