RED SEA ADVENTURE: EXCERPT Chapter 2 TWMH

This is a taster of Chapter 2-- Red Sea Adventure-- from my new book Travels with My Hat.  Seeking winter sunshine, I had gone back to Hurghada, a small  fishing village with one hotel in 1964. I wondered if it was still there...

...‘I want to find the Funduq Sheraton,’ I told my taxi-driver, a young man wearing designer stubble and a David Beckham 7 football shirt.

 ‘Road closed.’ His brow knitted in the rear vision mirror.

‘Izmi Hurghada thirty years ago!’ I tapped my chest with a certain pride since I had clearly graced Hurghada before he was born. But he was right. The old road was blocked by a rusty, corrugated iron fence plastered with posters advertising an ‘Eid Concert’ at the Ministry of Sound and other extravaganzas for the imminent Muslim feast of sacrifice.

‘Funduq Sheraton!’ he suddenly exclaimed, pulling up beside a crumbling circular building surrounded by leaning lamp posts and dusty trees. Grey, shabby and clearly unloved, I recognised it as the old Red Sea Tours Hotel, a large Marriott which had risen beside it being one of 160 new hotels since my visit all those years ago.

Hurghada’s long main street was still known as Sharia Sheraton, even though a new Sheraton had re-located to Soma Bay, far away from bungee jumping, kite-surfing, glass-bottom boat rides, submarine tours and other entertainments for holidaymakers flocking to the popular Red Sea resort. Wherever I looked there were hotels, cafes and shops selling tourist tat, but a sign, Harrads Hurghada, captured my attention.

On the pavement outside, glass water pipes, brass trays, wooden animals, leather pouffes, and camel backpacks were displayed beside baskets of karkady—the  dried red hibiscus flowers that Egyptians make into tea. As I raised my camera to take a picture, an intense looking man who clearly hadn’t shaved for days, got up from a dirty white plastic chair. ‘Everything inside 1GBP,’ he said, holding up a finger.

Going into his shop, I picked up a fish from a display of onyx marine life. ‘Fish 4 GBP,’ he quickly corrected himself.  Removing the stopper, I sniffed one of the half-filled, urine-coloured flagons of perfume lining a shelf. ‘Perfume 10GBP for100 grams.’ He cleared his throat. Then all of a sudden he flew into a rage.

 ‘Tourist just lookin’. No buy anythin!’  Flecks of spit appeared in the corners of his mouth as he shouted.  ‘ Every tourist fuggin Russhin. Old woman wantin sex. Fuggin rubbish. Only lookin! Pay nothin! Russhin Fuggin! Fuggin! Fuggin! Oh Allah! What we do?’

 He clasped his hands together and concerned my presence might bring on a seizure, I left him shouting to continue my walk along the Sharia Sheraton.            

 Every second shop I passed was stuffed with souvenirs. In the window of a leather-ware store, a lizard skin handbag, including the head, half-chewed away by insects, was marked 145 Egyptian pounds. I wanted to buy a plain white T-shirt, but everything had either a shark or a pyramid on it…

                 

DIVING AT DISHDABA

Excerpt from Chapter 2 Red Sea Adventure

Travels with My Hat

...My childhood dream was no longer a dream. Or a deadline. Pulling on a mask and snorkel, I followed Morris out into the bay where I looked down on an underwater Eden.

Corals covered every inch of the reef. Some were soft pink and yellow ‘flower’ corals, feathery tentacles waving as they sifted in plankton from around their colony. Others were hard, limestone corals—mosaic, organ-pipe, brain and grass coral -- interspersed with lacy orange and red gorgonian sea fans. Still others like the fawn, blue-tipped staghorn coral were the size of small sedans.

Moreover, the abundance of fish was marvellous. Extraordinary! Now I understood why Jacques Cousteau was so enthusiastic about the Red Sea where divers and marine biologists have recorded some 1,200 species. In the first minutes, I identified white, black and bright yellow butterfly fish, red banner fish, goatfish, bream, a rainbow-coloured wrasse, a surgeonfish and a cheeky triggerfish - a species that knows no fear (one of these little fellows had nipped me while I was snorkelling off Rangiora, the great atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago).

A wall of soft corals dropped 10m (32 ft) to a narrow plateau bristling with pink and mauve elk-horn coral where I spotted a red hawkfish resting in the branches of an orange sea fan, and a regal angel fish hovering near a cluster of lemon-coloured anemones. Green and mauve parrotfish were grinding the coral polyps with pharyngeal teeth and a school of eight squid, my favourite marine creature, jetted through the water like a team of Red Arrows.

When I swam after them, they flushed brown, then yellow and green, and the last animal squirted a puff of sepia-coloured ink. Coming up for air, I was brushed by a soft turquoise-trimmed nudi-branch which Egyptians know as a badia for its undulating movements which resemble those of a belly dancer.

Morris and the other boys managed to spear plenty of fish, but there was no wood to build a fire so we could cook them. Mas’udi writes of the Red Sea coast as being barren more than a thousand years ago, so unlike in the Pacific Ocean, there was no driftwood washed up on the tide-line. Ruth and I each had a tin of Chinese corned beef and a packet of biscuits brought from Hurghada, but they would not stretch far when shared between six of us. The boys had brought nothing at all...

