Tallen, my youngest daughter and part-time dive buddy entered the cool emerald coloured water with me as the current slowed to a stop to change direction (slack). Full of anticipation, Tallen and I descended down the southwest side of Virago Rock within Porlier Pass, a .65 km (.4 mile) wide channel between the islands of Valdez and Galiano.
Erythra Thalassa—Red Sea, as directly translated from the ancient Greek name—is what it was called by the ancient Romans as well. Long has this great body of water been a focal point of trade in the Middle East, which has stood as a crossroads between Europe, Asia and Africa for many thousands of years. The Red Sea, today, is still an important vehicle of global trade as well as a major tourist destination for millions.
In the heart of the Middle East, occupying 80 percent of the eastern shoreline of the Red Sea, sits the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It covers an area of over 870, 000 square miles, almost all of which is desert, which holds more than a quarter of the world’s oil reserves.
The sun was just greeting the day as I hurried to the top deck of our cruise boat with a steaming hot cup of coffee in one hand and a camera in the other. I was alone, enjoying the splender of another Egyptian morning. Wispy veils of fog danced across the Nile’s glassy surface, slowly dissipating as the sun’s rays enveloped the distant mountains and countryside.
“Sui Generis” is the most appropriate way I find to describe the Galapagos Islands. A place where the intruder is the human being. A place where many of its inhabitants are animals that exist only in this small piece of the world. A place where evolution seems to have been suspended at some moment in time. A place where we can feel like pioneers in each corner.
”They don’t eat people … do they?”
I can still remember the strain of uncertainty in the voice during the conversation. It is now several years ago since we sat together in the compartment of the train on its way north through Northern Sweden’s misty autumnal wilderness.
