I Love the Smell Of Neoprene in the Morning…Smells Like Diving!
It was a perfect, calm day, with the sun shining on the desert and the Red
Sea as I touched down in Egypt for the first time. On arrival, even
before leaving the airport, I had caused a stir. The officers at Passport
Control seemed to think that that my being Irish was the most interesting thing
that would happen to them all morning.
“Irlanda,” one called to the other, pointing at me and for the next
quarter of and hour, all worked stopped on both of their queues, as the
boyos started quizzing my knowledge of Arabic. Just why they assumed I
knew any Arabic for the mere fact of being Irish, I never quite grasped.
However, the looks of the faces of the people behind me being held up due
to all these shenanagins was priceless.
Dahab was a desert town / divers’
colony a couple of hours up the coast towards the Israeli border. I
managed to sneak on to one of the Swiss tour buses at the airport and got
an illicit lift into the centre of Sharm. This wasn’t as easy as I
thought it would be. I think the bus driver had been well suss about my
status as a package tourist, especially my grubby clothes coupled with
the fact that the hotel I had chosen to invent as my place of stay was a
five star joint, and as an added bonus it seemed to be nowhere near the
centre of town. I couldn’t get out there, it wouldn’t have worked given
that the Swiss tour rep was accompanying the guests into the foyer to
make sure they checked in okay. As the bus driver shot me a knowing look
when I failed to get off the bus at the place I was allegedly staying, I
was quietly panicking. At the next few hotels the same thing happened,
the tour rep got the luggage off the bus and held it captive until the
tourists checked-in. I was thanking my lucky stars I’d kept my bag with
me. A while later we pulled up near a cheaper two star place, that was
set off the street a little away from the bus. When the rep left and
walked to the hotel, I took my chance, fled the bus and hid in a
courtyard until it left. Heaven only knows what the others on the bus thought.
To make things worse, at the airport I wasn’t quite quick enough to
notice that there had been another tour bus going to Dahab. So after a
short cab ride I found myself at the local bus station at 3:30pm to find
that the next bus to Dahab was leaving at 5pm! There was nothing for it
but to pull out a book, order a sweet tea and wait. Amongst the only
people who spoke to me was an Egyptian man with impeccable English, who
told me he was a writer from Cairo and did I realize that he thought I
was someone famous when he saw me sitting there, as I was so “beautiful”.
And that I had wonderful eyes. He didn’t explain the thought processes
which might have lead him to think that anyone remotely famous might be
waiting at the East Delta Bus company tea stall for a local bus up the
coast costing $2.
By 5:30pm we were finally on the road, just at the end of sunset. Apart
from a rather worrisome police checkpoint the journey was relatively
uneventful. When we got to the town, in what transpired to be one of my
best tactical moves of the trip, I asked a another European looking guy
if he wanted to share a cab to the camps. Ben was a Canadian who had been
coming to Dahab for several years. He had arrived back in Egypt a few weeks beforehand and was looking for winter work as a dive
instructor. He was to prove a willing, able and interesting guide and
guru for all the local goings on. I picked up some much needed food and
he brought me to the place he was staying, the improbably named
“Fighting Kangaroo Oasis“. The place was cheap, clean and ruin by
Bedouins, which Ben assured me was a guarantee of few hassles and sales
pitches.
Dahab and the camp was beginning to seem like a cross between
Koh Samui and Mamallapuram, where colourful characters and local rip-off
merchants mingled in equal measure, in a place which had started as a
Bedouin settlement, moved to a hippy hangout and was going towards
becoming a Sharm-like resort. The camp had more than just Ben as a semi
permanent resident. There was JJ, a French writer who had acquired an
accidental son by a Sudanese woman now living in Cairo, and Steffi the
Alsacian art restorer and dive master. She told me once while under the
influence that she couldn’t really apply to museums and galleries to be
restorer as she had worked on stolen pieces of art. Her manner of
recounting this was so flippant that I was inclined to believe her.
While getting my diving sorted the next day, I got talking to Mohamed the
camp manager.
“Saddam Hussein changed my life,” he tells me. “When I think about my
life before, it was…y’know…ruled by the clock. Now I don’t even wear a
watch,” and he presents his bare wrist for my inspection.
Turns out Mohamed was Kuwati and before the invasion he had been an air
steward for Kuwati Airlines. His family had some Egyptian origins and
when Saddam came they simply left and never went back. That afternoon I
took a walk along the shoreline and sucked up the quietness along with
the sea air. It was hard to believe I was looking across to Saudi Arabia.
Apparently I had fallen on a good moment to do some dives in Dahab. The
full moon was in a few days and one of the staff instructors told me the
conditions were always very calm in its approach. This is a boon indeed
considering that the area is one of the prime spots for windsurfing and
strong winds will wreak havoc with underwater visibility.
