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…

                 

The Terrible Cafe Lemsid

 Excerpt from Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book ---Travels with My Hat, 85,000 words 8 pages pictures.         Chapters on Ethiopia, the Royal Tour of Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen. Pictured is the terrible                      Cafe Lemsid in the Western Sahara, from the final chapter on Morocco.

                                                                

...I’ve often thought I’d found the middle of nowhere on my travels, only to realise that I was on the edge of somewhere, but the Café Lemsid was definitely in the middle of nowhere. Caramel and raspberry red, it resembled a giant lolly that had fallen off a desert transport and surrounding it lay the detritus of local civilisation: burst tyres, perished fan-belts, broken lobster-traps and empty port-a-gas cylinders. A rug was stuffed in a hole in the wall to keep out wind-blown sand, and among items stacked behind its counter were boxes of Gunpowder tea, flour, candles, packets of “Tide”, balls of string and inevitably— tinned sardines.  It’s owner said fresh fish arrived daily from Boujdour, so that even in this god-forsaken place I was able to sit down at a broken table for lunch (grilled dorade).  A lame, fish-eating chicken hopped about for scraps: it would never be killed and eaten, I decided; it was much too horrible. As I settled my bill, a grand-taxi pulled up and I half expected it to disgorge a host of characters from a Fellini  film—dwarfs, transvestites and dancing bears—but they were merely crushed passengers from Dakhla, relieved for the chance to stretch their legs on their long journey up to Agadir...

EPIC WALK - GREAT READ

SAHARA: by Paula Constant

It is with regret that I have reached the end of SAHARA, the account by Australian writer Paula Constant of her epic walk across the Western Sahara, to Mali and ‘not quite’ Niger where authorities forbade her to continue across this volatile belt of Africa with on-going Tuareg dissent and latterly, an active al-Qaeda cell.

Indeed God knows what might have happened had she continued her journey. While courageous, the plan must be seen as politically naïve considering the events, sometimes tragic, that have befallen travellers in this desperate part of Africa.

SAHARA is long — almost 400 pages, but I found it gripping from beginning to end, and while I hold the above view, I found it a rivetting read.

Though haunted by a failing marriage (the least interesting part of the book) and plagued by difficult guides, perpetual interest in herself — as a lone white woman walking with camels — burrs catching in her clothes and a urinary tract infection about which she is brutally frank—Paula still managed to write a diary after walking an average 25kms a day, from well to desert well.

Her writing is achingly descriptive of a landscape that often has little to describe. And it is never repetitive. We encounter the nomad tea-making ritual on a dozen occasions, but something colourful is always included to make it different to the last one.

Her character comes across as tough, honest and determined, and her writing flows easily from page to page, like the great dunes she crosses with her camels.

I particularly loved the part where on hearing the evocative music of the Saharoui, she and her two guides jump up, stamping out a rhythmic dance on the desert sand. “Madani and I dance with our arms up and out to the sides ..he stamps his feet and cocks his hand over his head…I hold my arms out and turn my hands, my hips roll and twist beneath my melekhva.” ( the sari-like dress worn by Saharoui women).

Paula Constant is one cool head and one helluva writer and I feel her publisher—Bantam— might have done her better in the choice of paper, and a cover that does not buckle up.

And while the writing can stand alone in this powerful account of ‘love, loss and survival’ it begs for pictures of the splendid and maddening people she met en route. Especially her nomad guides— M’Barak, Madani, Mohammed, Ali and Ibrahim.

Bantam 2009— ISBN: 978-1-74166-929-9

Images of the Western Sahara: www.copix.co.uk

Preview: for publication in 2012

Travels with My Hat is the memoir of an Australian nurse who through skill and determination, switched careers to become an award-winning travel writer and photographer. It is a colourful record of her experiences defined by travel, undertaken on her own initiative, often without official help, and frequently against all odds. “We don’t know who you are,” she was told by the travel editor of the Daily Telegraph on arriving in London in 1974. “To get a name here, you need to write a book.” Which is exactly what she did. Publication of The Gulf States and Oman in 1977 brought a deluge of commissions on the Middle East. Books followed on Jordan and Pakistan. Christine was invited to visit Iraq by the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein. Since visas were not issued to British journalists, she returned home and obtained clearance from the Iraqi Vice-Consul in – of all places –Bondi! Her journeys to Iraq, Ethiopia, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan and Morocco are rounded off with letters to her mother who had never left Australia. We join Christine avoiding bandits in Yemen, diving in the Red Sea, and dining with Arab sheikhs in a racy account of forty years of travels when only one of a thousand and one problems, was being a young, western woman working in a man’s world. I have occasionally wished I were a boy, she writes in a chapter on Yemen. Not for the penis per se, but for the freedom it allows a man, since reality for a woman traveller is that her sex presents constraints…

Photos by Christine Osborne

www.copix.co.uk

http://travelswithmyhat.com

Experience, travel and

SELF- PUBLISHING THE NEXT BIG THING

The NO FLY ZONE over northern Europe and UK affected far more than holiday-makers. Kenyan farm workers were laid off, German car production was suspended due to a lack of spare parts, British fencers were stranded in Beijing ------- and for anyone involved in publishing, the 2010 London Book Fair, forecast to be the best ever ----- was little short of a disaster.

One publisher told me that 70% of his meetings had been cancelled. American and Spanish agents were conspicuously absent but also unable to make it, the South African contingent held a `Not the London Book Fair’ in Cape Town. Good for them!

If anything the LBF was awash with aspiring authors. Writers are always lurking among the exhibition stands, but this year with the rising interest in self published works, they were out like a swarm of bees.

I listened to an excellent talk on the merits of DIY by Siobhan Curham, a successful young self published author who provided useful advice to any writer considering this route.

The strongest argument for self-publishing is that as publishing houses expect authors to do most of the marketing, why not go ahead and publish your book yourself.

All very well, but like any business, self publishing requires investment and not just the cost of paying a printer, or one of the many companies who specialise in this field. You must employ a competent editor and while family can be helpfully picky in pointing out typos - better to pay a professional proof reader.

Ditto advice for the cover design. Don`t ask your best friend who is a dab hand at art to do it. There are people specialising in book design and irrespective of the old adage --- don`t judge a book by it`s cover -people do, and if the cover is less than exciting - it will likely inhibit sales.

So just as digital cameras have revolutionised photography, self publishing is coming into its own but it must be total commitment.

Writing is only part of it - marketing and distribution follow on - so unless you`ve the time, the will and the means to invest in your project - don`t touch it. Otherwise go for it, best of luck and see you at next year`s London Book Fair.

Recommended reading: Dan Poynter`s Self-Publishing Manual: How to Write, Print and Sell Your Own Book ISBN 9 781568601427.

http://findingtheplot.co.uk/ Siobhan Curham

Images: www.copix.co.uk

www.blurb.com

www.authorhouse.com

www.booklocker.com