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Sitting at an unfamiliar bar reading a 4th hand newspaper at Five to Seven in the morning with a tired smokey looking Blonde contemplating whether or not to have another beer can mean one of two things, either you are a Rock-Star or you are at an airport due to fly out somewhere nice in the very near future. Now I love airports with a great passion and there is a good reason for it. Possibly the best place on earth to sit and people watch is Terminal 4 at London’s Heathrow Airport. If ever you should grow tired of the view, wait but a mere few seconds and it will change from strange looking women who resemble NATO Commando Penguins to unfeasibly tall African men with big hoopy earrings nervously glancing at the security cameras. Although I must say my own personal favourites are the large Black American Beat-Box Gangsta (apparently I am told there is no ‘er’ at the end of gangster in favour of an ‘a’ or the B to the Z to F to the whatever they are blithering on about. In my defence they very well may be as famous as Huffa Puffa Diddly-Bottom for all that I know. I do however love watching their bemused jauntily angled baseball capped conversations with the equally befuddled Slovakian Duty Free girl who is attempting in vain to explain that sadly you cannot take 27 bottles of Hazelnut Bailies back to the good old US of A no matter whether or not you once saw Michael Jackson and know the President.

The point that many fellow travellers may have now noted is that airlines are changing fast and are starting to charge even quicker. Originally it was quite simple with the odd couple of quid here and there for the extras like fuel surcharge or departure tax. Yes that shocking fact is indeed true, you actually now pay to leave the UK and pay to arrive where you are going. Despite this fact airlines have started cracking onto the ideas of extras. ‘Would you like a seat Sir?’ enquired the surly spot riddled mammoth who sat behind, or mores to the point, sort of sprawled all over her desk area like a large make up splattered blamonge. ‘Would you like an in flight bucket of microwaved slop for £60 return?’ ‘Would you like to use the toilet during the flight Sir?’ and my personal favourite, ‘if Sir would like to look out of the window more that thrice we can do an offer on that’.

Slowly they pack you in to your coffin like seat as you prey in vein that the women or rather the solar eclipse of gargantuan hugeness that is squeezing her way down the aisle is not going to sit in front if you, but sure enough she does. And sure enough she smells like Bacon flavoured Frazzles. Then you sniff the air like a Gazelle on the Great African plains scenting a tang in the air of Peanuts, mmmm peanuts, Roasted Peanuts. Yup, someone has farted, and you are inhaling it. But a mere 20 minutes later and you yourself are adding to Global warming when you have created your own effervescent vapour, single handily managing to all but melt the leather off the back of the seat behind you. Oh and did I mention also managing to melt the contact lenses of the dazed looking women in seat 13B. Good skills I say to you.

Then starts the ‘Let’s see how drunk we can get’ competition which sadly squeaks to an abrupt end just as quick as it began when it dawns on you that at £4.50 for 150ml of Red plonk from somewhere in Kazakhstan is going to take an absolute bare minimum of £30 each to get drunk so instead you focus your attention on the cabin crew, and my god how they have changed. Do you remember those days of smoking hot Size 8 Sienna Miller lookalikes who would lean over you with their amply firm 32C and 34DD cleavage whilst gently brushing their nipples into the side of your eager and mostly grinning face as they reached on tippy toe for the overhead locker? Do you remember those distant days when they would sexually assault your senses with gently wafting scents of expensive perfume, expensive cigarettes and slightly tinged pinkish eyes from where they had been out all night partying at a Russian swingers club. Yes those good old days when until 20 minutes before the flight took off your delectable cabin crew were with some hot shot Russian Billionaire and his lesbian girlfriends. Well hold the press, stop the traffic and put out the cat, I have some shuddering news.  They ‘aint like that anymore.

Gone are the universal airline standards of clean, young skin. Gone are the standard of hair being up in a bun or 3″ from the collar, gone are the make up checks, along with the IQ checks. Now the delightful UK’s charter flight airlines have opted in favour of the make up gunned Hippo-Crocko-Pigs who thunder up and down the aisles with faces like savagely smacked arses with attitudes only akin to Pol-Pot himself. Dare you venture to as much as press the call button by mistake instead of the reading light button ‘in the panel above your head’ and you will be met with an icy stare and a garlic laidened huff from a witch/stewardess who demands a simple but curt, ‘WHAT?’. Time, at this point, I am glad to say seems to stand still as you watch a veritable plethora of people fetching things down from the over head lockers that they simply cannot do without for the next 5 hours, then bizarrely not 5 minutes later feel the need to put them back from whence they came.

