A month on the wild side (part 1)

It had been a decision quickly made over my birthday weekend in early December, signed and sealed before the still-hot melting wax of thought had time to cool and dither and faff. Yes, there had been last minute nerves mixed in with all the excitement, and as I looked down from the jet's cold metal belly at the mounds of snow encrusting the runway I tried as hard as I could not to even attempt to picture what lay ahead. Not just yet, anyway.

It is probably to overstate the case to say that I'm afraid of flying, but I've always understood why some pre-flight passengers might dose themselves with alcohol or tranquilisers; comfortably numb could well be a most commendable flight path. The cups of tea and fizzy water I'd had during my long wait in the snow-bound airport were very small beer by comparison, necessitating only loo trips rather than sweet oblivion. But no matter; the plane was only half full and I had the block of three whole seats to myself by way of some compensation. The staff busy themselves with the ritual of take-off - bolting the doors; closing the overhead lockers; the safety talk; the seat belt check; the first small movements; that slow-growing rumble that turns into a growl that becomes the powerful roar of the engines that thrusts you back into your seat and has your brain muttering half-remembered prayers whilst seeking religious conversion.

There had been times in the five weeks between my decision to go and actually reaching 35,000 feet that I really thought it might not happen at all. Britain had been enduring its coldest, snowiest winter in more than three decades. All the airports had been forced to shut several times, including up to a day before my own departure. It had also been a very tight time squeeze to get a whole three-jab course of rabies vaccinations done at the travel clinic. But cruising now, relaxing high above the clouds amid brilliant jewel blue skies, miniature plastic glass of Diet Coke in one hand and in-flight meal on the fold down table in front, all that was left behind.

All that lay ahead was the ocean, America, and a month in the middle of nowhere surrounded on all sides by wild animals. Grinning, I finished my drink, folded the table away, tucked myself up under the bright red blankets and fell asleep. Next stop: Florida.

Friday Fling

“Do I look like a middle-aged lady wearing this?” Liz asks me as she opens the door. We stand quietly for a heartbeat, stare at each other. “No, you look great. And anyway, if we do we might just as well embrace it. We are middle aged ladies.” And we laugh and hug our greetings as we always do.

Liz does indeed look great, her small and slender womanly figure wrapped in a sleeveless printed cross-over top, new jeans with a thin belt, and a pair of spotty peep-toe high heels. Her hair’s swept up and back in a soft blonde roll, the fringe just brushing her glittering blue eyes and gently sun-freckled face. She looks very glamorous. Much more so than me, dressed as I am in a black shirt, stripy jeans that I bought from the Red Cross charity shop, and my good old favourite pale tan cowboy-esque boots that I bought seven years ago in Salt Lake City.

We’ve arranged to meet to go for dinner tonight at The Ship, Liz’s local pub that also happens to serve the most wonderful food. When we push the door open, the small bar area is cramped with bodies clutching glasses and raincoats after the unseasonably chilly wet day. A few bobbing multi-coloured helium balloons, emblazoned with a four and a zero, are in the hands of a couple of children; several more balloons are dotted about on the tables when we duck under the curtain into the tiny restaurant section. But there’s one round table free, so we sit there and look at the menu as the birthday party take up their seats around us.

When the waitress comes we place our orders and raise our wine glasses (red for Liz, white for me) in a toast to each other. She’s off to Colorado on Wednesday to be matron of honour at a friend’s wedding, staying in Denver for ten days or so before moving on to see another friend in Cincinnati. We talk about the trip and Liz describes her packed itinerary which encompasses both familiar rituals (the wedding, the hair and make up, the post-nuptial celebrations) and the unfamiliar (a bachelorette party). I’m sure that she will have a wonderful time and I’m quite envious not to be going too; still, I’ve leant Liz The Philosopher and the Wolf to read on the aeroplane so a little bit of me will be travelling with her, in spirit anyway.

