... , Mike, Eddie, Anne, Frances, Phil & Sian set off from Gatwick for mainland Egypt and the harbour village of Hurghada. We'd paid
£520 each for 5 days' boat diving, including
accommodation, meals and insurance to 30M.
The Red Sea!
How can I get over what it was like? Imagine this: your whole world is wind, and spray. You've just come out, but you simply can't wait to go again, as the waters
ceaselessly heave and swirl. Now you inflate; now you dump: you witness colours previously unimagined as gas hisses and bubbles around you. Your bottom time mounts, as those precautionary stops become mandatory. You're carrying less and less weight every time...
These medical problems ...
... weren't bad enough to spoil the trip, however, and we were back diving the day after it hit us. According to the doctor, if you bake in the sun for several hours and then neck down a litre of iced water you can expect to get the s***s.
Can't win...
The dive centre ...
... known as "James & Mac" or "Barrakuda", depending on who you asked, was on-site, and a two-minute walk from the jetty where the boats tied up to wait for us. Diving began with a half-day check-out trip, and despite offers of Baksheesh to all involved they simply wouldn't give us second dive on the first day, even though the max depth was only 10m. Nevertheless, even though half of our divetime was taken up kneeling in a circle waiting to demonstrate a mask-clear, I counted four lionfish, a turkeyfish, emperor angelfish and what my logbook now calls a "shoal of yellow things" since forgotten. It was a real pain to be taken back to the jetty when we were all raring to go again (no: I mean diving this time).
The Giftun "Village" had everything ...
... that we needed: a main building housing bars, restaurants and lounges leading into a walled compound of low white
accommodation blocks set in gardens bristling with paranoid cats. The whole place was kept remarkably neat: no matter what hour you emerged from your room, or groped back to it, there would be someone cleaning here, and raking there. The beach was an agreeable sandy gaggle of straw sunshades, and sunloungers draped from dawn with beached Germans. The pool was one of those brochure attention-grabbers with a central island, reached by a bridge, and an in-pool bar with submerged seats to get your back just that right shade of cherry red for the flight home.
Diving got going properly ...
... on the second day. The boats were all very similar, with a canopied upper deck where the skipper would steer with his toes from a swivel-chair, a good-sized rear deck for kitting up and an enclosed cabin in which the crew would serve a tasty Egyptian lunch, cooked on a primitive stove. The guide, a (very) young English-Egyptian girl, would brief us carefully on what to look for and which way to go, and we'd all dutifully follow the recommended profile: down to about 24M and then gradually upwards. Found a small cave atop a coral head completely crammed with glassfish, and was startled (again!) when a curious Napoleon Wrasse, big as an armchair, appeared next to my ear. The viz was lousy for the Red Sea (although better than the year before) - there were times when you had a job to see much beyond 15M.
We spent the evening in the "bedouin tent" ...
... hung with exotic fabrics and brass lanterns, with white-robed egyptian servers ready to bring you a gigantic waterpipe, or peculiar teas. Later, we had the first session of "Egyptian Roulette". The alcohol content of the local "Stella" lager is so variable that after five of them you can be either untouched or s***faced, depending on which bottles you get. We met Yasser, our friendly Egyptian tour-rep.
"When I was living in Walthamstow, I used that College Pool all the
time!" he told me (bizarrely!). Most of the time we took breakfast and dinner in the busy buffet, with a dozen or more dishes of offer each day plus an improbably wide choice of sweet pastries and unfamiliar desserts. On the last night the
a-la-carte restaurant served up fillet of camel, and parrotfish - very tasty if you could keep your mind off what you were eating.
It's the marine life ...
... that makes you want to come back to the Red Sea. One dive stood out in particular, for me. As we descended there was a large Moray eel swimming free below, and we soon spotted several crocodile fish. We found several sand-coloured scorpion fish, and then the mother of all stonefish - he must have been trying to camouflage himself against my "suntan" as he was bright purple and as ugly as sin itself. I was transfixed by him, and the passive threat he represented. A shoal of 40+ unicorn fish drifted past, and we encountered a Picasso fish (weird!) before a large ray flapped silently across our path. My best highlight was when, just in time to stop me barging ahead, Sian spotted a colony of garden eels waving dreamily in the current. As we crept forward, we crossed that invisible threshold, and they slowly retracted - as one - into the sand, until just their eyes, and then nothing, was left visible. I don't remember much of the rest of that dive now, but my logbook entry mentions boxfish, needlefish, big-eyed-emperors, pipefish, clownfish, various angelfish, bannerfish and a squid. What I do remember is the sudden huge fart (aftermath of Pharoah's revenge) which collected around my shoulders and took me up five metres before I could grab my BC controls...
A few years ago Hurghada was a tiny hamlet ...
