Travelogue

Late Summer in Oslo and Book Launch

Almost as soon as we set off for Oslo, a family member texted. This particular individual who likes his motors, advised us that if we were hiring a car –to make sure and opt for the Fjord Fiesta. I wondered if we ought to institute a family ban on puns and then, because he was going to a concert while we were away, I texted right back to him – enjoy the Fjoo Fjighters. Is there a cure for this sort of thing?

I’d been planning this visit to Norway’s capital city for a long time and the list of sights to be seen was formidable. They range from the Kon Tiki Expedition Museum to the Paper Clip Monument – two different tributes to the spirit of human endeavour. There are many things to see and only a short long weekend. I planned to soak up the unique atmosphere of a northern city and satisfy a long held fascination with a country whose forbears paid the odd plundering visit to these shores many centuries ago, a country that has given us Grieg, Munch, Ibsen, Amunsden, the heroes of Telemark, the pop group a-ha and the afore-mentioned paper clip.

Aker Brygge Oslo

Arriving in Oslo and Thank you for the Music Grieg

As we flew in over Telemark to make our landing, I was listening to a particular piece of music on my ipod. Certain tunes and songs are good at catching sagging spirits and fluffing them up, like the effect of a pleasant breeze on a sultry hot day. Wedding Day at Troldhaugen is such a tune.

Not that my spirits were sagging at all, but each time I hear Wedding Day – I feel curiously content. Played on piano, it is full of simple pleasures, love and hope, laughter and fun and mischief. Yet it has a bit of restrained melancholy here and there to remind us that happiness must be handled with care, and that joy and sadness are never far apart from each other, two sides of the same coin. It speaks of the occasional wild abandon of love and its more measured and sedate pleasures. Above all, for me, the music is playful.

Edvard Grieg (Norwegian composer), famously wrote wedding Day at Troldhaugen, for his wife, as an anniversary gift. Listening to the music, I imagined the breakfast scene at their hideaway in Troldhaugen, as Mrs Nina Grieg fixes a wayward curl and tucks into her cheese and honey and freshly baked bread, wondering if her husband in his state of heightened artistic inviolability, might have completely forgotten the date. I imagine the couple making inconsequential married conversation over the clinking of porcelain teacups in their saucers. She watches expectantly as Edvard finally opens a carefully wrapped parcel to find a pair of thick woollen socks that she has commissioned their ancient cook to knit for him. And then when he has pronounced the elaborately patterned socks to be ‘just what he’d hoped and longed for’ Grieg lays the package carefully to one side, then taking his wife by the hand and leading her to the piano, with a fond and mischievous glint in his eye, he begins to play this delightful piece of music.

I doubt very much it happened that way and like most couples – the Griegs had their ups and downs – but still!
What an anniversary present!
Lucky Mrs Grieg!
And thanks Grieg for giving the world a totally non-addictive, non-carcinogenic, non-polluting and environmentally friendly, utterly non-chemical anti-depressant cum stimulant, that doesn’t even provoke anxious comments in the media about its dangers to human or animal health and well-being. By the end of our visit I know for sure that this music definitely suits this city. Oslo, it turns out, is full of the same light mischief and low-key playfulness. It’s romantic but not in a wild abandoned way. And it has its melancholy notes too, but mostly it’s a relaxed and cool and fun place.

Day 1:

Den Perfekte Mann or Meeting Fortinbras of Norway on Rosencrantz Gate

Students of Shakespeare will be familiar with a little tragedy called Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. It’s a melancholy story and it ends badly for the eponymous hero whose agonising struggle to revenge his father’s murder is hampered by his own scruples and an inability to take decisive action.

Shakespeare’s great work brims with sharply drawn and complex characters, the sort of people who hang out in the corridors of power today – the towering figure of Hamlet – a young man torn between his duty as a son and a higher morality, or Claudius the efficient but sinister power-broker, or the aging and increasingly irrelevant Polonius.

Yet one striking Nordic chap is often overlooked, though paradoxically a play has been written about him and people have been known to name dogs and record labels after him. Poems have also been penned in his honour. His name means Strong Arm and though he appears only briefly, throughout the entire play Hamlet, his presence hovers pointedly in the background. He is a great soldier, brave, rash, honourable, inspiring the loyalty of his men and admired by Hamlet himself.