There were other advantages to staying in the campsite. The night of the
full moon the Bedouin owner of the campsite’s son was getting married and
all the guests were invited to partake in the festivities. What I had was
essentially an evening invite to a full Bedouin wedding, not an
opportunity to be missed. Hours after we had been told we were going, we
finally loaded up in the back of a pick-up truck and drove the few miles to
the Bedouin village on the outskirts of the tourist areas. The skies were
completely clear and the moon was providing that blue/grey tinge like a
badly lit black and white movie. The evening was loaded with atmosphere
even before we’d got to the village. We got to something resembling the
village square, there were camels and children and rubbish strewn about
haphazardly. The smell was something else too, not unpleasant just
indescribable.
Myself, Mohamed the camp manager, and a few other blinking tourists from
the camp piled out of the pick-up, trying to figure out what we were
supposed to do and feeling more than a little idiotic. I threw Mohamed a
“you brought us here, what the hell are we supposed to do?” look and he
came and told me he’d never been to a Bedouin wedding. After a while he
suggested we take a walk. Women were seated on the ground in the open
“village square” area. The men were chanting in small groups dotted
around the village, accompanied by drum beats beaten out on empty oil cans.
After some time one or two women got up to dance with one of the groups,
causing the other groups to play even harder and louder to attract
dancers. Occasionally some of the men would even defect to groups with
more dancers. The women were covered from head to foot in sheer black
shawling, the upper shawl decorated with gold designs which reflected
brilliantly in the full moon. They danced with their heads covered,
occasionally revealing their faces to the male musicians, much to their
approval. How they managed to produce the music they did with only oil
cans and their voices is beyond me: tribal, hypnotic, resounding in the
night as the women whirled and twirled and glittered in the moonlight.
We eventually happened upon the groom, a tall stocky man looking tired.
He invited us to his house for Bedouin Tea � quite different from black
or green teas you find anywhere else with a strong taste of sage and
other herbs. We sat in his yard among concrete sheds that looked like
they were still under construction. There were goats and chickens all
over the yard: quite a contrast to the guesthouse building back at the
camp his father owned, with ensuite bathrooms and ceiling fans in all
rooms. A matriarch type figure appeared with the tea. She was probably
not as old as she looked and although small in stature she had enormous
presence. She and Mohamed spoke in Arabic, he occasionally translated for
us but mostly we sat in silence enjoying the delicious tea and trying not
to intrude more than we clearly were.
After a while we left and rejoined the singing and dancing in the main
square. A truck pulled up and its strong headlights caught on one of the
camels at the side of the square, projecting a larger than life camel
shadow on the side of a tall wall. Just another surreal sight for the
diary, but I wished I could have caught it on camera.
The Bedouins and especially the women have a way of looking through you
as they pass. Something in their face, in their comportment says “I see
you, I know you are there, but you have utterly no relevance for me.”
Perhaps a survival mechanism, a result of being perennial outsiders to
any and all rulers of their lands through time. It was most strange. I
had the sensation of being invisible until some of the younger girls
approached me, smiling. The bravest one, under goading and encouragement
from her friends, asked me if I spoke Arabic, it was heartbreaking to
have to say no. She tried out one or two English phrases on me but soon
lost interest, given my inability to communicate. She and her friends
skipped off to join the party.
The safest bet when you don’t know the
local language is to find some under fives. They never seem to mind that
you don’t speak their language as they communicate on altogether
different channels. I remember in New Zealand a little girl from Hong
Kong rabitted on to me for an entire bus journey either oblivious or
ignoring my complete lack of Cantonese. I had noticed two younger girls
playing clapping games and apparently acting out for my benefit. Soon I
was sitting in the dirt teaching them a rather tricky clapping game from
my youth (Under The Bambush, if anyone remembers that one). The others
from the camp headed off, but my teaching duties were not yet complete
and, only too happy to not be invisible anymore, I stayed on a while. On my
way home, the kids thought I wasn’t sufficiently decorated for having
been at a wedding and dragged me into a local shop to put a temporary tattoo
on me. At least that’s why I think they did it!
After that I decided that it was time to get moving and visit an English
woman I knew, who was working as a diving instructor in the resort town
of Sharm El Sheik. It had been years since we’d met on a four day tour of
Kakadu national park in Northern Australia and I almost didn’t recognise
her. Her place was very ex-pat style and in fact could have been an
apartment in almost any town anywhere in Europe. Most of her co-workers
were English too, as were most of their clients. They are all
technically on residency visas but the authorities seem to turn a blind
eye to people working in diving on residency visas in the Sinai
peninsula.
Shortly after I made my escape towards Cairo, I had no real will to leave
the tranquillity of the Red Sea resorts but I figured it would be a shame
to come to Egypt and not see the Pyramids.
