Dahab, Nuweiba and Home

A quick google search for “Dahab, Egypt”, produces a mixed haul of watersports, hippy and package dive holiday results. The entry for hippy.com suggests that it would be easy to find “recreational drugs” in Dahab and one reviewer scores it three out of five stars for hippy friendliness. The Watersports pages are dominated by tales of the Blue Hole and the three hundred days a year of force four wind or above whilst the package holiday market stresses the Bedouin origins of the Sinai peninsula and the opportunities for camel driven desert travel. In fact the town is as its google search suggests, originally a Bedouin settlement resulting from its rich fishing on the reef, it became a hippy colony in the seventies and has since become the reserve of the committed package Watersports enthusiasts from the West. The reef, the desert and the drifting, sun-washed way of life holds its appeal for all three and now Dahab is a rich combination of them all; a tourist resort run by the Bedouin, founded by the hippies and worshipped by the sportsmen. Such a contradictory set premis has created an attractive atmosphere, distant from the five star hotels and Hard Rock Café chic of Sharm El-Sheikh it boasts a strong backpacker culture, with a heady array of waterfront restaurants, many made up of swathes of cushioned seating on the floor and centred around large fires burning long into the evening while wafting reggae from the rafters over a nubile mixture of gap year travellers, seasoned divers and, as it turned out, escapist Arabists from Damascus.

“How long are you planning on staying?” asked the receptionist in my chosen hotel, The Sphinx.
“A night, maybe two.”
“Ah, yes, we have plenty of guests who have arrived and never left.”
This ominous thought still filtering its way through the fug of a ten hour bus journey, I wended my way up the warm, open staircase to my home for the night through the shafting sunlight of the open air internet café and down a short corridor which continued onto the roof and down the beach, two hundred yards closer to the large blue mass I had recently discovered to be the sea.

Two days of sleeping, eating, snorkelling and sunning in the ‘Funny Mummy’ restaurant, a classy themed affair that served a mean ‘Funny Mummy Breakfast’ and was spitting distance from the most of the required amenities for a windless, sunny afternoon by the sea. On the second night I wandered into town to find the other Durham Arabists from Damascus who I had bumped into on the beach during their own week off and, having slept through their invitation to the pub, was fortunate to run into Mario. Mario was a German who, having left his job around three years ago, was in the process of cycling the materialism of a previous life out of his system. He thought that should take about another eight or nine months, but in the meantime we contented ourselves with indulging in a few frames of pool and discussing the joys and freedoms of cycling, the desert and owning only one pair of trousers. He had just arrived having pushed his way up through the Sahara from Khartoum, following – and drinking – from the Nile all the way into Egypt where the Egyptian authorities, deeming single travellers out of convoy a security threat, forced him to travel up to Sinai on a bus. It was evident that he had found what he was looking for in the saddle, “if I wasn’t happy I wouldn’t still be cycling, I thought I was leaving for five months and I’ve been going three years. I had money before, but now I’m so rich, in time, in freedom and in experience.” The Sudanese of the desert had impressed him enormously with their kindness, often welcoming him into their homes without even asking his name. After several frames of pool and several more beers (of which it turned out neither Mario nor I had been particularly rich in recently) we stumbled off to the Funny Mummy and continued swapping travellers tales well after the rest of the customers had slunk back off to their rooms and the staff were looking keen to do the same. Once the waiter had established that Mario didn’t want to listen to any more “Habibi music” and found some more acceptable Tracy Chapman and we had polished off our drinks it was time to prepare for what would turn out to be an unnecessarily early start by taking ourselves off to our respective beds.



The hotel bus up the coast to Nuweiba left ten minutes late or so and soon deposited us at the port amidst a sea of already travel weary Arabs, asleep in their kaffiyah scarves on their sacks of luggage in the road and on the traffic island. The Lonely Planet referred to the ferry services as ‘reliable’ and so it was with some surprise that we received the news of a nine hour delay and were recommended to spend the day on the beach. A short hop in a taxi deposited us on a magnificent and deserted beach with stunning views of the Sinai Mountains behind, the rusty red Saudi Arabian coastline soaring up from the Gulf of Aqaba twelve kilometres away and a Bedouin family lunching under a palm tree slightly further up the sand from us. We watched as they made their way over to us with a bag full of wares, mostly consisting of ‘gap-year’ style, bead necklaces and bracelets, whilst their children played in the debris of the beach and the shallows of the reef. One boy was rolling a tyre intently around in front of him while his sister, whose name was Jasmine, was fishing in the shallows, and later pulled out a baby octopus, rushing up to show us. She was a striking and dishevelled mess of about ten years old, and was wearing an electric pink jumper with billowing silky black trousers and a shock of black hair across her brow which offset against the stunning Saudi Arabian backdrop and with a tiny, yawning octopus in her hand made quite the picture. After the mixed reaction to our request to photograph the elder women who had now returned to their cars, it seemed wisest not to invite recrimination for either of us by trying, so my camera remained in hand, and her picture a only mental.



After a lovely fish supper, in an empty restaurant in town, we took a Bedu taxi back to the port and were treated to the full beauty of the desert sky at night as we sat on our bags in the back of a pick up truck, racing along the unlit desert road that flows between port and town, on one side the sea and on the other the mountains.

The café we resolved to wait in was a scrubby affair that carried the air of a place quite accustomed to travellers with a long wait ahead. Interspersed amongst the ragged selection of nargile smoking and tea drinking customers were three enormous and cracklingly loud televisions. Each belted out its own channel ranging from z-class American movies, to Arabic farce (with which we were to become well acquainted) and music videos to a captive audience of weary looking Arabs, recently risen from their luggage and apparently unphased by the delay.