And who is this Shakespearean Alpha Male?
This paragon of manly vigour who sounds like he’s stepped out of the pages of a nice bodice ripping romantic thriller?
This Norwegian Gladiator?
His name is young Fortinbras, son of the old King of Norway and played in Kenneth Brannagh’s Hamlet, by brooding Rufus Sewell, all glistening black wavy hair, manly chin jutting and flexing thigh muscles. In Shakespeare’s original text though, the character remains more of an enigma. At the end of the play, Fortinbras praises the slain Hamlet as a man of great honour and orders that, the dead Dane be awarded a funeral with full military honours. Moments later Fortinbras swiftly, breezily and manfully seizes the throne of Denmark for himself, on the basis of some old ownership rights.
Cool, enigmatic and ruthless or what!

On my first night in Oslo I saw someone who made me think about Fortinbras. Until then, he’d never been high on my list of literary or romantic heroes, not till the moment on Rosenkrantz (Fate for sure!) Gate when I saw a man who was surely born to play the role of the Fighting Prince of Norway.

I won’t go into details, but let’s just say there’s a strong possibility that this Fortinbras type will turn up in a work of fiction very soon – cunningly disguised as a Norwegian archaeologist on the trail of Viking battle sites in Ireland, or a Scandinavian oil millionaire whose life comes badly undone after a chance encounter on a Dublin street with an old colleague and adversary. This will lead to a low-key look at life in countries that have grown rich quickly (Ireland and Norway). Tor(we’ll call him maybe) will have some terribly bad luck and also some amusing catastrophes in Dublin coupled with some very good romance, probably with a fiery Irish woman. Life will throw up unforeseen twists and surprises for him. And to paraphrase Oscar Wilde – the good will end happily and the bad unhappily.

Obviously I didn’t tell this divine vision on the street any of that though, as he was busily playing a game with his little son. He might reasonably have thought I was daft. He’s probably never even heard of Fortinbras. Plus my excellent companion and I were en route to dinner at the lovely Oslo quayside Aker Brygge – and references to the tall handsome Alpha Male, whose enigmatic blue green eyes collided with mine for a milli-second – naturally might not have been appreciated.

Day 2: Money – Money – Money – it’s a rich man’s world

There’s no sense in going on about it but Oslo can be an expensive place. Since the oil boom, Norway is now a rich country and people are paid well. Many workers earn significantly more than their counterparts in Dublin. Eating out therefore requires some forward planning and a little more research than usual. But I tried to look on the positive side. Expensive dining out is always good for the waistline and it makes a green salad (usually cheapest option) seem almost appealing. It’s no surprise that many visitors to Norway, bring luggage heavily laden with clinking bottles, and return home later, their bags unaccountably lighter.

But there are plenty of inexpensive pleasures too. Most of the hotels (including ours) are very central and Oslo is an easy and pleasant city to walk. The cycle paths are excellent and sturdy looking municipal bikes can be rented at one point and deposited at the next. City traffic is light and even during the rush hour there is a muted calmness about it all – no honking horns or screeching brakes or drive by shootings. Mostly the city resonates with the sounds of very good street performers. Turn onto the main thoroughfare Karl Johans Gate and by the time you have reached the royal palace (Slottet), you may have heard a Russian folk tune, a haunting Chinese air, an unaccompanied tenor singing Verdi, some catchy Asian rock, more Russians singing in beautiful harmony about something that sounds very sad. We did!
Sadly no Fields of Athenry though!
The National Art Gallery also offers free admission and an impressive range of paintings, including Van Gogh, Picasso, Braque and of course Edvard Munch. I have now ticked off The Scream as one of the ‘thousand and one paintings to see before you die’. But his other work on show there is equally compelling.
Down at Aker Brygge is apparently where the cool Oslo people hang out. We spent a couple of evenings there, watching majestic yachts sail by and ferries head out to the islands and other ports on the Baltic. One sleepy morning as we sipped coffee on the waterfront, we heard a spine-tingling twenty-one-gun salute echo out through the morning mist. By the time the last shot sounded we were most definitely wide awake and ready to take on the world. At last - something that really does wake a person up in the mornings!

