And so we find ourselves ensconced in a Marriott 5 star hotel on the Red Sea coast in Egypt, with bratty children of wealthy Westerners and wealthy Egyptians equally, quiet and pensive loners sipping lemonades, dottering Germans with wheely-thingies to help them walk, and most strange of all – Russian tourists. Do Russians have enough money to travel between their own cities, let alone a 5 star resort in the Middle East? I scrutinize Russian speakers to see whether they look like mafia gangsters…
While Carrie took the kids on a submarine ride today (not one of those glass-bottomed simulacrums, but a real sub) which you can read about on her blog, I walked the “tourist boulevard” in town to locate a travel agent’s shop. The Boulevard is thinly-veiled attempt at tourist city creation that falls short of everything that idea offers except for the trinkety shops aspect, which is plainly designed to separate you from your wad of Pounds as quickly as possible thankyouverymuch. I came across six or seven such shops, finding all but two shuttered and forlorn. The hit tourism has taken in Egypt is killing Hurghada very publicly. Glass doors and broken, chairs overturned, and wattle fences erected to prevent you from seeing the abject architectural carnage behind them. But I peeked over anyway, something no self-respecting Egyptian would do, already knowing full well what was on the other side. I crept through one such fence and took a few hasty photos (one or two are below) before being bellowed at with such a force that the guard’s voice reverberated in my chest – literally. I was stunned at his volume and vociferousness, and beat an offended retreat.
I located one trip[ operator still in business and negotiated a minibus and driver to take the six of us 250 Kms away tomorrow to explore the Monastery of St Paul, the first ever monastery in the world. Really. And it is still in existence and run by Coptic Christians to this day. Fee: LE1050, plus a “tip” for the drive of LE150 (this equates to CAD$200 – and LE stands for Egyptian Pounds). There is a catch; the pickup time is 5am tomorrow morning. Blerg. Hopefully I’ll post tomorrow on our last night in Hurghada of whatever happens tomorrow. Stay tuned bat-fans to the bat-channel…
During the walk back to the Marriott, I kept seeing a rise of land – a massif – peeking from between the buildings on my left and away from the sea. It was still early in the day and I resolved to wander over and have a look. Clearly, it was private land and under some sort of development at such a slow rate as to warrant a levelling of ground, and that’s it. Perhaps I was living so slowly that the builders’ movements were incomparably faster than me and therefore invisible to the eye. Buuuuutttt, I somehow doubt that. As I have done many times before in other parts of the world, I just strode in past some buildings and started climbing. I made sure I wasn’t really on someone’s private back yard, I’m not that rude or inconsiderate. I tucked in behind an abandoned shop and used hands and feet to find purchase on the loose limestone and sandstone rock. I was mildly surprised at the effort required and quickly chocked that up to a) being way out of shape, b) still getting over the cold I brought with me here, and c) the elevated heat and difficulty in climbing such loose scree. But I made it up to a kind of plateau overlooking the town, which was my object anyway and was presented with a grand view of the Boulevard, the Marriott dominating one end of it, a military tower off in the middle distance and hazy in the early afternoon light, and the Red Sea spread out “bluely” from one side of the entire view to the other – millionaire’s yachts dotting the bay like Lego pieces for obscenely wealthy children. I looked about me and saw small, slithery trails from what can only have been snakes and lizard tails, talus cones of sediment setting from where construction had ceased, and a few red-painted markers. These last gave me pause for consideration. The last time I had come across red paint on rocks of any kind had turned out to be warnings of a field of land mines. I had rented a horse for a few hours in the Sinai in 1992 and taken him here and there, shooting pictures from the saddle. I had been extremely lucky (the horse, perhaps less so – or maybe moreso in that nothing untoward happened). And I so I convinced myself that the red, fluttering flags here and there, and the odd red piece of rope on the ground were mere remnants of the earnest attempt at taming raw earth. Yeah, that was it. I took a few more photos and found the way down the earth-movers had made that would have made my scrambling up a sheer slope less arduous. It was even paved, sort of. But then I saw a guard’s hut at the foot of this way down, and thought “uh oh”, followed by “rats”, followed by something unprintable. Oh well, I thought to myself “Brass it out, Danny”. I learned this phrase years ago when viewing “The Man Who Would Be King” – quite possibly my favourite movie, although The Year of Living Dangerously is certainly in contention (as is Dersu Uzala, and…oh you know what I mean). Fortunately, the guard post was unmanned at the time, but very much still in use. I hastened to the sidewalk and wandered back to the hotel to collapse on the bed for a little nap. So went this day.
