Inutile et Indispensable

Egypt III: Dahab, Nuweiba, and Alexandria by Neil Hilton

The third and final installment of Neil’s adventures in Egypt. The accompanying photo album is up and good to go; check it out!

Samantha and I returned to Turgoman Station at midnight,about half an hour before our scheduled departure. We already had tickets and were directed to sit in a waiting area downstairs. Another individual came along and asked where we were going, then had us move to a different waiting area. There, just to be sure, I showed my ticket to a guard and asked him if this was the departure gate for the bus to Dahab. He told me it was, and it should be arriving shortly. “Shortly” extended for a while, which was unsurprising and unalarming given the nature of “Egypt time,” which is much like “Spain time,” “Nicaragua time,” “African time,” or time any other place that is not the US or Britain. Eventually, a bus pulled up and people began queuing at the door for their tickets to be checked, so Sam and I followed suit. When we got to the front of the line, addressing the same officer that I had spoken with maybe 30 minutes before, he said that there was a problem. This, he explained, was the bus to Sharm el Sheik–not the bus to Dahab.

A word on Sinai tourism–don’t go to Sharm el Sheik. I’ve never been so I can’t say this out of firsthand experience, but absolutely every review I’ve gotten of it has been overwhelmingly negative. If you’re into casinos and a huge preponderance of Eastern European tourists then it might be your place, but otherwise it probably is not. From the beginning, Sam and I made a clear and intentional decision to avoid Sharm and go to smaller places instead, like Dahab. However, the bus standing before us was not going to Dahab, despite what no less than three individuals in the train station had told us earlier. We had, in fact, missed our bus while sitting at the gate for a different one. We were hustled upstairs to the ticket office, where a slick employee with moderate English skills snidely explained that our tickets were now worthless. However, for just 20 LE more each, he could “do us a favor,” and put us on the bus to Sharm. We would arrive at 6 am and have to take another bus to Dahab from there, which would cost another 11 LE each or so. Sam and I were infuriated, but we really had no other alternative. We forked over 40 LE and angrily got on the bus to Sharm, resentful and sullen.

Looking back at this incident, I’m not sure how these circumstances came to pass. There’s really no good answer–either these people are so woefully inept and inadequate at fulfilling their remarkably simple jobs that they failed to read the ticket, and assumed that we were going to Sharm based on the fac that we were white, or it was intentional. I don’t imagine an intentional act would have been out of malice, but rather out of financial gain–if just two of the three people were in on it, they each made 20 LE, and they know that the dumb Americans aren’t going to be able to do anything about it. In fact, they could pull this scam every night to a different pair–just tell them to go wait in the wrong spot, and then charge them extra when they miss their bus. It’s not pretty, but it’s quite possible that’s what happened. Ironically, however, the Sharm bus caught up to the Dahab bus at around 2:30 am and a very helpful young Egyptian that spoke nearly flawless English helped sort us out. This happened at one of many security checkpoints, where a plainclothes officer would come onto the bus and check IDs. Sometimes they asked for everyone’s, sometimes they were much more selective and only took young males. Presumably, this was because they were looking for specific individuals–no doubt part of Mubarak’s crackdown on Hezbollah. I lost count of the number of times this happened, but I’d estimate it was about seven or eight during the course of our nine our bus ride. Finally, we arrived in Dahab the next morning, tired and sore but ready to go to the beach.

We stayed at a nice hotel in Dahab called Seven Heaven that was recommended by Lonely Planet. The staff there was very committed to making us feel as at home and appreciated as possible, which was a nice change after our experience at the bus station. Our room was small but very usable and clean, and literally down an alley and across a wide avenue from the Red Sea. Dahab is set up in a very simple but effective way, with one main Corniche-type street running along the shore, going directly through countless restaurants that seem almost identical. Each restaurant has a bar and indoor table area and kitchen, and then another branch on the other side of the boulevard with low tables and couches and pillows. Sitting at one of these spots, you are literally feet away from the sea, and can enjoy really good food with a great view. Dahab’s economy is based 100% on tourism, so interspersed throughout are hotels and tour agencies that arrange scuba diving, interior treks, rock climbing, camel rides, trips to St. Catherine’s Monastery and Mt. Sinai, and basically anything else that you request. The feel of the town was a little bit more touristy than we had hoped for, but it was still a very relaxed and mellow place. Everyone spoke English and appeared at all times to be at least a little bit high, so they were very friendly and slow-moving.

We never really went to a proper sandy beach, but we did rent snorkeling gear on our first day and walk up to a spot called “the Lighthouse,” which is a really good local spot for snorkeling and diving. I haven’t been snorkeling since I was a little kid and went to the Caribbean with my family, and even then I think I was too small to really do more than splash around in the waves with a mask on. Because of thise, Dahab was the first time that I think I’d ever really experienced it and been able to fully appreciate what I was doing. The Lighthouse is a large reef just off of the shore, where the ground suddenly drops away to perhaps 10 meters deep. Despite the heavy traffic, a lot of fish and jellyfish live in the reef, and even a few eels. We shared the area with a lot of other people, but we were able to observe a lot and even take a lot of pictures with my waterproof digital camera (it’s advertised waterproof-ness is arguable given past experiences, but this time it held up just fine). The Red Sea is quite salty, so it very was easy to float around with my face in the water and take pictures of coral and fish and scuba divers.