Day 3: Embarassing incident in the Newsagents

There’s an almost unavoidable streak of vanity attached to publishing a book and some people can handle it with beautiful grace and humility, or alternatively, they deal with it by cloaking themselves in a curtain of chirpy unassailable arrogance. Me – I tumble into an angst-ridden cesspit of insecurity tangled up with bouts of absurd self-congratulation. It’s not a combination of feelings to be recommended. Seeking out one’s own work in bookshops can utterly ruin an otherwise perfect day. So I didn’t go looking for THE BOOK and whenever I came across a bookshop in Oslo, I scurried quickly by.
But my evasion tactics came undone in the newsagents at the bus station. Hurried attempts to buy a Sunday paper ended with the pages splattered and scattered across the floor. Flushed with embarrassment I began hastily scooping up the various bits of paper only to collide with a bookstand, almost toppling the whole thing over. The shop assistant smiled nicely and I laughed at my clumsiness and then tried but failed to hide my childish delight – (as obviously I’m trying to give up absurd self congratulation in all its forms) – at careening completely by accident into the one bookstand in the shop that housed, amongst others new publications, Den Perfekte Mann.

We went on a couple of out of town jaunts but the trip across the fjord to the Folk Museum at Bygdoy – the largest and oldest in Europe – was especially delightful and atmospheric. There are scores of striking buildings in this open-air museum, redolent of a country, like our own, whose rural and urban populations were often steeped in poverty and religious oppression and whose only hope in the end was to emigrate to America. These are sad dark little dwellings, some scarcely a hundred years old where people eked out lives much as our own ancestors did, struggling to survive on meagre resources.

The lurking shriek of Mortality

Stave Church

The stave church, one of thirty such remarkable structures that survive in Norway, is very eye-catching. Truly – it is one of the spookiest, grimmest buildings I have ever stood in.
It seems people have wedding parties there!
What?
It must be like having your wedding in Great Grandfather’s tomb!!
I sat in a dark corner of this steep windowless wooden structure and felt only the whistling of the wind and a lurking screech of mortality. It would certainly be a great place for a funeral – yes a big black coffin decked out on a candle-flanked bier would look right at home in a stave church. The gloomy windowless place of worship is made completely of wood and is a work of great architectural ingenuity, decorated here and there with intricate carvings. Though parts of this one have been reconstructed, there are others scattered around Norway, which survive intact from as far back as the twelfth century.

Surreal Thoughts in The Folk Museum

Gas Station

Not far from the stave church was a charming little petrol station, reconstructed just as it had been in the nineteen twenties, bright, cheerful and inviting. Then I had a brainwave. What if the functions of each building could be reversed? Maybe if petrol pumps were compulsorily housed in forbidding stave church like structures, we’d think more carefully about using them and depleting our oil resources. And if places of worship and reflection were bright, open and accessible like filling stations, people might be more tempted to pop in and explore the spiritual side of life. (Yes! This is a crazy idea probably brought on by too much green salad and the shock of that early morning twenty-one-gun salute!)

In another section of the Folk Park, a student flat (part of a reconstructed tenement building) from the nineteen eighties, kitted out with comical accuracy, brought back amusing memories of our own college days, when the height of sophisticated décor in Dublin was a purple candle stuck in a straw covered Chianti wine bottle, and a cassette recorder was considered to be a genuine status symbol.

Day 4: Party Time on Oslofjorden

The view from Ekeberg Restaurant

We were lucky enough to be invited to join the large Swedish and Norwegian publishing house DAMM for the Autumn launch of their books, including mine. It was a great honour and we looked forward to the evening, simply glad to have been invited along.
There are stories of book launches and literary gatherings where the highlight of the evening is a scramble for a glass of cheap wine in a darkened room somewhere, where the introductions are hurried and a nasty scrum bunches aggressively over the cocktail sausages. This is sometimes followed by some lonely lurking in a corner, offering a few hopeful smiles as folk hurry by to be seen in the company of important looking people wearing high heels and dramatic voluminous gowns, with excessive dental work and very bare very muscular arms. At least I’ve heard that’s how it is in some of the more remote parts of Antarctica!

