It was a perfect, calm day, with the sun shining on the desert and the Red Sea as I touched down in Egypt for the first time. On arrival, even before leaving the airport, I had caused a stir. The officers at Passport Control seemed to think that that my being Irish was the most interesting thing that would happen to them all morning.

"Irlanda," one called to the other, pointing at me and for the next quarter of and hour, all worked stopped on both of their queues, as the boyos started quizzing my knowledge of Arabic. Just why they assumed I knew any Arabic for the mere fact of being Irish, I never quite grasped. However, the looks of the faces of the people behind me being held up due to all these shenanagins was priceless.

Dahab was a desert town / divers' colony a couple of hours up the coast towards the Israeli border. I managed to sneak on to one of the Swiss tour buses at the airport and got an illicit lift into the centre of Sharm. This wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. I think the bus driver had been well suss about my status as a package tourist, especially my grubby clothes coupled with the fact that the hotel I had chosen to invent as my place of stay was a five star joint, and as an added bonus it seemed to be nowhere near the centre of town. I couldn't get out there, it wouldn't have worked given that the Swiss tour rep was accompanying the guests into the foyer to make sure they checked in okay. As the bus driver shot me a knowing look when I failed to get off the bus at the place I was allegedly staying, I was quietly panicking. At the next few hotels the same thing happened, the tour rep got the luggage off the bus and held it captive until the tourists checked-in. I was thanking my lucky stars I'd kept my bag with me. A while later we pulled up near a cheaper two star place, that was set off the street a little away from the bus. When the rep left and walked to the hotel, I took my chance, fled the bus and hid in a courtyard until it left. Heaven only knows what the others on the bus thought.

To make things worse, at the airport I wasn't quite quick enough to notice that there had been another tour bus going to Dahab. So after a short cab ride I found myself at the local bus station at 3:30pm to find that the next bus to Dahab was leaving at 5pm! There was nothing for it but to pull out a book, order a sweet tea and wait. Amongst the only people who spoke to me was an Egyptian man with impeccable English, who told me he was a writer from Cairo and did I realize that he thought I was someone famous when he saw me sitting there, as I was so "beautiful". And that I had wonderful eyes. He didn't explain the thought processes which might have lead him to think that anyone remotely famous might be waiting at the East Delta Bus company tea stall for a local bus up the coast costing $2.

By 5:30pm we were finally on the road, just at the end of sunset. Apart from a rather worrisome police checkpoint the journey was relatively uneventful. When we got to the town, in what transpired to be one of my best tactical moves of the trip, I asked a another European looking guy if he wanted to share a cab to the camps. Ben was a Canadian who had been coming to Dahab for several years. He had arrived back in Egypt a few weeks beforehand and was looking for winter work as a dive instructor. He was to prove a willing, able and interesting guide and guru for all the local goings on. I picked up some much needed food and he brought me to the place he was staying, the improbably named "Fighting Kangaroo Oasis". The place was cheap, clean and ruin by Bedouins, which Ben assured me was a guarantee of few hassles and sales pitches.

Dahab and the camp was beginning to seem like a cross between Koh Samui and Mamallapuram, where colourful characters and local rip-off merchants mingled in equal measure, in a place which had started as a Bedouin settlement, moved to a hippy hangout and was going towards becoming a Sharm-like resort. The camp had more than just Ben as a semi permanent resident. There was JJ, a French writer who had acquired an accidental son by a Sudanese woman now living in Cairo, and Steffi the Alsacian art restorer and dive master. She told me once while under the influence that she couldn't really apply to museums and galleries to be restorer as she had worked on stolen pieces of art. Her manner of recounting this was so flippant that I was inclined to believe her.

While getting my diving sorted the next day, I got talking to Mohamed the camp manager.

"Saddam Hussein changed my life," he tells me. "When I think about my life before, it was...y'know...ruled by the clock. Now I don't even wear a watch," and he presents his bare wrist for my inspection.

Turns out Mohamed was Kuwati and before the invasion he had been an air steward for Kuwati Airlines. His family had some Egyptian origins and when Saddam came they simply left and never went back. That afternoon I took a walk along the shoreline and sucked up the quietness along with the sea air. It was hard to believe I was looking across to Saudi Arabia.

Apparently I had fallen on a good moment to do some dives in Dahab. The full moon was in a few days and one of the staff instructors told me the conditions were always very calm in its approach. This is a boon indeed considering that the area is one of the prime spots for windsurfing and strong winds will wreak havoc with underwater visibility.

