In 1995, when I was eighteen years old, I began a gap year overseas. My experiences in Egypt were character-building to say the least, and I have many fond memories of attempted muggings, freight hopping, jumping off moving buses, being stranded in...
"We got to Sharm el Sheik at 5 am. We managed to get to the 'Sharm' volunteers' place and then found that we'd been left a note saying they'd gone to Dahab – I guess because we were late!
"Anyway, we caught another bus to Dahab which turned out to be only an hour away! We got there safe and sound at last.
"Dahab was really cool. It's really cheap with holiday camps that join on to a road lined on either side with restaurants. You have to go through the restaurants to get to the beach, but they are not like proper restaurants with chairs and tables. They are more like big tents with carpets, rugs and cushions for lazing on – the Arab feel. Having said that, they have based the holiday village on a Caribbean style i.e. palm trees everywhere, the clothes worn by the staff and the food being cooked. Every restaurant (nearly) has some sort of theme i.e. 'The Shark' one had a freshly caught shark hanging up to be cooked (small one though).
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"Our first night there [...] Ben and I went to climb Mt Sinai. The others had gone the previous night. What you do is climb it during the night so that you can get to the top just as the sun rises. The terrain in this part of Egypt is beautiful: mountains, desert and the sea! We started climbing at 1 am and took about 2 ½ hours to make it. At the top it's freezing, and there are little [huts from which Bedouins] dish out tea and thick blankets. We waited for ages, and there were about 100 people or so up there to watch.
"At about 6 am, the sun comes up – and it's so excellent. The thing is it starts to rise under the cloud layer [and] it's really confusing as to which line is the horizon at first.
[...]
"[It was] really funny as the Arab Bedouins were asking the Japanese tourist (complete with video camcorders and cameras) if they wanted tea etc, and so they chanted a few times 'Please, Japanese' and just about everyone was laughing!
[After the descent, we wandered through Saint Catherine's Monastery, at the foot of the mountain and saw what is believed to be the burning bush where Moses was appointed to lead the Israelites of Egypt. The tree appears stricken by a strange phenomenon since no leaves grow on its bottom half. We later discovered that this is because the tourists pick them!]
"We spent one more day in Dahab, and then we all went back to Sharm el Sheikh. The volunteers' accommodation there is like a surf shack which is really cool. It's amazing to think that down here during winter is the busiest time of the year as the summer is too hot here.
"We had [an] Egypt vs Jordan football match, 5-a-side and we won it, so there'll be a rematch in [***].
"New Year's Eve was spent at a party in some rich guy's big house by the sea. About 300 people came during the night and out of 30 big pizzas, between the 10 of us, we managed to scoff 9 of them!! There was lots of proper beer as well which makes a change from grotty Egyptian 'Stella'. All the people there were either English or American and were all holiday makers. The thing that we all remarked upon was the patheticness [sic] of it all – the atmosphere – everyone was behaving contrived, all flirting or showing off etc. being cool like people normally do at parties. This was the first [proper] party we had been to since being here. We've been here 4 months, and some of us 5 months, and so we had a big discussion on the way back to the hut. Just about the way we'd lived amongst Arab people so far and haven't had to impress anyone, especially girls for a while, and by what we wear. It doesn't matter what you wear here – Egyptians stare at you anyway. Don't get me wrong. We haven't gone all critical or anything. It was just strange to witness something like a party which seems so false as we haven't been to one for ages."
5th letter home to Mum
Here are a few recollections that never made the letter: first, I felt embarrassed that in 4 months we hadn't managed to catch up with Andrew in Cairo yet given that he was the only volunteer there, especially since we'd actually been on a trip there by this time. It turned out that he'd been to Alex on a trip and not caught up with us either!
In Dahab, I made a joke that I didn't quite pull off, and a couple of the volunteers laughed at me openly. I told myself that they were probably stoned as a way to protect my ego, even though I had no proof that they actually were.
A couple of days later in Sharm el Sheikh, one of the volunteers, who was based in Jordan, had a go at me for spitting out of a window in the surf shack. I'd actually had an out of control sneeze and explained this to him afterwards. He did apologise, but he'd accused me in front of everyone, and I felt like the wind had been taken out of my sails for a day or two. He was one of three volunteers on a project, and the other two commented on how he smelt behind his back on our last day together. This gave me a more nuanced perspective of his earlier surly accusation.
What else...? We watched camel racing while we were there.
