City vs. Sea, Earth vs. Water

Cairo leaves a dirty taste in my mouth. Literally. There are cars and people and dust and fumes and smoke and smog and dirt. You can't breathe. You can't see. I have wanted to see the pyramids for ever but the rest of the city is pretty much null in my book. According to our first taxi driver, there are 18 million people in the city; according to the next, there are 25 million. Either way, that is a LOT of people. Most of them are poor; they live in dirt (kind of like adobe) apartment complexes and wash in the Nile (yes, I actually saw this). They look at me like a piece of meat, ripe for the taking. They hiss and leer and make kissy noises. You know they are ripping you off but can't really do much about it. I am all for letting the "journey not the destination" be the fun part, and it is, but sometimes you just groan and say, "enough".

Needless to say, after seeing the Pyramids and the Egyptian Museum, we got out of there fast. We headed to the Red Sea for some diving and relaxing. The Red Sea dive was fantastic. The water is so clear, the coral is multicolored, there are tons of fish, and I even saw an OCTOPUS. Two of them to be exact! That was cool. I have never seen an octopus before.

The last couple days have been very relaxing. We went to Nuweiba, which is a small town where you just relax on the beach and snorkle. We are now in Dahab, which is a bit bigger (Nuweiba didn't even have electricity or Internet or anything, just beach). We have been relaxing, enjoying the area, looking at many camels (they don't charge you to take picture of them here!) diving, swimming and snorkeling. It has been great.

Tomorrow we move on. The next stop is Athens and after that...the world! Egypt has been great but we have so many more journeys and destinations to experience!