I was on a cruise ship along the Nile River in Egypt, passing through the narrow canal of the Esna Locks. I was relaxing in my cabin when I suddenly heard a voice outside. A street vendor, spotting me through my open sliding glass door, started trying to sell me a towel for $5—right from the shoreline!

Before I could even process what was happening, he launched the towel straight into my cabin through the open balcony door. Caught off guard, I picked it up, examined it, and—rather than negotiating—tossed it back at him before shutting the door.

Undeterred, he kept yelling in a mix of languages, still determined to make the sale. My girlfriend later added an AI voiceover intro and uploaded it to TikTok, where it quickly went viral, racking up over 2.8M views (and counting).

The moment is funny, unexpected, and captures the incredible hustle of street vendors in a setting you wouldn’t normally expect—selling towels to tourists on a moving Nile river cruise!