I was quite tired from being on the bus to Cairo most of the evening. In fact I'd been attempting to get to Cairo most of the day, having been denied access to an earlier bus in Sharm El Sheik. There was a two hour to wait until the next bus, which of course didn't leave for a further hour.

I met a French guy and his Egyptian friend while waiting for the bus. They had also been denied access to the 2:30pm bus. We got talking a little and due to either his bad understanding or my bad accent, he understood I was Dutch (Ollandaise) rather than Irish (Irlandaise). I was too tired and hung-over to bother correcting him. And besides, I thought it was amusing, Irish people have the kind of accent while speaking English that often people think when we say "Ireland" we are saying "Holland", odd that it should work in French as well.

The journey was fairly uneventful except a full shakeout of the bus and ID control for all the Egyptians at Suez. And of course being woken from a deep and needed sleep to be sold a tea that I didn't even want from the bus's ground hostess. I had only taken the tea as it seemed like the quickest way to get the guy to leave me alone so I could get back to sleep. I couldn't though...

All this left me quite dazed as I arrived in Cairo at 1am. To my dismay the French guy and his Egyptian friend made a quick escape from the station. I was hoping they would help me with bargaining for a cab. To make things worse I wasn't quite sure which bus station I was at, and hence wasn't sure what fare I should be hitting for. The taxi driver that approached me spoke good English, which set alarm bells ringing right away. When I didn't like the fares he was offering, he brought over his mate the policeman to verify this was the fare. Well it was either that, or he did it to intimidate me. I ended up paying more than I wanted, cause I was tired and I wanted to get away from the station and into bed.

I made it to Hotel Dahab in the end, despite the taxi driver telling me it was no longer good (and by the way, did I want to stay in his friend's hotel instead?) and some guy at the door of the hotel building telling me it was full (and by the way, did I want to stay in his friend's hotel instead?). Hotel Dahab was a wonderful, friendly shithole off the main square Talaat Harb, just the kind of place I love. I had regained some of my energy, or perhaps fallen into overtiredness, and stayed up chatting to the night clerk. I learned a new Arabic word "magnoona" – crazy, which was to be applied to me frequently during my brief sojourn in the country. Unfortunately, I wasn't used to the city noise and didn't get much sleep the first night.

I woke up late the next day and got as far as the Egyptian Museum which was right beside the hotel. I had met some Dutch guys arriving that evening and they invited me to accompany them on a trip the next morning to see the (semi) famous weekly Camel Market outside Cairo. But first, a manager in the hotel arranged for about 10 of us to go to for an evening of Sufi devotional music in the old town. It was inside a splendid fortress that we were treated to the music and the whirling dervish style dancing at once mesmerising and hypnotising.

Fast forward to the next morning and I somehow had a bad feeling about this cab idea. There was something dodgy in the guy just happening to be outside our hotel at 5am and offering to help. He also said his "friend" was a taxi driver and he would negotiate a good price for us. Indeed the price he was asking to take us to "near" the market was almost too good to be true. I always think when things seem to good to be true, they usually are, but the Dutch guys were set on the idea. However, his idea of "near the camel market" was about 90mins away. In fairness we did get to the place where the bus left for the camel market but at an insanely inflated price. There wasn't much we could do, the price had been agreed and we had to pay.

Over an hour later and in the depths of the countryside outside Cairo, we arrived at the Camel market. The sun was just coming up, it was cloudy, there were camels and white robed men as far as the eye could see. It was surreal and bizarre and, just like the Bedouin wedding, now that we'd got here, I was wondering what the hell we were doing. I felt kinda dumb and out of place. In the back of my mind I wondered how we were going to get back. We'd come out on a local minbus, which was very good fun but could hardly be expected to have a regular schedule. I didn't fancy our chances on getting a good deal on a cab back to Cairo either.

We trailed a bit at the entry, slightly dazed from the early start. Quite soon someone came to sell us "entry tickets", although it really could have had anything written on it. Well, at least it wasn't too expensive. We wandered deep into the market and saw various herds of camels getting beaten by various owners. We passed some other Europeans and I was approached my the woman with them.

"Don't tell me you're enjoying this," she said. Not quite sure of how to react, all I could say was, "well, it's interesting."

"I'm hating this," she said. "I really can't take seeing animals treated like this."

Somehow it didn't really bother me. She was German and had been teaching English in Cairo for two years. She'd been thinking about visiting the camel market for some time. She said she was glad she came but the look on her face said otherwise.

I will say the most impressive site besides seeing two camels being fit into the back of a pick-up truck, was the slaughtering of a goat. It went from animal to food in approximately 5 minutes. Quite impressive! Not too long later we decided it was time to go and headed towards the Nile barrages which lay between the Camel Market and Cairo. One of the Dutch guys had told me there were some nice parks there to relax in. After the rigours of the camel market we spent a fairly quiet day strolling through the park, having tea at a VERY local roadside stall and visiting an amusement park.

