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.