Shamandura Generation E-Book

Claudio Di Manao

• Herausgeber: Claudio Di Manao
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Shamandura Generation is an exhilarating portrait ofSharm el Sheikh's diving community. Between boats, corals and bars thecharacters of Shamandura Generation live and dive forgetting about their age in a surreal Egypt Riviera and a marvelous Red Sea.A real 'Cult Book' among the Red Sea divers."This book took a while to get into. The author starts by explaining certain things about working and living in Sharm el Sheikh. However, once into the main part of the book, I found the content to be amusing and enjoyable, even though it is obvious there is a considerable amount of poetic licence. Just the book to take with you if you are going on a diving liveaboard or resort holiday."

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

SHAMANDURA GENERATION

To the city of Sharm el Sheikh

Introduction

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Epilogue

The Author

claudio di manao

SHAMANDURA GENERATION

text and drawings © claudio di manao

translation: barbara ferri

ReefWritersCo.

www.claudiodimanao.com

To the city of Sharm el Sheikh and its people

To the thousands of Sharmers that on the 24 of July 2005

two days after the bombings, screamed out on the peace road,

"You won't break the spirit of our community!"

Introduction

Maybe it’s the nitrogen that makes divers such a special lot and us in particular, professional dive guides and instructors, who are used to monstrous amounts of nitrogen in our bodies. Maybe it’s the desert climate, that for 9 months a year makes us feel we’re locked up inside a clothes dryer. Whatever the reason, the fact is that what happens in Sharm el Sheikh just doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world, or so they say. This is a story worth telling. Mind you, it’s not my fault. Everyone I know pushed me to do it.

I got myself into this predicament on a typical day, one of many, when I showed up at the dive centre with an alcohol breath and an uncertain step, my face clear evidence that I hadn’t slept much. My colleagues were curious. The lovers of gossip wanted to know “who” I was up with all night. I answered dryly that I was writing a book. I wasn’t exactly lying; let’s put it this way: I was doing first-hand research for a book that I didn’t yet know I would be writing. From then on, almost every day they all started asking me how my book was coming along, what I was writing about, if they were in my book and especially what I was writing about them. I always answered saying I needed more real life stories to add. Everyone became so insistent that I found myself forced to actually start writing. I did start, but had very little time.

I then left Sharm el Sheikh and having more free time on my hands, I started reconsidering this insane idea. They, meaning staff members and friends, kept at it by e-mail, by phone… Strange people, I thought. Maybe they really did deserve a book.

Diver warning: This book does not speak kindly of you, divers who make our lives miserable on board. This guide is a bit different. I do apologize for the long “non-diver” section.

Non-diver warning: A special section was created for you, so you too can understand something of this book.

Reader warning: All the material in this book is based on true stories, real people and places that (unfortunately) truly exist. Having no intention to respect the privacy of any of the characters in the book, I started writing using their real names. Then, the smartest of them paid good money, so I changed a few details (names, places and dates), just enough to make the characters unidentifiable to PADI, local authorities and their girlfriends. Steve, who didn’t pay a penny, is still Steve in the book. Sorry mate!

Disclaimer: We do not take any responsibility for possible break-ups, divorces, dismissals, or PADI inspections. A few obscure tales have been reported in first-person, including the name of the source, exactly as they had been told.

Enjoy your reading.

The Place, The People

We are talking of a small segment of desert that runs along one of the most beautiful seas of the world. The parched mountains, going from orange, ochre, red, beige and lilac to dark chocolate and all the way to olive green (depending on the slant of the sun, the season, the time of day, the viewpoint etc.) provide a natural setting that is not to be found elsewhere. It hardly ever rains here and this is a blessing, because when it does… it gets flooded.

The sea is the Red Sea, which is not red at all, but midnight blue and aquamarine and only on particularly ill-fated days, greenish. Due to an anomaly in space and time, Jacques Cousteau discovered the Red Sea before the Phoenicians. The Red Sea is a Cousteau trademark. Such an amazing sea and climate cannot but attract tourists and most of all members of a particular tourist subspecies known as: divers, subacqueos, plongeurs, buzos, tauchers, that we have the privilege and more often than not the obligation to take underwater. To everyone else we teach how to dive and if they’re really not up for it, we take them snorkelling, with mask, snorkel and fins, to discover fishes and corals while splashing about on the surface. If they’re not into that either, there are camel rides in the desert, jeep safaris, Saint Catherine Monastery, Mount Moses, casinos, Pacha, beach bumming and an endless series of bars; but at this point they’re not our business anymore.

FAQ (from tourists to dive guides and instructors)

Do you live here?Where are you from?How many dives do you have?Do you actually like living here?Do you think of doing this your whole life? (Advice and suggestions follow)

The answers to these questions usually create a sense of confusion in the inquirer. It is frankly quite difficult to find a dive guide who works in Sharm but lives in Cairo, or who takes the bus every day from Stockholm, round-trip of course. It is also a challenge to identify nationalities, since everyone working here has blondish hair and darkish skin because of the sun. It is finally just as complicated to distinguish people’s native tongue, due to contaminations with the language commonly spoken by Sharmers. But we will discuss this new unofficial language later on.