There were other advantages to staying in the campsite. The night of the full moon the Bedouin owner of the campsite's son was getting married and all the guests were invited to partake in the festivities. What I had was essentially an evening invite to a full Bedouin wedding, not an opportunity to be missed. Hours after we had been told we were going, we finally loaded up in the back of a pick-up truck and drove the few miles to the Bedouin village on the outskirts of the tourist areas. The skies were completely clear and the moon was providing that blue/grey tinge like a badly lit black and white movie. The evening was loaded with atmosphere even before we'd got to the village. We got to something resembling the village square, there were camels and children and rubbish strewn about haphazardly. The smell was something else too, not unpleasant just indescribable.

Myself, Mohamed the camp manager, and a few other blinking tourists from the camp piled out of the pick-up, trying to figure out what we were supposed to do and feeling more than a little idiotic. I threw Mohamed a "you brought us here, what the hell are we supposed to do?" look and he came and told me he'd never been to a Bedouin wedding. After a while he suggested we take a walk. Women were seated on the ground in the open "village square" area. The men were chanting in small groups dotted around the village, accompanied by drum beats beaten out on empty oil cans.

After some time one or two women got up to dance with one of the groups, causing the other groups to play even harder and louder to attract dancers. Occasionally some of the men would even defect to groups with more dancers. The women were covered from head to foot in sheer black shawling, the upper shawl decorated with gold designs which reflected brilliantly in the full moon. They danced with their heads covered, occasionally revealing their faces to the male musicians, much to their approval. How they managed to produce the music they did with only oil cans and their voices is beyond me: tribal, hypnotic, resounding in the night as the women whirled and twirled and glittered in the moonlight.

We eventually happened upon the groom, a tall stocky man looking tired. He invited us to his house for Bedouin Tea – quite different from black or green teas you find anywhere else with a strong taste of sage and other herbs. We sat in his yard among concrete sheds that looked like they were still under construction. There were goats and chickens all over the yard: quite a contrast to the guesthouse building back at the camp his father owned, with ensuite bathrooms and ceiling fans in all rooms. A matriarch type figure appeared with the tea. She was probably not as old as she looked and although small in stature she had enormous presence. She and Mohamed spoke in Arabic, he occasionally translated for us but mostly we sat in silence enjoying the delicious tea and trying not to intrude more than we clearly were.

After a while we left and rejoined the singing and dancing in the main square. A truck pulled up and its strong headlights caught on one of the camels at the side of the square, projecting a larger than life camel shadow on the side of a tall wall. Just another surreal sight for the diary, but I wished I could have caught it on camera.

The Bedouins and especially the women have a way of looking through you as they pass. Something in their face, in their comportment says "I see you, I know you are there, but you have utterly no relevance for me." Perhaps a survival mechanism, a result of being perennial outsiders to any and all rulers of their lands through time. It was most strange. I had the sensation of being invisible until some of the younger girls approached me, smiling. The bravest one, under goading and encouragement from her friends, asked me if I spoke Arabic, it was heartbreaking to have to say no. She tried out one or two English phrases on me but soon lost interest, given my inability to communicate. She and her friends skipped off to join the party.

The safest bet when you don't know the local language is to find some under fives. They never seem to mind that you don't speak their language as they communicate on altogether different channels. I remember in New Zealand a little girl from Hong Kong rabitted on to me for an entire bus journey either oblivious or ignoring my complete lack of Cantonese. I had noticed two younger girls playing clapping games and apparently acting out for my benefit. Soon I was sitting in the dirt teaching them a rather tricky clapping game from my youth (Under The Bambush, if anyone remembers that one). The others from the camp headed off, but my teaching duties were not yet complete and, only too happy to not be invisible anymore, I stayed on a while. On my way home, the kids thought I wasn't sufficiently decorated for having been at a wedding and dragged me into a local shop to put a temporary tattoo on me. At least that's why I think they did it!

After that I decided that it was time to get moving and visit an English woman I knew, who was working as a diving instructor in the resort town of Sharm El Sheik. It had been years since we'd met on a four day tour of Kakadu national park in Northern Australia and I almost didn't recognise her. Her place was very ex-pat style and in fact could have been an apartment in almost any town anywhere in Europe. Most of her co-workers were English too, as were most of their clients. They are all technically on residency visas but the authorities seem to turn a blind eye to people working in diving on residency visas in the Sinai peninsula.

Shortly after I made my escape towards Cairo, I had no real will to leave the tranquillity of the Red Sea resorts but I figured it would be a shame to come to Egypt and not see the Pyramids.

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