The taxi drove us up the side of a fjord and disgorged us. We stepped out in trepidation and standing in the bright evening sunshine, we were instantly silenced by spectacular views over the city. Behind us, a white nineteen twenties functionalist building swept and curved across the side of the hill and beneath it, terraces of tables and chairs were set out for the guests – all of whom looked to be having a wonderful time.
Were we perhaps in the wrong place?
Had we landed in the Bauhaus Movement or on a movie set for some Great Gatsby remake?
We edged forward in our sunglasses, our chins jutting outwards (think Fortinbras with Raybans). Then trying to look as though we were planning to buy the place and give the chef his very own TV show, we strode breezily towards the front door.

Ida and Pádhraic

Before we could go inside though, we were intercepted and greeted warmly by Ida from DAMM, who led us onto the terrace and introduced us to some of the other guests. My excellent companion had been lamenting the lack of blondes early on in his trip – but now he came into his own. Surrounded by a bevy of beautiful Norwegian ladies he found his voice – and so began one of the nicest evenings we have spent in ages. We settled into good-humoured jokes about the Viking invasions of Ireland (It seems that while we were away the Danish Government apologised to the People of Ireland for the Viking Raids). Would the Norwegians now apologise? The conversation and the laughter flowed. Rarely have I felt so instantly at home anywhere. We talked about everything under the sun. There was champagne, fine food and one of the most stunning views I have ever dined over.
Oh – and needless to say – not at all like they do it in Antarctica!
The Ekeberg Restaurant was built in the nineteen twenties. Stylish and sparsely decorated with huge windows overlooking the bay and graceful curving walls, it is said that high living Nazis (knowing a good thing when they saw one) used it to party during their occupation of Norway. After the war, the restaurant fell into a state of dilapidation. Now it is beautifully restored and though the complexities of history still resonate softly in the curved rooms and on the terraces, today it is a most agreeable place, and possibly one of the finest vantage points in Europe in which to sip champagne, talk wistfully of the past, reflect wisely on the present and speculate wittily on the future.
Or simply admire the view and the talent – if you prefer!

Fjord Fiesta

Shamefully we never got to see The Kon Tiki Museum, the Munch Museum, Vigeland park, The Resistance Museum, The Nobel Peace Centre, The Viking Ship Museum, Monument to the Paper Clip – and so much more. This all means only one thing. I’ll have to go back to Oslo, and maybe head out to Vestlandet, up to Trondelag and beyond to the far North. Perhaps I’ll drive the Atlantic Road that winds its way across the islands towards Kristiansund. Maybe I’ll even reach Nordcapp, the spectacular northern tip of Europe. I’ll want to explore the hidden corners of Norway, tucked away in remote hills and valleys.

And of course the fjords – which means that next time round I will definitely be renting that Fjord Fiesta!

To Ida and everyone – Takk for meg. Thanks from me for a wonderful time, and takk from the companion too.

Flight Into Egypt

There is something moving about the ancient biblical tale of little Moses, even in more secular times.

Fearing that the Pharaoh Rameses will slaughter her baby son, Jochebed conceals the infant in a flimsy cradle made of bulrushes coated in pitch. Then, desperate to save him by any means, she sets him adrift into the waters of the great Nile river. Miriam, Moses’s sister watches the fragile little craft until it comes to rest at the bathing place of the Pharaoh’s beautiful daughter. Then in an irony that will have far-reaching cultural, religious and historical significance, the defenceless baby is saved and adopted by the tyrant’s daughter and covertly nursed by his own mother.

Sloth on The Nile

Whether factual, or simply part of the rich fabric of folk history, it is one of the truly great stories. Reading any vivid account of how the vulnerable infant is wrapped in cloths and hidden in a fragile basket among the reeds, only to be found by the Pharaoh’s daughter, is both exciting and terrifying. Just last month, gliding lazily along the banks of the Nile in a Felucca as sunset approached, I was reminded of tiny Moses drifting helplessly at the whim of fate and nature.

