I went to Pakistan for the mountains. Jordan for Petra. Egypt for the pyramids. Mauritania because somewhere along the way, riding an enormous freight train through the Sahara sounded like a perfectly reasonable thing to do with my time.
Hospitality wasn’t exactly the centerpiece of the itinerary. Yet, looking back on those journeys, some of the people I met left a greater impression than the places I’d traveled thousands of miles to see.
Over the years, I’ve found myself visiting quite a few Muslim-majority countries, often without deliberately planning it that way. My curiosity usually begins with something geographical or historical. A mountain range I’ve been reading about, an ancient city, a desert, or a corner of the world I know embarrassingly little about. Then I arrive, meet people, and discover that whatever initially drew me there is only one small part of the story.
What caught me off guard, particularly during my travels through North Africa, the Middle East, and Pakistan, was how often hospitality seemed to extend well beyond what I was accustomed to back home. Strangers invited me to eat, helped me navigate unfamiliar places, offered me somewhere to stay, and occasionally refused to accept anything in return.
At first, I found some of it difficult to understand. Not because kindness was foreign to me, but because I was so accustomed to the idea that everything should be reciprocated. Someone buys dinner, you get the next one. Someone helps you, you find a way to repay the favor. It’s a perfectly reasonable arrangement, but traveling began introducing me to people who seemed completely uninterested in keeping score.
And I wasn’t quite sure what to do with that.
Pakistan: I Came for the Karakoram, Stayed for the People
Pakistan had been on my mind long before I finally arrived. I was drawn to the Karakoram, one of the most extraordinary mountain ranges on Earth, and the opportunity to trek toward K2 Base Camp and cross the Gondogoro La.
The mountains were every bit as remarkable as I’d hoped. Towering granite walls, glaciers stretching beyond the horizon, and a landscape that makes you feel wonderfully insignificant. It’s difficult to spend time among those mountains without developing a healthy respect for both the scale of the natural world and your own limitations.
But Pakistan also introduced me to a warmth I hadn’t entirely anticipated.
Like many Americans, I’d grown up hearing about the country largely through news headlines. Discussions of Pakistan often centered on security, conflict, and geopolitical tensions, with relatively little attention given to the ordinary lives of the people who actually call it home.
That isn’t to suggest those concerns are imaginary or that traveling there comes without risks. It’s simply that a country’s headlines rarely provide a complete picture of its people.
I remember one encounter with a taxi driver who, at the end of our time together, got out of his vehicle and gave me a hug goodbye. It was a small gesture, probably insignificant in the grand scheme of his day, but it stayed with me.
We weren’t lifelong friends. We were two people who’d happened to cross paths, and he chose to end the encounter with genuine warmth.
It’s funny how something so ordinary can feel remarkable when it happens somewhere you’ve been conditioned to approach with apprehension.
Throughout my travels, I’ve often found that the distance between what we expect from a place and what we experience can be enormous. Pakistan was one of those reminders.
I’d come to see the Karakoram, and I certainly got my fill of mountains. But the encounters along the way gave the journey a different kind of depth. The landscape made me want to visit. The people made me want to return.
Mauritania: Haroune and the Art of Making Room
A few years later, I found myself traveling overland through North and West Africa. My route began in Morocco and continued south toward Mauritania and Senegal, a journey involving buses, shared taxis, border crossings, and more patience than most travel advertisements care to mention.
Mauritania was a country I knew relatively little about before planning the trip. I was curious about the Sahara, the country’s landscapes, and its famous iron ore train, but I hadn’t arrived with an especially sophisticated understanding of daily life there.
In Nouakchott, I connected with Haroune through Couchsurfing. He welcomed me into his home, and I ended up spending about a week experiencing the capital through the rhythm of his daily life rather than a conventional sightseeing itinerary.
There’s something particularly interesting about staying with someone in their home. You begin to notice the things that rarely appear in travel guides. The routines, the conversations, the neighborhoods, the ordinary decisions that make up someone’s day. You’re not simply moving through a destination. You’re getting a brief glimpse into how another person experiences it.
Haroune was incredibly generous with his time. He helped me navigate the city, shared meals with me, and made me feel welcome in a place where I initially knew almost nobody.
When I decided to take the iron ore train across the Sahara, he also helped me prepare. This included a rather memorable shopping expedition through Nouakchott to find a pair of ski goggles, which were apparently an essential accessory for my upcoming adventure.
I hadn’t anticipated that shopping for winter sports equipment would become part of my itinerary in West Africa, but travel rarely feels compelled to explain itself.
The train journey itself was an extraordinary experience. Roughly twenty hours perched on an enormous pile of iron ore, crossing the desert in an open freight wagon, with dust covering practically everything I owned. By the time it was over, I looked like I’d spent the previous day personally assisting with the mining operation.
