Travels with other people

Stream of consciusness Blogging while on holiday

Sunday
Funny thing about airports is that I usually encounter them as a professional. By that I mean, I am in a business suit and getting ready to go somewhere for work. When I travel for holidays, it always feels weird -- especially after the last five years in which I have done some serious planing about. So today I am headed to Egypt for a package holiday. This means that I am at the airport on a Sunday afternoon, getting onto a flight from Gatwick South Terminal; seems to be package tour hell. I am surrounded by families in all states of happiness and misery. Children crying, laughing, screaming, squatting by huge piles of luggage concentrating on a video game, staring blankly into space while the MP3 pounds in their ears. How you parents do this is beyond me as cute as children are they grow up into surely teens who seem like they are walking around with a huge cloud hanging over their head. I'll have to ask Mum and Dada if we three were like that, if so let me just thank them now because I would have been tempted to abandon myself (if I had behaved that way. Luckily I don's remember it.)

So we finally get called to the plane. I am flying with a company called Viking Air; never heard of it. I won't bore you with the check in details, but lets just say it wasn't BA standards — and they aren't that high. It involved several desks, more money and three attempts. I felt annoyed and I hope those behind me where going to be patient. The family in front of me had about 15 members, I cannot imagine travelling like that.

Anyway, once on the plane we take off and it turns out it's a Canadian flagged plane so all announcements must be in English and French; which was kind of annoying the fact that we are headed to Egypt from London meant Arabic might have been a better second language choice.

The other interesting thing about flying a charter flight is the passenger participation. First one baby starts to cry and everyone cranes their necks to see, then after about five minutes baby 1 starts to calm down and baby 2 starts up and soon they are duelling wails going on with full other-passenger harumphing as back up. We finally start taxiing, passengers then burst out with an excited clap — "yay! We are underway!" When we take off there is a large exhalation of collected breath; then as we bank there is a "whooo" noise from most passengers. All I can think is that this is going to be a long long flight if there's going to be a passenger soundtrack. Basically it settles down for the 4 hour flight; except for the mandatory applause when the pilot sets the plane down with a "Welcome to Africa" notification' which causes a ripple of consternation through the e passengers — "I thought we were going to Egypt."

I get to the Sharm el-Sheikh airport at about 10:30, I'm not leaving the resort so I don't need a visa. I just need to pick up my bag fill out a landing form, fill out another form in case we all come down with swine flu. Then try and find my ride.

Finding my ride is a bit trickier than I had expected. Eventually a man tells me to go to the white Range Rover. I have flashes of white slavery and then look around me. If you were going to recruit for a brothel you wouldn't pick me out; you would pick out one of the 20 year olds who are all wearing next to nothing. So I climb in the White Range Rover and set off.

It strikes me as I am driven through the blasting hot night that many of the places I've been in the past couple of years were all designed by the same folks. They all have HUGE roads — well over the required capacity. They tend to be divided highways (dual carriage ways for my Brit readers) with U-turns only available every so often. Barely any sidewalks (pavements) and no shade if you were so foolish as to walk. So clearly all these places were planned by traffic engineers who created them so that folks could drive. I was weirdly reminded of the roman roads in Britain which are dead straight. I have seen the following roads similar - Abu Dhabi and Dubai (dead straight massive and completely full); Bucharest and Tripoli (not as well maintained and clearly designed by the same guys who did Moscow, Warsaw and parts of the Czech Republic). For comparison I've also driven or been driven in Florida, California, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, York, Bristol, the Yorkshire Dales, Devon, Cornwall, Penzance and other bits of the South west of England. Lots of different roads. The little ones are best.