To be honest, until that moment, like many a lukewarm atheist / part-time Christian, I’d almost forgotten Moses had ever existed. Biblical tales, however exciting and universally resonant, tend to languish in the doldrums of political incorrectness these days. Sometimes it seems as though it’s just not polite to mention God and his colourful pantheon of associates any more. But looking around me at the broad expanse of water, at the palm trees, the rushes, the camels and buffalo and the men tending to them, I remember the bible tales of my childhood and I realise fully the remarkable drama of the story. What a risk Moses’ mother took in placing him there! What an agony of desperation and fear she must have been in. As we drift indolently, sipping hot tea with the boatman and chatting about the merits of Islam and Christianity respectively, menacing birds of prey hover overhead. There are hungry crocodiles further down, and snakes, strong currents, sudden and treacherous winds, not to mention all the other man-made dangers, boats and barges, industrial and construction waste and human effluent. Way back in biblical times it must have been a bit like hiding a baby and buggy on the hard shoulder of a ten lane superhighway.

Walking in the Shadow of the Valley of Death

Pliny, the Roman scholar, who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, described the extravagance of what he saw in Egypt as ‘an idle and foolish exhibition of royal wealth.’ It’s a snuffy and superior Roman comment but there’s some truth in it. Even my companion remarks that the Pharaohs were ‘so into themselves.’ We are in The Valley of The Kings and in spite of the area being one vast tourist trap, the attractions of Luxor, Karnak, Valley of The Kings, Valley of The Queens and the Collossi of Memnon – to mention just a few of the antiquities scattered hereabouts – are truly breathtaking. Others from Herodotus to William Golding have written of the scope, the scale, the ingenuity and the sheer imagination of it all. The shelves of bookshops and libraries worldwide are littered with the memoirs of feisty Victorian Ladies who dared to explore this magical land without their husbands. It’s all been seen and noted. But like the millions who have passed through over several millennia, I just want to see it for myself. It’s another something to tick off the to-do list.

My companion is an excellent young chap called Seán. The gentlemen of Luxor are most respectful to him, though jokes about me being his sister do not meet with his approval, since I am, most clearly, his mum. Offers of camels in exchange for me are met with slightly less disapproval and I suspect even considered, momentarily.

Showdown in the Doctor’s Surgery
I generally only get sick before holidays and this time within days of our departure, I find myself in the doctor’s surgery, wheezing and spluttering with what he describes as a particularly bad dose – swollen glands and all. I must take to bed and stay there with some very large antibiotics – “It’s complicated,” I tell him. “The son and I are heading down to The Valley of The Kings for mid-term.” There’s a stand off. The regular warm twinkle fades terrifyingly from his eye and he eyes me sternly. I hear a small voice squeaking from a corner of the surgery that I really have to go. This is something that simply has to be done and I can’t put it off any longer. I do not want to be staring my own extinction squarely in the face when I walk in the shadow of the Valley of Kings. (It’s surprisingly easy to discuss idly one’s own demise with a family GP). Some days later I hobble onto the plane like a one-woman weapon of mass-biological warfare and pray that I am not about to inflict another plague on the unfortunate Egyptians.

Versace Does The Afterlife and Celebrity Big Burial

The whole culture of Egyptology is both awe-inspiring and incredibly kitsch. Everything is so phenomenally over the top – Cecil B de Mille does the Afterlife – with costumes by Versace and human deification by Gods R Us; Mummification and Entombment by Celebrity Big Burial, with tomb decoration by Hieroglyphics and Cartouches Grand Designs Direct. It’s easy to snigger, like Pliny, at this Pharaonic extravagance. Yet the sheer scale and engineering ingenuity of Life after Death, Egyptian style is remarkable. On a minor note, in the tombs of the West Bank there are many reminders that fashion is timeless and that quality eye-liner has been an essential item in the make-up bag since Nefertari was a child. The female figures especially are graceful and beautifully draped and exquisitely made up. It’s tempting to wonder if some pre-Christian Estee Lauder type wandered around peddling Miss Pharaoh Temptation Lipstick or Cartouche Rouge Allure.

