There’s no real way to easily do justice to a city like Cairo, so please indulge me. I’m on a small ship just south of the Sinai as I write this and it has been a few days since we left, I wanted to jot down my observations earlier, but you know, between drinking by the pyramids and diving on a WW2 ship that was sent to the bottom by the Luftwaffe, time was both a rare commodity and wisely spent.
Cairo is hot, dusty, dirty, sprawlingly huge, polluted, loud, ancient, intriguing and hides secrets and treasures. You also get the feeling of a city trying to burst free from its broken shell, without quite managing it just yet. An imperial ugly duckling so to speak.Read more
The motto emblazoned on their license plates isn’t overselling it, Bonaire really is a diver’s paradise, specifically, a shore diver’s paradise. First however, a little context.
Bonaire is the easternmost of the ABC islands and is essentially part of the Netherlands, expect wheels of gouda cheese (not kidding) to be found in the most surprising places. The upshot/downside (depending on your point of view), is the strong European influence and the presence of a very clean, large and rather well stocked super market, the Van Der Tweel, where on some days, you can find (in the parking lot, sold from the back of a modified Land Rover) a perhaps famous smoked chicken. I don’t know about famous, that’s a claim on the flyer, but I can tell you about delicious, have some if you have the chance.Read more
Excuse the slightly juvenile double entendre, but it can’t always be arthurian lore and Jewish mysticism you know. BTW, guess what, we were in Bonaire…
Everything was perfect that day. It was my birthday, I was in the tropics rather than the frigid north (at that time in the grips of an ice storm), I had the best buddy divers with me and a pick-up truck (did you know they are called “utes” in Australia? Me neither). There really aren’t many ways to top that.Read more
I’m not saying we’re branching out just yet, but the thought has been floated of adding an “S” to our initials and a surfboard to our logo. As we already have a surfer among the founding members of the D&C, the concept was not so outlandish.Read more
It’s the shortest day of the year, the day where night’s mantle spreads widest across our hemisphere. The flip side of this passage through Hades, this chthonic corridor as it were, be it literal or figurative, is that as of tomorrow, the days are getting longer. Not that you would know it by looking at the Canadian winter, but still. The minute the nadir is passed, the ascension begins. We will start looking to summer, after a fashion, and the full moon that will greet us on January First is certainly another auspicious sign; luminous silver to light our way in the coming year.Read more
Scuba diving, quality cocktails, taking it easy and other treasure maps.
