On the recent stop in Egypt on the Dawn Princess World Cruise, over 1,000 passengers and crew loaded into buses at Port Said where the ship had docked and took a 3 hour ride into Cairo, heading for the pyramids.

But while most everyone else was heading in the same direction, 26 of us had decided to head off the beaten track in 4WD vehicles. So we parted company with the police escorted bus convoy on the outskirts of Cairo and headed out to Sakkara where we would find not only Egypt‘s oldest pyramid but also a collection of 4WD‘s that would take us away from the crowds.

But before we got dusty four wheeling around the desert, we had a good look around the Step Pyramid, designed and built by Imhotep in  2650 B.C. for the Pharaoh Djoser.

The  Step Pyramid  and it’s surrounding enclosures, was the prototype for all other pyramids.

It’s currently undergoing extensive conservation work, but visitors can easily wander around the complex, viewing the colonnaded corridor, ancient limestone wall, and even 12th century tourist graffiti.

Then it was off again in convoy, but this time in  4WD’s and minus the police escort. Bouncing around in the dusty desert, we headed out in search of  first the Bent Pyramid and then the Red Pyramid of Dahshur 

At each pyramid, we exited the air-conditioned 4WD’s, surrounded not by hoards of visitors and vendors but only the desert and the obligatory policemen and their camels standing guard over the pyramids. 

     

Of course, no visit to Egypt is complete without a visit to the Great Pyramid of Giza and Sphinx. So we reluctantly gave up the 4WD vehicles, climbed back into the bus and headed back into crowded Cairo.

By the time we arrived at Giza in mid-afternoon, the crowds were already there, along with what seemed like hundreds of persistent and insistent vendors trying to sell Egyptian kitsch and camel rides.

(photo credits: Liz Lewis)

But having been up close and personal with the Step, the Bent, and the Red Pyramid, we were happy to stand back and let others crowd around the Sphinx.

As the Dawn Princess slowly makes it’s way to India, via Singapore and Kuala Lumpar, I’ve been spending my days lounging on the Promenade Deck reading about another woman’s journey to India by sea.

The Original Letters from India by Eliza Fay paints quite a different picture of ocean life than the one I am living at the moment.

 On the Dawn Princess, there is no lack of food, lack of service, or lack of entertainment. The most difficult decision that needs to be made every day is where and when to eat and whether to sit and read or go to the gym.

This, of course, wasn’t the case for Eliza Fay. Her journey, by land and sea, was fraught with complications, imprisonment, near ship wrecks, and very little comfort. But as her letters reflect, it was never dull or uninteresting. 

Little is known about Eliza Fay’s early life, apart from the fact that she was born in South London in 1756 and her father was mostly likely a sailor.

All we really know of her life is what happened after her marriage to Irish lawyer Anthony Fay when she was in her early twenties. In 1779 the  newlyweds embarked on a haphazard journey to a new life in Calcutta, a journey that Eliza recorded through a series of letters that she sent to her family in England.

And what letters they were. Long and rambling, more like journal entries than letters, they are often hard to read due to their lack of structure. But it’s this very lack of structure – unguarded and uncensored – that make them so fascinating. Here is a woman, with limited education, who is living an adventure that would have most of us shaking in our shoes.

The collection was first published in 1817 and provides an unguarded and uncensored glimpse of their perilous adventures by land and sea across Europe and the Middle East to India.

In long, winding, letters, Eliza Fay offers up frank opinions and descriptions of those she meets, both favourable and unfavourable. No one and nothing is spared except maybe Eliza herself who she obviously sees as the stoic heroine who survives one misadventure after another.

But perhaps Simon Winchester, in his introduction in the edition put out by the New York Review Books, descirbes Eliza’s letters best when he writes that

“No calmer correspondent can be imagined than the magnificent Mrs Fay, for whom the words imperturbable, indomitable, and redoubtable might have been coined”

“Gok Gok! Bup Bup! Gok Gok!”

Male elephants are known to be testy and often highly irritable, and the massive one staring us down just 25 feet from our jeep was definitely having a bad morning. From out of the brush deep inside Yala National Park, he lumbered towards the red-dirt road on which we were parked, our engine silenced, not another safari jeep on this hot southeastern Sri Lanka morning in sight.