Our meals when they arrive are freshly cooked and searingly hot. The pieces of chicken from Liz’s fajitas sizzle among char-grilled red and green peppers on a small iron dish beside a plateful of soft floured flat breads. My creamy fish pie comes in a square white bowl, topped with mashed potato and pale orange melted cheese. I’ve had a fancy too for some chips all week so have ordered a side portion, all chunky and long and golden crispy yellow.

When we’re done, Johnny the pub’s landlord finds us a table in the crowded bar and we fetch another glass of wine on the way. A solo musician strikes up at the far end. He’s got a selection of instruments – violin, banjo, guitar – and starts a rousing uproarious set of traditional Irish tunes sprinkled with a little country and a few harmonic minor tunes of more recent origin. After a few rounds of REM, The Dubliners and The Devil Went Down to Georgia, several women have kicked off their shoes, are holding up their skirts and Irish dancing. We alternate between clapping and singing along and talking in the lulls and above the wonderful infectious music until Johnny calls time.

It’s cold and damp when we get outside and we scuttle across the road rubbing our hands against goosepimpled arms. We’re nearly at Liz’s house when we remember we’ve forgotten to pay, so laughingly turn back and go in by a different door. No-one has noticed our accidental eat and run, and we settle up with the barmaid before heading outside once more. Liz and I embrace by my car and I wish her bon voyage for her holiday. I’m sure she’s going to have a ball.

Plane sight

I doubt that “Beverley Hills Chihuahua” would have been my film of choice. But then in-flight movie selection was always a mysterious art.

Lacking headphones, I could only guess at the plot. It had lots of talking dogs in it (including a German shepherd, the double of Kaos) and was the second film on the trot on the aeroplane to feature crumbling Aztec ruins. I think I grasped the gist.

Strangely, I was sitting in the same seat on the way home as I did on the outbound trip – seat 32D. It was one of those fabulous ones by the emergency exits; so long as the monkey monster thing from the Twilight Zone doesn’t come along and wrench the door open, there’s plenty of leg room. My silent children’s film watching was only interrupted by being whacked on the elbow by the finely-turned bottom of a rather rotund air stewardess as she busied herself in the cabin. I thought she resembled Victoria Wood – but in appearance only, not demeanour. Thus I also thought it best to keep that observation to myself

Goodbye Egypt & thanks for a great time

We checked out of the hotel after breakfast, settling up via the convoluted route of currency converted from Egyptian pounds via Euros to US Dollars. A new influx of arrivals had come in last night and most of them – it seemed – were queuing at the dive centre.

The dive centre is set apart from the hotel at the top of the strip of sand that runs between the grounds and the bay. It has a central dome, smooth rendered and indistinguishable from the many others around from outside. But standing inside looking up is like being in a cool bread oven. The bricks of the dome are unplastered and exposed and set in palest pink lime mortar. At the pinnacle of the dome, a perfect circle is open to the desert sky; when it rains, if it ever does here, it must fall inside too.

I slid my crate of borrowed gear under the hatch in the wooden counter on the ground at the base of the heart of the dome. When I paid I was presented with a “Coraya Divers” membership card and a fan of multi-coloured car stickers. I’m going to send one to Rhona - along with the book I bought her at the airport - to be a little piece of Egypt in the middle of Lancaster.

We made our way to the beach and set up our accustomed enclave next to the sea. The four of us spent our last few hours in Egypt in companionable quietness, exchanging only a few words now and then on our regular refreshment trips to the beach-side cafe. I’ve been concentrating on absorbing in minute detail how the heat of the sun feels on my skin as I lie here. It will be many months before I feel that again and I wish I could bottle the sensation for uncorking on the cold and dreary remnants of the winter days that wait for me at home.

Liz and I took one last stroll down the jetty. As we walked, I described to her the fish I’d seen when snorkelling yesterday. I was especially struck by the parrot fish I’d seen grazing on the reef and was telling her about it when one swam into view in the shallow water above the coral under the jetty. As if he’d known we’d wanted him to appear, he stayed in our sight for several minutes, even turning on his side momentarily so Liz could get a proper look at his spectrum of colours.

