How to Dive the Red Sea

Well, you all know how the story ends: I'm crisped, stung, sick and pneumonic, low on sleep and high on frustration. But this bullet point dénouement really belies the total experience, so let's see if I can recreate the weekend in a way that encapsulates both the highs and the lows. Here goes.

Pictures unabashedly stolen from friends.

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Thursday night after a quick shopping trip, an even quicker shower and a bite of food, Hammad and I headed off to the dive shop in Dokki. Even though it was in the opposite direction of the Ramses bus station, our trip leaders were concerned we that we wouldn't all make it to the station (and also probably wanted us to haul our scuba gear around so they didn't have to). As dusk fell on the city, we rolled into the dive shop, where organized chaos met general disarray. Some kids were digging through their backpacks, wondering if they had remembered sunglasses; others were double-checking all the gear in their scuba bags. All of us were reaching for our wallets.

The proprietors were concerned first and foremost about exacting payment. We had already paid in hard, US cash for the classroom academics and instruction manual (when ended up being over $325, when all was not-quite-explicitly-said and done), and we were assured that the actual dive trip itself would cost just 70LE. When we chose the "safari boat" option, that price turned into 300LE, with meals, transportation and accommodations included. Of course, when we got there that night, the cost was 430LE: 300LE + 130LE for the bus transportation. I had only 450LE in my wallet--a small fortune here in Egypt--and had no choice but to fork it over.

There were about 20 of us, comprised almost entirely of AUC study abroad students, but including one random Egyptian businessman named Ahmed who was quite nice but surely felt out of place with a group of crazy Americans. We took minibuses to the bus station and waited for our bus to arrive.

At around 9:15pm, our bus pulled away from the curb. After some excited tittering and the lighting fast consumption of recently-purchased candy, we settled in to get some fitful sleep on the 5 hour bus ride to Hurghada. You never really sleep that well on buses, but you do your best.

That's when the movie started.

I tell you, I don't get it. Terrible sound quality, misaligned tracking and maladjusted volume aside, I cannot understand why a loud, long movie would be played on an overnight bus ride where every single person on board was trying to sleep. A collective groan went up when the movie started (it's par for the course on almost every bus ride in Egypt), sighs of happiness rippled through the rows whenever the movie stopped, and angry mumbling could be heard when it inevitably started again. Even through the drowning noise of my iPod, it was impossible to sleep. At least the movie was entertaining.

Although it was mostly in Arabic, it was the story of a hapless shisha bar owner and his misadventures with Americans. I wasn't following it too closely--once in awhile, I'd hear one of the customers in his restaurant say, "But I'm an American, dammit!"--until I looked up to see footage of the second plane flying into the World Trade Center. That's a very powerful clip, and I didn't really understand why it was being shown in what seemed like a comedy. You'd better believe after that it had my attention, comprehension of Arabic be damned.

The main character goes on to somehow meet George Bush, who is looking for an Arab to play Osama bin Laden in a video released to the US. They spend a lot of time in the studio, with Bush directing in a Billy Bob Thorton type drawl: "Be more terroristic." Condi shows up at some point, and points at things with impunity. Eventually the main character is brought before the White House Press Corps as bin Laden, and then sent to some Gitmo-type prison where a Lynnie England look-alike strips for him (?!) and he then escapes with the help of a prison guard.

Toward the end of the movie, the bus attendant told a girl in our group who spoke Arabic that he wanted us all to know that it was a comedy. All I could think was: is this how Russians feel after watching any Tom Clancy-inspired movie?

After the movie, they started playing loud music which lasted the duration of the trip. We rolled into Hurghada at about 2am, got on a minibus that took us to the dock.

Our boat was a 50m, four-floor yacht named Empros with a lot of dark wood and brass and nautical stripes and generally everything a boat is supposed to have. After a quick briefing by the crew and our dive leaders, we found out that we would be getting up at 8am the next day, and as it was nigh 4am, we booked it to bed.

The morning found us somewhere in the middle of the Red Sea, anchored on the edge of a coral reef. While we waited for our breakfast to be served, I took a look at our surroundings. The water was a deep and clean blue. The distant shore was smooth and tawny. And the sea was dotted with happily buoyant pink jellyfish floating like tea candles. Huh.

