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I don’t mean to be xenophobic, but I have a problem with Americans. Not all Americans. Some of my very favourite people in the world are Americans, and while travelling I’ve met many Americans who have become good friends, but every so often on the road you meet one of those bad Americans who are so stereotypically American that you start to suspect they must be Al-Qaeda operatives pretending to be American in order to give Americans a bad name.
I was on a hotel boat on the Nile.
I boarded in Aswan and we were going down to Luxor, stopping every morning and every afternoon at the beautiful ruins of ancient temples. At breakfast I noticed the family at the next table. Everyone noticed them: their voices could drill through stone. There was a father and a teenage daughter and a mom. The father never said a word. He sat motionless through every meal, his eyes glazed like a stuffed moose. He might have been a secret drinker, or maybe he was permanently meditating as a way to ward off a stroke and forget the horrible situation in which he found himself.
The daughter stared at her cellphone all day and said things like, “Stefanie’s having a party! Why am I stuck here when Stefanie’s having a party?!” and “Why do we have to go and look at another bunch of old rocks?”
Her mother wore sunglasses the size of a pair of spleens and said things like, “Don’t ask me, it was your father’s idea to come here” and “Do you think that guy’s a terrorist? He looks like a terrorist.”
She said that about every Egyptian she saw, which was a lot, because Egypt is full of Egyptians, which is one of the main things she didn’t like about Egypt. She said that about the waiter and the captain of the ship and the tour guides and all the villagers on the riverbank. She even said that about the steward, Etty, who everyone loved. He had a moustache like an upside-down broom and was always smiling.
Whenever Etty came to her table she would place a hand protectively on her handbag, as though she thought he was going to grab it and gallop away on a camel, and when he brought her a drink she went “Tch” and ostentatiously wiped with a napkin where his hands had touched it.
She was the worst woman I have ever seen in my life.
On the second day, wandering back along the quayside to the boat from the temple at Kom Ombo, I saw her haggling with an elderly man selling cotton shawls. She had been haggling for fifteen minutes, and I watched her beat him down for another fifteen. Finally she had the price she wanted and marched off, crowing like an Australian winning the World Cup.
“I won!” she crowed.
“How much did you get it for,” I asked.
“Two dollars!” she said.
“How much was he asking?”
“Three dollars!”
She strode off beaming, and behind her I saw the two other Americans make a point of buying a shawl from the man and giving him a ten-dollar bill.
I started to grow obsessed with her. I was reading Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, and I tried to hatch an elaborate plan to murder her and frame her daughter for the crime.
“Or maybe I could just push her overboard in the night,” I said.
“You can’t kill anything that evil,” said my girlfriend. “Stop obsessing.”
But I couldn’t stop. I stalked her all around the boat, eavesdropping and filling my heart with hate. I’d go rushing back to my girlfriend.
“Do you know what she said this time?!”
“I don’t want to know,” she said. “I’m trying to relax.”
I went back up to the roof-deck to top up my tank of loathing. As I arrived she was yelling at Etty for bringing her a drink with ice in it. “The ice in this country gives me the runs!” she yelled. “Are you trying to poison me? Just plant a bomb rather!”
As Etty hurried past me, I pulled him aside.
“I’m really sorry about her,” I said.
“Why?” he said politely. “She is not you.”
“I just don’t want you to think that we’re all like that, or that we think like that, and we’re just not saying it …”
And Etty smiled gently, and said, “There are Muslims who do good things and there are Muslims who do bad things. There are Christians who do good things, and there are Christians who do bad things. We are all only who we are. Don’t worry about her – look at the sunset. The world is beautiful.”
And I looked at the sunset and it was beautiful – the sun dropped orange over the brown desert hills and the sky was washed in peach and tangerine and plum.
“You’re right,” I said, “Thank you.”
“And anyway,” he said with a wink, “sometimes I spit in her drink.”
Darrel Bristow-Bovey is a columnist, screenwriter, travel writer, author - follow him on Twitter
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