When I returned to Nouakchott, Haroune welcomed me back. He gave me somewhere to shower, let me wash my clothes, and fed me. After nearly a full day aboard the train, these were exactly the things I needed.
There was no grand ceremony surrounding any of it. He was helping a friend who had returned from a rather dirty adventure.
And perhaps that’s what made the experience so memorable.
I hadn’t arrived in Mauritania expecting someone to take care of me. I was traveling independently and had grown comfortable figuring things out for myself. Yet here was someone who repeatedly made room for me in his life, simply because he wanted to.
I remember feeling a little uncomfortable with the imbalance. I wanted to contribute, to help, to find some way to reciprocate. It’s a feeling I’ve encountered many times while traveling, particularly when someone offers more than I expected.
But Haroune’s hospitality reminded me that not every act of kindness needs to become a transaction. Sometimes the appropriate response is simply to receive it graciously and remember it.
That might sound obvious, but I’ve found it takes a little practice.
Tunisia: A Meal I Never Asked For
Tunisia offered another reminder of how ordinary generosity can become an extraordinary memory.
During my travels there, I met two brothers and ended up mentioning that I enjoyed shakshuka. It wasn’t a request or some elaborate attempt to secure a home-cooked meal. I simply liked the dish and happened to say so.
Later, after I’d stepped away to take care of an errand, I returned to find that they’d prepared shakshuka for me.
There was something wonderfully uncomplicated about the gesture. We’d spoken about food, they’d remembered, and they’d decided to make some.
No elaborate planning, no expectation of anything in return, and certainly no reservation required.
It was a small act of hospitality, but one that has remained surprisingly vivid in my memory. I can recall spectacular monuments and incredible landscapes from my travels, yet sometimes it’s a plate of food prepared by someone who hardly knows you that stays with you the longest.
Food has a remarkable ability to cut through the awkwardness of unfamiliar places. You may not share a language, religion, nationality, or much understanding of each other’s lives, but sitting down to eat gives you something immediate in common.
I’ve found that some of the most enjoyable conversations begin this way. Someone offers tea, passes around bread, or insists that you try something they’ve prepared. Before long, you’re laughing about something, trading stories, and discovering that the distance between your lives isn’t always as great as you imagined.
Of course, not every interaction becomes meaningful simply because food is involved. I’ve eaten plenty of forgettable meals while traveling. But the gesture in Tunisia was different because of how naturally it happened.
The brothers didn’t appear to think they’d done anything particularly remarkable.
I did.
Jordan: More Than Petra and Wadi Rum
Jordan was another country I originally visited for its remarkable landscapes and history.
Petra had been on my list for years, and Wadi Rum was somewhere I’d wanted to experience long before I arrived. Both lived up to the anticipation. Petra’s ancient architecture and Wadi Rum’s enormous desert landscape are the sorts of places that remind me why I became so interested in exploring the world in the first place.
But alongside the famous sights were smaller moments that made the country memorable.
I remember spending time in Wadi Rum sharing tea, talking, and laughing with people I’d met there. There is something about sitting together in a desert landscape that makes time feel a little less urgent. You don’t necessarily need an elaborate activity or a full itinerary. Sometimes a conversation and a glass of tea are enough to occupy an afternoon or evening.
I think about that distinction often when I travel.
There’s a difference between being served something and being made to feel welcome. Both have their place, and hospitality is certainly an industry as well as a cultural practice. But the encounters I remember most are generally the ones that feel personal rather than procedural.
It’s not necessarily about how much someone provides. It’s the sense that they’ve made room for you, even briefly, in their day.
Jordan gave me plenty of spectacular photographs. The conversations around the tea are harder to photograph, but no less memorable.
Hospitality Isn’t Unique to One Culture
One thing I’ve become increasingly careful about is turning a handful of positive experiences into grand declarations about entire countries, cultures, or religions.
I’ve met extraordinarily generous people in Muslim-majority countries, but I’ve also encountered kindness in places with entirely different traditions. I’ve had wonderful experiences with strangers in countries I was told to be cautious about, and difficult encounters in destinations celebrated for their friendliness.
People are people, which makes them wonderfully complicated.
That said, hospitality has a particular cultural and religious significance in many of the places I’ve visited across North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. In Islamic traditions, generosity toward guests, charitable giving, and caring for others are deeply valued principles. Those values can also be found in many local customs that extend beyond religion itself.
I find that fascinating, especially coming from a culture where independence and individual achievement are often treated as particularly important qualities.
In the United States, we’re generally quite comfortable talking about personal responsibility, ambition, and building a successful life for ourselves. Those aren’t necessarily bad things. I’ve spent much of my career pursuing ambitious goals, and I still believe there’s considerable value in working toward something meaningful.
