In my numerous visits to the Middle East, I frequently pay someone to hold a knife to my throat.  Actually it’s a razor, but either way I’m aware that one quick twist of the wrist could bring a quick end to my life.  Time and again, however, all that happens is that my stubbly whiskers get removed.  Sometimes pain is involved, but that’s only when the razor is set aside and the man fills his palms with cologne, slapping it on my cheeks and neck and rubbing it in -- burn, baby, burn!  I’m speaking, of course, of the barbershop.

In travel literature, barbershops don’t get the attention they deserve.  This is a shame for a host of reasons, of which I’ll mention three:

1. In most countries the barbershop is a great place to meet locals.
2. A half-hour in a barbershop serves not only to shorten the hair but also to educate.  For instance, pay attention to posters decorating the wall or to how folks interact with one another and you’ll gain some knowledge of local culture.  (And if your haircut takes an hour or two, chalk it up to culture.)
3. In many countries haircuts are incredibly, beautifully cheap.  This past November a trip to the barber in Leon, Nicaragua set me back about 80 cents.

 

Quang Ngai, Vietnam

Zababdeh, West Bank

Bangkok, Thailand

It obviously isn’t just in Damascus or Cairo or Riyadh that one can step into a barbershop and ask a man to put a knife to his throat.  I’ve also had a woman in Hat Yai, Thailand scrape a blade along my trachea.  It was a disconcerting experience, not because of the shave but because she suggested my ears and nostrils needed trimming, which was the fist time in my life I’d ever been told this—and a subtle way of being reminded that my twenties were over.

I’ve reclined in a wobbly chair on a sidewalk in Delhi, about five feet from a napping cow, and listened as my barber pulled out a razor and proudly declared, “This is a new razor, sir, don’t worry one bit.  It is very brand new!”

Rishikesh, India

I’ve been tag-teamed in a barbershop by two Chinese women who shaved not just my face but my entire cranium.  They went to work with great reluctance and only after suggesting I would look very ugly bald, but they did a superb job.  It was also in China – two thousand miles and eleven months later – where, not having had the chance to bathe in several days, I stepped into a barbershop in the high-altitude frontier town of Tashkurgan (it’s tucked up near the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan) and asked what a simple shampoo would cost.  I asked because it was dusk and I was cold, and I had no hot water in my hotel.  To be shampooed would run the equivalent of a dollar, they said, and so I stepped inside.  Soon I was relaxed in that universal reclining chair of the barber, hot cloths across my face and then water (and then adept fingers) running through my hair.  The bliss was almost too much and would become utterly rapturous when Shakira started to blast out of a radio across the street.  She sang:

Whenever, Wherever
We're meant to be together
I'll be there and you'll be near
And that's the deal my dear

Shakira was singing about a guy, but she just as well could have been singing about a barbershop.  Conventional wisdom says you get your haircut before you go on a trip.  Some of us travelers, however, think otherwise. 

It was in the city of Guangzhou where the two Chinese women shaved me bald.  The barbershop was not far from the hotel where many American couples stay while going through the final stages of the adoption process (from Guangzhou they return to the States with their new child).  I know the folks in the hotel where happy.  Things weren't half bad here in the barbershop, either.

Joel Carillet, chief editor of Wandering Educators, is a freelance writer and photographer based in Tennessee. He is the author of 30 Reasons to Travel: Photographs and Reflections from Southeast Asia. To learn more about him, or to follow his weekly photoblog, visit www.joelcarillet.com.