Another update to add to the collection. This time for the month of November that I spent catching up on some sun in Egypt.

To be honest I don’t have a huge range of exciting tall tales to be told about the trip. I have a lot of interesting eye-opening experiences and a few lessons learnt, but nothing worth going on in detail about in an email…well actually, there is the one about the close encounter of a sexual kind with a dolphin, but I might leave that until last to keep people reading : )

Mostly I have a few stories that are best discussed over a quite ale, but in the absence of the opportunity to do that, here’s a “brief” summary of the trip.

I spent the first two weeks of the trip doing one of the organised tourist tours around the country with a group of other Aussies and Kiwis in roughly the same situation in life as me (although some of them shouldn’t have ever bothered to leave home by the way they complained so much).

The tour took in a well travelled tourist route around most of the country, encompassing Cairo - Aswan - Luxor and Dahab.

The highlights mostly included the usual tourist attractions, i.e. the Pyramids of Giza/Sphinx, Valley of the Kings, a whole lotta temples, cruising down the Nile on a Felucca, being in a Muslim country for the holy month of Ramadan, Egyptian markets galore and a variety of other smaller tourist activities.

The Pyramids and the Sphinx are definitely worth going to see. They are a very impressive sight and absolutely huge. However, it was kind of hard to enjoy the experience when you are constantly struggling to fight through the crowds of other tourists, at the same time as fending of the locals trying to sell you endless streams of dodgy souvenirs at ten times their worth. The constant haggling was something I was well sick of by the end of the trip, when you have to haggle for every time you buy for everything down to a pack of gum from a store it soon loses its novelty. I mostly end up paying twice as much as I should for things because it wasn’t worth the effort of haggling over the equivalent of 10p English.

The quantities of tourists in Egypt definitely lessened the experience of the trip somewhat. It was hard to imagine you were going to somewhere exotic and different when you constantly surrounded by people from every nationality, touting cameras and buying useless pieces of junk. There is a well founded tourist industry in Egypt that churns people through the same beaten track charging tourists ten times what a local would pay for the same experience. It takes something away from it, but still you take out of it what you make of it. And, it was entertaining seeing the locals charging Americans twice what other tourists were paying just because they could get away with it.

All the markets/bazaars, etc. also suffered from the same problems. The second any store owners saw a tourist coming they automatically cranked up the sales pitch because they know tourists are an easy source of money.

I can definitely say that temples and hieroglyphics no longer hold much of an appeal to me. After seeing the first two temples the rest just became a blur. Not being a connoisseur of ancient Egyptian history I didn’t fully appreciate what I was being shown for anything other then the novelty value. As impressive as it all is, there is only so many pictures you can take (and I did take a few).

The Valley of the Kings was the same experience again. More hieroglyphics and crowds of tourists. The best thing about the Valley was riding a Donkey out and around there from town. Purely for the entertainment factor, a group of twenty tourists cruising along, out of control on a bunch of donkeys with minds of their own is a ridiculous site. Thankfully, the donkeys knew their way around and weren’t interested in some stupid tourist steering them off a cliff, so us back seat drivers didn’t have to do anything except try not fall of ourselves.

The highlight of the tour was by far the two days we spent cruising down the Nile on Feluccas (small traditional sailing boats). Doing nothing but lazing around on deck covered in mattresses, indulging in a variety of recreational activities, jumping in for a swim occasionally, watching the Nile cruise by is a great way to spend a couple of days. If you can handle sleeping on deck and going without showers and toilets for a couple of days its great experience.

Overall, the tour was a good time. Even though I was happy to see the back of most of my tour group by the end of it, it was a good way to do it. Trying to find your own way around the country would be a constant battle that would end in you paying twice as much as you should without a tour guide to steer you in the right direction.

After the tour, I stopped in Dahab for another two weeks to learn how to scuba dive. Diving is definitely an incredible experience, its another world altogether down there. On top of that, Dahab & the Red Sea has some of the best diving to be done in the world. I saw a variety of reefs, marine life, some world famed dive sites including The Blue Hole, The Eel Garden and The Thistlegorm shipwreck (something else all together) - for those diving enthusiasts who know there stuff out there.

By far the best dive I did was one that is considered to be at the height of diving experiences, one that many hard-core divers dream off. On only my fifth dive, still part of my training, we were headed out to one of the local sites. On our way into the water we passed a group coming out who were ecstatic at having briefly seen two dolphins swim past them. With a small air of hope we entered the water on the look out.

Before our entire group had even entered the water and assembled I found myself staring eye to eye with a bottlenose dolphin. When I overcame the momentary shock of the confrontation I realised that there were two of them happily circling our group checking out these strangers in their world.

For the next 58 minutes the 8 of us spent our time in the same spot enjoying the amazing experience of swimming and playing with the two wild dolphins who were just as excited by the experience as us. At one point when I was swimming along with one of them, doing my dolphin boy impression (/as my instructor later called it), when I managed to connect a little too well with it. Before I knew it I found myself coming face-to-face with the erection of an over-excited young dolphin. With stories about dolphins being the only other species on the planet to have sex for pleasure running through my mind, I gave up my attempts at friendship and quickly swam closer to the rest of my group. My instructor later told me that he’d never seen someone clench their butt cheeks as tightly as I did then. I may well be willing to give anything a try in life, but I never thought I’d have to give the disclaimer of trying anything but having sex with a dolphin.

Anyway, that’s the ’short’ of it. A month way definitely a long time, that seemed like an eternity when I finally had to return to the working world back in London. There are plenty of other smaller tales, and plenty of photos, to be told over time. As usual though, it was definitely worth. While I might not of always had a romping good time, the experience was worth every minute.

For now I’ve gotta come up with some other plan in life and somewhere else to go. I’m sure it won’t take long though.