Daytime in Dahab is very slowmoving, with meals taking a considerable amount of time to arrive and no one walking anywhere very quickly. The nightlife scene picked up a bit, so Sam and I decided to be social. We went to a bar called “Yalla!” and made friends with some “locals.” I use quotation marks because it seems that very few people in Dahab are actually locals, and are rather Americans, Europeans, or Australians that have been there for at least three months or so. These people generally find work in dive shops or hotels, make enough money to support a fairly frugal lifestyle, and spend a lot of time hanging out on the beach–not that bad of a lifestyle, if you ask me. One of our new friends was German, another Britsh, and a third from Cairo. This was Monday night, which is apparently “quiz night” at Yalla!, so we formed a team to answer a large number of remarkably hard questions or complete tasks, in competition with other teams. I’m proud to say that our team of five officially did the worst out of all of them, an honor helped by our exceptionally bad skills on the Pictionary component. The prize was a relatively small amount of credit at the bar, so I didn’t feel THAT bad about losing so horribly. Afterwards we hung out with our new friends for a bit, then called it an early night.

The next day we hoped to go to a smaller town an hour up the coast called Nuweiba in the morning, but we got moving too slowly to catch the bus. Instead, we had a leisurely lunch and swam some more until the second bus came later in the afternoon. This we did make, and were surprised to find ourselves two out of five total people on the whole charter bus, including the driver. Nuweiba is relatively remote, and much less-discovered by Westerners. We were ushered off the bus at the edge of town, where a taxi driver was waiting. We had hoped to wander around a little bit on our own and feel out prices, but weren’t expecting how spread out, disorganized, and just generally empty the town is. The driver immediately dropped the name of Soft Beach Camp, which looked like the best of the options in the tour book, so I consented. We haggled a bit over prices (and still got fairly well screwed over), and he took us where we needed to go.

Soft Beach is an amazing place. For 60 LE, about $10, Sam and I stayed in a grass and wood hut with nothing but a dirt floor, a hard mattress, a mosquito net, and a bare light bulb. We slept a few hundred feet away from the white-sand beach, and half that to a delightful central structure that consists of a concrete floor with rugs and pillows and tables everywhere for people to lounge around in, with a slow computer and a kitchen that can cook about half of the things advertised on its menu, as long as you don’t mind waiting for an hour or two. The beach is beautiful, with hammocks and chairs and armies of little purple jellyfish that don’t sting but leave their victims a little slimy. A one-eyed dog named Charlie follows guests everywhere, digging in the sand for crabs and chasing Bedouin kids that come to sell handmade bracelets and necklaces to the tourists. Three large kittens roam around the lounge area begging for scraps and jumping into laps. On clear days, Saudi Arabia is visible, only 13 km away across the Red Sea.  Travelers generally come planning to spend one or two nights, and wind up losing track of time and money and spending a week. Sam and I stayed for three nights, which was the absolute maximum we could because this was the end of our trip together.

On the first night, we met a group of international students studying medicine in Israel. They were finishing up with their spring break a few days before Sam and I, and had spent the entire thing in Nuweiba. We followed them to another camp down the beach that had some young Bedouin men, clearly not sober, with tabla drums and a lot of slightly-sexist enthusiasm. There was a small group gathered and much dancing ensued. At times the guys would play traditional songs with lyrics that they all knew, or intermittently they would turn on a boombox pounding American rap songs that they would provide extra percussion for. I’m not sure how long we stayed, but we had a really good time. After a while, we got a bit exhausted of fending them away from the girls of the group, and went back to Soft Beach Camp. Sam went to bed at this point, but I stayed up and met more people. The other main group sharing the camp with us were four best friends from Alexandria, on the Mediterranean Coast of Egypt. They come to Nuweiba everytime they can scrounge together enough money to do so, and sometimes even when they haven’t managed to do so. Mo (short for Mohamed) is a Detroit native that was raised paying $1 whenever he spoke English in his home. He has a quick wit and sharp tongue that almost matches mine, so we had a good time verbally sparring. He moved to Alexandria four years ago to do a six year med school program after visiting extended family there his whole life. Gemy is his best friend of one year, an Alex native. His English was good but heavily-accented. Gemy is a huge, good-natured guy, who is very imposing but also very sweet. He has a massive scar on his right elbow where he had a horrific compound fracture from being hit by a car on his bike when he was five, riding in tears and frustration at the death of his mother earlier that day. Mostafa, called “Disha” by everyone else, is much quieter. He is less confident with his English, and has never been farther away from Alexandria than Nuweiba. Still, he is very good with puns and deadpan humor, and I liked his smile. He and Mo have known each other since they were just a few years old. Disha’s girlfriend, Salwa, was the last piece of the puzzle. She was raised in West Virginia but is also very Egyptian, and now studies in Alexandria. She is the thinker of the group, and offered a rational counter-balance to the other three goofy kids.