Assured that the jellyfish weren't anything to worry about, we ate our typical Egyptian breakfast--foul, bread, honey and crepes--were divvied into groups of six, got our brief about the area we were diving (Abu Ramada/The Aquarium) and started suiting up. My instructor was Osama, and I was in the all-girl group. For the rest of the trip, Osama's wrangling yells of ya binat!! (hey girls!!) played a starring role in my dreams.

The suiting up process was always interesting.

Step One (pictured): Attempt to get into wetsuit onesie. Get one foot in. Jump up and down. Get knee in. Remember putting on tights in elementary school. Scrunch up from the bottom. Wiggle. Repeat with other leg. Attempt to get it over your ass. Feel like the suit is judging you. Moan. Get your arms in. Velcro shoulder straps. Step Two: Put on wetsuit jacket with little half-legs. Wonder why you have to have another layer of Neoprene around your thighs. Wage war against the zipper. Win. Step Three: Wetsuit booties. Step Four: Fiddle with your vest. Attach your regulator to the oxygen tank. Check pressure. Step Five: Put on weight belt. Do your best Shakira hip shake. Mention that this would be a great workout. Step Six: Have one of the very nice deckhands help you put on your insanely heavy vest and tank. Fasten appropriate straps and belts. Step Seven: Shuffle to the back of the boat. Awkwardly put on your flippers. Spit into your mask; rinse. Step Eight: Penguin shuffle over to your buddy. Do a buddy check. Watch in horror as one of your regulators inevitably goes crazy and loses 20 bar of air before it can be stopped. Mentally prepare yourself to get into the water that looks very, very cold. Inflate your vest. Put on your goggles. Tell everyone and their mother that they can go ahead of you.

Step Nine: Jump.

Breathing underwater isn't something that comes naturally. And while that may sound like a pretty obvious statement, even snorkeling goes against my basic instincts. When my face is in the water, I'm holding my breath. And since the cardinal rule of scuba diving is that you never hold your breath underwater, I had to fight against my brain to accept the fact that I indeed could take a full and complete breath through my regulator. I had gotten over it in the pool, but had to do a little bit of mental encouragement to do it again in the water.

We slowly descended along a weighted rope, pausing every few meters to adjust our ears to the pressure. We went down to about 9m, and sat on the floor of the ocean, practicing skills. We practiced switching regulators underwater, clearing water out of our mask by blowing out of our nose, and how to do the ever-elusive "fin pivot" which demonstrated a mastery of neutral buoyancy.

That was the first dive. After some deck time to absorb the nitrogen in our bodies, we dove again. This time we descended a little faster, practiced more skills like hovering and shared air, and swam around a bit. Personal victory came when my instructor ripped my mask off and handed it back to me, and I didn't freak out and breathe in through my nose. I kept my eyes closed, calmly inhaled through my regulator, and cleared the mask with one strong blow through my nose. We won't go into what happened when I practiced this in the pool.

We were done for the evening, and retired to the boat to listen to music, play cards, eat and just generally hang out. We were getting up the next morning at 7, but I had to wait for a rather important phone call from Jake which would be coming around midnight. From the top deck, we watched the sunset, which lit up the cliffs of Hurghada unlike anything I've ever seen.

I killed time hanging with the Egyptian deck hands and dive instructors, who, like all Egyptians, seem to never sleep. We watched dive videos, talked about certification levels, and played cards. I showed the resident Speed champion how it's done, and didn't let him forget it. I then taught them all Spit, and proceeded to wipe the deck with them.

In the middle of this, Jake called early to tell me that a tornado had ripped through his tiny southern town, avoiding his house but hitting the local high school and killing a bunch of students. Then my Dad called to tell me that Washington Mutual had decided to shut off my debit card for no real reason, even though I had put a travel notice on my account. After about 15 minutes of being on a conferenced hold with Card Services, we gave up. Then Jake called again to tell me his assignment...and wouldn't you know I couldn't hear a word he was saying. After waiting a year and a half to know this answer, and my reception craps out. Admittedly, I was in the middle of the Red Sea, but still. I finally made out his locale for the next three years: Cheyenne, Wyoming. That wasn't exactly D.C., and all my little hopes and dreams just kind of fizzled out. Disappointed, tired and frustrated with Vodafone and WaMu, I retired to my bunk.

Early Saturday morning, I woke up to some not so pleasant stomach cramps. With the previous nights' events washing back into my consciousness, I elected to stay in bed and skip breakfast. The cramps got worse, but after a large mental debate with myself ("Um, when are you going to be back in the Red Sea again?" "But I'm tiiiired. And sick." "Red Sea, Kari."), I got out of bed and hit the deck just in time for suit up. Hammad had kindly saved me some food that I would later eat. I didn't know that it would be the last food I would eat for quite some time.