Despite the simple fact that being at 38,000 feet immediately seems to make you want to shit like an African Mountain Gorilla you know that this is an absolute complete and utter No-No for two reasons. 1) In doing so you will proudly announce to circa 400 people (due to the time spent in the toilet cupboard) that you have either been for a colossal shit of that you have single handily decided that you were going to go for the ’single handed unilateral mile high club’. And 2) the fact that if you do as so much as dare to ‘drop one off’ and in doing so add to the frozen block of Poo-Ice that will fall 38,000 feet to the ground and with any luck splatter the roof of some French house or village. But the real reason is simple, if you do, when you open the door, the only Sienna Miller lookalike on board will be standing there in the aisle waiting to boldly venture into your cubical of shame.

Heading back to your seat you notice and smile politely to the freakishly ugly baby who has cried incessantly since check in, the hideously fat Bling-tastistic Chavs that have been rowing constantly for the last 7 hours and the people who drop ‘Oh no we never normally go on these package things but since George lost his job for wanking off the bosses dog we have been forced to constrain our budget’. I tend to just fart silently at this point pretend to be asleep.

Then just as suddenly as it all started, Captain Kangeroo bounces you down the runway and judders to a screeching halt throwing the door open to let you waft in great lungfuls of 40c dryness and the stale smell that is unmistakably, distant Poo. Yes Ladies and Gentlefolk, welcome to your holiday.

After the usual 400 person deep queue with one surly poc marked Jabba The Hutt lookey likey Immigration Officer stamping your ‘Welcome Visa’ you are through to arrivals to find your brand spanking new Dakine or Animal Dive Bag that now looks like they blew it up and ran it over going around and around upside down with it contents spewed over the conveyer belt. Damn and blast those Superman Pyjamas and Magic Cock-Grown cream.

Skipadoo to the hotel being gleefully informed by your 12 year old ‘Beach Party Rep’ that you are in for a ‘rocking time’ and ‘14 days of Sun, Fun, Sea and come on everybody let me hear you say Owa Owa, I said I can’t hear you at the back Owa Owa!’ Now it was at this point that I always like to set the record straight for the holiday by informing the girl, who’s IQ would rival that of a MacDonalds cheeseburger that, and I quote, ‘If you don’t fuck off with immediate effect missy I shall take great and indeed huge delight in throwing you off the bus via the sunroof, now fuck off and leave me alone.’ Happy little traveller that I am.

PART TWO

Welcome to your holiday, it is time to relax. Then, within milliseconds, it starts. Your arse, or bottom as some prefer to call it spontaneously implodes on you for absolutely no apparent reason. What normally is as reliable as Big Ben or the opening hours of Mr Patel’s corner shop suddenly and inexplicably your arse gets thrown into total disarray. Speaking of starting things, they start it. Just like they did when they invaded Poland, the Germans, the Jerries, the Hun start moving in on all things beach front and on all the things that you thought wistfully you might like to try. Yes of course there are the 05.45am early sunbed towel expeditions, of which I take most huge delight by just tipping them off and mixing up their towels. Gone is the Volleyball court to Hans and Ooter. Gone are the slots on the first dive boat and gone, is most of the breakfast by the second the lark has even thought about a) waking up b) getting out of his or her nest to sing a jolly tune. The only tune that is being sung/whistled/chirped is the theme to The Dam Busters which is the source of much hilarity to the large bald headed, heavily tattooed women from the Manchester flight which arrived at 04.00am after being delayed in the snow and by someone trying to smuggle in 10 kilos of coke in a plastic donkey!