She and I also took to reflecting on ourselves and what might happen next to us. At a personal level, I know that I’m in a different place emotionally than this time last year when I first visited Egypt. The emotional tsunami that still gripped me at that time has passed; now only a few small waves remain. I think I’ve just about closed that chapter; a few intimate insights I’ve had here give me encouragement that a new one is starting to open. If I do come here again, not only will I be able to claim my very welcome Coraya Divers discount but – with luck and an open heart – I’ll be reading from the lines of that as yet unwritten script. That is a most encouraging souvenir to take home from a wonderful holiday in Egypt.

Float like an Egyptian

Back into the Red Sea today - this time snorkelling on the house reef. The on-shore breeze was strong, whipping the water in the bay into white horses and sending spume crashing over the jetty. Maybe not ideal snorkelling conditions, but this is our last full day and I want to see the fishes again before we leave.

At about 100 yards out into the bay, the wooden jetty splits in two. Straight ahead is the disembarkation point for divers and the three motor boats that ferry scuba trips to off-shore sites. The L-shaped spur to the left is for snorkellers and leads to a canopied pontoon that in turn gives way to an iron staircase and ladder that drop directly into the water and onto the reef.

The fish cluster around as if at the edge of an infinite ornamental lake and I am not disappointed. Shoals of white fish with luminous eyes look to be swimming upside down and are everywhere just beneath the surface. Further down the face of the reef a huge parrot fish is grazing, his rainbow colours flashing in the sunlight. At the very bottom two stone fish skulk invisibly on the white sand. In between, a hundred thousand fish of all colours and shapes and sizes swarm and wriggle and dance, chasing each other or feeding in companionable oblivion.

The snorkelling zone is roughly marked out by a string of buoys and slime-covered ropes that bob up and down in the waves. The current is driving on-shore and swimming against it is both exhausting and pointless. Holding onto the marker ropes gives me a fantastic view of the reef life below, and I float there ebbing and flowing as the water rises and falls. The stillness of the perpetual motion of ocean and creatures and plants allows my brain to snuff out one by one its constant threads of internal chatter and narration. Eventually all that is left is my body floating in the sea and just the one direct feed from eye to brain. Complete sensory immersion; I think this must be what meditation is like.

An hour or so later, Liz meets me as I'm walking back along the jetty, flippers and mask in hand. She fetches some coffee while I change out of my wet suit and the four of us sit on the beach drinking our drinks as the sun starts to go down. We head into the hotel's health centre and spend a quiet hour in the spa pool and steam room. By the time we come out, the sky is blazing red and the call to prayer drifts to us, carried on the breeze from the other side of the bay.

Fly like an Egyptian

We watched a magnificent sea eagle hunting above the bay this morning.

It was joined by two or three smaller kestrel-like raptors, taking it in turns to dive down into the sea before soaring up again and circling, searching, eating. There are other more familar birds here too - the ubiquitous sparrows and doves of course, but also - surprisingly to me - pied wagtails going about their business in much the same way as they do 2,500 miles away at home.

Blog like an Egyptian (part 6)

The Red Sea is what draws people to this part of Egypt.

Well, that and the climate - now in mid-February the days are sunny and almost cloudless, the temperature perhaps in the late twenties Celcius. De-salination operates on an immense scale here. The water produced irrigates the tropical planting around the resort through an endless series of hose pipes and ditches. Outside this artifical oasis it is utterly arid, dust and sand and rocks and mountains the only natural features.

Juxtaposed and bounded by this barren landscape, the Red Sea could not shine any more jewel-like than if it were composed entirely of sapphires. The sand on the beach is coarse, the particles a beige collection of grit and gravel right around the bay. At its heart the sea rolls lazily up and down, huge breakers crashing some way off outside the inlet. The reef eco-system is a delicately balanced thing; careless tourists with clumsy fingers and feet have the potential to cause substantial damage. To protect the fragile marine equilibrium, the shore is protected by a line of posts with chains strung in between. You may not casually launch a swimming or snorkelling trip from the beach, only from the jetty that juts 100 yards or more out into the bay. One consequence of this is that the sea is people-free; the fishes and the coral go about their business undisturbed by shell collectors, curious toddlers or shrieking teenagers.