We played the wetsuit game again. It's always fun.

The third dive was incredible. A few skills at the bottom, but it was mostly a real dive. We swam all around the coral reefs at about 13m down, and let me tell you, I've never seen so many fish in my life. After a summer as an Oregon ZooTeen working exclusively in the Tidal Pool section, I pretty much consider myself an expert on marine life. And I didn't even know where to start down there.

Masked butterfly fish. Emperor angelfish. Pennant fish with long, trailing crowns. The omnipresent damsels and clown fish. Groupers and parrot fish. Morays. A few blue spotted rays. Long, spindly cornet fish, and massive herds of schooling fish that just hung in the water, still like a curtain. We were even lucky enough to see the venomous stone fish and lion fish. And let's not forget the foundation of all of this: the coral. Teeming with sponges and anemones, the brilliantly white coral stretched infinitely and intricately around us.

At the end of the third dive, we practiced a shared-air ascent, where my buddy was "out of air" and used my back-up regulator, or octopus, for breathing. Together, we would slowly reach the surface as one unit. It worked very well, and we only had one more skill to practice: Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent (CESA), where we practice ascending to the surface on only one breath, continuously exhaling as to equalize the pressure in our lungs so that our lungs don't explode. Kind of key.

We were floating in the water one by one, waiting for our turn to practice CESA, when I realized that my right hand was stinging. Clumsily, I pulled it out of the water to see a small pink jellyfish draped over my fingers like some kind of hand towel. With a resounding thwbbpt, I flung it off me; to my dismay, white and red welts had started to form along my knuckles. After practicing my CESA, I stole some vinegar from the kitchen and self-medicated. It didn't really bother me for the rest of the trip, but I still have some neat scars on my fingers.

We rested and relaxed on the deck of the boat before our fourth and final dive, which would prove to be more challenging than I expected.

We suited up for our fourth dive, which was supposed to be purely fun with one skill at the end. The descent wasn't as smooth as the last three times: this time, my ears refused to clear. All the tricks I had learned stopped working. For the rest of the dive, I would be plagued with intense pain in my ears (my left ear still hasn't cleared as of writing this).

As I waited at the bottom for the rest of our team to finish their descent, I noticed I was having trouble staying down. The descent had been difficult anyway, as I wasn't able to sink without someone pulling on my belt. I was doing everything in the book--fully deflated vest, exhaling deeply to remove my lungs of buoyant air--but I could NOT get down without help. And once I was down there, I had to fight to stay down. I don't know why this was the case, but it continued to haunt me the rest of the dive.

About two minutes into our swim, my weight belt fell off. Luckily I caught it, or I would have definitely shot to the surface. I struggled to put it back on, and ended up fighting with the latch the rest of the dive. Most of my diving compatriots were controlling their depth through a combination of breathing (breathe in and you float up, breathe out and you sink) and inflating/deflating their vest. As my vest was completely empty of air, I was using just my breathing to try to stay down, and had to kick and fight for every meter. It was beautiful down there, still, but I couldn't focus on the scenery.

About halfway through the dive, as we swam over an outcropping of coral, I lost my fight with neutral buoyancy and started floating towards the top. My instructor kept signalling for me to deflate my vest, pantomiming wildly with his thumb over his deflate button.

There's nothing more frustrating to be frantically told to do something that is impossible. I had no air in my vest to let out. I surfaced, followed by about three other girls who apparently had the same problem. Without speaking, my instructor pulled me underwater again, and I struggled once again to maintain neutral buoyancy in the water.

My weight belt came off again, and I was getting pretty low on air. I was halfway through the "red zone" on my indicator, and I had pretty much had it, so it was time to surface. And that's exactly what my instructor gestured for me to do. This time, however, it would be me who was out of air, and my buddy who would loan me her octopus.

So here's where things went wrong.

There I am, about 10m down, struggling to not shoot to the surface, and I have to negotiate breathing from someone else's tank. But I've done it dozens of times, no problem. I'm a pro: I take a deep breath from my regulator, remove it from my mouth, and immediately begin blowing little bubbles out of my mouth. I then take my buddy's octopus, clear it by exhaling deeply, and takea long, hard breath of sweet, beautiful oxygen.