He stopped mid-stride and turned towards us. We sat there, sweating, waiting for this ornery elephant to make his next move. He swayed slightly forward, stamped his front right foot, and for a minute the three of us—me, my girlfriend, and our driver/animal tracker, Nimal—thought he was about to charge.

Note: as rugged and ready to tackle Yala’s rough-and-tumble roads as our jeep was, every time Nimal turned off the engine and tried to restart it, it stuttered, gasped, and needed a second or third turn of the key to rev back up. This fact was not lost on us.

Nimal has been doing these morning tours of Yala for “at least maybe 25 years”; in other words, he knows what he’s doing. So when he saw this mighty elephant sway, he began to quietly make those odd-sounding noises: “Gok Gok! Bup Bup! Gok Gok!”. I turned and looked at him, wondering if these sounds were the only protection we had from this elephant. Whether it was because of Nimal’s calls, or just because our big-eared friend decided it wasn’t worth the effort, the elephant soon turned and walked back into the brush.

Lesson learned: trust in Nimal, Yala National Park’s wily veteran animal tracker.

Photo Copyright Brian Spencer

Some of you long-time readers may remember that when we launched the Perceptive Travel Blog on March 21, 2007, one of the original contributors was UK-based travel photographer Steve Davey.

Eventually, Steve had to move on to other obligations, but he still helps judge the Perceptive Travel Remarkable Photo Contest and he also wrote about Debre Damo monastery in Ethiopia for the magazine.

While we were sorry to lose his wit and fabulous photos on the blog, we’ve continued to follow his travels with interest, including the photo tours that he leads all over the world with the support of Intrepid Travel.

The good news is that his latest offering looks really interesting, and we thought we’d share it with our readers.

The “Impressions of Ladakh” photo tour is scheduled for 12 – 27 July, 2010 starting in New Delhi, and Steve will lead a small group (12 people maximum) through this wild mountainous region on a trip that offers….

“A unique opportunity to improve your travel photography, whilst exploring the highlights of Ladakh in the company of a professional travel photographer.”

It’s a wide-ranging itinerary, with notable monateries and towns, the Tak Thok Tse Chu festival and Dharamsala, the home of the exiled Dalai Lama and the government of Tibet in exile.  Note that:

“This tour will be travelling through some difficult territory, and much of it will be at altitude. It will be a more physical trip that others which Steve has run, and a reasonable level of fitness and mobility will be required. If you are concerned about this, please contact Steve to discuss your situation.”

If you’re interested, contact Steve and tell him his old Perceptive Travel blogging friends sent you!

I was on a snorkeling expedition in Bora Bora, preparing to jump into its impossibly blue ocean waters — the very waters which I knew to be filled with sharks.

Now, I was with a seasoned crew, the InterContinental Thalasso had arranged it as one of their “Insider Experiences”  — and an insider is certainly what you want for such an occasion.

I’m not really known for my sangfroid, but I wasn’t particularly nervous. I’d never seen a shark outside an aquarium, so I was excited. Plus I’ve always find that ocean snorkeling offers a comforting sense of detachment –  when your mouth is stretched around your breathing tube, there’s only the faint anodyne taste of salt, and the sound of your breath like Darth Vader, all other sounds transformed into a tactile rather than a heard sensation. Whatever passes before your mask seems to be behind glass, in the palpable density of water.  Unless someone or something is brushing right up against you, it seems quite safely distant.

Once we’d all clambered down the ladder, one of the crew threw a yellow rope into the water, another attached it to the anchor line. We were asked us to grip on and keep our bodies behind it.

I submerged.

From the boat, fish, hacked into pieces, hit the water. In moments, the blue water delivered a group of black-tipped reef sharks. These sharks are not that big – perhaps three feet. Their fins look dipped in black ink and these had yellow spots on their dorsal fin as well, which meant that they were on the younger side. I watched them feed.  After a while, I looked down and that there were much larger sharks beneath me, well below the surface. They were swimming slowly.  These are lemon sharks, later learned were lemon sharks,  typically eight to ten feet long. Since it was day time, they were sleeping — they swim in their sleep to keep water flowing over their gills. But if you go into these same waters on a night dive, these sharks move fast, prowling.