FAQ (from diving instructors to tourists)

Are you a diver?Did you ever try diving?Where are you going tomorrow, Tiran or Ras Mohammed?Are you married?What are you doing tonight? (Advice and suggestions follow)

Even if you’ll never believe it, in Sharm we work hard, really hard. We’re proud of this, because work, when it involves passion, becomes a double gratification. There’s no place for lazy bums here. They last so little that they go back to their home land terrified and start doing whatever it was they were doing before with a lot more interest and devotion. The population of dive guides and instructors can be over 1000, depending on the season, climate, slant of the sun, etc. This community includes English, Germans, French, Italians, Spanish, Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians, Danish, Swedes, Swiss, Finnish, Australians, Americans, Argentinians, Brazilians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Japanese, Russians and, obviously, a large number of Egyptians. This international microcosm created the new language of Sharmers: a mix of all the most commonly spoken languages with Arabic.

This new language has become the official language of taxi drivers, tour operators and carpet sellers. A classic example of this is, “This carbet meya meya, sehr gut! Only talateen Egyptian pound for you, Aleman!”

I’m sure you can imagine that at the root of many quarrels, delays and misunderstandings in Sharm el Sheikh is a tiny linguistic issue. To this we must add another factor: trivial cultural differences, that also result in a series of shortcomings and misinterpretations between foreigners and locals. These cultural differences are totally irrelevant as they are only limited to: conventions, mentality, customs, viewpoints, concept of time, behaviours, diet, clothes, shopping, social relations, relations between the sexes, work, money, preferences, opening hours of banks, shops and public offices. That’s all.

With regard to opening hours, which I must admit I haven’t fully understood yet, expect banks and shops to open and close several times a day, according to the hours of prayer. Don’t count on anything being open 24 hours, except for a few supermarkets and the sea.

Living in Sharm is, at any rate, very easy indeed. It just takes a little getting used to.

Most often than not, in Sharm el Sheikh you’ll feel like you’re on Candid Camera. From taxi drivers to skippers, from dive guides to bank opening hours, you will think you are the victim of TV hidden cameras, or of Murphy’s law. Keep in mind that in the most optimistic possibility, nothing will ever go as planned. So be positive, learn the rules of Egyptian conversation by heart and enjoy the sea, the colourful fishes, the colourful corals, the Egyptians and the even more colourful tourists and a touch of grey in the backroom of the local shops, just to rest your eyes a bit.

Get used to obstacles and frustrations, delays, absurdities and dust. There’s a lot of dust flying all over the place, making its way into your hair, your laptop, your shoes, your most intimate and hidden things. What can you expect? We are in the desert after all!

What kind of people can come here? All types. No exclusions (now that I think about it, I haven’t seen many citizens of Burkina Faso, but I’ll research the matter further). Tourists come to Sharm because their friends and travel agencies tell them to, while foreign residents end up here because friends and families, in the hope of getting rid of them, told them that finding a job is easy. While tourists come and go so quickly that it’s impossible to get a sense of their personal history, those who work in Sharm have a lot of time to tell everyone else their most fascinating and very personal stories. There’s no such thing as being born a diving instructor. The ones who become instructors at a young age, get tired of dealing with divers and fish in general and end up opening bars, restaurants, real estate agencies and online magazines.

Only the tough stay on. These are the ones who said no to something important: office, traffic, shop, cinema, mother, girlfriend, taxes, bailiff. These are the ones who one day told themselves, “At the end of a day’s work I haven’t seen a single barracuda, nor a soft coral, nor a mask clearing, I’ve had it!” These are the hard-core Sharmers. There’s no way of getting them back behind an office desk. Any other warnings?

Rinse vegetables thoroughly.Never expect an appointment to be kept.Don’t dive below 30 metres.Taxi drivers are your worst enemies.Beware of abrupt interference of space-time holes.

For Non-Divers

One becomes a diving instructor, but is ‘pre-born’ a diver. Even if you don’t remember it, know that all of us was drowned in liquid for approximately the first nine months of our lives. Therefore, as PADI and Lao Tzu said, we are all bipeds ignorant of the fact that we are really fishes. Arm yourselves with perseverance and start remembering what you already know. A bit of water in your nose is no excuse. It’s only water.

This brief introduction does not replace a diving course. I’m just trying to make this book readable to those of you who are not familiar with tanks, regulators, fins, masks, etc.

Diving is easy and not dangerous. You must respect the rules and do the exercises, but most of all enjoy what there is to see underwater. Tanks are filled with air and they don’t explode unless you beat their neck with a sledgehammer and regulators will always give you air underwater, unless you drag them in the sand for days, pound them with a hammer or club them.

The BCD, or Buoyancy Control Device, is a jacket that you inflate/deflate in order to:

float,sink,none of the above.

