At last, a day of relaxation! We didn’t have to be up on time to be anywhere, apart from breakfast really, so it was a nice change from charging around like a mad thing. Breakfast was fantastic! Sausage, eggs, bacon, mushrooms & fried bread… unfortunately, I woke up then and had to face the usual bread, jam, cheese & flipping natural yoghurt again. There were, at least, hard boiled eggs to be had, to add a bit of variety! The dropping wind (at last!) had led to an influx of persistent flies that put up a good fight over the bread roll I was after. Eventually I managed to subdue them long enough to gain control and retreated to the depths of the shade to make the usual processed cheese/goat’s cheese sandwich, washed down with a hearty mixture of water & grapefruit seed extract. That morning I tried to get clever and put the 4 drops in an entire cupful of water, thinking this would dilute the taste sufficiently not to taste it. It didn’t work. Yuck! Oh, and while I’m on the subject, just in case anyone ever thinks, “hmmm… natural yoghurt & honey – surely that will take away the taste of the grapefruit seed extract?” don’t bother. I tried. It doesn’t.

We’d arranged a couple of things with Ruth. Firstly we were going to snorkel around the “house reef” (i.e. the local bay at Nakari) and later on we were going on the sunset tour into the desert combined with a camel ride. The valiant snorkellers met with Ruth at the water’s edge at 10am to venture into the depths. We were hoping to find sea horses in the sea grass bed a few metres down in the bay, but the first thing we found was an enormous school of jellyfish! Fortunately these were the non-stinging kind, so they presented little more than a nuisance. Well, that is, to all of us except Martin, who for some reason was distinctly uneasy about the little purple blobs. He even went so far as to claim he’d been stung by one at one point! I personally brushed up against about 4,000 of the little rascals without being stung, so he must have been damn unlucky to find the only Portuguese Man O’ War in that lot…

Having found the bed of sea grass in about 5 metres of water, those that could dived down for a look but we didn’t find any sea horses unfortunately. We then set off for the left edge of the reef which had fewer jellyfish and worked our way outwards. Loads of new varieties of fish and an amazing sight awaited us just over the drop-off: a huge school of juvenile yellow barracuda was there (and stayed there for the rest of the week) all about 10 inches long. The way they moved almost as one was incredible. If you dived down and approached them slowly, they would circle around you in a huge silvery wall – a really impressive sight.

After we’d swum out about 100 metres or so from the beach, we crossed over the bay and came back in to shore along the right edge of the reef. The jellyfish weren’t too much of a problem further out from shore – it was in the warm water nearer the beach that they seemed to be congregating. I’m not sure what the natural predator of the jellyfish is in the red sea, but it isn’t doing its job! We then helped out clearing some of the rubbish out of the bay – lots of plastic bags mainly, which we scooped up and dumped into a zodiac craft as a few of the lodge staff helped out. OK, so the next day there was a fresh batch of bags, but at least we tried!

Lunch was a strange mixture of an oddly-flavoured spaghetti (sort of a bit like a pesto flavouring, but not quite) and, guess what? Yep. Chicken. It was nice chicken though! After lunch a few of us ventured back into the water, but the rest lolled about in the shade or sunbathed on mats just outside of it. We were basically killing time until about 3pm when the jeep was going to come and pick us up for the desert tour.

The jeep arrived on time and we were accompanied by Ruth, who was going to visit a nearby hotel whilst we were in the desert. We drove miles back up the road, even past Marsa Shagra, where we’d begun our week, and dropped Ruth off at her hotel venue with promises that we’d pick her up at about 7pm. After driving back a little further down the road, we turned off into the desert and began a bumpy 20 minute drive to where we were to rendezvous with the camels.

The camels were waiting for us with their two handlers: Ahmed (about 6 years old) and Mansoor (about 11). They were an unruly looking bunch and were capable of a wide range of noises… most of them reminiscent of ancient plumbing. One of us was going to have to be first to get on the kneeling camels and Sharon was the lucky person! Sensing a possible £150 from “You’ve been framed”, I put my camera in video mode, but unfortunately for us, Sharon managed to stay on admirably as her camel pitched her first forwards (as its back legs extended) then backwards (as the front end caught up). I was next to go, as the camel/tourist date arranger had picked on a particularly big & nasty piece of work and obviously needed someone equally big and nasty as a soul mate… It was a novel experience being unceremoniously pitched skywards as the camel unfolded its gangly legs… mind you, it probably doesn’t often have something my size to contend with!

The rest of the group managed to get aboard without any major incident and we set off with our camels linked together in two chains. Ahmed had Val, Linda & Frankie and Mansoor was leading Phil, Me, Sharon, James & Martin. We plodded through some pretty rugged terrain, which obviously serves as a river when the rains fall further inland. Saeed, our young Bedouin guide explained that it hadn’t rained since 1996, so we were unlikely to have to contend with any flooding… Just as the novelty value was wearing out, we arrived at our destination: a small Bedouin camp and once more went through the trials and tribulations of parting company with our trusty steeds… If anything, this was more fraught with danger than going up as the camels had an alarming tendency to drop to their knees with very little warning, as Martin discovered!

