Field Report 8:
Safaga, Egypt - June 30, 1998

Written in my tent at Sharm el Naga on July 26, but sent from the Sheraton Heliopolis in Cairo, Egypt

By Chris Kostman

 
Hello friends!

(Note: I wrote this four days ago and am sending now that I am in Cairo. I'm on the waiting list for the only mid-week flight, which leaves here for NY around midnight tonight. If all goes well, I'll be on that plane and be back in LA on the 1st. I'll send out my final Egypt report from home, a few days after I actually get there!)

This will be my last missive from Egypt. We're still lacking military clearance and I've decided that three weeks of sitting on the beach and world-class diving is all I can handle while awaiting the local bureaucracy to see fit to dot some i's and cross some t's. Time to cut my losses and head home to pick up the pieces of my life back in California. T'won't be easy, seeing as I left my job and put everything I own in a storage unit in order to come here. Not to mention lots of time, money, and energy expended, plus the greatly appreciated financial and moral support I received from family, friends, and sponsors in order to pull this expedition off. But on with life I must move.

I just finished reading Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast." A great read which devoted two full pages to right-on descriptions of 1920's era bicycle racing in France, it also helped me pass the last few days. Some of these days here have only been punctuated by my friend Dave noting "the wind's starting to pick up." Most days are a simple routine of breakfast at 815am, a dive, reading, lunch at 1230pm, another dive, then a nap, dinner at 730pm, followed by the whole gang sitting around for a BS fest until 10 or 11.

I skipped the afternoon dive today. Bad move. Dave and Brad (Bradford Eldridge of VA) just reported back that they dove with a half dozen bottle nosed dolphins. ("The Flipper-type," Dave just explained.) What a loser I am! Skip world-class diving for a nap and that's what I get. OK, time to gear up for a night dive after dinner. Gotta borrow a flashlight from one of my teammates...

Speaking of meals, breakfast is served for us in the restaurant here at the campsite, but lunch and dinner are brought over by Cheryl in the Land Rover from the official INA Camp at Sadana Island, 2km north of here. (We call ourselves the INA Exiles Camp or the INA Expat's Camp.) When Cheryl rolls down into camp, all of us pop out of our tents or off our plastic beach chairs and pretty much swarm the Land Rover from every direction. It's like when the cowboys arrive in their pickups to feed the cows and all the cows beat their well-worn paths to get their hay, or whatever it is that cows eat from the back of cowboy pickup trucks. But the meals punctuate the day and provide a small, but life-supporting amount of sustenance. I'd like to report that my sweet tooth is disappearing due to lack of ongoing feeding, but I can't say that's true. I may be losing weight here, but I'm craving food, especially sugar.

Lately Dave and I have been playing backgammon in the evenings. I've had brief flirtations with this game over the years since childhood. I remember playing it with my Uncle Glen in Oakland when I was a kid and my last memory of the game is from Pakistan in 1990 with my BA and MA advisor, George Dales, who passed away six years ago. We usually play best of three games, but that sometimes escalates into best of five or best of seven or... Well, at least it's fun, brings back good memories, and currently helps to pass the time.

I'd go nuts as a prisoner.

Dave and I share a tent with John Nichols of Texas. He's just looking at, and proudly showing us, his fourth roll of photos that he's taken underwater. The first two rolls were great shots with absolutely no subject matter, since John hadn't realized that one can, and should, actually compose shots by looking through the viewfinder. Needless to say, he's a new diver and his camera-aiming ability is pretty much nil. But a few days ago I changed his life when I explained the whole look-through-the-viewfinder-to-actually-get-a-shot-of-what-you-want thing and his photos now each contain a neatly centered shot of one kind of fish or coral or moray eel or other sea creature.

The things we learn when not staring at the inside of a tent roof from a pool of sweat...

Best regards,
Chris Kostman
 

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