Week Seventy

I'm up particularly early this morning, but Milla dosn't join me in the land of the conscious until 11.00 or so. This four-hour gap allows me to finally get the journal up to date, as well as showering and making a list of things I really want to see around the world (which might help our discussion). Shortly after Milla rises I head out for the internet place, full of determination to make great inroads into getting the website up to date as well: I'm sabotaged when the electricity goes down all across Dahab (a first). There's a delay of two hours (we play cards) and then I get more hours in: when I return, Milla's not only made up an equivalent list to mine but has completely cleaned the room (it was beginning to fill up with sand).
We compare our lists, which merely underlines our incompatibility on this issue: most of mine are in Africa and South-East Asia; most of hers are in Central and South America. Our overlap areas seem primarily to be India and the US. The discussion becomes more heated and we break for food and alcohol in the evening: despite this the division becomes more vitriolic and we leave the bar separately, but at least manage to make up once we're back in the room.
This issue clearly needs more work.

Today is windy - seriously windy: trees are bent over, waves are crashing white against the beach (isntead of the usual quiet lapping), and the temperature doesn't get much above a chilly 25. Brrr. Our second problem of today is that we have no electricity in the morning, so no internet. Thirdly, we finally run out of Nescafé 3-in-1 sachets, and buy a couple of experimental local alternatives. We stay in, chat, play cards, fo the finances for last week: Milla lets the cat in to play with - naturally it only wants to play and be affectionate with me. Until she feeds it. Just after midday we get power back, and both hit the internet for a while (Milla's trying to get her internet banking options working). I get back a couple of hours after Milla, by which time she's read sections of my Africa boko: I left it out in the hope she'd find things to visit, but she's only read the health and crime sections - she's even more determined not to go, and doesn't want to "let" me go now either.
We play cards, try our new coffee (it's revolting - thank God we only bought two sachets) and later give the cat her evening meal before the electricity goes off again. We wander down to the beach (150m from where we're staying) and watch it come on again area by area across Dahab. Then we do a bit more internet andround off out day with some food, some cards and more entertaining of cats (that cat's beginning to think of our room as home). We get to bed at 02.00 or so, after three separate missions to kill mosquitoes.

Another windy day, full of day-trippers from Sharm el-Sheikh (they come here in busloads - Germans, Italians, Israelis, Brits; family groups, OAPS, etc. - all to see different bars, dive centres, souvenir shops and beaches/waves: possibly they come here to see the hippies and hear Bob Marley - Do Not Feed the Backpackers) struggling against the weather. There are virtually no learner divers splashing around the wave-beaten shallows again today, but the rough conditions don't seem to be deterring the deeper-water divers (which is fair, I guess). We're surrounded in the bars by people wearing pseudo-amusing Diving-type T-shirts, talking about diving: Dahab is a dive-city Mecca, and lots of people have spent lots of money coming here just to dive.
Us? We wake up late, play cards, do internet time, eat and drink and so on: maybe we'll dive later.

It's calm today, and the temperature gets back up to 34#C - it seems winter has passed: we have a little plan for today, which is to visit "Dahab City", the non-resort part of town. I hit the internet place late in the morning - Milla will collect me once she's showered, or rather she won't: after a couple of hours I collect our laundry (dropped off yesterday) and go back to the room. Milla's decided to write a letter instead, which she doesn't finish until 15.15 - it then takes her half an hour to get ready to go out, so we end up leaving the camp with only 75 minutes until sunset. Great. Hopefully there won't be anything in Dahab City worth seeing.

We're staying in Assalah (or rather its southern shoreside extension Masbat/Mashraba) which is a couple of kilometres north of the upmarket lagoon ("Golden Beach") resort and neighbouring "City". Our walk there takes us past more outskirts of Mashraba, which are mostly more shops (eg. a laundry called "Happy Trousers") and more work-in-progress hotels, flats, shops, etc. Then there's a desolate stretch, flanked by sand and more sand (desert, rather than beach), from which we get excellent views of the magnificent barren mountains which line the coast here (we can see similar along the Saudi coast facing us). En route we look in on the lagoon area - there's a nice Hilton, a Swiss Hotel and other very plush-looking holiday-village type places, all with extensive well-watered greenery: down at the shore itself the sand is perfect, the water is calm and clear, there are people lounging around drinking and others wind-surfing - it's all very idyllic.

