Our heroines encounter vultures, mummified cats and a few nasty emotions

By Flo Conner

Editor's note: The following is not your typical travel article. Resemblance to anyone you know means you are or live with someone who is a southern chick. Any practical information about travel is coincidental and should be considered suspect.

It's tough to find out that a close family member is insane.

It's a nightmare to discover that fact when you're miles away from straitjackets and sedatives.

My sister and I have been traveling buddies for years, and I never knew she was nuts. There could have been many times along the way that Becky could have lost it, but didn't. Like the time we went to Rio de Janeiro for her 40th birthday, when we discovered that, thanks to government-mandated plastic surgery, even the 70-year-old women looked like Barbie, while we looked like Nibbles, her fat pony. Or the time she decided to quit smoking the day before we left for Europe, the world's last smoking hole. She begged for cigarettes while I spent the entire trip learning how to say "For God's sake, don't give her one; she's on the patch!" in French, German, Dutch and Italian.

She even kept her cool in rush-hour traffic in Rome when hand movements I learned from watching World Federation Wrestling took on new meaning in Italian, such as "Swerve this way!" and "Hit me again, it's a rented Mercedes!" And, despite her nervousness, she climbed a dark, rickety, medieval staircase inhabited by 400 sweating Americans, skeletons of tourists who didn't make it and a gazillion spiders just so I could see whether or not gargoyles on the top of Notre Dame really looked like my exes. I discovered that Becky was claustrophobic, but I didn't think she was crazy.

Until we got to Egypt.

What was it that drove her over the edge? The shock from experiencing a culture that believed that everything from pharaohs to cats needed to be mummified, a temple built to worship them and cruise ships launched to visit all 500 of them in a single day? The narrow, crowded, bustling streets of Cairo so different from the sterile malls of home? The dust that flattened our big hair? Or the incredible heat that forever dispelled the notion that good southern women couldn't sweat?

No, it was guilt.

In case no one else has noticed, people from other countries are not like us. In fact, people from anywhere else in the United States are not like us. We know that men anywhere are not like us. Southern chicks are polite. We don't like to argue or bicker. We're taught that expressing any other emotion other than sweetness triggers a smothering guilt laid on at birth by our mommas, who got it from their mommas and so on and so forth back to original sin, which was not disobedience, but rudeness, at least in Dixie.

Egyptian shopkeepers must have known this, or at least knew how to channel our mother.

"Pretty lady," they would call out to us in the bazaar, "come look at my alabaster vases, my solid gold necklaces, and this prize mummified cat found recently in Ramses tomb." The voices would drop an octave. "It's the only one of its kind." I would roll my eyes and move on the mummified litter in the next stall, but my sister would stand transfixed. She wanted one.

In another culture, say any mall in America, the shopkeeper would have named a price, my sister would have paid it, and off we'd go with our dead cat wrapped in Egyptian ace bandages. But this was Egypt, not Pier One.

The shopkeeper named a price equal to the gross operating budget of Kuwait. My sister shook her head and began to move on. Suddenly, the shopkeeper appeared pained. "Pretty lady, what have I done to make you walk away?" he said, wringing his hands and tearing his hair out. "I'm just a poor soul trying to run a business, and you want to ruin me." Could that be a tear in his eye?

Flooded with guilt, my sister emptied her purse to buy the cat. It took 12 seconds to discover that the shopkeeper next door was also a struggling guilt-tripper, as was his neighbor and the next, and the next…you get the picture. A shiny object, an outrageous price, a hurt look, "I only try to be nice to pretty American lady, and you treat me like this?" It was enough to cure us of shopping.

Well, almost.

It didn't take long to realize that we were walking dollar signs to most of the people we met. This is not a criticism of the Egyptian people, because we met very few of them. The people we met were the vultures who preyed on the only other people stupid enough to brave 160-degree temperatures to visit the temples: tourists. Everywhere we went, we were met by someone intent on selling us a selection of mummified cats, whether we wanted them or not. We tried to be polite and say no. "No" in vulture language means "Please show me one with different colored plastic eyes." The constant barrage took a toll on my sister. After a while, she started getting assertive. "I SAID NO, YOU LITTLE VERMIN, STAY AWAY FROM ME!" echoed off more than a few stone columns and dead pharaohs. And was that foam on her lips?

One poor man took a different approach by chastising her. "I was just trying to bid you welcome to my country, and this is the thanks I get?"

My sister broke. There's a scene in "The Mummy" where the monster rears from the ground and destroys everything in its path, but that was computer-generated imagery. With my sister, it was years of mother-induced guilt suddenly gone bad. Her hair crackled as her head grew as big as the sphinx. With one huge roar, she burned that merchant and his rare, mass-produced mummified cats into a few scattered ashes.

At least, that's the way I remembered it.

After that, the merchants left us alone. In fact, everyone left us alone. My sister began muttering and jerking her head in odd ways that made the cat she was carrying seem like it was alive. A few times, I caught her talking to the cat, whispering in its little bandaged ear and scratching its bony head. When we showed up at the pyramids, we suddenly had the whole place to ourselves, with the armed guards hired to protect tourists from terrorists setting up roadblocks to protect the terrorists from my sister.

I can't say that it was more pleasant without anyone trying to sell us something. In fact, it seemed a bit more sinister on our own, but it could have been touring Egypt with an insane sister and a bandaged cat. Hmmm….those little bandages might make excellent restraints…..

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