Now I am not one to grumble. I am not one to complain. I am not one to make a fuss, but when some German (add a superbly rude word that starts with the letter ‘C’) forcibly pushes in front of me in the queue to get some hot chips and bit of chocolate sponge cake which bizarrely, but not surprisingly tastes exactly like Chicken Jalfrezzi, my last straw breaks. It is 1966 all over again. It is D-Day. And yes, as far as we have come since the end of WWII. As much as we try to tell ourselves that all is forgiven and all is forgotten, we know secretly, well not so secretly actually, that we just do not like the Germans. It is the same reason why when someone with an Irish accent in a central London pub shouts out ‘there’s a package for you’ you bristle. In the same way that when a dark skinned bloke who clearly used to wear a big bushy beard and a white sheet and a back pack gets on the London underground muttering something about some bloke called ‘Ali Akbar’ and being off to meet some ‘Virgins’, you get off.

But then hey, putting it into respective, us Brits aren’t exactly what you would call exemplary model citizens. Las Malvinas aka The Falkland Islands. Not ours. We took it. They wanted it back. We said No. We went to War. We won. Lots of good men died, and many many non combatant Penguins. And before long, mark my words, The Sun newspaper will be displaying headlines such as ‘Our Boys Go Back’ as Argentina absolutely 100% will invade the Falklands again…mark my words. But I digress. So back to the holiday.

Why in the name of God and all that is holy do German men think that Budgie Smugglers are acceptable? Great fat lubs-of-lard German women cram their gargantuan buttocks into tiny thong bikinis and fail abysmally to stuff there humungous honkers into a unfeasibly small bikini top. Then they strut up and down the beach with what I can only describe as a huge curly haired Black cat sticking out of the sides of the ever straining bikini and from under their armpits. Or they opt for the complete other extreme……CAMEL TOE. Now try as hard as you might, Evils wins out over Good and you take a sneaky peaky and instantly wish that you had not. Mystique and intrigue are one thing as your mind wanders and you distantly think what they might look like naked, but hell no. Right here, right now I am here to tell you that you get to see the whole thing. Like taking a brass rubbing of the Grand Canyon you can clearly see every nook and cranny with the intricate detail of the Hubble telescope looking at Pound coin from 3 feet away. Sometimes however this sequence gets reversed and you get a glimpse of the old Beaver cracker before you get to see the face. Big  mistake, huge, colossal in fact. You can audibly hear the screeching of the tyres within your brain when you look up to see that face of some poor and rather unfortunate filly who’s face must have previously met with an incredibly fast deceleration in a car crash where upon her bottom lip folded backwards all the way over the very top of her head. Still, at least you never see these girls in the rain. why is that you ask? Simple, their bottom lips stick out so far they cant go out in the rain for fear of drowning when their jutty outy lips fill up.

Speaking of jutty outy lips. No holiday to anywhere that has warm water can really ever go by without some poor fool suggesting a bid of diving, or SCUBA or strapping a tank to your back and leaping into the waters to go and startle tiny fish and be startled by even bigger fish. Now with any diving there is always an inherent risk due to the shear nature of the fact that we, as in human beings, can’t breathe under water, no matter how hard we try. Now that has always foxed me because I spent the first 9 months of my life under water in my dear mothers womb. Now for some, being in or on or under the water seems to come naturally. For others they seem to embrace it as much passion as you would do a Christmas kiss from a drunken Grandmother who manages to slip the tip of her tongue into your mouth. But for me, for me personally, diving is fast becoming a passion of a different sense.

Being in Egypt, diving becomes a way of life. From the moment the sun comes up until it gently drifts down behind the distant mountain ranges, diving just seems to seep under your skin. I take much pride and and a healthy pinch of honour to know that I am a PADI Rescue Diver, this means in simple terms that you are expected, and in deed are looked upon to make sure you are there immediately when things go wrong, and they do, frequently. But there just seems to be this truly wonderful sense of camaraderie when 12 of you pile into a Minibus like the United Nations at a stale mate, none of you communicating and all sitting there in your respective languages.However by the end of the day you have forced them all to speak our wonderful mother tongue of English and everyone is babbling on about how big the Manta Ray was, did you see the shark, how Ooter managed to look even fatter under water and so on.