... with a crude harbour. Now, like Sharm-el-Sheikh, it's a chequerboard of resort-hotels and building sites, with most of the development in a thin strip running for miles along the beach. We negotiated with Abdul, our taxi driver, that he would give us a tour of "Old" Hurghada before dropping us in "New" Hurghada and collect us after an hour and a half, all for 30 Egyptian pounds or
£6. Egyptian cars are quite like european ones except that they don't seem to have lights and the horn is evidently operated by a switch connected to some part of the suspension. Either that or drivers are paid by the honk: I'm sure Abdul was honking at incautious trees. The old town was a succession of tiny gloomy stores and murky cafes, with crowds of men playing backgammon over inky coffee, and the traditional turban and "jelabah" (robe) much in evidence. The new town was scintillating with bazaars of all kinds selling brass lanterns, replica
sphinxes, pyramid ashtrays, waterpipes, comic t-shirts and all the other essentials of modern living. Abdul picked us up on the dot, and as he dropped us at the hotel he invited us all to visit his family for a meal, purely out of friendliness.
"Want to do a wreck?" ...
... asked Alex, our new guide. Sure we did. Right in the main part of the working harbour, an Egyptian patrol boat helpfully installed on the bottom by the Israeli airforce to aid tourism development. After several dives mucking about at less than 10M a dive to 32M seems very deep, and even quite dark. Guns, clips of shells, propellors, plus a solitary anemone with clownfish sentry. I found one strange construction: a sort of "tree" of dull grey pipes with evenly spaced small holes. I concluded that it must be for pumping out smoke during an attack: the camera subsequently revealed that it was the brightest scarlet colour, and a sort of sponge!
Gossip: one of our party says to another before the dive "This one's going to be quite deep. You'd better have a look at the tables." Reply: "I can't be bothered now. I'll have a look when I come up."
Haggling ...
... I now understand, is an entertainment which you pay for. I thought I was pretty accomplished, beating down this poor trader from (LE) 90 to 65, until I saw the same thing (a decorated box) in another shop with a price ticket (!) of LE 31. Oh well, they do get more practice. There is a curious mix of hard-sell and a
genuine tradition of hospitality in the approach as you pass yet another bazaar - it's hard to resist, however tough you think you are/not. Why else would I now own a traditional egyptian decorated fly-swatter?
A night dive...
... is always something special. On this trip there were only two (and I spent one of those evenings in the bathroom). I've twigged recently that my buoyancy control, normally excellent, goes out of the porthole when I don't have a visual reference. However, it's amazing just what you can see underwater at night. For the first time, this time, I didn't use my big UK400R: instead I made do with the UK40 - not much bigger than a chocolate bar. Once you get used to it, you can still see everything you want to, and your eyes have more chance of picking up glimmers from the surface and even the effect of starlight coming through the clean air. With the torch turned off, I could see after a few seconds the spectacular natural phosphorescence of the water as I swept my hand about, and after a little longer I was starting to get a reasonable degree of monochrome vision thanks to a starry night. With the torch back on, I could see featherstars out for dinner, sea urchins - spines rippling - feeding on some recent catch, and parrotfish sleeping (or trying to) in rocky crevices. A lionfish caught in the beam blazed like a sudden firework in the blackness. Sian and I had worked out between us that it's not enough to wave your torchbeam wildly to attract your buddy - you're doing that anyway! It dawned on us that it's better if you swing it with a distinctive rythym (the torch, silly). Discovered my new slate is luminous - what a good idea! It seemed a real shame to get back on the boat after "only" 51 minutes with over 100Bar left in my tank. Back in the bar I kept a hopeful eye out for a fly to swat.
The haggling didn't all go their way ...
... as I had a countermeasure up my sleeve. I'd swotted up a bit of pidgin Arabic, and this went down a storm - the surprise and pleasure in being greeted (however artlessly) in their own language was unmistakable. I took great satisfaction in conducting an entire bank transaction in Arabic (plus rather a lot of waving), and even though the whole bank was in fits of giggles by the end of it I was treated especially warmly. (Of course it's always possible that I had inadvertantly asked if the teller's nostrils were still radioactive.) One thing in my favour when haggling is that so far I can only count up to seven in Arabic. I think it might be reckless to learn the remaining numbers before your negotiating skills are up to scratch. Arabic is a wonderfully evocative language: "Good Evening" (misa 'al kheer) means literally "may your evening be prosperous" and the reply "misa 'al fuul" means "may your evening be perfumed with the scent of Jasmine". I bet the insults are breathtaking.
The last dive.
Tired this time. I'd been snorkelling hard for over an hour between the day's two dives and Sian had been proving to the crew that no matter how they contrived to throw her off the boat she could always take them in with her. Kept it shallow, mostly less than 8M, since that's where the colour and the life were here. Hordes of surgeon-fish: deep azure blue with razor-sharp yellow barbs below the tail - not a fish to be grabbed at. Found a blue spotted ray lurking nervously below a ledge. It waited patiently while I framed a shot with the camera, but the film had jammed and it had rewound itself prematurely. Oh well. Water temperature: 27 degrees. My next dive was to be outside Portland Harbour in March.
Next?
This was our third week in the Red Sea, but it won't be our last. At the moment we can't plan anything for family reasons, but we've a vague idea of going back in the late Autumn or Winter. Ideally, this would be a liveaboard, targetting wrecks like the Thistlegorm, but another trip to Sharm's a possibility. Anyone of a like mind?
