Tuesday, 18 March 2008, Sharm el Sheikh

[skyring]

The noon’s over the yardarm, so we’ve had a couple of peanut slabs, rosewater chickpeas and sesame bricks between us, my wife and I. And that’s not counting the vaguely Turkish Delight sweets that we’ve saved for the folk at home, a month away, and if they make it that far it’ll be a miracle.

Somewhere it’s noon, but it’s midnight in Canberra, we’ve sailed that far around the world that we are quite out of synch with our children now. So what’s new, my offspring might ask, and I find to my surprise that I’ve left a comment on one of my own pictures on Flickr.com that’s aimed at me. “Dad,” I unexpectedly say to myself, “there’s more pictures of that bloody bear than there are of anything else. Especially Mum.”

I must have kept logged in on a computer back home, and my daughter has found a new method of confusing me, because I’m pretty sure that I didn’t write that comment. I shoot off a smart-arse answer to myself, in a back-alley Internet cafe, and drag Kerri out to get her picture took in front of some suitably tacky Egyptian scene.

Yeah. When I married her, I never thought we’d wind up in some two-bit coral town at the pointy end of the Sinai, but here we are.

In those days, as bride and groom, I had a splendid tawny-gold note showing an impressive statue of some ancient pharaoh, with a face value of ten Egyptian pounds. I used it as a bookmark, and I’d dream of ancient evenings, and pyramids and hieroglyphs and great sandy deserts broken by the flooding, fragrant Nile, full of crocodiles and lotus flowers and triangular-sailed ships.

Romance, it was.

And here we are. Ten pounds turns out to be a greasy note that the locals might use to wipe their bums with, if they used toilet paper. That’s progress.

And prices are flexible here. “That whole bag of groceries,” my wife tells me, brandishing her 150 Thai baht calculator, “cost us twenty-seven cents.”

It’s not a light or small bag of groceries, neither, as I’ve carried it a kilometre in the fierce Sinai sun.

“But that beer you had,” she goes on, taking the moral high ground and belting me over my overheated head, “cost nine pounds. Err, dollars.”

I think she got that one right. We had a drink ashore, and I ordered a beer, thinking that at last I’d escaped P&O’s monopoly on alcohol. An Islamic nation might not be the best place to get drunk, on reflection. P&O is cheaper here, for once.

I’m beginning to think that the P in P&O stands for pirate, and that those fire hoses manned day and night in these doubtful waters might be better aimed at the purser’s office, or maybe the piranhas setting the prices for tours on port days. Not all the crocodiles are in the Nile, I’ve got to say, and we’ve scored a victory in snagging some washing powder ashore, which may have cost us seven cents for a big box, as opposed to half a quid for a tiny baggie in the ship’s store.

I’m getting fed up with all these funny currencies, to tell the truth. At least from now on, it’s mostly Euros. Euros and pounds, which are at least within a loud whimper of an Aussie dollar in value, and you don’t have to resort to calculators to work out if the taxidriver is ripping you off.

Personally, I think my darling bride has got the conversion factor backwards at least once, but we’ve had a fine old time ashore, scored some bargains, caught up on the internet, and gotten some lovely photographs.

It’s all very exotic, this cruising life. Sand and sandstone this week, the Med the next. Sharm El Sheik turns out to be a little bitty town, kind of like a seaside resort back home, except that beaches in Australia usually keep the sand on the beach, instead of all over the surrounding countryside. The souvenirs are just as tacky, but, and the tourists fingering them dubiously are exactly the same.

The stallholders wear flowing robes here, and if you look halfway interested in their wares, they’ll kidnap you inside and offer strange bargains in flexible currency.

“Eighty pounds?” my wife moans. “But a moment ago, before I tried it on and said I liked it, it was only thirty!”

We settle on fifty, and hurry off, a pink embroidered top in a plastic bag crinkling happily in our hands. Fifty pounds is only nine dollars, I tell my dear wife.

Mind you, we got asked for ten pounds in tips by some street sweeper who showed us to an unusable autoteller machine, and I had to give a US dollar to a toilet attendant who switched on the hot air blower for me. Next time I’ll hold it in until we get back to our cabin, though when I consider the daily rate for our cosy floating home, it’s probably cheaper ashore.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Aurora. She’s a grand ship, and I have yet to find any reason to revise my wholly favourable first impression of her and her crew. But the bean counters have found ways to squeeze a few more pounds out of the passengers, and every day the bill mounts up, with internet charges and port excursions, bottles of wine and currency conversions.