We walked down to the place where our guide book said we could get a ferry back to downtown Cairo. The Dutch guys had a vision of a relaxed cruise back to the centre along the Nile. What we got was a two hour, crowded downstairs, loud music upstairs, rusting boat which seemed to take an age to get back to the downtown. The lower deck of the boat was full of families returning from a day out, Friday being the traditional day-off in Muslim countries. The upper open deck was full with teenagers seemingly coming back from a daytime disco. They were continuing their revelries with very loud Arabic pop music and outrageously good dancing.

Soon the Dutch guys couldn't take the music anymore and returned the milder lower deck. I was left alone, which at the beginning wasn't really a problem but slowly I became completely encircled by a bunch of youths and began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. I could always have escaped to the lower deck but I loathed seeming like I was fleeing and besides they were just kids. I stuck it out and in the end the few girls in the group made the others apologise for their behaviour. I wandered round the upper deck a little but continued to feel like I was getting too much attention and joined the others below.

The music was still audible even there and there were a few teenagers dancing on a makeshift stage at the back. No sooner had I arrived than the people around us were asking who I was, what were the relationships and where I was from and did I like Egypt. At the time I was pretending to be married to one of the Dutch guys, it was just simpler that way (not to mention giving me an air of respectability). Soon some men asked me to dance but I declined thinking that it probably wasn't the done thing. Then a little later a quite timid woman in a veil got up and equally timidly motioned for me to dance with her. We were in a quiet corner of the boat and I saw no possible harm coming from a little dance with this lady, especially as I love to dance. I was wholly unprepared for what happened next.

The minute I got up to dance the entire lower deck of the boat exploded: not only were all eyes on me but there was a great outcry of whooping and cheering and cries of "Yalla! Yalla!" coming from all directions. Not to mention that quite a few people scattered around the crowded deck stood up and joined in the general mayhem with their own dancing circles. There was nothing else to do but get into and revel in my new found stardom and soon I was getting requests to come and join other groups for a dance.

By the end of the cruise I had danced with about half the boat, I was utterly exhausted but completely charmed by the residents of Cairo who had been offering me food, drink and conversation as well as dancing all the way back to the centre of town. I was amazed at the general enjoyment and sensuality of the women's dancing to the pop music. Honestly, it's easy to forget you're in Africa until you see something like I experienced on that boat.

With another few days in Cairo I managed to get in most of the tourist trail including haggling at the Al-Khalili market, being descended upon by hoards of schoolchildren wanting to touch my hair in the backstreets, getting ripped off in an elaborate scam at the Pyramids, being greeted with a "Happy Christmas – Welcome in Cairo" by almost everyone we met and of course the essential "café" experience.

Being a Muslim country there are no pubs and bars, only prohibition-style cafés with darkened windows which serve alcohol. A few of us from the hotel went to check a local café out one night. Inside there were a few people scattered about the place, most seemed to be drinking alone. There was nothing approaching a convivial atmosphere in there which was a stark contrast to the lively coffee stalls in the rest of the town. Due to the fact that I work in an engineering university, I barely noticed that I was the only woman on the premises. However, this point did cross my mind while drinking my fourth large beer. I began to have a mild panic: if the general population didn't drink and for sure women didn't drink in public, exactly how likely was it that this joint had a toilet for women? As I say it was only a mild panic, as I knew in the worst case the hotel wasn't too far.

The guys had apparently been using a trough-style urinal at the back of the pub and they weren't too sure if there was a cubicle. What followed was one of my most interesting bathroom experiences. So small we hadn't noticed it but the relatively unused women's bathroom was in fact in the middle of the place, and looked to have been converted from one of those telephone booths you sometimes find in pubs. I took a deep breath and a double take on the table of men sitting right at the entrance to the toilet and went in. I could see most of the pub through the cracks in the door and decided it was better to keep the light off. I barely had room to readjust my clothes in this strange telephone booth toilet. Turns out I needn't have been embarrassed, the men at the table, who had two inches of wood between their heads and me peeing, were as gentlemanly as possible under the circumstances.

By the end of my time in Cairo I had cracked the taxi fare strategy. I didn't haggle, or try fractured Arabic, I simply hopped in the cab, gave the destination with a reasonably good accent and paid a pound or two over the odds, to avoid complaints. It worked like a dream. If I'd tried to ask the price and haggle I would have paid the same but it would have taken me twice the time – in a different league to anywhere else I have ever been, Egyptians are extremely hard bargainers. So gone were the days where I tried "Take me to the airport for a hamster?" out on the cab drivers. This was a turn of phrase the English ex-pats I'd met at the Red Sea employed, a mixture of Arabic, (the Arabic word for five sounds like "Hamsa") and cockney rhyming slang.

For the last two days of the holiday I returned to Dahab, which appeared ever more the oasis of tranquillity after Cairo, to relax and catch up with some people I'd met the first time around. I was extremely sorry to return to a cold and drab European winter, and when I saw a notice in a Dive shop looking for a receptionist I was, for the first time, regretful of having a life to go back to.

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