The beach is studded with woven willow parasols that collectively resemble giant Mexican hats perched on top of 6 foot poles. Or perhaps they are a squadron of flying saucers, hovering slightly above the sand, in benevolent formation as a prelude to miniature global domination. In any event, along with the co-ordinating half-moon shaped wind breaks, they provide great shelter from the sun and on-shore breeze alike.

Dive like an Egyptian (part 2)

Second dive of the holiday, today to Marsa Mubarak, a site that needed a 15 minute trip by mini-bus to the port at Al Ghrahib. From there a hard boat (with a RIB in tow) guided us out twenty minutes into the Red Sea and curled along the coast to the south and the reef. The boat was double decked - the upper deck strewn with comfortable cushions - and we took our shoes off as we boarded.

I was buddied with Barbara from Germany today, our compliment of 8 divers split into 2 groups of four: David, Stephen, Barbara and me led by our wonderful Karim. The dive site itself was cluttered with pillars of coral and decorated with beautiful fronds of fire coral; one, at about 15 metres, was swarming with tiny orange and silver fishes all the way up its height and into the sun above like a still from a big screen film. A great highlight of today was seeing a huge sea turtle, swimming fast high above our heads, and an enormous Lion Fish hovering over the reef oblivious to the fact it just looks impossibly constructed - like a cartoon come to life.

From a 'diving practice' point of view, today's dive - my 7th open water dive so far - was both good and bad. Good, in that I managed the 20 metre (well, 20.4m to be exact) depth that is the maximum allowed with my BSAC Ocean Diver qualification card, and that the dive was 50 minutes long and quite a distance too. Bad, in that once again I needed to share Karim's tank via his octopus (alternative air source) for a short while to get me back safely, even though this time I'd taken the precaution of requesting a 15 litre tank. I'm still clearly using too much air - this will get better with experience I know, but for now perhaps I need to stick to shorter, quicker dives. Or just breathe less.

Balloon like an Egyptian

I appear to be developing a case of the Egyptian Balloon. Either that or all the trousers I packed have mysteriously shrunk in transit.

The food here is delicious, plentiful and in constant supply. A dangerous combination. In the restaurant, at the poolside bar, in the beach front cafe, one is never more than a short waddle from piles of pastries and all manner of savoury delights. A small domestic army continually patrols collecting up glasses, plates and cups the second they are empty. A further unseen regiment returns one's room to pristine order whilst one is engaged in hard core poolside lounging or scoffing. The beds are pressed and adorned with a towel sculpture covered in hibiscus petals by the time you get back for a post-lunch pre-dinner nap.

After only a few days, I have entered into that holiday fugue state with complete loss of all sense of time or responsibility. My guess is you'd be hopelessly irredemably institutionalised if you stayed here for a month. Well, that and very fat: a proper Egyptian Balloon.

Dive like an Egyptian

The Red Sea is enchanting. I know this from my 1st trip to Egypt this time last year; it was the two 'try dives' I did then that inspired me to learn how to do it properly. I joined Swale Sub Aqua Club when I got home and have been training with them since.

My most recent dives were a few months back at the end of November - a Club weekender to Portland in Dorset. The sea water temperature was 10 degrees and we surfaced to sleet. The Red Sea at Marsa Uum Gerifat today was a much more pleasing 22 C - with a wet suit on it felt like a warm bath. My try dive instructor last year was a young Egyptian guy called Karim. He'd been kind and patient and held my hand as I tried to overcome my brain's underwater evacuation manoeuvres. So it was great that he was our guide again today on our house reef orientation dive.

I know from the more experienced divers in my club that a degree of anxiety before a dive is to be expected. Even though I am much more familiar now with what to expect, those first few minutes are spent trying to wrestle brain control from the sub-conscious automatic to the manual over-ride that is needed to enable it to accept that - kitted up - you can indeed breathe underwater. We jump from the wooden jetty, our faith contained in neoprene and compresed air.

