I love getting my hair cut on the road. Not only is it necessary—to avoid looking too hippie-ish (important when you’re living the life of one by backpacking for months on end)—but it can be the start of all kinds of wacky adventures. We were in Đà Lạt, Vietnam, drowning my sorrows after a disastrous clearcutting, when the owner came and took us on a tour of the other, closed-off floors in his bar. He’d turned them into an enormous Gaudi-esque indoor concrete cave complex—complete with rivers and secret passageways. At one point we lit candles and clambered down into a cavern below street level, where he was working on installing a lake. Why he was doing all this we couldn’t divine from him, but who cares—it was a fantastical experience and it all started with a botched crop.

* The Cuban government apparently gets somewhat nervous about locals interacting with foreigners outside of hotels, giftshops, and other touristy venues. By “nervous”, I mean one day you might realise “Hey, where did JC go? Haven’t seen him or his family in a while”. So I’m changing the names of any Cubans we met. In this case though, I’ve conveniently forgotten his name anyway.In Cuba, in the old Havana slum, JC* runs a tatty but proud shop, with his bare-fluorescent lighting and torn Chevy benchseat-cum-waiting-lounge. He was a hoot, an astute political commentator, and a magician with the scissors to boot. In a country where you make do with what you have, JC crops your chops with the creakiest pair of shears you’ve ever seen. And he had more than a few cutting remarks about Castro. Not just Fidel (”Liar!”) but his heir-apparent too (”He’s worse. Fidel, at least he talks. But Raul, he doesn’t talk: he just does!” Ominous.). An enlightening chat while the scissors whizzed away: he’s learning English at night-school, for the day Cuba finally opens up, and he has to pay for his textbooks in pesos convertibles—that pesky double-currency that keeps the people poor and the tourist-dollars flowing straight to the government. Even though we were probably paying 10 times the going rate, what’s CAD$4 to us? “I can buy books now. Because you come to my shop, I can live.” Yikes.

In Luxor, wheel-and-deal-capital of Egypt, I was getting a bit shaggy, so off we pop to the local barber. Borat-lookalike but a meek fellow, not a word of English, and our Arabic wasn’t up to snuff, but the customer he’s working on obligingly chimes in, and so the negotiations begin. I don’t even remember how much we finally paid (something like CAD$4 again), but we knew we’d been E-gypped when he finished up and gave Borat a fraction of what we’d just agreed to. Whatever: he looked like he’d been working for 16 hours straight (I mean, we wandered in around 1030 at night) and he seemed like he appreciated the money. As a result, he took his time getting it right: I’ve never had someone take so much effort before. Kept asking if it was okay and would adjust on the fly as requested. Another pruning pro. Snipping away as the old black-and-white tv blared its song out of our well-lighted chopshop and into the night. Great success!

If you know me, you know that all good things must come to an end. Uganda was my follicular Waterloo. On the advice of Nazma’s mom I head out to their barberman a block from the house. Recall that myopia means when the glasses come off, I’m effectively relinquishing all control. He was an earnest sort: brimming with enthusiasm, he makes like he knows exactly what I want. I couldn’t see a damned thing but I knew something was up when the scissors never once made an appearance. No trace of a comb either. Just a succession of increasingly smaller clipper guards. Now to be fair, I’m probably the first Chinese customer he’s ever had, so granted he doesn’t know what to do with my hair. This is Uganda, and without a trace of racism, everybody—I mean everybody— has the same close-cropped do. And so after a half-hour of old-growth littering the floor and an icing-on-the-cake application of Jerri-Curl oil (no kidding), I was sporting my own Asian mini-fro. You may think this helped me blend in with the locals more, but astonishingly, it didn’t. Nazma’s mother was very proud: a cut that short means longer till the next visit, which makes it good value for my (strangely again) CAD$4.

In the end, no Samson-like rampage ensued; no bitter tears; just the usual histrionics-via-blog-entry. You take the good with the bad and something as mundane as a haircut becomes a great way to meet the locals, and it may make for a good story. In this case, now we’re several weeks on: I’m sporting a hastily bought Fidel-style hat these days (funnily enough), hiding the remnants of what I’ve come to call the Changing-of the-Guards haircut, and waiting for that day when it finally grows out and I can run the Barbicide gauntlet once again.

Judging by the few ant-speck humans around the base (we were at the back end: no tourist hordes in sight), you really get a sense of just how massive these things are and how there’s nothing you could do in your lifetime to ever, ever muster up enough goodwill (or indentured labour) to construct something similar in your name.

We were busy being humbled when suddenly a tourist-police officer on a camel comes up, shouting in Arabic, arms akimbo. His automatic rifle caught the sun with no need for translation. Very slowly, almost calmly, S&M started leading us away from him, inexplicably screaming back at him hotly. He followed us for a ways, but then seemed to tire of the chase and wandered off, but not before yelling something that sounded like “No ticket!”. S&M affably put it off to something about “knowing someone who came the other day but they don’t like him”: general nonsense. Whatever: we were here to see the Pyramids, and S&M was getting paid to deal with such problems. We snapped off a few photos and moved on.

At this point, S&M was slowly chipping away at his credibility by regaling us with tales of how the dastardly Napoleon stole the nose of the Sphinx. We were led around the Queen’s Pyramids behind the smallest of the Big 3. As we got closer, I promptly fell off my horse. My foot even got caught in the stirrup—the nightmare coming to life—but Michael Jackson, bless his heart, obligingly came to a halt while I sorted out my difficulties. Turns out my saddle was loose: after a brief inspection, S&M gave me his own, unnamed but properly dressed horse.