The rest of our time in Nuweiba was spent with these kids. We ate, drank, danced, swam, and snorkeled with them. Others joined as well–there was a New York native doing a master’s program in anthropology at the American University of Cairo, two British girls on gap year before starting their first year of university, and a small group of Germans. Nuweiba was a great place to make new friends, and it would have been nice to spend more time there. However, we had to get Sam across the border back to Israel and me to Cairo to catch my flight back to Beirut. I was planning on just going straight back on my own and spending some more time with Jonah and his family, but the Alexandrians convinced me to come back with them so they could show me their city for a day. I eventually consented, and am very glad that I did. Due to the lifestyle of Nuweiba, we missed two public buses before being fully packed and fed, so ended up hiring a microbus for 100 LE each, with no other passengers but us. The bus ride was a nine hour adventure, getting us to Alexandria at about 1:30 am. We were delayed for a variety of reasons, but a surprisingly large one was the presence of Americans. Paul the New Yorker and I apparently caused some consternation by taking a microbus rather than the approved larger buses that we had intended to take. We were actually turned away at a checkpoint and forced to take a different route, because Americans apparently weren’t allowed to travel on certain roads. Still, we made it eventually. We dropped Paul off in Cairo and then continued to Alexandria a few hours beyond.

We stayed up for all of that night, driving around the city in Gemy’s car and getting a late-night dinner at the sort of restauarant that they warn white people not to go to for the sake of our stomachs. We also had a delightful local drink made out of pure cane syrup, pulverized out of the canes themselves in a large machine as we watched, with orange or coconut juice added afterwards. This refreshing concoction was served in massive glass beer steins while we sat in the car, and cost less than 50 cents apiece. Egypt is awesome like that. The four of us ended up staying until dawn, and watched the sunrise from a little cafe across the street from the rebuilt Library of Alexandria. The cafe wasn’t open yet, but the attendant let us in and served us tea while we sat at a table and appreciated the beach and lightening sky. Alexandria is a very peaceful and beautiful city, and was probably my favorite place in all of Egypt. I’m not sure what I would do there, but I could easily see myself living there. We slept for a few hours at Salwa’s apartment, then did a quick tour of the city. There are a lot of remnants in Alex of the old monarchal order, including an extensive palace complex. Apparently, the old king had an entire palace for his, um, harem, which is rumored to have 365 rooms, for exactly the reason you think it would. Additionally, he had a separate palace for drinking tea, a tower that was his designated hash-smoking hangout, another large and impressive building to do administration stuff from, and his own private rocky beach to fish from. All of this was connected by a series of tunnels underground and a very nice garden/park above ground. The king seems to have had a pretty awesome life. After this, we got lunch at an amazing local seafood restaurant that was tucked into an alleyway. According to Mo, this restaurant is one of the oldest continually-used establishments in Alexandria, and is fairly famous in the region. The cooking was all done in grills and friers outside, in the alley, and food was brought upstairs into an adjacent building. The portions were enourmous and amazingly delicious. I got a massive combo platter with calamari, three fish fillets, a stack of very large shrimp, a huge pile of oysters, rice, bread, and extremely strong shrimp soup. This meal was incredible, but unfortunately slightly rushed as I had to get to the train platform to catch a 2 pm train back to Cairo.

Getting me on the train was an adventure, since we were a little late. In Egypt, you can either wait in line at the office and get a ticket, or you can just show up and get on the train, and pay a bit more on the train. This means that sometimes there are not enough seats for everyone, but is balanced out by the fact that most people don’t show up early enough to buy tickets, so there are spaces available for freeloaders that show up late. We were so late that the train was actually starting to move when we got to the platform, so I literally had to do a running jump into an open door to make it on and shout my goodbyes to my friends as I was rolling away. I paid the attendant a tip for letting me on (not that he really did anything to help), and then found a seat and bought a ticket when the collector came. The train ride was only two hours and I slept through most of it, but the bit of countryside that I did see was fairly nice. This whole area is the Nile Delta, so it is well-irrigated and moderately populated. The train was cheap and an excellent way to travel from A to B.

I spent my last evening in Cairo hanging out with my extended family. Jonah and I watched the end of an American basketball game. This was good bonding time, though as a true Bostonian he was pretty upset when the Celtics lost to the Bulls by one or two points in overtime. Afterwards, he put Zoe to bed, and Jessica and Mikayla and I played Disney Uno–which I lost horribly. Few things are as humbling as losing three times at Uno to a four year old girl, especially when you’re legitimately trying to win. Finally it was bedtime for her as well, and I had a chance to make some phone calls and get some sleep. My flight back to Beirut was early the next morning, which Jonah graciously got me to the airport for. Getting home was uneventful except for some unpleasantness with my ears painfully deciding to not un-pop for more than a day, and a particularly slimy taxi driver that conned me into paying an embarrassingly large fare for the ride home from the airport. I went directly to sleep, content with the best spring break I’ve had in a long time. Despite the few snags we ran into on the way, I definitely recommend Egypt to anyone who wants to have a crazy fun vacation.

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