Making our way over to the camp as the sun started to set behind the hills, we found a mother with her two young children (whose names have escaped me now, unfortunately) along with her aunt and (I believe) her brother. The young mother was preparing a delicious flatbread by pounding and rolling out a simple-looking flour mixture, whilst the children sat and regarded us with suspicious eyes. Sharon, doing her Kate Adie bit, realised that we were in danger of treating the family a bit like a zoo exhibit and went to sit down to interact a bit. The children took to her straight away, eagerly accepting her offers of the hot bread that was being handed out to us. I also amazed the children by showing them pictures of themselves on my camera. Kids are the same anywhere in the world – they adore seeing pictures of themselves! After a few minutes of this, we went to look at the aunt making a sheep’s wool carpet, weaving the coarse threads very dexterously together. Saeed explained to us it would take around a month to make the carpet and it would only sell for the equivalent of about £20 at the end of it all… Sharon disappeared at this point to acquaint herself with a Bedouin toilet, an activity which passed by relatively harmlessly apart from her overbalancing at one point and nearly ending up falling down a fairly noxious hole in the ground!

We then retired to a point where a series of seats & cushions had been arranged into a large circle and watched whilst tea and coffee were prepared. The tea was vaguely minty and the coffee, which he had roasted and ground in front of us, was extremely strong, sweet and gingery. Along with some more of the flatbread, it was fantastic to sit there in such utter quietness as the sun’s last rays set the low hills around us aglow with a warm light. As the light began to fade, more and more stars started to appear in the clear sky above us until it was almost completely pitch black and there were just too many stars to believe… You can understand a lot more about light pollution once you’ve been somewhere truly dark!

All too soon, it was time to set off to meet up with Ruth and we started saying our goodbyes to the friendly Bedouins. 50 metres or so away, our driver was attempting to start the jeep for the return journey. “That didn’t sound good,” said Martin as the jeep made a noise that was a passable impression of one of the camels. By the time we’d walked down to the jeep, it was becoming clear that it was not a very well jeep at all…

The bonnet was up and our driver was delicately adjusting the battery terminals and the starter motor with a rock. As the jeep was exhibiting all the signs of a faulty starter motor or ignition coil, banging those two wasn’t an entirely bad idea as this could, in theory anyway, have freed up anything jammed. Not quite so sure what good banging the battery terminals was doing though! An equally bad idea was the hurricane lamp being held above the engine, which by now (judging by the strong smell of fuel) had been completely flooded. We attempted a bump start, but as the engine was flooded and the driver let go of the clutch before we’d got any speed up, nothing happened. The children joined us at this point and had a wonderful time being swung around in circles by all and sundry as the daft grown ups frantically disconnected and reconnected wires under the bonnet, seemingly at random. The approach appeared to be to boldly touch the live wire against most of the metallic objects in the engine compartment. “Yep, that blue wire is still the horn,” I muttered under my breath as the driver shattered the quietness of the night for about the 4th time by touching the live wire to the (particularly strident sounding) horn. It was becoming rapidly clear that they just hadn’t got a clue how to fix it. The mobile phones had no signal, so Saeed dispatched a runner to go back the 3 or 4 miles across the desert to civilisation to fetch a replacement jeep. It was fast approaching 7pm, when we should have been meeting up with Ruth and we had no way of letting her know what was going on…

We had two further attempts to jump start the jeep whilst we waited and each time it almost caught (and would have done, but for the fact that the driver kept flooring the bloody accelerator and flooding the engine in between jump starting attempts!). Saeed then explained that we were going to start walking out towards where the replacement jeep would meet us, so we said our goodbyes again to the children (who Sharon, Val and the others had been teaching to sing “Happy Birthday”) and set off in two lines into the utter darkness behind the solitary lamp. We pretty much retraced the route we’d come in by camel and it was fairly easy going, although some of the womenfolk just weren’t wearing sensible “walking in the desert “ shoes and were starting to scrape up their feet on the coarse sand that was getting in.

After half an hour or so, we began to see lights bouncing off the tops of the hills around us and we knew then that our replacement vehicle was near. After another 10 minutes or so of waiting around, the new pick-up truck arrived and we gratefully squeezed ourselves into the (far too small) space at the back of the truck. It was now about 8:30pm and Ruth was probably starting to wonder where we were (in fact, she’d been speaking with Thomas, the owner of the tour company we were out with, who had correctly guessed the probable hitch of the broken-down jeep, so probably wasn’t too worried, I should think…). The drive out of the desert was extremely uncomfortable as we were all wedged so tightly into the back of the truck, but it was nice when we finally got back onto the road and saw the lights of civilisation again… Although I didn’t hear it actually being said, I later heard that poor old James (who hadn’t really coped entirely well with the uncertainty and unpredictability of our situation out there) had leaned forward and said earnestly, “you know, we were lucky to get out of there alive…” Well, maybe it wasn’t quite that hair raising – but it adds a nice air of glamour to the whole expedition, so it works for me!

We were unloaded at Shagra whilst the truck went to retrieve Ruth from the hotel and we just managed to catch the end of dinner which, of course, included rice & chicken amongst other things… The transport back to Nakari was in a slightly more civilised (but equally cramped) 4-wheel-drive type vehicle. The cold beer on arrival back at Nakari tasted ever so good and we discovered that the thoughtful chefs had even laid on 8 dinners for us all, even though we were by now too full and/or tired to eat them… apart from poor old Ruth who’d had nothing to eat for a while!

Read on: Day six - More dolphins and less wind (at last!)
Go Back: Day four - Tummy troubles & Dolphins

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