1997 Egypt Hugharda

Never tell an Egyptian taxi driver you will reward him if he hurries – death comes via many routes but I should have focused my bleary eyes at 6am on the drama at the entrance to the hotel grounds where a security man was helping the taxi driver to replace a wheel that seemed to have fallen off! No time to get another taxi, the dive tuition commences on the dive boat at 7am so hurry and I will pay extra! We went the wrong way round a roundabout and on the opposing side of a dual carriageway but it was early in Hurgharda with little traffic around. Hang on didn’t I just see at the petrol station someone filling fuel cans to put on the cart being pulled by a donkey – huh! No time to click, hurry.

Never learn to dive in Egypt even if the Red Sea beckons – count the ways that death and disaster loomed in this disastrous dive tutorial. There was a wind storm brewing and the waves were 3 feet from top to trough and the 25ft boat rocked and rolled and I wondered where the gentle introduction was to take place but this is Egypt. “Is put on like so, is hold nose go swallow, is down go, hold rope goes down – jump OK?” and with that basic tuition I was pushed over the side and started to be blown away in the wind, so grabbed the rope and killer (sorry, I mean teacher) deflated my buoyancy aid and down we descended with the excruciating pain of my beginner attempts to equalise pressure in my ears.

My pain was immaterial, the evil one (sorry I mean dive leader) wanted me to go down so he deflated my buoyancy further so I was a dead weight clinging to the rope with one hand while trying to equalise ear pressure with the other and he being so frustrated actually grabbed hold of me to drag me down! Eventually we neared the end of the rope which was bouncing up and down as the boat above bounced in the increasing swell and I looked down and noticed that the rope was weighted with a grappling hook, hooks pointing upward, and the boat, rope with me clinging to it and the hook were bouncing up and down three feet. At that moment I realised how fish are hooked – line and sinker came to mind.

I fell off the rope onto the sandy bottom 20 feet under the boat and half walked and half swam until suicide man (my teacher) inflated my buoyancy device to float like those fish that eventually came to peer at their potential next meal. Suddenly I realised that I was floating in an aquarium, an alien world where gravity was absent and the familiarity of the vertical was replaced with any way I wanted to move. And the whole living world down here was another experience to explore. I was hooked now in an emotionally committed way, but having survived climbing in the Himalaya, hang-gliding and other risk sports including being an instructor in some of the sports, I realised that this idiot and this country was not the place to learn safely.

My survival instinct had more alarm bells when at the lunch break, the only other divers were Polish and were guzzling beer and I think spirits which I never mix with risk sport but their leader said they were going to go deep and wanted to enhance the nitrogen narcosis experience. I realised that I was in the company of dangerous nutters and shortened my afternoon dive and eventually returned to dry land and our hotel cum leisure club on the outskirts of Hurghada.

The three week holiday was allocate the on arrival, no prior knowledge of location, and ours was a big ride out of town and was self catering but of course there were no shops so the only realistic option was to have meals in the hotel which were going to cost a lot. Fortunately a few of us were travellers so we got together to do a group discount with the hotel manager and I cannot remember the exact numbers but we write from left to right, Egyptians from right to left so when we haggled a discounted rate for the week he said something like 64 but when I insisted he write it down as a contract he wrote it backward, aw shucks …

The group jelled well and we shared taxis into town and when I said that I had previously been to Luxor on my own and anyone fancy sharing a taxi, three others joined in and the taxi driver was from Luxor so well pleased to take us the 300km in about 4 hours. On the way over the desert we saw the remains of a railway, most incongruous sections of raised bed with sleepers and rails on top then suddenly nothing. It seems that the British built it but when it rains in the desert there is no soil to soak even a short downpour so flash floods can was away even rail embankments. We heard that the same can happen to roads so a British engineer made sunken bridges ie the road went down a dip which was dry normally but allowed flash floods to flow over it.

After road blocks to dissuade terrorists we arrived at the same hotel I had found when living in Cyprus and wandering around Egypt. We went to our taxi driver’s house which was a wonderful experience, medieval in construction but colour TV and timeless hospitality and exemplary manners and a genuine welcome from his family. Good people are good people anywhere in the world. Our photos show some highlights with Tutankhamun, sound and light show at Karnak, Temple of Luxor and a whole holiday in itself until time to go back to Hurghada with our friendly taxi driver who we tipped generously.

Our spontaneous group included a professional photographer who had been sent by Thomas Cook to take pics for the next holiday brochure so when we arranged a Landrover trip to the desert it was a privilege to have him along and humiliating to be beside him, take the same shot but realise the difference between holiday snaps and the subtle detai of light and shade and composition that makes a photo suitable for the cover of a book with space for the title text, or a poster or a come-on pic to entice tourists. The Landrover driver tried to scare us over the sand dunes but we scared ourselves after the Bedouin tea stop by scrambling up a rocky gully which we realised might not be too stable and might have desert poisonous wriggly things. Eventually back to the hotel and more glorious food which we paid the proper price for in the remaining two weeks.

Back on the Red Sea the fun started again with lots of snorkelling, fortunately I had my spectacle prescription shaped into the twin lenses of my goggles so great fun seeing the fish and coral immediately adjacent to the beach, very convenient but potentially deadly for the next experience. The coral reef came onto the shore and the hotel complex next to ours had dynamited the coral and the rocky shore to make a small harbour for dinghy sailing boats and windsurfers. That might have seemed like a good idea to a heartless idiot looking at a drawing board who did not know anything about sailing but immediately outside the entrance to the exploded mini harbour were coral heads just under the surface waiting to catch the unwary person in a boat or windsurfer.

An Italian chap had the franchise for windsurfing and said it was virtually impossible to sail out and he realised that the water sports business would fail. When you fall on living coral, not only does it tear the skin but the living organisms of the coral get in your flesh and start growing / infecting. Fortunately I was a windsurfing instructor and very experienced so I managed to get a semi short board out into the open Red Sea and have fun. We struck up a friendship and he, being Italian, chatted up two American ladies and wanted me to join in – no way! But there was sharing of a most unfortunate type when he later realised that one of the ladies was quite ill, and the next day when I innocently shared a bottle of water with him after my windsurfing, I realised that was when he shared their flu germ.

This but developed with amazing speed a few days later when waiting for our flight and the locals offering a leather jacket which I quite fancied but wanted to haggle and realised the price would drop when the flight was called, but suddenly the bug hit and I could hardly walk so started staggering towards the plane genuinely no longer interested and in desperation the price plummeted and I still wear the jacket. But the price was the bug, and I was so ill that I could not sit upright on the plane and ended up on the floor of the plane (it is draughty down there!) and at Heathrow they had to get a wheelchair to get me to the health station where a flu type bug was diagnosed – but I am still here and the holiday was wonderful.