Flashback: Diving the Red Sea

Before diving in (sorry) to the story of the week we spent scuba diving in Sharm el-Sheikh, we just wanted to say how thrilled we are for the people of Egypt now that Mubarak has officially stepped down. There was a strong sense of resignation and apathy when we were there – a feeling of “What’s the point?” that pervaded the few political conversations we had with locals. I remember our guide Mohammed saying that things were never going to change because the corrupt government made all the rules. The contrast behind that defeatism and the images and stories we’re seeing out of Cairo today could not be more stark. We wish them all the best.

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Flashback: Jewels of the Nile

Given the current political unrest there, Egypt seems like an appropriate place to begin writing about some of the places we didn’t have time to cover during our world tour last year. As we learned during our travels there, and as we’re now reading in the news on a daily basis, Egypt (and the Middle East in general) is filled with complexity, contradiction, corruption, and confusion. It’s a difficult place to wrap your head around, especially as a westerner, and we left feeling like we never got a true sense of what the day-to-day life of the average Egyptian is really like. We did, however, see some of the most impressive, ancient monuments and art we’ve seen anywhere in the world, and we got to share the experience with my big brother Dirk, which made the trip all the more memorable.

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CPCD (Contagious Political Chaos Disease)

Greetings! We will now be turning to the phase of our trip we affectionately like to refer to as our Adventures in Developing World Political Chaos. Over the span of a couple of weeks in May, we managed to stumble into not one, but TWO countries on the verge of meltdown as their respective political crises essentially shut down big portions of both countries, leading us to wonder if we were carrying some kind of contagious political chaos disease.

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