Across the Sacred Lake

A quiet stroll among the giant columns of Karnak, watching light and shade dapple and glide with almost divine artistry in the intervening spaces, is one of many simple reminders that three thousand years ago, beauty and the skill of the artist were recognised and celebrated. Our guide round Karnak is Hassan, knowledgeable, friendly and as I couldn’t help remarking – not unlike the boy-king Tut. ‘My ancestor’, he grins – not overly offended by the comparison. His tour is excellent and personal and we would not have found our way through the vast site so well alone – even with our very good guidebook. It’s difficult to find words that depict Karnak. Descriptions vary from extremely technical treatises on the layout and the hieroglyphics, to torrid passages of gushing prose. A Romanian princess held a candle-lit dinner party here in the nineteen thirties to the strains of Old Man River. The French army stopped by on the orders of Napoleon in 1798. Amelia Edwards, a nineteenth century writer, tells it like it is:
‘. . . The scale is too vast; the effect too tremendous; the sense of one’s own dumbness, and littleness , and incapacity, too complete and crushing. It is a place that strikes you into silence; that empties you, as it were, not only of words but of ideas. . . I could only look and be silent.”
At the end of his guided tour, Hassan leads us to the Sacred Lake and points across solemnly to the other side.
We gaze over the holy waters earnestly.
The Afterlife? We wonder.
“The Temple of Coca Cola!” – he says with a bright smile. We pay him more than agreed because he has been so good and afterwards, as the crowds drain away to escape the mid-day sun, we steal around between the columns, temples and sphinxes like children trespassing in an Emperor’s palace.

We are all Pharaoh-ed and templed out and we retire to the pool which juts out into the Nile. Each afternoon we watch the world drift by on the Egyptian Superhighway. It’s not quite The Winter Palace or even the Cataract Hotel further down near Aswan, but with cooling river breezes and feluccas drifting by, within feet of our sunbeds, the Iberotel is perfectly adequate.

Queen Hot Chicken Soup
This morning a group of us rose at five after a sleepless night and were crossing the Nile on a delicate mist before the sun rose. The West Bank is different and poverty is instantly everywhere. A man appears out of the mist and with a swash-buckling leap lands on the prow of our little river craft. He offers tea and even at this early hour he is the bearer of a delightfully rakish grin. He is called Tarik, tall, lean and very handsome.
He explains with a sardonic curl of the eyebrow, and a distant gaze in his eye, that he is our pilot. Then we are bundled into an ancient VW minibus and whisked through narrow streets past goats and donkeys and children, past the Collossi which look rather absurd so early in the day, like some monstrous piece of installation art or a practical joke left behind by the local sculpture school. We gather in a field and listen to instructions. Then we all climb into a basket and are whisked up into the sky by the rather droll Captain Tarik. Not quite a magic carpet, but we are entranced all the same, floating way above the Valley of Kings and Queen Hatchepsut’s very grand temple – an early Beckingham Palace. The locals refer to this particular queen who was Aunt, wife and mother-in-law to the same unfortunate young fella – as Queen Hot Chicken Soup. From our dreamy perch as the sun creeps up on the edge of the horizon, and we drift over the Valley of The Kings, we can see the last routes of the Pharaohs as they headed up the Valley and into the Afterlife. We can also see into the impoverished and half decaying houses of the villages close by. Little children skip along paths, through fields of corn and sugar cane, making their way to school. They wave up at us.

Luxor Air Traffic Control

An intriguing aspect of our balloon voyage, is that we can hear all the air traffic control exchanges as planes from across the world file their co-ordinates and request clearance to land in Luxor Airport. I’m half expecting to hear a disembowelled voice announcing that he’s King Tutankhamun and he’s coming in at a sudden, steep angle, Alpha, Charlie, Whiskey, Foxtrot Zulu – or words to that effect. Out in the Valley of the Kings though, air traffic control generally consists of a dozen balloons, dipping and rising elegantly to avoid each other. There are about two dozen of them and they do not always obey the Highway Code. Captain Tarik ridicules the haphazard ballooning style of another pilot and I think he puts out his hand and makes a gesture which is more usually seen from the rolled down windows of cars on busy city streets.