You have to get used to it. Improper use of a BCD, as stated by manufacturers, can result in:

yo-yo effect,uncontrolled ascents,uncontrolled descents,

but also: traumas, injuries, diving diseases and irreversible damage to corals. A weight belt is necessary to bring you down; otherwise, when wearing a wetsuit and full equipment, you would float on the surface like a buoy, when the point of diving is to stay under the surface of the sea. How many weights you should put on your weight belt is constant topic of discussion on board between dive guides/instructors and divers. To know how deep you are, there is a depth gauge. To know how much air is left in your tank, there is the Submersible Pressure Gauge. These two items, more precisely their reading and interpretation, are also frequent topics of discussion between the above-mentioned anthropological groups.

Nitrogen: please don’t start asking how this happens or doesn’t happen, nitrogen enters our tissues after each dive, depending on depth and duration of the dive. Full stop. Up until a certain level everything is fine, over that certain level you’re in for a tour of the hyperbaric chamber. If you shoot up like a balloon, same story. And what happens when they put you in the hyperbaric chamber? They recompress you. Why? Because it’s good for you. At depth, nitrogen has the effect of smoking a joint. This is not a good excuse to go deep (and this is another frequent topic of discussion).

To know how much nitrogen you have absorbed and therefore how long you can stay at a given depth, but also a lot of other important things, there are dive computers and tables. A dive computer takes care of this and lots more, including making strange noises and showing video games. You need a mask to be able to see properly underwater and learning to clear your mask is fundamental to becoming a diver. Mask clearing is the most dreaded exercise for both diving students and instructors.

Wetsuit: it protects you from the cold.

Fins: if you don’t know what they are, this book is not for you.

Corals

Whatever you’ve been told at home or at the travel agent’s, corals are alive. Whether alive or dead, you are not allowed to touch corals. Full stop. If I catch anyone, say your prayers and if I don’t catch you, a stonefish will. A stonefish looks like a dead clump of coral, but its sting is lethal.

Fishes

See the section on corals, same story.

N.B.: turtles, octopuses, shrimps, snails, molluscs and lobsters should not be molested, nor grilled, nor should you attempt riding on their backs, as they are all protected species. You are not. You’re only protected by your diving insurance and common sense, if you have them.

At this point, I bet you’re dying to become divers. Why not? It’s super cool! It’s full of colourful fishes! You’ll feel weightless! One day you could become instructors and have a life just like mine!

(If you answered ‘mmmhhh…?’ to all these statements, turn the page).

A diving course lasts approximately 4 days, 7-8 hours a day. There’s no difference with the diving courses you take back home, where you go 2 hours a week, for a month. Meshi? What do you do in a diving course?

You REGRESS. As fishes became amphibians and then mammals and then humans, to go back to being fishes you’ll have to go through a clumsy frog-like phase in the pool and then at sea. That’s life.

The first level is Open Water Diver, the second is Advanced, the third is Rescue and then we get into the jungle of acronyms of various diving agencies: PADI, BSAC, SSI, NAUI, etc. In this jungle, different names are used to say the same thing: a Divemaster is a Diveleader, a Divecon, or a 3 star, basically a dive guide. CMAS, FIAS, FIPSAS, EULF still use stars like hotels and ski schools. An instructor is more or less the same everywhere. You will hear a lot of talk about PADI.

PADI

In the beginning there was Chaos. There were people diving with strange hoses, metal boxes on their heads, cooking gas tanks they washed and filled at the gas station. There were naval or military diving courses, where people dived with spanners, shears, picks, welders and mines. Few of them ever came back. Then came Jacques Cousteau, with his sci-fi designed equipment, jealous of his secrets, of his dive tables and of the exact location of the Thistlegorm wreck, which he never revealed. Scuba diving existed, but it was groping in the dark, like Captain Nemo’s aquanauts if their helmet windscreen wipers had broken down.

And then there was PADI. It formed out of the Chaos, as a clump of light from plasmatic matter and said, “LET SCUBA DIVING BE RECREATIONAL”. And so it was.

The first day it created Standards and Procedures.

The second day it created the instructor manual.

The third day it created the modular course system and the Master Scuba Diver rating.

The fourth day it created the PADI Instructor.

The fifth day, the Quality Assurance Department.

…and since PADI is American and week-ends are sacred there, the sixth and seventh day, it took a break.

The first Course Director preached “positive reinforcement” and the learning pyramid structure. He preached the equality of mankind with regard to mask clearing and the right of any person of goodwill to become a diver. His word spread, reaching Tibet, Siberia and the fried chickens of Kentucky, circulating from Bangladesh to the Bismarck Archipelago; new schools and new followers originated everywhere.

Without PADI, we would be nothing. Without PADI, a whole lot of divers, instead of enjoying the fishes, ignorant of the sacred principles of recreation and buoyancy, would be scraping the bottom of the sea, holding bolts, ropes, spanners in their hands with blackened masks. Without PADI, there wouldn’t be as many divers. Without all those divers, no one would ever dream of paying us good money for lounging about all day amid boats and swimming pools and chatting with women on board. Without PADI, mark my words instructors and friends, you would all be working for free. And for those of you who do, you’re doing something wrong.

PADI has no limits for expansion: it conquered the world; it will aim at the stars. PADI will take over NASA and the first recreational astronaut course will be a PADI course.