Except this time, all I got was water.

Numbly, as I was still inhaling, I struggled to realize what had happened. Why did I have water in my lungs? What was going on? I took in a little more water. I put my hand up to my mouth. All I had in my mouth was a bite valve.

Did I grab my snorkel instead? That's what it felt like, as I could taste the salt water rushing into my mouth through the bite valve. No, not the snorkel; I had taken the regulator, which was now floating in a few pieces in front of my face. The mouthpiece had come off the regulator. Huh.

With no air in my lungs, and water in my mouth, I didn't quite know what to do. I reached for my regulator and whacked straight into my instructor, who had his octopus ready for me. But I had nothing left with which to exhale and clear the regulator. To inhale some air from the regulator, I'd have to inhale some more water.

So that's what I did. I took a short, sharp breath, and exhaled as hard as I could. I did this over and over, until finally my mouth was clear of water. I quickly switched over to my regulator and shot to the surface with my buddy right behind me. I don't even know if I had my eyes open on the way up, if I held my breath, or how long it took. It's easy to say that in an emergency situation, you can slowly and calmly ascend to the surface, but when you just got a lungful of water and you can't control your buoyancy anyway, it's a whole different situation.

I could hear the rales in my lungs when I started breathing air on the surface. Those lasted for quite some time, in between coughing fits and waves of nausea. My instructor seemed unphased by what had happened--"It happens."--but to me my near-death experience was pretty jarring. Not jarring enough, however, to prevent me from completing the required 200m swim and ten minute float for my certification after the final dive. But believe me, I collapsed afterwards.

We hung out on the top deck until we docked at Hurghada around 4. After wrangling our gear, we took a walk around downtown Hurghada. We piled into minibuses about an hour later, got to the Hurghada bus station at 6...only to find out that they had sold all of our seats on the 7pm bus because no one had come to pick them up. This meant we would have to wait for the 9pm bus back to Cairo. Annoying, sure, but no biggie, right? What's two more hours in Hurghada?

And then calamity struck my digestive system.

It arrived slowly and insidiously, like a coming storm: I couldn't tell you when it the weather started to turn, but I could tell you when it started to rain. And rain it did. Let's just say that those morning stomach cramps came back with a vengance, and allowed me to see the inside of at least four different bathrooms in Hurghada, all with different states of hygiene. (If you're interested, never under any circumstances use the ladies' restroom in the Hurghada Bus Station, because if you're not sick already, you will be.)

The bus ride was like nothing I've ever experienced before. I was doubled over in pain. I was nauseus beyond name. I spent a lot of time trying to mind-over-matter my stomach into submission, and to some extent it worked. But let me tell you this: when it was 3:00 am and the driver pulled over to let out two passengers and have a smoke, there was almost a diplomatic incident.

We finally made it back to the dorms, dragging our scuba gear behind us, at 4am. After I narrowly escaped an assault charge with the fine security guards at my dorm (see previous post), I spent a lot of time in the fetal position in my bathroom, talking to my parents on Skype because I couldn't sleep, or running to the floor's sole bathroom which is convinentaly located as far as geographically possible from my room.

I didn't really notice my sunburn until I went to lay down, but despite the rampant use of sunscreen employed on the boat, I managed to make my back very, very unhappy. It's currently an interesting shade of angry lobster/fushia.

Sunday, I skipped my only class and just generally felt sorry for myself. Sarah infused me with Gatorade, which is probably more expensive here per ounce than gold. I slept a bit, and continued the war on my intestines. I went to the market with Sarah Sunday night to get some bananas (the only part of the BRAT diet available in Egypt, as toast seems to be a foreign concept here), I noticed an odd rash on my palms. No idea what it was--Kevin, if you're reading this, it was NOT ringworm--but by this point, I could have started growing spines and I wouldn't be too surprised.

So the conclusion of the weekend found me sort of physically destroyed. Sometimes I still breathe and feel a little water in there. My ears haven't popped yet. I can't wear a tshirt without considerable discomfort. And I'm still beholden to the location of the nearest bathroom. I have cuts, bruises, and jellyfish welts.

But I wouldn't have traded this weekend for the world: I saw some incredible, amazing marine animals, met some great people, got away from Cairo to somewhere with clean air, and lived like a king all weekend for about US$75. It was, in a word, fantastic.

Now if I could just start digesting food normally, that'd be great.