Off the Couch and On the Road

After a moonlit snorkel at the Blue Hole (I copped out, those lion fish sting man, I wanted to see exactly where they were) it was a late night with beers and pool, and so we all enjoyed a sleep in the next day.

This might be an appropriate time to mention that unless you plan on laying down with your legs parallel to the wall for three days, you should not spend three hours on a camel in a wet bikini, with no padding on your ass save wet jeans and a few rough blankets. It hurts. Seriously. Not only was I contemplating adopting children, because  I doubted at the time I could ever have full use of my nether regions, I walked with a limp and a wince for many days afterwards. Chafing, my friends, is hell, and I have a newfound sympathy for all babies with nappy rash.

‘Ok!’ I hear you say, ‘Too much information!’ But I am just thinking of others, really. Think of it like one of those public service announcements where the woman in the suit tells you to dial a 1800 number to save the children. Only she is on a camel in a wet bikini.

You’re welcome!

We were fully intending on doing nothing but chilling out that day, but the fact many of us were heading to a northern hemisphere winter after this trip had us all running (or limping, anyway) for the snorkel gear. This time we drove in the opposite direction to ‘The Three Pools’ where our driver waited while we spent our last few hours in Dahab amongst the coral and fish. I am not sure whether I actally found the ‘3’ pools – to me it was a neverending shelf of coral and fish – but it was fantastic snorkelling, and we all tried to come up with a way to convince our tour leader to let us stay in Dahab a little longer. Quite unsuccessfully it turned out, and so it came to be that we were on a bus that afternoon to our final destination – St Cathrine and Mt Sinai.

-Sarah

On our first full day in Dahab, everyone else went diving while my asthmatic little self slept in and chilled out in the sun by the pool, meeting everyone for lunch before taking a jeep north of Dahab to go snorkelling at the Blue Hole.

The Blue Hole was an awesome coral shelf right off the coastline, and we spent a few hours heads down and bums up, immersing ourselves in a whole other world. The tropical fish were unlike anything I have ever seen, the brightly coloured coral lit by the sparkling sunlight from above, and so many beautiful animals and underwater flora it was like watching a National Geographic program in 3D.The Red Sea was so salty it was a challenge to dive down, you couldn’t help but float, which was fine as some of the most stunning fish were right below the surface.

How funny, I thought, that only a few weeks ago I was lion spotting in the Masai Mara and here I am spotting lion fish on an underwater coral reef.

We reluctantly left a few hours later, the bright aqua water of the coral reef replaced by the rocky shores of Dahab, before lunch, a nap and another jeep ride back to the Blue Hole for our sunset camel ride out to a Beduin village further up the coast.

The camel ride was amazing, the sun hitting the enormous rocky cliffs to our left and the Red Sea to our right – no photos could have ever done it justice. We arrived at a deserted Beduin village and snorkelled along the coastline before feasting on traditional Beduin food (flat bread, hommus, tomatos and chicken/fish) around a campfire on the beach. Soon we were once again full and sleepy, and mounted our camels for the journey back to the Blue Hole with nothing but the full moon lighting our way.

We were all mostly silent on the way back, listening to the sea gently lapping at the shore and admiring the night sky, the shadows on the cliffs and the moonlit water. I don’t think I have ever experienced anything so beautiful – being first in the procession of camels it felt like I was discovering the world for the very first time, and I couldn’t help but shake my head in amazement, grateful just to be.

There are no photos, nor words powerful enough to describe it, only to say that there must be a God. Because the world is a very beautiful place. A very, very beautiful place.

-Sarah

From Luxor there was a four-hour convoy to Hurghada, mostly known for being home to one of the world’s few official Ministry of Sound clubs. And we meant to go, really we did. But after our hectic week, long bus ride and massive dinner (with lots of juice), we all yawned, stretched and agreed the one thing we would like more than anything was sleep. So the rather pathetic night was henceforth known as, ‘The night we didn’t go to Ministry of Sound’. The shame.

The following morning I knocked back a few sea-sick tablets and caught the ferry over to Sharm El-Sheikh on the Sinai peninsula (which is technically in Asia, so we had crossed a continent but were still in Egypt. Cool, yes?) The memories of that ferry from Zanzibar were still a little too close for comfort, but it wasn’t too bad, and bar one of the boys who was sick anyway with a bug, we were all fine. A few hours on another bus and we arrived in Dahab, where our tour leader told us the general attitude was, ‘No problem, this is Dahab. Relax’.

A long, narrow touristy town with desert on one side, the Red Sea on the other and the red rocky mountains of Saudi Arabia on the horizon, Dahab was pretty quiet – a combination of the end of the summer season and less tourism due to tension with the Israli’s and the bombings a few years back (I hope I got that right, politics is beyond me). But it was paradise, we took a deep breath and felt like we were back on the Felucca again. It was also quite a liberal area, so the girls could finally done a bikini and shorts and not have to keep our shoulders and knees covered in the sweltering heat.