But I’ve also begun to appreciate that independence can become a strangely limiting ideal when taken too far.
We become so accustomed to taking care of ourselves that accepting generosity can feel uncomfortable. We start wondering what we owe someone before we’ve even finished thanking them.
Travel has repeatedly challenged that instinct in me.
The encounters I’ve described aren’t evidence that one part of the world has a monopoly on kindness. They’re reminders that different societies can emphasize different ways of relating to one another, and that paying attention to those differences can teach us something useful.
The more places I visit, the less interested I become in deciding which culture has figured life out.
I’d rather borrow the good ideas.
The Uncomfortable Art of Accepting Kindness
I’ve always enjoyed traveling independently. There’s a certain satisfaction that comes from arriving somewhere unfamiliar and figuring out how to navigate it. You learn to become resourceful, comfortable with uncertainty, and reasonably good at improvising when your plans fall apart.
But independent travel also has a funny way of revealing how dependent you are on other people.
A stranger helps you find the right bus. Someone translates a conversation. A family offers you somewhere to stay. A person you’ve known for twenty minutes invites you to eat.
You can plan the entire journey yourself, but you rarely accomplish it entirely alone.
That’s something I didn’t fully appreciate when I first began traveling.
I used to associate independence with being able to handle just about anything without asking for help. Over time, I’ve realized that there’s considerable strength in being comfortable receiving it.
Generosity also creates a certain responsibility. If someone welcomes you into their home or community, there’s an obligation to be respectful of their time, customs, privacy, and boundaries. Hospitality isn’t an unlimited invitation to treat another person’s life as part of your travel experience.
I’ve become more conscious of that distinction as I’ve gotten older. I’m grateful for the people who’ve shared their lives with me, but I also recognize that those encounters involve real people with responsibilities, ambitions, relationships, and concerns that exist long after I’ve moved on to the next destination.
They aren’t characters in my adventure.
I just happened to be fortunate enough to cross paths with them.
What I’ve Carried Home
One of the unexpected consequences of spending so much time traveling is that you gradually begin bringing pieces of those experiences into your own life.
Not physical souvenirs, although I’ve accumulated a few of those too. I’m talking about the habits, perspectives, and ways of treating people that you encounter along the way.
The willingness to invite someone to sit down. The generosity of sharing a meal without turning it into an accounting exercise. The understanding that a person doesn’t have to be especially familiar to deserve your time and attention.
Those are things I’ve tried to carry home with me.
I’ve also come to appreciate how much of hospitality has very little to do with elaborate preparation or material resources. Some of the most memorable meals I’ve shared have been remarkably simple. The circumstances weren’t particularly polished, but the company made them meaningful.
Years later, as my wife and I began building Gevity, a private wellness club in Austin, I found myself thinking about many of those experiences again. We were trying to create a place where people felt genuinely welcomed, where relationships developed naturally, and where community meant something more than a collection of people occupying the same building.
There’s obviously a world of difference between opening a business and welcoming a traveler into your home. But I think the underlying instinct can be surprisingly similar.
You make room for people. You pay attention. You create opportunities for them to feel comfortable being themselves.
And you remember that hospitality isn’t something you can manufacture entirely through beautiful furniture, clever branding, or an impressive list of amenities.
Someone has to actually care.
The People Are the Part I Remember
When I look back at my travels through Pakistan, Mauritania, Tunisia, Jordan, and Egypt, I still think about the landscapes and landmarks that originally drew me there.
The Karakoram remains one of the most extraordinary places I’ve ever explored. Petra is every bit as remarkable as the photographs suggest. The Sahara has a scale and stillness that’s difficult to put into words, and standing among the pyramids offers a rather humbling reminder of just how much history happened before any of us arrived.
But when I begin telling stories about those places, I often find myself talking about the people instead.
The taxi driver who hugged me goodbye. Haroune helping me prepare for a train journey and welcoming me back when I returned covered in dust. Two brothers in Tunisia who remembered that I liked shakshuka. Conversations over tea in Jordan.
None of those encounters required a famous attraction or an elaborate adventure. In fact, most happened during the ordinary hours between the things I’d originally traveled there to do.
And that’s probably what I appreciate most about them.
I’ve never believed we need to travel to become kinder, more generous, or more understanding people. There’s plenty of opportunity to practice those qualities wherever we happen to live. But traveling has given me the privilege of witnessing how other people express them, sometimes in circumstances very different from my own.
It’s made me more curious, a little less certain of my assumptions, and considerably more appreciative of the people who have welcomed me along the way.
I still plan trips around mountains, strange train journeys, ancient cities, and the occasional place that makes my family wonder whether I’ve thought things through.
I suspect I always will.
But after enough time on the road, I’ve learned that the places are often just what get me there.
The people are what make me want to keep going.