Just inland from this slice of the decadent West (or at least the decadent South Pacific, or the decadent Caribbean) is the tiny, concrete, 3-storey blocked Dahab City. It's actually two districts of blocks - one to the north, towards Assalah, is a bit run down; the second is slightly better, to the south, and next to the town's bus station/stop, post office, bank and collection of two supermarkets and a café. In between these conglomerations are some solitary houses, the council buildings, the secondary school and a rather natty-looking modern mosque: it's all a bit depressing and depressed (we were hoping for somewhere with real shops - possibly somewhere to buy a replacement kettle, and a watch battery - my cheap one from Ankara has died).

Our one real stop is the post office - a concrete box with a counter inside and three guys: after "weighing" Milla's letter (on the palm of one hand), the balance of opinion is that it's more than 50g, so they charge a pretty steep $1.50. The eleven stamps pretty much cover the envelope. We get a 25-piastre note in change, which is interesting - up until this point, the lowest denomination we've seen is 50-piastre: there's a rounding-up conspiracy going on in Assalah (kinda like in Syria) - they have occasional items priced at 25 or 75 piastres, but won't sell you one - you have to buy several, or get no change. The logic may be that if foreigners think the lowest denomination in the country is 50 piastres, then they'll think things prices at 50 piastres are really cheap . . .

After walking back after sunset along a (different) barren and windswept road, we pause for sandwiches and coffee and then head out to diving centres again. This time our preferred place claims to have finally sourced appropriate masks, so we progress the issue further and fill in the registration, legal and medical forms for a course - gosh. We both answer Yes to a couple of the hundreds of questions on the medical form, and it turns out we need a medical. The medical, at the other end of Assalah, costs $5 each (all the doctors are in a price-fixing cartel, with the diving schools) and straightforward: my guess is that he would have signed us off as "fit for diving" unless we'd actually been clinically dead (and even then, it would have depended on how advanced rigor mortis was). He also cuts, cleans and puts antiseptic/antibiotic on a little cut which Milla picked up a week ago, which hasn't healed.
Instead of going back to the dive centre with our little medical forms, we detour by the internet place and then for a couple of beers. We end up hitting the sack after 01.00, with vague (actually quite definite) plans to hit the diving place between 08.30 and 09.00 tomorrow morning and get a course underway.

The alarm clocks go off at about 07.00: Milla gets up and switches them off, and then goes bck to bed. I get up, make two coffees, am briefly successful at rousing her, but she goes back to bed again after half a cup: my attempts to wake her after that point are defeated by her apparent narcolepsy. It seems we're not going to start learning to dive today, then. Instead I put in a couple of hours internet time, and wake Milla on my return - we play cards for a bit, and I go for another session: Milla collects me after two hours (I'm almost up to date), having showered. Earlier we discussed exploring north along the beach to see if we could find whatever is left of the original Bedou village of Assalah: we get side-tracked into Tota for beer and food though (it turns out that they have a big area out the back as well - God knows when they get enouh customers to open it), and stay there until sunset.
In the evening we visit Dive Zone (our chosen diving centre), apologise for not coming in today, fill out the rest of their forms (including mildly alarming legal waivers) and leave my passport as deposit for thick textbooks. Textbooks? Yep - as with learning to fly it seems we have to learn a whole bunch of theory first. There's tons in the first section, all about pressure and controlling buoyancy and the array of equipment, and it takes several hours to digest. To bed well after 01.00, with Milla alarmed by the list of things which can go wrong.

