Taxi's and Sakara

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Now if you’ve ever been to Sharm the word Sakara means a lot…if you haven’t, well it’s a type of beer (and it’s THE beer out here!) One thing that is driving me crazy is the lack (or complete non-existence) of pork out here. ‘It’s a Muslim Country’ I hear you cry, ‘Of course there’s no pork!’ Well there’s beer…and they don’t drink alcohol! So why can’t they sell godamn bacon! I mean going into a pizzeria and seeing Hawaiian on the menu as ‘sweetcorn and pineapple’ almost broke my heart. In my (serious) pizza creating mind a Hawaiian is not complete unless it has both pineapple AND succulent ham chunks on top.

So as you all know I’ve been out here now 2 weeks (at time of writing!) I have budgeted my travels to include a 3 month stint at Oonas hotel but its tres chere so I went flat hunting. First stop, estate agency which turned out to be too involved for my simple mind so by good luck my instructor was moving out of his flat so I moved into it. The flat itself is in a perfect location, close enough to Na’ama centre to walk to the shops but far enough away that I don’t have to hear the dreadful wailing of some amateur karaokist or god forbid, the cries of ‘Taxi? TAXI?!’ from the desperate Egyptians (more on that later!). Also a positive side to Egypt is some things e.g. bills are SUPER cheap! Downside, air-con doesn’t work (no worries I bought a fan!) and the toilets slightly dodgy but it could be a lot worse!

Egyptian roads…there is so much one can say about these! In England if a man honks his horn at you it’s a ‘Wahay! Look at you’ thing, in Egypt there is a joke that the brake wires are connected to the horn…they go off CONSTANTLY! So of course when I first ventured into the wild lands of crossing Sharm’s main road I though’ God get over the shorts OK..! They’re not THAT short!’ turns out it has nothing to do with my attire and everything to do with my skin tone aka pasty white. White means tourist which means rich which then means they hack those taxi prices RIGHT up! However there is a way around paying extortionate prices. Hop on the blue shuttle buses that race down the road (wave your hand at the driver and they’ll stop). They cost 1 EGP (which is about 12p) and will drop you right by your resort/apartment complex! Brilliant! Yes you may be crammed on a bus full of Egyptians giving you freaky looks but hey! It saves you a good 90p. Worth it  And the Taxi guys are starting to recognize me now which is great! They seem to have got the picture after me yelling ‘LA’AH’ at them while doing the Lain stare (which for mon famille et ami’s if very well known!). For those of you that have never travelled to Egypt or somewhere similar like Turkey you won’t have experienced the hassling. There is this crazy idea out here that if you go up to someone and yell ‘COME IN MY SHOP YEAH! BEST PRICES IN WHOLE OF WORLD’ then that poor victim, sorry customer will come and spend some nice crisp money. Well I am more inclined to venture into places that DON’T have a pain in the arse guy screaming at me! Or worse trying to chat me up using the classic line ‘Do you play basketball’ which my response which has gone from ‘Haha no *blush*’ to ‘Piss off…’ in the matter of a week.

Now onto the best stuff, DIVING! I went on the boat again a few days ago and did two dives, the last being Shark and Yolanda, two reefs known for attracting the ‘big stuff’. And I saw the coolest thing so far on my trip….a BABY TURTLE!!! I know right 😊 It was beautiful. This little girl, (ok maybe not baby, maybe 10 year old child in turtle size…) was just swimming around eating pieces of jellyfish and didn’t even notice our arrival! I swam memorized towards her and then knelt on the floor and just stared (meanwhile my dive group all did the same thing!). There’s a SCUBA rule that says ‘Look but don’t touch’ which is really important in keeping the reefs and aquatic life alive so as much as I wanted to swim up to the turtle and Hi five it Finding Nemo style we had to stay back out of respect for the sea. (But seriously, I wanted to go swim up into her face and just stare at her! And try and get into the mindset of a turtle :P) So yar, that’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!

Yesterday I started my first open water course which was really cool (it’s part of my Divemaster course). We have two great students and it was awesome seeing the course from an ‘instructor point of view’ (in the sense that I wasn’t doing the skills and was assisting the instructor) I really liked seeing there excitement as they first entered the water and began breathing but it was weird being a ‘rolemodel’! I had to remember to do everything properly and not slack! (E.g. when I come up from the surface I spit my reg out in a most ungainly fashion :P Something which I had to rectify when it began hissing half of my godamn tank out when it hit the water upside down…damn free-flow.)

So I’ll try and get some photos up, still don’t have an underwater camera but I’m sure y’all know what a turtle looks like 😊

Written beginning of May.

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