The first afternoon consisted of lunch on cushions next to the deep blue choppy waters of the Red Sea (I alwys imagined it to be dead calm, but it wasn’t. So there you go.) followed by a nap, and the most enormous, and cheapest, seafood dinner you could imagine. We ate so much we could barely lift ourselves up to go to bed, the food was so spectacular.

One in our group commented that this trip felt like we were all 5-year-old again – our whole sense of being was focused on eating, playing, complaining about minor injuries for sympathy, and not wanting to go to bed but having to because we couldn’t keep our eyes open any longer. Quite an accurate description really – we even, after listening to our tour leaders instructions, often proceeded to ask the exact question she had just answered, to which she would throw her hands in the air and exclaim, ‘Listen!’.

Ah well, most 5-year-olds had it pretty good, so I couldn’t complain. Except about my sore toe…

-Sarah

On the first night in Cairo, whilst I and one other caught up on sleep, the rest of the group ate at a local Egyptian restaurant and arrived in reception the next morning with their hands clutching their chests, claiming they were in love. With juice.

Apparently the range and quality of the juice (lemon and mint, mango, strawberry… the list was endless) was so exceptional it was beyond description. My roomate and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows and shrugged with a, ‘Um, ok, we’ll take your word for it’. But it had begun – every restaurant, cafe, street stall and city was judged on its juice, to the point where the boys would drink three before a meal and two during, and our table was always filled with empty glasses with no room for food.

The enthusiasm was contagious, and soon we were all in on the game – a mango juice wasn’t good enough unless all you were doing was consciously trying to suck up chunks of mango through a straw, and failing. The strawberry had to be fresh and tart but not bitter, and of course size and presentation mattered.

The waiters always had a twinkle in their eye when we confirmed the juice order – was it so unusual? Did we discover a hidden jewel of Egypt? Or just catching on to what everyone else already knew? No matter, we had fallen in love, and it’s hard to think straight when you have 10 choices of heaven on the menu. Food was an afterthought.

True, Egypt had exceeded all expectations to date, but who would have though our tour leader would say, ‘Our next stop is Dahab, you will love it!’ to be met with a chorus of polite smiles and nods, before saying,’And they have the most amazing juices!’ preceeding the kind of palpable excitement reserved for teenage girls at a Justin Timberlake concert.

Love just doesn’t make sense.

-Sarah

We had a 5am wake-up call and a brief river crossing by boat before meeting our sprightly donkeys for the hour ride to the Valley of the Kings the next morning. The donkeys were a hell of a lot more comfortable than the camels were (although a sports bra would have been nice) and had sudden spurts of energy that seemed to come from nowhere, causing all the donkeys in the group to lurch forward, as though they couldn’t bear the thought of arriving last.

Our guide, Adlle, bought us our entry tickets and, upon looking at the queue of hundreds trying to enter the site past the armed guards, winked and told us we would ‘find a way to get around this’. He then walked straight to the front of the queue and started asking tourists for tickets, to which a new queue formed and he collacted a few tickets before collecting ours, hence we were all at the tomb of Ramses IV in under 2 minutes. Only in Egypt.

We saw the tombs of Ramses IV, IX and XVI that morning, the most vivid of all the tombs in the valley, all piled near each other, sometimes actually on top of each other as was the case of King Tutankhamon, which is why it was left untouched for so many centuries (Ramses IX tomb was built on top).

King Tutankhamon (who died at 19 of a gangrenous leg, discovered only recently. Random fact for your next dinner party conversation!) is probably the most famous Pharoah in modern times, but was actually a bit of a nobody in his time, so we spared the money to see the tiny tomb and instead spent the time in awe of the other tombs. As I said to one in my group, ‘just when i think I can’t possibly be more amazed, I am. Amazing.’

The vivid paintings (not carvings) on the stone stood out after more than 3000 years in clear whites, blues, reds, yellows and browns, every inch of the walls and roof covered, from the tall narrow entrance, down the long corridor to the coffin room at the end. Amazing.

We travelled by bus several hours later to Dier al-Madina (tombs of the workers) where the workers who built the Pharoahs tombs were buried. On their days off they spent their time carving and painting their own tombs, smaller and brighter than the King’s tombs with unusual details in the paintings such as hair and muscle tone we hadn’t seen previously. ‘Perhaps they borrowed the paints and tools from the Pharoahs tombs to create their own?’ Adlle suggested, the first office stationery thieving maybe? The tombs were grouped in lots of 60, the teams of workers used to build the Pharoahs tombs scattered across the sandy hillside. The valley was stunning and although only 63 tombs have been fully excavated, experts predict there are hundreds more to be discovered.

We walked to dinner that evening and ate traditional Egyptian food overlooking Luxor temple beautifully lit up, the Nile, and in the distance, the tombs of anicent idols. I didn’t think I could be any more amazed, but I was. Amazing.

-Sarah