November 13, 2007: Neptune’s Revenge or Could you speak a little louder? I’ve got a banana in my ear…

Or at least, that’s what it feels like. After barely a week of diving, I managed to trap a miserable little plankton in my ear, and it cooked up overnight into one hell of an infection. I tried to wait it out, but by the second day I knew it was too much for eardrops and paracetamol alone. So of I went to the recompression chamber in Marsa Alam, a one and a half hour drive away (there’s a hospital here in El Quseir, but it is ill-advised to avail of its services), where the doctor was waiting for me. (Despite everything else I may have to say about the dive centre and it’s management, I was really impressed at how quickly they arranged for medical care for me)

For the record, on a pain scale of 1-10, I was already sitting at around an 8, with painkillers. So when the doctor took a long strip of gauze, coated it with antibiotic cream and jammed it deep into my ear canal with a pair of blunt scissors, it really fucking hurt. (If you’re a Gillis, think of this as about equal to taking a meat thermometer and ramming it into your ear with a ballpine hammer. Man, I hate it when that happens!) When he was finished he patted me on the shoulder as if he were a soccer coach and I’d just made a nice pass. Then he prescribed me four different drugs, told me to keep the ear pack in until Thursday and stay out of the water for a week, asked for €25 (staff price; tourists pay €50), accepted C$20 instead (only about €14 but all the cash money I had — I’m completely broke until payday) and sent me on my way.

Of course, for most people an ear infection isn’t a big deal. Once the antibiotics kick in, the pain is mostly gone and you can get back to your regular routine. But it’s counter duty for me for the rest of the week — no diving. (Insert Napoleon Dynamite-esque sigh here.) I hate the counter. Dang it. It’s just so damn boooring. It’s low season so you spend half the day hanging around doing nothing — but you still have to hang around in case someone comes by. And I’m not much use at reception anyway since all the dive centre guests are German and half of them, when they get to the counter and find out they have to speak English, will actually not bother. We’re in Egypt, people! You should be thankful you don’t have to speak Arabic! (All of which begs the question, why did they hire an English-French instructor in the first place?!) Anyway, malesh.

November 4, 2007: Asalaam alaikum

So, I had tried to orchestrate everything ahead of time to make my return to Egypt as smooth as possible, but of course in Egypt there always has to be some drama. Here, nothing ever runs like clockwork, so as the minutes ticked by while I waited outside the airport for my friends to pick me up, I figured their lateness was simply because they’d lost track of time, or possibly gotten the dates mixed up. Since I didn’t have Hamada’s phone number on me, I started to consider my options: I could get a taxi to take me to an internet café to get his number, then to a phone store to buy a SIM card to call him. He wouldn’t leave until I’d paid him; I’d just have to trust him not to run off with all my luggage… Such thoughts were pushing ever more forward in my mind as Hamada ambled up to the entrance and walked me back to his beat-up Fiat. We got in but he didn’t start it. Instead, he pulled out a phone (nearly the same size as his car) and started calling around to anyone he knew who worked in airport security. See, Ali had also been meant to pick me up, but there had been an argument with security at the gate when they drove in, and Ali, unlike Hamada, had not simply smiled and nodded and submitted to the power game played here by anyone in a uniform. So, he’d been taken into custody.

We eventually left the airport, sans Ali, and had a shai at coffee shop in town, where more phone calls ensued. Eventually Ali was released, and he met us at the café, everything still perfectly intact, including his pride (which is what got him into trouble in the first place).

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I spent the next day in Makadi Bay, where I caught up with Salah, my favourite student, and the rest of the compressor and dive crew. All the Europeans I used to work with are gone, but the Egytians are all still there and it was great to catch up with them all.

They haven't changed a bit, of course. Just me. My nickname has gone from enaba, which means grape, to badtir: watermelon. Great.

Salah relaxing after a long day in the equipment room:



Hamada, looking, as usual, like he's on top of the world.



I made a dive on Shaab Makadi Middle. Just on the edge of Makadi Bay, it had been one of my favourite nearby dive sites. With all the development that has been going on in the area over the last year or two, I was expecting a lot of reef degradation. But it didn’t lessen my disappointment at seeing the damage that has happened in just 16 months. There are table corals here in just 7 metres of water that used to be so vibrant, with every available surface encrusted with some type of coral, sponges draping over the edges, brittle stars and urchins perched at every angle, stingrays hiding under every shelter, and fish everywhere. I used to call it Giverny. Now, well, it’s still a nice little dive site, but many of the corals are bleached, sponges have withered, algae has overgrown many surfaces, and the fish just aren’t there in the same numbers: it’s only a shadow for what it used to be. I snorkeled a bit in the afternoon on one of the two housereefs. It used to be a perfect spot for intro dives, but it’s barely worth snorkeling on now.

October 29, 2007: Goodbye grey skies, hello blue

Okay, okay, I had one day of blue sky in London, but c’mon, London in November? One day is pretty good.

Anyway, I had a nice farewell dinner in Ottawa with Mom and Dad, Matante Marcelle, cousins Matt and Lisa, and even Mononcle Gilles, who just happened to have flown in to town from the Sault. Note to self: in future, avoid steak dinners before boarding overseas flights, particularly when flying cattle class.

(For those of you not in the know, I gave up waiting for job interviews back home and waiting for my boyfriend to leave the ship — he's still there — and decided to get back in the water. I looked all over but found work in Egypt first.)

Arrived in London the next morning without any hiccups — I didn’t even have to pay excess baggage for my dive kit — and Ali was waiting for me in arrivals to get me on the train to hers in St. Albans before heading off for another action-packed day of crime-fighting in the capital. She had big plans for me that day: the sun was shining and she’d armed me with a map of St. Albans and instructions for a walk that would take me through the park next to the abbey, the remains of a Roman town, and a museum on the area’s Roman history. By the time I got to casa, dulce casa, though, a hot shower and a clean bed were luxuries not to be passed up.

The following day I was ready to tackle Ali’s self-guided tour of St. Albans. It was a good excuse to take a few test shots with my new camera.

A view of the abbey from the park:


View through the remains of the Roman wall.


The local flora and fauna:




A couple of the Roman floor mosaics on display in the museum:



And then, it was time. I’d avoided it as long as I could. But this was my last day in the U.K. Time to face the music, take the bull by the horns, go mano a mano with my shopping nemesis. I had one day to find some swimwear before departing for Egypt. If I’d known what a big deal this was going to be I’d have done it in Canada, where you can find a bikini shop in every mall. Who knew the Brits didn’t have such things? Don’t they get the winter doldrums and need bikinis for sun holidays during the cold months? My mission took persistence and ingenuity, but I finally, exhaustedly, claimed victory over the shopping demons who’d conspired against me, and celebrated my success with Ali over some very good South Indian food on Regent Street and a couple of beers at G.A.Y.




And that, as they say, was that. I was on the plane the next morning and Hurghada bound.

(And for good measure, here are a couple of tourist shots of the Alps. I don't think I've taken photos from a plane window since my first flight as a kid!)