At eight o’clock a guard informed me that the ferry was delayed until one in the morning and accordingly we moved to the official 'waiting room' which turned out to be a foggy hall that smelt of bleach despite showing no sign of having seen any. It was full of slightly more 'respectable' passengers than the ones in the street on their suitcases, and very bony benches. A few hours of sleep and another guard told me we could board the ferry at one thirty. Having woken everyone up and stumbled up to the checkpoint again we were informed by yet another guard that it would not sail until the morning. Back at the waiting room we asked a large and important looking Egyptian what was going on. He informed us that the ferry had not sailed because of a high sea and a strong wind. I found this rather confusing having always considered the high sea the place for sailing, and I was convinced from my day watching this elevated mass of water that there was manifestly no wind whatsoever. Finally we asked him when he thought it would leave the next day.
A chorus of voices chirped: “seven…nine…eleven…twelve.” Each seemed as eager as the next to impart their hospitality upon us by producing a figure, regardless of its accuracy, for us to digest. Time for a hotel.

Being the brave traveller that I am, it took me about ten seconds to pick out my pyjamas. Having removed my shoes and zipped my jacket a little further up against the cold and the snapping bed bugs, I clambered onto my cot.



By seven thirty I was more than ready to wake up, and parting company with the stench of the loo that had kindly accompanied me all night, asked another guard what time the ferry would leave. He was quite convincing when he suggested eleven o’clock, although half an hour later his replacement told me that we should be back by nine thirty for a ten o’clock departure. Such promise was difficult to turn down and the girls and I (Will having decided to stay in bed for an extra hour) loaded up and set off. The guard ushered us through and told us to be quick in a manner suggestive of some urgency. Things were looking good. Just inside the door of the departure gate another man told us that we should change our tickets for the fast ferry at two thirty as the slow one would not leave before five in the evening. He was quickly corrected by a colleague who, alarmingly, announced the ferry was leaving “now”. We were rushed past the ever-waiting Arabs who were now queueing luggage in hand and through passport control. Unsure if our saviour was looking for some grease for his already sweaty palm, and carrying so much kit as to have looked ludicrous in the attempt at a subtle 'backsheesh' for our guide, I mounted the most delightful and grateful smile I could and passed into the departure gate.

After a short period of sitting on a bench, the only western people (and Sarah certainly the only blonde woman) in the room a customs officer swept a group of Arabs off a bench to make way for a Saudi family. Spotting us he took control once more and marched us, conspicuously, past the poor waiting Arabs, a mixture of Egyptians, Jordanians and Palestinians, and onto a bus. Things were moving. Then we waited. Once the bus did eventually fill up the girls were glad to have avoided the groping potential of such confined quarters and so many Arab men especially since there were only three women on the bus.

When we descended to board the ferry, which was stern to the port, we were greeted by three decks brimming with yet more of these particular type of Arabs, who teemed in every corner of this port and its surroundings and carried an air of downtroddeness that was difficult not both sympathise with and be wary of. From above us they stared down. Inside the floor was already littered with cigarette butts, nutshells and bodies, many of whom had been there since two in the morning when embarkation had begun. We picked our way through the mess and the cigarette smoke until we found the ‘first class restaurant’ – the kind of first class restaurant that offered chicken or meat with rice and Coca-Cola, only. Fortunately it was clean and the aggressive colours of fake wall-flowers on the wall made a reasonable diversion from the grime of the decks.

Finally we departed at ten to two. About twenty minutes before we had spoken to Will, who was at last out of bed, and who had suggested that our ferry would not get in until eight at night. When we tried to get off we were told we could not as it was too late. When Sarah asked if there was a problem with the boat causing our delay, the officer looked at her with a shock of great offence and asked what Eric Newby might also have described as “the unanswerable question”: “do you think your life is worth more than mine?” The answer 'no but perhaps my time is' didn't seem as constructive as it did amusing. Back to the 'first class restaurant' for shelter.

A barely noticeable journey in perfect sea conditions brought us up to Aqaba in three hours. Then we stopped off shore. Apparently this mythical wind had reappeared and we would have to wait for it to be safe to enter port. Out of the window the sea barely stirred, but still we floated, awaiting the beck of Jordan. Will called to say he had just left Nuweiba on the fast ferry (which was a mere four hours delayed) and we watched an hour later as the sleek lights of the faster service snuck in to port of us and pulled alongside in the harbour. Still we floated, and the same offended officer quoted “minutes, hours or days”.

After a further half an hour we were on shore, once more ushered off with the other whities and a few Saudi’s beneath the menacing, three-tier gaze of the other passengers, arrayed on deck like crows on a telephone wire.

Reunited, and having picked up two other Damascus students we fought our way through the taxi rank, which was patrolled by a Jordanian soldier wielding a baton, and negotiated a fare. Five minutes down the road, just comfortable with what might be considered a perfect number of people in our taxi we stopped to pick up “four Egyptians.” Reluctant as we were, four soon became six and eventually, after much negotiation and unwillingness to have our luggage strapped to the roof we set off again with only four of them. Our driver was either drunk or stoned, or both and we drove the full four hundred kilometres at a tantalising eighty kilometres an hour, with at least five coffee stops, and one lunch break around three in the morning. When we arrived in Amman and were considering asking for a discount because of the extra passengers (who had paid less than us) our driver asked for more on account of the two guys we had thrown out. Reflected in this argument were the two very different attitudes to service, from two ratehr different parts of the world. Four in the morning was no time for bridging cultural divides so we bunged him the original amount and left.

Our taxis departed Amman at four fifteen and we rolled into the border with a beautiful sunrise on the horizon around five thirty. One of the drivers stopped short of the main border post to deposit some cigarettes behind a bush and before contiuing. Eventually we fell out and into Bab Touma at seven thirty in time for a shower and a nine o’clock lecture.