I have written before at length about diving so I will keep this short but it is truly quite incredible and will be something that I will be writing about again in the near future. For those of you who have never dived, do, and for those of you who have you will know that incredible and wonderful feeling of being suspended completely upside down just hovering there in a state of almost suspended animation whilst you watch a fish go about its daily fish life. There are moments when you almost connect with a fish when it stops and looks at you just trying to work out what you are doing. I guess in another way you could think of it in the terms fo walking down Oxford Street one day on the way to the Bank when all of a sudden a large African Grey Elephant appears 20 feet above you, upside down hovering above you, just looking at you. I suppose indeed you would stop and look at it for a brief moment.

On the way back from diving one night I happened to ask the driver of the minibus why in Egypt they do not use their headlights at night. He looked at me as if I had asked him why he wore trousers. What I managed to grasp from our semaphore conversation was in essence two things. Firstly that Egyptian drivers feel that using their lights at night is a ‘waste of time’ and secondly, and most incredibly and possibly maybe the reason why there are 8000 deaths per year and 350,000 injuries in Egypt due to road deaths that ‘if I put my lights on and the driver coming the other way puts his lights on we will not see each other and will drive into each other and crash. So, the solution? Oh what solution do you think they came up with? Ready for this absolute little corker? Okay so here is what they do, they put their hazard lights on. Yup, just side lights and hazard lights. Then, they drive by using the flashing hazard light to illuminate the white line in the middle of the road. When they pass another car they leave it until the last second and flash on full beam to ‘make sure we do not crash into each other!! Now it is incredibly less terrifying than driving in Viet Nam and slightly less bowel twistingly scary than Guatemala but still, you find yourself tearing chunks out of your comfortable seat by simply clenching your buttocks.

I further enquired of our driver if he had ever seen anything really funny on his drives through the Southern desert. He smiled a big toothless grin and simply said, ‘Camel humping other camel, friend drive by and see this, thinks it really funny, but does not see other camel and drives into it. Simple life = simple problems.

What I do love about foreign travel is simplicity. Yeah for sure we all love the finer things in life such as a 50″ HD LCD TV, a 50 million giggawat ipod phone, a new car, new breasts, new shoes et cetera et cetera. Well how about you stripped all that away and just had one word that you had to use over and over again to make you money? Sound strange? Well imagine if you will for but one moment that you are a waiter who only speaks a language that no one else speaks apart from other waiters. Now image that you are paid just £20 per month. Let us say for arguments sake that one word is ‘Finished’. As someone sits down to eat you grab their plate and say ‘finished’ - everyone laughs. You ask for a coffee refill and he pours 1cm in the bottom of your cup and says ‘finished’ - everyone laughs. Add to this gently lifting your camera/sunglasses/fiancé/phone (and so on) whilst saying, yes you’ve guessed it, ‘finished’, and - everybody laughs. Aka simplicity in itself. One word + humour = wages go from £20 per month to £30 in one tip for being cool.

So the time has come to close this little section of travel writing once again with a promise to be back again soon. As we sit and reminisce upon our half a month in Egypt we have found a few things in life never change. 1) Germans + sunbeds is as normal to them as fish + chips is to us ‘island monkey’ as they like to call us. 2) Russians are rude and thoroughly pig ignorant. 3) 99.9% of Germans are also pigs and are just as equally ignorant (although not my mate Christof). 4) Italian women always have nice shoes. 5) Lesbians aren’t always semi naked pillow fighters who rub icecream all over themselves. 6) The French call English ‘Roast Beef’? 7) People from Essex although the butt of many a good jokes, are actually cool people and have something a little bit special about them, in a good way. If you mess with a Germans processes and German engineering mixing it up with a unique blend of ‘English engineering’ they almost faint. Chortle chortle.

Now I leave you with this little snippet of information……PRINGLES - Did you know they have flavoured side? I jest not. The next time you are tucking in to a packet of Pringles hold one in your hand and picture it like is a a small crunchy saddle. Now turn it upside down and lick the underside….you will be amazed at the increase in flavour.

More incredible travel stories coming soon and if you fancy even more, please have a look at this link to see the writing that I am doing to other magazines ESSENTIA Magazine Page 8,9 & 10

With the very best regards from

Chris and Blondie…travelling so you don’t have to.