The fishes and the coral are so brightly coloured here it is as if someone has run riot with all the colours from a child's paintbox. Purple with yellow spots? Check. Orange, white and black stripes? Certainly sir. Egyptian law prevents the wearing of diving gloves to help minimise damage to this natural underwater theme park - it is strictly 'look but don't touch' down here. It's a mutual stand-off that suits both parties; the coral is left undamaged by enquiring hands; and the diver remains unburnt / stung / poisoned by the self-defence mechanisms of the creatures & plants in the sub aqua zoo.

Diving really is the art of slow personified. There really is nothing to rush for, just observation of the fishes doing their fishy thing and the coral growing as inperceptibly as a glacier does on land. Karim - also my 'buddy' on this dive - leads us along at a sedate pace as we follow the gentle slope of the sea bed downwards. Around us the coral towers cathedral-like and massive, its imposing size in contradiction to its fragility. Karim guides us through a natural underwater canyon and we dive low and slow, passing among arches and loops in the coral. It is amazing and terrifying in equal measure. I notice I'm running low on air so for a while I breathe in tandem with Karim, sharing his tank via the octopus - the spare regulator that all divers carry for the purpose.

Down here normal means of communication are useless, so the international diving community operates a series of universal hand signals. Underwater, I 'hear' a running commentary in my head consisting of my buddy's signals and intentions and my own thoughts about what I'm feeling and seeing. The seascape is in constant motion. Glance up and shoal of silver fish flash life knife blades in the sun. Look ahead, there's a jellyfish, an octopus, a clown fish, a thousand and one living things going about their business unpeturbed and undisturbed by us in our ungainly kit. This is their world and they pay us no more attention than if we were shadows.

Too soon we're back at the landing stage and killing the 3 minute safety stop by watching yellow parrot fish watching each other. Up the steps and back on the jetty once more, nose running with snot and throat full of phlegm as the crew help us remove our tanks until we stand leaden and weighty on our own feet once more. We've been underwater for 50 minutes - it feels like seconds. David's signed up for a night dive this evening. After only six open water dives so far, I'm not ready for that dark mysterious water just yet.

Blog like an Egyptian (part 5)

Holidays to Aunty Nan and Uncle Doug were altogether more restrained affairs.

There existed between my Gran and Aunty Nan a palpable female rivalry. Nan was the youngest of the 13 children of their Scottish mineworking family and still - at that time in her 50s - clung to the notion of herself as the baby. She was small and thin and sharp, and I instinctively knew that she needled my Gran's usually even temperament. Unlce Doug was a man from whom disappointment and condascention hung like a mantle. He sneered, he burped, he was pompous, and - there is no doubt to me looking back now with adult eyes - he was desparately sad and trapped inside a small boxed-in life he had built around himself. That they lived in a tiny immaculate bungalow with precise grass is perhaps no surprise. If Aunty Betty represented freedom of a kind, then Nan and Doug embodied conservatism with both a big and a small C.

Because I was a child, of course I enjoyed my holidays with them just the same, although perhaps not as much as those with Aunty Betty. Certainly their location near Tenby in south Wales had more to offer, and I always went home cluttered with Welsh dragons and spoons with my name burnt into them.

Those holidays came to an abrupt halt when my Grandad died in 1982. Jim, Nan and Doug followed him during the 1990s, as did Gran two years ago - outliving her husband by some quarter of a century. Only Aunty Betty remains, her shadow living out its last days in a nursing home in the Wirral. Mum and I went to visit her last summer. She didn't recognise us.

If holidays now bear no resemblance to those of my childhood, it is I think because the world of vacationing in the homes of relations has passed away with its protagonists. It would, I also think, have been beyond my grandparents' recognition to have countenanced a week spent in a foreign country sitting beside a swimming pool helping yourself to tea or coffee or cakes as freely as you wished (not of course that one is superior to the other in itself). It's not so much that their field of vision was narrow; rather that the parameters by which they conducted their lives were different.

Blog like an Egyptian (part 4)

In the days before alcoholism (and later dementia) had gripped Aunty Betty between the teeth, spending time with her and Uncle Jim was always my favourite holiday choice.

