The Inaccurate Tourist

55. Egypt

Pharoahs and pyramids, hieroglyphics and gods,extravagant tombs of kings, the Luxor and the lush Nile. Monuments of incredible proportion and age, ancient technological marvels and wonders that have captivated the world for centuries...

I wouldn't be seeing any of that.

I went to Egypt on a rather luxurious dive cruise. I will see the mysteries of Egypt one day, so I couldn't pass up this opportunity to scuba dive the Red Sea on a brand spanking new boat. Of course, escaping the dreary parisian November for thirty degree Celsius sunshine wasn't going to hurt either.

We really saw nothing of Egypt on our arrival. We left Paris in the evening and arrived in Hurghada in the dark hours of morning. One of the tour operators greeted us and our luggage and herded us to the bus. We slept for the next five hours as the bus took us south along the sea to our boat. I woke up once or twice to peak out at a brand new continent.

We had a lot of stuff. Diving is like that -- a small suitcase for you, and a monster suitcase for your equipment. We hauled it to the end of the pier, where our crew stacked it high in a Zodiac and motored it off to our boat, the Nemo. The Nemo is 32 metres long and seven metres wide, with twelve two-person cabins for passengers, each with a private bathroom and shower. My roommate snagged us one of the four upper-deck cabins, so our door opened out to the sea air, and we had a real window. The other cabins were below the salon and had portholes.

The salon was impressively laquered inlaid wood and had tables and benches for eating and filling out dive logs. It also had a large TV, DVD player and stereo system capable of delivering Las Ketchup anywhere on board. Since nobody had thought to bring CDs, we heard their musical styling all week along with Destiny's Child. From what I gathered, there was someone who was under the misconception that the singer would find herself amiss without him, but as the story unfolds, you find that she has gathered strength from the experience, buying herself clothes, a house and a car to boot. Good for her!

Our first dive was at about noon. This is the readaptation dive, so we kept it shallow and tried to remember how all those tubes, valves and buttons work. The Red Sea is saltier than I am used to, which means the water is more dense and floating objects are more bouyant. I doubled my weights to eight kilograms, but it wasn't nearly enough. I could barely stay underwater for the three minutes at three metres standard security decompression stop. For the rest of the week, I dove with ten kilos.

Dive cruises are hooper efficient for managing the equipment. The tank, jacket and regulator were left assembled for the entire week. After a dive, you could rinse your equipment with fresh running water on the dive deck, walk five metres to the benches and lock your tank in. You unscrew your regulator, which is the signal for the crew to refill the tank, and hang your wet suit where it can dry before the next dive (out of direct sunlight). There were twenty-four little cubbyholes, each with an outlet for charging dive lights, cameras and the occasional cell phone.

We met the dive master on board, Bruno, who gave us the general rules of the boat. Most of them were along the lines of "don't do dangerous things you know you shouldn't do." For example, Goofus dives below 40 metres and has to miss the next day of diving, but Gallant waits until he's finished diving for the day before he hits the booze.

These first dives weren't just technical readaptation for me -- from the beginning, three things struck me as different from all my previous dives. First, the water was warm, between 24 and 26 degrees Celsius. I don't believe I've dived in water above 18 before. It's an enormous difference. Second, I've never had such good visibility. I haven't had much luck in the Mediterranean, and Bretagne was as obscured as the Pacific. The largest difference, however, was the amount of life underwater.

I must have seen as much on the first few dives in the Red Sea as in all of my previous diving put together. This is where language problems are going to come in -- while I can barely remember species in French, I never knew some of them at all in English. Some are easy, such as poisson-clown, or poisson-perroquet (clown fish or parrot fish). I don't know the translation of murène, a giant grey eel with teeth.

It gets dark early in Egypt in November, so our second dive was a night dlve. It's interesting to dive in the dark. The water is the same temperature as in the day, but the fishies are asleep -- some lie sideways in the coral, some just hang suspended, and some stick upside-down to the wall. Nasty looking urchins crawl out, with foot-long protective spikes and little else. There's a species of nocturnal worm that looks like a bundle of feathers on feet, and another that looks like a little satellite dish made of vines. I imagine both of them trap plankton at night, and they both curl up when you shine your dive light on them.