The practice of throwing fish into the water so that tourists can have a shark encounter is called “chumming”.  It’s controversial, as the feeding of any wild creature would be – it affects their normal feeding behaviors.  There’s also a problem that’s almost always theoretical in the case of sharks, which is that the animals then associate people with food, which can lead to mishap. Hollywood to the contrary, any instance of a shark attack is a misunderstanding on the part of the shark – a shark doesn’t really want to eat a person, a shark doesn’t crave a new taste sensation.  Shark attacks are shark mistakes – it takes a bite to see what sort of fish or seal you are and when it turns out you’re not a nice tasting seal at all, the shark leaves.

Unfortunately, that single bite may also leave you permanently dead.

But again, this is unbelievably rare. I have read that there is a better chance of getting electrocuted by your Christmas lights. (The reason the rope was in the water, in fact, was to keep us snorkelers clear of the fish – lest a fish chunk hit a shoulder or an arm, leading a shark to take more than its share for a snack.)

In any event, these sharks were completely uninterested in their rapt audience.

A couple of days later,  while I was on a Paul Gauguin cruise, docked off the island of Moorea, I lept at the opportunity to go on another shark snorkel. This time, the water was only up to my waist, and as clear as a crystal pitcher. The rope was thrown again, and the chumming , but this time the number of black-tipped reef sharks was impressive –  more than a dozen, perhaps as many as 20.  I grabbed onto the rope, and the sharks came quite near. I could see right into their expressionless silvery eyes, and got a good look at the dark pilot fish swimming with its fin on the shark’s belly, ready to snatch up any shark leftovers.

It had been stormy the night before, and the current was pushing me into the sharks. As I tried to maneuver my body backwards, but when I twisted around, I saw sharks there too — very close to my kicking feet.  I looked forward again: a shark whipped around to get the fish thrown at him, and I could see its teeth. That snapped my illusion of distance, of detachment. My stomach knotted and I felt that primal “get me the hell out of here.”  I returned to the boat.

Of course, sharks are predators and they can be dangerous.

But the reality is human are not their natural prey, and we are much more dangerous to them than they are to us. The number of shark attacks each year is very small, at the same time, the number of sharks fished or worse, finned – pulled from the water, their fin hacked off for food, and the body returned to die – is huge.

According to Pew Shark Conservation Project:

• Up to 73 million sharks are killed for their fins, valued for the Asian delicacy “shark fin soup.”
• Some shark populations along the eastern U.S. coast, such as scalloped hammerheads and dusky sharks, have plummeted by as much as 80 percent since the 1970s.
• Several species of sharks, such as the porbeagle and spiny dogfish, are also fished for their meat – a staple of the fish-and-chips dish served in Europe.

Today, the Maldives banned shark fishing, the second nation to have done this – after Palau. Both are diving destinations, both realize that sharks are worth more alive and in the water where tourists can come see them, than in a fishing net. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora is meeting now in Doha, Qatar, and shark conservation is an important part of the conversation. In the US, a shark conservation bill, which would severaly limit finning, has passed the house and is awaiting its turn in the Senate. (One hopes that shark health will be an easier sell than human health.)

Honestly, even if I’d never gotten into the water with sharks, I would be philosophically inclined to want this bill to pass.

But the fact that I saw sharks and swam with them and yes, even got a little panicked by them, was an important part of making me care about it even more. Travel is supposed to be a social good because, as a certain Mark Twain once said, it’s fatal to prejudice. I’m not sure that’s always true, but I do think that travel always stimulates curiosity, by making some part of the unknown world immediate.   Before I left French Polynesia, I made sure to catch a documentary about sharks, which I probably wouldn’t have made a special effort to see before. It’s made me closely follow the shark conservation story.

I say all this because it’s hard for an amateur to see sharks without chumming. I understand that the disruption of eating patterns is no small thing, that it’s not what you’d want, ideally speaking, for a shark population. But at the same time, I’ve got to believe that the costs of chumming are probably more than worth the gain in shark awareness.