She was great fun for one thing. Never having had any children of her own, Aunty Betty combined in my child-like eyes an embodiment of grown-up glamour with a dangerously thrilling edge. She dressed in trousers (slacks, as she called them) with brightly coloured revealing tops; she wore high heels to take us shopping by bus to Birkenhead market; she drank whisky and smoked cigarettes; she taught me card games and how to place bets with two pees and Swan Vestas. I felt grown up and priviledged to join her and Uncle Jim, my grandparents and old Mr Bridger at the dining room table, turned after completion of the evening meal into a card table littered with whisky glasses and overflowing ashtrays.

They taught me rummy and patience, and - thrillingly - 5 card stud and pontoon (black jack). All hands accompanied by precision betting and no prisoners taken on account of age (or lack of). The gambling was serioulsy approached, and winning a hand genuinely admired - and not in that patronising adult-to-child way to which I was more accustomed. The smoking and drinking and card playing would continue for hours, interupted perhaps around 10pm for some cream crackers and cheese.

By the time I introduced Aunty Betty to the ex years later, she was alcohol raddled and in the first tentative grasp of the dark shadow of dementia. It was hard to reconcile the slurring stumbling old lady with the vivacious and dangerously exciting woman of my childhood. When she vomited and fell off her chair during Christmas dinner one year, I knew my Aunty Betty was no more. The husk left behind did not do her justice.

Blog like an Egyptian (part 2)

Holiday reading is such an important matter isn't it? Not being sure that the 8 books I'd packed into my luggage would offer sufficient variety, I bought another 4 books in WH Smith at Gatwick airport.

Today I'm reading "Sway: the irresistible pull of irrational behaviour" by Ori & Rom Brafman. Very much in the model of Gladwell's "Blink", or indeed "Freakonomics", the book examines, in essence, how we are well equipped to make 2+2=4 but sometimes opt to answer 5 instead. The book is interesting too on a personal level, examining how we often choose to make irrational (or downright stupid) choices, diregarding information - that is glaringly spellbindingly death-defyingly obvious but not what we want to believe - in the process. Of course the book never calls our irrational choices stupid. It's far too politely scientific for that - although that is what it means.

Poolside conversations inevitably turn to a critical examination of one's fellow holidaymakers. The variety of body shapes and sizes available for perusal - not to mention the eclectic selection of tattoos, piercings and swimwear - make this a sport with great entertainment potential. One's overly harsh observations, however, tend to be a little reined in by the sure and certain knowledge that others are considering you in exactly the same way. My ego does not probably want to hear the analysis of a 40 year old blonde woman with badly shaved legs and wonkily painted toes who alternates between scribbling in a pink paged notebook and reading a lime green book on economics & philosophy whilst sitting next to a swimming pool drinking endless coffee.

Blog like an Egyptian

We arrived at 6.30pm and were embraced at once by the warmth of the desert night. Marsa Alam airport is made up of a number of brightly lit cubes set down - - it appears - completely at random at the edge of the desert. In thinking through their approach to tourism here, the authorities really have opted for a 'win-win' philosophy. Tourists are attracted to the resort hotels by the magnificent Red Sea and delightful climate. And yet, whilst benfitting from the influx of tourist cash, the real Egypt is kept insulated and immune from the pollution of the side effects of tourism by the simple expedient of the hours of desert that so effectively provide a buffer.

There really is quite literally nothing here except the thin string of upmarket hotel resorts, innoculated from harm on the one side by the sea and on the other by the desert. The hotel itself is low strung and curved around the swimming pools terracing down amid semi-tropical gardens, and, at its open side, facing the sea. The Red Sea here co-operatively channels into a horseshoe-shaped bay, so that viewed from above the whole resort looks like two C shapes set at 90degrees to eachg other. Beyon the arterial service road lies only desert, here in the early morning revealed as a series of mountains.

We arrived last night in time for dinner, retiring for early doors two hibiscus teas later. A bit of personal grooming was in order in preparation for unaccustomed pool-side flesh baring. When I looked again this morning, it appeared that my toenails had been painted by a 5 year old. No matter; I don't think anyone's likely to inspect them.