Underwater images by Erik Bjurstrom

Photo Christine Osborne, Dishdaba 1964

WHERE IS EMAN AL-OBEIDI?

While it is good to see Arab women protesting alongside male demonstrators in the Arab uprisings, it is appalling to learn how at the first opportunity, many men turn to rape.

The shocking attack on the CBS journalist in Cairo, and now this terrible video of the poor Libyan woman crying out for help to the international media, is a violent and graphic reminder that women face specific and harrowing abuse in times of war and conflict.

Someone has left a post on Twitter re Eman al-Obeidi, the woman beaten and raped by Gaddafi lackeys in Libya ---- what can we do, we must do something, she tweets. The terrible thing is we can’t. And as I write this blog, she is incarcerated, somewhere unknown, certainly being tortured, even being raped again, for boldly, desperately, speaking out.

On the outside, looking in, we can only pass on the message and support by whatever means, the brave women who dare to speak up. Women like Marvi Sirmed in Lahore, ‘Zeinobia’ in Cairo and Emma Al Nafjan in Riyadh, to name just three of many courageous female bloggers putting their freedom at risk for daring to write of unacceptable situations in their respective countries. .

And neither let us forget the thousands of African women in Rwanda, Congo and Darfur who have been gang-raped by soldiers. Pray for women at risk everywhere in this violent world and wish the bastards who commit such atrocities may rot in hell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26vYN_kxK3Y&feature=share

http://feb17.info/general/video-eman-el-obeidis-cousin-speaks-out-translated/

CATWOMAN: WHERE WAS KUCHING?

While it is always a pleasure to see Joanna Lumley, Catwoman which she recently presented on ITV was flawed. In the sense of significant omissions.

Joanna played with the ubiquitous cats in Cairo`s Khan el-Kalili Bazaar, but little real emphasis was placed on their status in Pharaonic society when on death, they were afforded the same mummification as humans. In 1888, an Egyptian farmer, near the town of Bani Hasan in Upper Egypt, uncovered a tomb containing around 80,000 cat mummies, from 1000-2000 BC

But the most surprising place left out of her tour of the feline world, was Kuching, capital of the east Malaysian state of Sarawak, home to the world`s only museum entirely devoted to Felis catus among whose 2000 exhibits is a mummified cat from Bani Hassan, on loan from the British Museum.

Cat-lovers have presented most of the 2000 museum artefacts on display out of pure love. There are cat clocks, umbrellas, mugs, brooches, plates, cups, key-rings, teapots, door knockers, aprons earrings and t-shirts. All either shaped like a cat, or depicting a picture of one. From a moggie to a Maine Coon.

A gallery of cat-people includes Charles Dickens, whose cat Wilhemia used to sit on his desk and paw at his snuff; Florence Nightingale who owned some 60 cats, and is said to have never travelled without one, and Queen Victoria, who kept a cat named White Heather at Buckingham Palace.

Anne Frank`s attic ordeal is claimed to have been made more endurable by the presence of her two beloved cats who evidently survived on mice. While Colette, the bi-sexual French novelist, maintained `our perfect companion would never have fewer than four feet.` ie. her dainty little golden-eyed Chartreux named Saha, immortalized in her novella The Cat.

c.Christine Osborne

Image: Cat statue in Kuching Sarawak

Image: Cat in Muttrah souq Oman

Source: www.copix.co.uk

LUXOR HORSE-CARRIAGES. BEWARE!

Sightseeing by traditional horse carriage is a pleasant way to explore the popular city of Luxor, in Upper Egypt. For around £1 GBP, you can clip-clop along the Nile where tall-masted feluccas are moored between the massive monuments of Luxor and Karnak.

Spending a little more, buys you an hour's circuit of the dusty backstreets, passing perfume and spice shops, tailors and crafts stalls selling alabaster busts of Queen Nefertiti, onyx statues of Anubis, and other Pharaonic gods.

I went to Luxor to photograph the Coptic spring festival of Shemen Nessim. Placing my camera bag up on the carriage, I stepped onto the metal foot-plate, but it came down on my legs, slicing them to the bone. The accident required emergency surgery in Luxor International Hospital, but while my injuries were serious enough (I had to have a further operation in London) they could have been worse.

"I advise tourists not to take caleche," a Luxor tour rep told me. “You see families, with their kids perched next to the driver, galloping along the corniche and on rounding a corner, they are often thrown off."

Egyptian Tourist Police are attempting to crack down on the scores of illegal caleche waiting outside Luxor's tourist hotels. Brought in from the countryside by poor fellaheen, hoping to make a fast buck, most are unroadworthy. As I discovered.

If you do take a caleche, check it displays a yellow license plate on the rear, confirm that the driver really does know where you want to go, and don't allow him to use his whip.

The Brooke Animal Hospital, caring for tired old carriage horses, is located behind Luxor Temple.

c.Christine Osborne

Image: www.copix.co.uk