Again, the alarms go off at about 07.00, but today we're both up by 07.15: a slow breakfast follows and we're at the diving centre by 09.15 - so far, so good. By 09.30 we're sitting watching a video, with quaint 1980s promo music, telling us all about diving: actually, apart from positively enthusing about the whole activity (pointless, since we're already on the course), it's a recap of Module One from the manual. After that we get to meet Ashref, our supercool and laid-back Egyptian instructor, who tells us that today's gonna be all theory. Up until lunchtime we read and watch Module Two as well, answer the exam questions on Modules One and Two, and get kitted out from the stores (we can see through the goggles) - interesting observation is that wetsuits are kinda springy, and bounce you back to upright if you bend over in them. The equipment consists of a 3-part wetsuit (longjohns, jacket and boots), a mask and snorkel, a "BCD" (Buoyancy Control Device - actually an inflatable jacket), a pair of flippers (sorry, "fins") and a regulator (air-supply hose assemby, with step-down pressure values - the bit you put in your mouth is the "Second Stage") - we'll see if we can fit it all together later.
We break for an hour in the early afternoon - bizarrely, on the way back to our room for something to eat, we're intercepted by a guy offering us student cards: is there some way they can tell? We go with him to his side-alley shop, look at his sample card (fairly crappy, but convincing to cursory inspection - amusingly he's put "Univ. of Edinburgh" - and, importantly, done with letraset rather than handwritten). 50EP is his asking price, about $11, and he also casually mentions being able to change money at 5EP to the dollar (bank rate is 4.61). We leave, telling him that we'll be back later.
Our afternoon session is two-fold: we sit for over an hour in the restaurant facing the diving centre, going through the questions and materials from the first two modules with Ashref - piece of cake. We also discuss whether to take the mandatory 200m swimming test and 10 minute floating tests today: the sea's a little choppy, and it's a bit chilly, so we decide to postpone until tomorrow morning (the sea's always calmest in the mornings). Instead we go through the Module Three video, which is particularly alarming to Milla since a large proportion of it covers aquatic life and other dangers (exploding lungs, for example).

We break before sunset and go for beer, of course, and talk about how boring today was: in the evening we play some cards before heading out to see about student cards. We've also talked about how best to pay the discounted $187 course fees - in Egyptian Pounds is best because Dive Zone's using 4.60 as a rate, and we can apparently now change at 5.00 (which brings it down to $172): unfortunately we have a fairly small supply of dollars left, but we'll see if we change some euros instead. It's a different guy at the dodgy shop - he offers us only a crap rate for euros (barely better than the banks), but takes our photos and a $5 deposit - the cards'll be ready tomorrow morning (it's quite late now).
We take the euros back to the room, decide to change some of our precious dollars, go back and get them for 5.02 (our original contact is there - his buddy only wanted to give us 4.65), and use that to pay a deposit for the diving. En route we run into Troy (not seen for several days) and Tim (not seen since Bosra) - they seem to have sent the last week or so in the interior of Sinai, camping out at an abandoned Bedu village. Pretty cool. Also, Troy seems to have pretty much given up on his original Libya project and is now looking at Sudan/Ethiopia instead - largely, I think, because there are very few other ways you can go from Egypt rather than any active desire to go there. After that, I go to the mostly deserted internet place for a while (there's a football match on - Egypt vs Ivory Coast in the African Cup - Egypt seem to be winning!). When I get back, Milla tells me someone was trying to shake their way in through the metal-barred back window earlier - he ran off when she shouted at him: a bit worrying. We go to bed early at 23.45.

An incidental note on the division of labour here (and in other Arab countries). There's a guy we can see out the back window who we've watched for several days, and he seems to be very slowly single-handedly building a hotel: making the bricks/blocks, pouring the concrete, assembling the whole thing, etc. It'll take him ages, but he's already got the two-storey/twenty-room shell in place and he's getting there. It's an odd contrast with most activities here, which seem to take a bizarre number of Arabs to do. Three to make a phonecall, one to build a hotel, apparently.

Up at a slightly later 07.30, we have breakfast and hit the diving centre to wait for Ashref (he said 09.00 for 09.30): we actually wait by the shore in the little restaurant, where they do breakfast for 5LE - perhaps tomorrow. When Ahref arrives we have a coffee, then load up a trolley with all our gear and a bunch of cylinders, and roll it round to the popular training area at the Lighthouse point (there's no lighthouse there that we've seen): our trolley-puller, Mohammed, lays out a big mat and organises the stuff on it. All along this stretch of beach are similar mats wth similar spreads of equipment.