The son is enjoying his birthday treat. We have climbed to a couple of thousand feet. Captain Tarik asks us from time to time if we are all still here. The landing is fun and we are warned like Lot’s wife, not to look back until we are told. When we finally get the signal to turn round there are about half a dozen men wrestling with the now collapsed balloon, squeezing the air out of it and twisting the massive swathe of material into a ball that is eventually squashed into a crate not much larger than an old fashioned tea chest.

Moses and the Nile

But back to Moses and that river journey. On the last day of our short holiday we drift calmly through the waters of the great Nile, observing the currents and the hovering birds and groups of scrawny camels tethered to the ground. In one field are water buffalo tended by old men in traditional clothing who sit under the shade of palm trees, as they have done for thousands of years. In the next field, a group of Egyptian boys play a lively game of soccer. Our captain is also called Moses – or so he says. He makes us delicious hot tea and enquires why so many European ladies come to Egypt in search of men. Then he answers his own question. Because Egyptian men respect women, he declares. European women are in better shape than Egyptian women – he insists. I’m not sure where the conversation is heading and my young companion (aka the son) smiles at me sphinx like. I tell Moses about my very long and deliriously happy marriage and the conversation moves swiftly to Moses explaining to me how Islam is a better religion than Christianity for women. Am I staying in a nice hotel? Do I have a room all to myself? Questions can become intimate very suddenly in Egypt. I quickly point to a hovering bird and he explains that it’s a kingfisher.

A life without adventure . . .
Those feisty travelling Victorian ladies have much to answer for. As I am in Luxor without a husband, some locals think that I may be in need of a husband. A number of offers are forthcoming and it’s all harmless fun. We return to our hotel and pack up in preparation for our flight early the next morning.
At which point I discover my passport has gone missing. The next few hours are spent in a state of high drama and anxiety as the Tour guide / rep insists that he will personally rescue me and that I must embrace the ‘adventure’. I think at one point he even says ‘you’re getting on that plane. . .’ He’s very sweet and genuinely helpful but I can’t help thinking he’s watched Casablanca a little too often. I have a close encounter with the Egyptian Police which involves a sub-machine gun, several mobile phones and some epic chain smoking. There are also many urgent communications with the Embassy, the first of which begins with a reply that is like something from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop: ‘I’m terribly sorry but I’m actually in Khartoum and I can’t possibly help you tonight.’ I would have to put my son on that plane in the morning, then fly on to Cairo – at enormous expense and wait there anxiously like Ilsa Lund (Bergman) until Rick Blaine(Bogart – or is that Almaz) turns up with my passport. I sleep fitfully and imagine my son flying back home alone, as his mother is whisked away into white slavery to make alabaster camels, her identity stolen forever.

. . .Is a life without meaning??
In the morning Almaz appears with a cheery smile and we head for the airport. I am getting on that plane. I have a sheaf of very important papers from both police and a helpful lady at the embassy in Cairo, that will guarantee me safe passage back to Dublin. Still as our travelling companions slide effortlessly through Passport Control into the departures lounge, and we are shunted to one side, I fear the worst. After an agonising wait, we are through and in the departure lounge there is another scene worthy of Casablanca. A different Rep turns up with my passport – which has appeared quite miraculously and with earth-shattering timing at the very eleventh hour! It appears that Almaz has come to my rescue once more! Fifty suspicious questions hover on my lips but the flight beckons and it is time to go. I am directed to the balcony of the Departure Lounge where he stands below waving up at me and mouthing words that I can’t hear through the noise of the crowds. Is he saying ‘We’ll always have Luxor Police Station . . .’
But no. He has placed a little note in my passport. It says: a life without adventure is a life without meaning.

Flight out of Egypt

From the balcony above, I enter into the spirit of adventure for one expedient moment and blow Almaz an Oscar-winning kiss before hurrying with indecent haste to board the plane.
The next day, I pay the passport office in Molesworth Street a visit – better safe than sorry.

Logistical Info

We booked our trip with Budget Travel, who offer prices from €484.00. February is a good time to travel when it’s not too hot. We stayed in Iberotel and arranged a room with a Nile view (well worth the extra money). There are plenty of local restaurants and tour companies offering good value for money. Our Balloon Company was a reputable firm called Hod Hod Soliman. Thomas Cook local tours of the area are also highly recommended.