We knew something was up when we crested another hill, coming up onto the Sphinx and attendant droves, but only from a distance. I think Nazma caught on first, demanding to go up close. S&M—ebullient, accommodating, and remarkably sweat-free until now—began to look nervous.

“Ok, Madame: no problem,” as we darted along the wall of the Sphinx enclosure (but not in it) and up the road towards the Pyramid of Khufu. There’s an alley between a row of funerary ruins and another set of Queen’s Pyramids, where no tourist ever bothers to venture. This is where we slipped in, making our way towards Khufu.

It was pretty apparent by now that S&M was trying to avoid the cops, which could only mean that the stables never bought our tickets to Giza. We were in the compound illegally, and my hairless Asian physique would be, I’m sure, valuable currency in an Egyptian prison.

Sure enough, sneaking along the passage we heard a shout and looked back to find another camel-riding, shiny-weaponed cop heading towards us. S&M pulled us into a side-enclosure, got us off our horses, shooed us towards Khufu saying “five minutes”, and turned back to meet the cop. Presumably with a wad of bribe money. Hurray for baksheesh.

At this point, we didn’t care. We knew we’d been scammed, but we were determined to get our money’s worth anyway. If we’d been stupid enough to sneak in on our own, fine—Midnight Express time—but with S&M around we had a handy scapegoat and a dumb-tourist card to play.

The Great Pyramid of Khufu is wonderful – amazing in its construction, longevity, and just sheer bulk. I won’t even bother describing it. 20 minutes later, we returned to a pant-peeing S&M who crammed us back onto our horses and took off as fast as he could.

Riding back down, past the Sphinx, Nazma still wanted to go inside the Sphinx enclosure. S&M tried to convince us there was nothing to see (hello? Sphinx?). Knowing this was a lost cause, we managed to snap off some pics from outside.

Returning to the stables, we complained to the owners that we knew we’d been scammed. We explained to our original guide but it was pretty plain she was in on the whole thing. A few rapidly tossed words in Arabic (”the jig is up”?) and the incoherent owners ponied up two entrance tickets—absurdly out of date judging by the displayed prices.

Our only objective at this stage in perpetuating the scrum was to convey that we were onto them and that we’d tell everyone we met. Apparently we weren’t getting through because S&M chose this otherwise awkward moment to tell me “if you want to baksheesh the guide (i.e. him), that’s no problem”. The only grammatically correct sentence he’d managed all day. We celebrated his gumption and newfound English skills with a car-door in the face as we got in our charter and sped back towards Cairo.

Giza: the only remaining wonder of the world; append the list now with the modern wonder that we didn’t get scammed more than we did. In the end, though, don’t think for a minute that we weren’t suitably awestruck and humbled. Nothing like 6 million tonnes of limestone geometric perfection devoted to someone else to put you in your place. Now if someone would only put the scammers in theirs.

• The car might be missing essential safety equipment: it may not have seat belts. Or brakes.
• You may, without prior consent, be sharing the car that seats three with the driver’s entire extended family and all attendant livestock.
• Your “guide” may know less about the destination than you.
• And their English skills may mysteriously crumble at convenient times, say when it comes time to settle any bills.
• Even more audaciously, previously negotiated prices can change, and what can you do if you’re already there?
• Or your destination, structures that have been standing around for over 4500 years, are “closed today” (very sorry, sir), but the guide knows of an excellent papyrus (banana leaves) and alabaster (wax with stone chips) museum nearby: a special kind of museum where all the pieces are for sale.

Any or all of these could have happened to us that day, but we got taken in what turned out to be a pretty comical way — one that could only work in a baksheesh-fueled country like Egypt.

We drove through a backalley and into a courtyard 100m away from the entrance to the impressively fenced Giza compound. Our guide led us to an outfit called DI Stables, which I later figured out probably stood for “Dis-Ingenuous”. Some handwringing and 360LE later (about CAD$72), we were teetering on two horses, ready for action or serious injury. They were improbably named Mickey Mouse and Michael Jackson (he was a little splotchy).

Now the tour we’d bought ought to have included admission to the compound (already 60LE per person) plus a traipse out “behind” the Pyramids, to a hill where you can get all 9 pyramids in one shot (what I’m calling the Big Three, plus six smaller ones). With this in mind, we weren’t wondering too much when we set off decidedly away from the main compound entrance, hugging the fence and wandering through the Cairene alleys, finally emerging into the open desert.

There were a few things going on at that moment to addle our senses. Needless to say, the heat was pretty crazy. Maybe you’ve seen The Three Amigos, that scene where they’re clopping through the desert, mirage-ridden and delirious: kinda like that.

Then there was the slow, grinding, nether-regional torture that horseback riding inflicts on the uninitiated. I couldn’t even stand up in my stirrups to alleviate this because my quads were still on strike after the Red Pyramid (another story). Every horse-step was like a punch in the ass.

Finally, there was the constant threat of unwise speed from our guide-turned-menacer Sam/Moses (hereafter referred to as S&M), who insisted that later, we would “strong gallop” as it was more comfortable. Personally, I’d take ass-punching over getting dragged behind an unfettered Michael Jackson, excavating tombs with my face.

All these thoughts percolated through our brains, so we barely noticed when S&M found a hole in the fence, and we moseyed on in.

We still have Luxor to contend with: the fabled “hassle capital of Egypt”. But for now we’re in Alexandria, the hotel room has a view of the Med, the toilet seat doesn’t work, and we’re tired but pretty happy. We survived Giza, we’ve put our Saigon street-crossing skills to good use because the drivers are even crazier here, and hearing the 5-times-daily call to prayer rising from the mosques everywhere has become so comfortable it feels like home.