Travels With My Hat: A Lifetime on the Road. Christine Osborne
I would be up at dawn, netting baby squid, prawns, miniature jellyfish, and other fascinating creatures from the weeds (to everyone’s horror, I once innocently caught a small, but deadly blue-ringed octopus in my hand).
Encouraging this early interest in ichthyology, my parents gave me T.C. Roughley’s Fish and Fisheries featuring colour plates of every species of fish in Australia. On my thirteenth birthday, I received The Silent World by Jacques Cousteau, the famous French diver who pioneered the aqualung. Under the Red Sea, written by the Austrian diving team of Hans and Lottie Hass, was a prize received for coming first in biology at Temora High School and holidays away from the wretched hospital were spent diving on the Grande Recife off the island of New Caledonia, a two-hour flight from Sydney.
I was already familiar with Hurghada. Arriving in Europe in 1964, I had embarked on a marathon journey with Ruth Bicknell, a nursing colleague from Royal North Shore, when we’d hitchhiked from London, down through France and Spain to Morocco, and across North Africa to Cairo. Wearing sunfrocks! Ruth, a slightly built brunette, wore the same pink frock, washing it every evening, all the way from Morocco. Naïve young Australians, we’d shared many adventures on the way, but nothing untoward had occurred until we reached the Red Sea coast of Egypt.
Some people aspire to attending the Vienna Opera Ball, or Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, but it had been my dream to dive in the Mare Rostrum, as the Red Sea was known in antiquity. Informed that Hurghada lay only 500 kilometres (310 miles) south of Port Suez, I begged Ruth to come. Although we’d had several spats, as most travellers do, Ruth was an easygoing companion and seeking similar company in later life, I was to find that people like her are hard to find.
An alert to two young females hitchhiking brought the Suez police speeding down the road with their siren wailing and their blue light flashing.
‘La!—no hitchhiking,’ admonished a sweating officer ticking off the reasons why, on lecherous fingers: bandits, a breakdown in the desert, and above all, the Red Sea coast was a military zone. He flagged down a bus, two passengers were ordered to surrender their seats, and we were bundled on board.
But the bus proved serendipitous. Among the veiled women and men—Ruth and I thought they were wearing pyjamas—we discovered four Anglo-Egyptian students from the University of Alexandria. They were going on a diving holiday in Hurghada and we could join them.
‘You’ll be safe with us,’ assured Morris, a lean, green-eyed medical student.
Hurghada had none of the historical attractions of other towns in Egypt. A small coastal village, it was never more than a meeting point for Saudi fishermen selling dried fish to camel caravans from Upper Egypt. A score of coral stone houses were built around a tiny mosque and surrounding them were palm frond shacks likely to become airborne in a strong khamsin, the hot, sand-laden wind blowing off the Sahara.
‘Al Ghardaqah has one tree and no water,’ announced a passenger using Hurghada’s Arabic name. ‘Most of us work in the fish factory owned by a businessman from Cairo who drives around like God, in a grey Jaguar. That is where tourists stay.’ He pointed to a white circular building on the seafront.
The Red Sea Tours Hotel was a luxury that Ruth and I could not afford. On our journey across North Africa, we’d never spent more than five shillings a night on accommodation and on several occasions, because we were the first Australian visitors, we were not charged anything. For us it was the Hurghada Youth Camp where canvas stretchers in an army tent cost only five piastres (about one shilling) each.
MY PICTURE IN THE EGYPTIAN MAGAZINE HURGHADA, 1964
As we were settling in, a middle-aged Egyptian bearing an old Eastman bellows camera waddled up and introduced himself. A magazine in Cairo was doing a destination feature on Hurghada. He would like to take our photographs. ‘I’ve got a German girl here on a diving holiday for the cover. But I need more pictures to show that tourists are trickling back since the Suez crisis,’ he explained politely.
We were photographed beside the skeleton of a dugong and a large leatherback turtle in the Hurghada Museum, a small wooden shed. I also posed in my bikini, with a lacquered red lobster on the beach. With a cheap camera bought especially for our trip, I had no inkling that one day I would become a professional photographer. And the event was to be of major significance for the German cover girl.
With the photo session over, Ruth and I set off to buy supper only to find Hurghada’s three stores all sold the same thing: onions, over-ripe tomatoes,khoubz (Arabic bread), and tins of Chinese corned beef. Dug out with our penknives, the latter made a meal of sorts as we sat on the wharf watching fishermen preparing their nets. On hearing us chatting, a whiskery old chap announced he used to work for the Suez Canal Company, nationalised by President Nasser in 1956.
WITH RUTH IN HURGHADA MUSEUM, 1964
‘Things were better under the British,’ he said. He looked up from baiting lines. How long were we staying? Had we seen the museum? ‘Dugong weigh 300 kilograms (660 pounds). Our boat catch,’ he said proudly.
We wandered back to the youth camp for an early night, but I’d barely closed my eyes when I heard someone fiddling with the tent flap. A turbaned man slipped inside and crossing to my stretcher, he ran rough hands over my breasts.
‘Hey!’ I yelled, but jumping up, I was tripped by the regulation youth hostel sheet that is sewn across the bottom and the intruder, running across the sand, leaping here and there over odd bits of detritus, made his escape.
Curiously for a former night nurse, Ruth slept through the fracas, but I explained what had happened next morning when a row of Arabs was seated cheekily outside our tent. Clearly one was the culprit and he’d brought his friends to laugh at my expense. For the first time on our travels, we felt unsafe, and after a brief discussion, we decided to return to Cairo. This news dismayed the boys.
‘We know of another great diving place where there is no one to bother you,’ said Sharif, a muscular engineering student with a mop of chestnut brown hair.
‘It’s a great bay called Dishdaba. The Germans were there a few days ago making underwater movies,’ Morris chimed in.
‘But how do we get there?’ asked Raouf a small youth who was studying law.
‘Hitchhike,’ Ruth and I chorused.
The Red Sea coast being only sparsely populated meant there was little traffic between Hurghada and Dishdaba, but finally a truck slowed down and pulled up. It was delivering bags of concrete to Safaga, a port under construction farther south.
‘Y’alla. Let’s go,’ called Morris scrambling up beside the driver. The rest of us climbed on the back with Sharif and the fourth boy, Muhammad, taking care not to spill our precious tin of water.
The journey south was thankfully cooler than our wait by the boiling tarmac. I estimated we had driven about 25 kilometres (15 miles) when the driver suddenly turned left onto a track in the dunes, but after travelling only a short distance, the truck shuddered to a stop and standing on the cabin roof, I saw we were marooned in seas of sand.
As night dropped its skirts over the Sahara, we jumped down and the men began digging us out. An hour passed, then two hours, until with the six of us pushing, the truck jumped free, but without even a wave, the driver reversed and we watched its tail-lights disappear back up the road to Hurghada. Morris quickly assured us he had paid the man to return with water, but at this point, we had no alternative but to walk, and helping each other on with our haversacks, we began trudging east, the direction of the coast.
Bored by the delay, at first we made steady progress, but our feet soon ached from walking in the soft sand. Stopping a moment, Ruth and I threw away our sleeping bags to lighten our loads. Ahead the boys strode on manfully under the stars, but finally, they too called