Not to mention the tips. We passengers are expected to tip the staff three pounds plus each day.  Per person. Two waiters, a wine waiter, and a cabin steward. Possibly others. We’ve really got no option, because P&O pays their service staff so little that a lot of their wage comes from tips. And also because we are so very well treated by everybody that I wouldn’t consider holding back their expected tips.

But once you add in the fare and the travel insurance and the tips and the incidental charges, it’s a pretty high daily rate for a holiday. A great holiday, sure, and I’ve barely stopped smiling since I stepped aboard, and it’s certainly not our last cruise, but we’ll go hunting value for money next time around.

But look, I’m distracted, and I really meant to write about Egypt instead of whining on about the management.

We’ve been sailing up the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea for the past two or three days. Apart from a tiny hump of an islet to port and some very high ground to starboard, we’ve not seen the land at all. We steer a middle course, out of shore sight as much as possible. Safety and security, I suppose, though it would all be very much more spectacular if we sailed from headland to headland, rounding each cape within biscuit toss, and waving to the nude sunbathers on the deserted beaches between.

This morning there were chunky silhouettes in the mist, and when I roused enough to go put on day clothes, make a few circuits of the Promenade Deck and fetch up with a cuppa at the Orangery, the shapes cleared into tawny gold headlands with mountains behind. A crowded marina and a clean ship berth. Fuss on the dockside, tour buses and jeeps lined up, port officials in suits and a couple of guys in black fatigues with AK47s, looking for physical threats.

A small lighthouse and a tumbledown building atop a cliff backing the berth. “See those ruins? That’s St  Catherine’s monastery,” I informed a chap taking pictures through a camera that could have been used by NASA from lunar orbit.

He grunted at me, possibly because he was paying sixty-five pounds apiece for an eight hour bus trip to the ancient monastery, and my sense of humour wasn’t appreciated.

There was movement all around. From the marina an endless procession of white-hulled dive boats set out, cutting across the harbour and rounding our stern within biscuit toss. Seabirds turned in energetic flight across the water, occasionally dipping in for a seafood snack. In the water I caught a brief impression of a head and a rounded back. A turtle, a seal, a mermaid. Maybe a frogman. I looked hopefully for another glimpse, camera at the ready, but no luck.

The tour passengers assembled and marched off to their buses, which duly departed. Kerri and I, unbooked for once, had a leisurely breakfast, glancing out at the bustle on the dock from time to time. About nine we yawned, stretched, covered ourselves in sunscreen and ambled off. An Egyptian official glanced at our passports, pre-stamped with a “Quick Trip” entry, and we were off, standing on the soil of Egypt. Or the concrete of Egypt, more correctly.

It was a reasonable hike into town. About a kilometre to the port gates, where we mistakenly imagined that the officials might like to look at our documents, and another couple of kilometres up and down a hill, the beach a succession of private areas on our right, young men lounging in scraps of shade to accept entry fees from beachgoers.

There was a modern sort of mall, where we managed to get some local money out of a sun-drenched ATM, but the bulk of the town was either hotels or the shops of the ”Old Bazaar”. Nothing looked more than twenty years old, especially the sign, but it was fascinating to browse amongst the shops and stalls. Big sacks of some purple herb, advertised as “Bedouin Viagra”. A pharmacist beside advertised the real thing.

Souvenirs and jewellers aplenty. Kerri bought a couple of silver necklaces which made her very happy, one with lapis lazuli inserts that brought out the colour in her sparkling eyes. The supermarkets were stocked with brands strange and familiar. Pringles with half the writing in Arabic script, cans in the fish section with a smiling dolphin prominent, labelled “Solid Dolphin”. Apparently it was tuna, with the misleading Egyptian message for “Dolphin Friendly”. All fascinating.

Internet cafe, where I left a book, and had the owner come running after me. “Not my book,” I called, like any good BookCrosser.

Taxi ride back to the ship – my wife, wilting in the heat, not keen on a long walk back up hill and down.

And then a lazy afternoon. So many drowsy afternoons on this trip.

Comments

Re: *eyes lit up*

[browneyedrae.livejournal.com]

I think we all wish this! Me too, Me too!

*slaps* face One day! But that day?? when!

Been waiting since I was 17 lol