Ido -left, I in the middle, Eyal - right
I was up early this morning, you have to be at the Aqua Sport Diving Club at 8:30am to get your shut together and cross the Israeli/Egyptian border - a lengthy and tedious procedure, as you move (in either direction) between surly, unpleasant Israeli border control (mainly young females) with attitude problem bordering (oops!) on the malicious, and thick, work-by-numbers (exclusively male) excruciatingly slow Egyptian officers. Truly an off-putting experience. Ido (pronounced Ee-doh), our guide and divemaster, keeps our passports, and his cool, as he takes us through the seemingly endless points of inspection. We are made to wait here, stand there, long eyelashes drop gravely as yet another person - pick your side of the border - scans your passport photo (I'm convinced I look nothing like mine - they'll never let me through, surely), then rise to meet your own eyes, while the eyebrows continue the ascent a fraction - that's supposed to be you? Get outta here! We finally find ourselves on the Egyptian side, and it only took little over an hour. Now we make our way, on foot, to the Aqua Sport branch adjacent to the Taba Hilton - a mere 30 m away from the official border. Our group is not large. Ido is assisted by Eyal, not the one who gave me the refresher yesterday, but another one, who joined Aqua Sport yesterday, having lost his livelihood in Thailand in the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami in December 2004. A handsome young man, keen to show off his skills as he essentially auditions for a job. There is one Dutch man, the only non-Israeli among us, a proud dad and his pre-army service daughter - Ido, our guide, ever cheerful, keeps addressing her as "gever" (man, or hombre) and she squeals with delight each time, and a middle-aged couple from some moshav in the north of Israel, he - a put upon husband with a bad back, she - a large woman who apparently makes all the decisions for him, lectures everybody on whatever is being said, and declares her dislike of ...almost anything actually. I try, and fail miserably, to put a smile on that frowning face. Eyal, a charming guy with no airs and graces tries too - nothing. The woman must have had her sense of humour surgically removed. Oh, well. The dives are just wonderful, albeit with poor visibility - the wind has not let up since I arrived, and it's raising some waves (as much as you can get in the Red Sea, i.e. not very). It makes some underwater sandstorms but at 15m it's still not bad at all: we see fantastic corals and a bustling market-place for fish - feeding, cleaning, darting here and there playfully, some large groupers come up to check you out, or you find yourself in the midst of a huge shoal of small, brightly coloured fish. I got to see some mature octopus, creeping his way along a coral, some lion-fish with their poisonous spines swaying on their backs as a warning to anyone with some funny ideas, big parrot-fish, colourful, with a beak-like mouths, sea-snakes, mornay eels, small manta rays - you have to be very "quiet" as the slightest movement represents potential danger to these remarkable creatures, and they refuse to come out to play - they must know how delicious they can be! Well, some of them anyway.
In the evening Bella invites me to a dinner at her friend's place. We sit on the porch in a housing complex - effectively an apartment hotel on its own compound, very modern, with its own facilities including a swimming pool, a bar, snooker table etc. It is used almost exclusively by the hotel and catering workers of Eilat, so it feels like a microcosm - a small community. Gabi cooks us steaks on the bar-b-que, we drink wine and chat the night away. Very civilised.
No comments:
Post a Comment