First up is the 200m swimming test and 10 minute floating test: Milla has swimming costume problems, so elects to do it in her wetsuit - to compensate for the added buoyancy, Ashref ties a couple of weights around her. There are two buoys a little out from the shore, 100m apart, so off we go, pausing only to observe that the water is/feels fucking cold. After 30m, Milla has problems and we divert to the shallows (there's a current, and she's not happy with the weights), discuss our options, and then start again slower - there's no time limit on the test. After a one-minute stop halfway, with Milla support by the buoy (which I'm sure is against the rules), and a lot of encouragement for the last 25m, we reach the 200m mark. Milla doesn't feel up to the 10 minute floating test immediately and we exit the water: Ashref says we can do it later. We establish a little base in a coffee house/restaurant just back from the shore, and discuss what we're gonna do next. This apparently will consist of going in with all our gear, sitting on the bottom in shallowish water (oh yeah?), practising various exercises involving removing and replacing our regulators (uh-huh), and some exercises involving filling and clearing water out of our masks (your nose is enclosed in a scuba mask, so you can equalise the pressure in it as you descend - otherwise the pressure differential sucks your eyes out).
Back on the beach it takes us about forty-five minutes to put everything together and on (this will presumably reduce over time) and then, like strange black alien creatures, we edge our way into the water and put our fins on (it's virtually impossible to walk in fins): this takes another ten minutes. We spend a couple of minutes playing with buoyancy, trying to get used to the concept that despite weighing more than the average motorbike we're not actually going to sink while our BCDs are inflated. Ashref suggests we swim out a bit further, and that's when the trouble sets in. First off, I'm having a bit of trouble with my mask: it doesn't seem to seal overly well, so whenever I put my face in the water it starts to fill with water and a choke/splutter reaction kicks in, which sabotages my chances of breathing. I bypass this temporarily by swimming awkwardly with my head up (the gear's not really designed that way). Milla, meanwhile, is having a panic attack over the whole concept of trying to breathe underwater. Ashref spends a while calming her down while I float nearby, playing with the equipment and intermittently sticking my head under the water to see if I can get used to it.
After her first few breaths underwater, Milla is much changed. She emerges enthusing about a little shoal of fish which swam round us, and when Ashref suggests trying one minute underwater, she goes to the bottom and stays for closer to ten minutes. I've meanwhile discovered that a.) breathing through the regulator makes you sound like Darth Vader and b.) exhaling the bubbles aggravates the whole mask situation. By pinching my nose I can do a few breaths underwater, but not with any confidence and I get panicked and have to stick my head up. Milla is meanwhile bouncing around, telling us all about fish and stuff - she's also shivering and, since we've been in the water for forty-odd minutes, Ashref suggests getting out to dry off and warm up.
We have a post mortem over a coffee and cigarettes - Ashref suggests my mask-sealing problem is probably because of my moustache (fine - I can shave that), and also that we both spend more time today snorkelling (it's early afternoon) to get more familiar/comfortable with the whole underwater breathing scene. Fine. After a long break, Milla and I go back in the water and swim up and down: it takes ten or fifteen minutes, but I eventually get happy swimming semi-submerged while pinching my nose and breathing through the snorkel - it hasn't solved the mask problem, but it's bypassed it: and it hasn't addressed the breathing problem. Never mind - we have a nice swim, look at the reef (all colourful coral in different shapes), the weird and bizarre fish (tons of them all over the place) and watch all the divers ascending and descending down the steep shelf which starts just offshore (which is quite surreal - both the sudden shelf and the slow-motion divers).
We return to the diving centre, clean and rinse our equipment (hopefully that'll get quicker in time, too) and leave before sunset with yet another new instruction booklet and plastic-coated A4 photocopied tables. Great.

Our internet guy intercepts us en route - he's set up a machine specially for Milla's internet banking, with XP and all the security options: frankly we're too tired, though. We bounce off the room, drop our stuff, and set off to collect our new student cards - our discussion yesterday ensured that we didn't get the same serial number (almost, but he had a couple of variations) - and then food and alcohol, since we're both surprisingly hungry as well as tired. The cards, on inspection, are disappointingly tacky compared with the ones from Istanbul, and the letraset letters are less than straight. Our conclusion is that the Istanbul ones are probably therefore genuine cards, though handwritten (dunno where they got them) - but this pair are quite clearly cheap fakes compared with them. Ah well - we'll see how they do.
Back in the room, after showering and shaving my moustache off (that throws Milla's concentration for the rest of the evening) I digest the new table and booklet (it's all to do with controlling safe nitrogen levels by controlling the time spent at different depths, and on the surface between dives). Then, both exhausted (why? we didn't do anything!), we crash out at 22.45.