Other than the urchins and worms, if you're lucky, you'll see slugs -- the danseuse espagnole is aptly named. It's about thirty centimetres long and a beautiful, bright red, with frilly white ruffles at one end. It moves through the water by undulating its sides sharply and gracefully, like a spanish dancer waving her skirt while kicking up her heels. It always lives in symbiosis with a small shrimp, which was either too small or too camoflaged for me to find. I saw a danseuse espagnole for each of the four night dives we had -- even the one where we couldn't find the reef and spent most of the dive turning around and around in midwater with our dive lights.

The next day -- our first morning on our boat -- was our first accident. The lovely varnished wood staircase leading to the lower cabins got wet and... Boof! A dislocated shoulder at St. John's Reef. The shoulder was right out of its socket and we were eight hours away from the nearest port. Fortunately, they found a kinestheologist on one of the other dive boats in the area who managed to wrench it back into place.

We took the victim back to port the next day, stopping for a couple of dives along the way. This seems a bit cold, but apparently the logistics of the trip back were that we could stop a few hours along the route without delaying her return to the local hospital and France. It was a bit of a downer, especially for her -- she's one of the most cautious and experienced monitors in the club and she was missed during the rest of the trip.

Speaking of downers for the rest of the trip, it was about this time that I experienced la turista, which is a delicate way of saying stomach-cramping diarrhea, which is an indelicate way of saying bowel discomfort. I only drank bottled water and sodas (labeled in english and arabic), but I was eating whatever I felt like, including salad. It was rice and water for the rest of the trip. I didn't miss any of the dives -- I felt better under water than above.

During the day, we dove. We saw gardens of coral and sharks. Some of us saw dolphins and turtles, but I didn't. After the diving, we played Jungle Speed and Uno, and watched Shrek in French once. There was turkey one night and cake another, and generally booze in the evenings.

It was a fun week at sea.

You can't fly immediately after diving. Nitrogen dissolves in your blood at the high pressures underwater, and you need to let it evacuate slowly. High altitudes have to be avoided (typically for about twenty four hours) because the dissolved nitrogen in your blood can reform into bubbles under lowered air pressure. This is the same principle that makes it mandatory to surface slowly at the end of a dive -- these bubbles can cause serious decompression problems, such as severe joint pain and neurological damage.

I'm not very good at foreshadowing, so reread that paragraph about potential neurological damage. We spent our twenty four hours in Hurghada, where I learnt how to haggle.

Well, technically, I avoided haggling at all costs. It scares me more than potential neurological damage. And the Egyptians haggle for everything -- at one store, the price of twenty-cent postcards was up for negotiation. As well as the stamps. And then we had to negotiate to get our change back in cash instead of additional postcards. At another store, I managed to reduce the price of some scarab sculptures by one third. I was holding out for a fifty percent discount until I realized that the price we were bickering over was pocket change.

The entire dive group met at a nice restaurant by the sea and had an excellent meal of many Egyptian foods. I didn't eat very much of the meal, given my stomach discomfort at the time. I remember the falafel was surprisingly welcome and digestable. I had freshly squeezed mango juice, which was fantastic -- thick as a milkshake. I had the ice cream and the thick, thick coffee as well. Incredibly enough, the price of the entire meal was the same as a fancy coffee in Paris.

The flight home was uneventful. The rest of the weekend and the first day at work was uneventful. The fourth day after our return, however, I happened to mention that I was still feeling dizzy from being on a boat for a week (what the French call mal du terre or landsickness). This caused a phone chain reaction between dive monitors and a couple of dive doctors until I ended up at the emergency room at the Hopital Val du Grace, the military hospital in Paris.

It is abnormal to still have vertigo that long after a boat trip, and decompression accidents can be treated easily if caught quickly. So I was examined by the médécin de garde, who informed me that it was unlikely that I had a problem, that it was probably too late to do anything about it if I had, and that I needed a neurological test the following week. So I trundled back the following week, where the hyperbaric specialist had me touch my nose in sudden, alarming ways, and balance on one foot. He told me that it was correct to have come to the emergency room, but there weren't any symptoms of neurological impairment. So I got the tour of the hyperbaric chamber, and then they sent me home. It was freezing rain, and I got sick.

Fish fish. Fishy fish. Fishy fishy fish fish.