Dahab and the Sinai
On October 6, 1973, Egypt attacked Israel, crossing the Suez Canal and establishing themselves in the western part of the Sinai peninsula, what was then Israeli territory. At the same time, Syria attacked the Golan Heights, on the north-eastern border of Israeli territory. The attack came during the holy month of Ramadan in the Muslim calendar, as well as on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, and because of Ramadan, the Israelis considered an attack unlikely, and much of the military was at synagogue or praying that day. Having established themselves there, the Egyptian armies proceeded to sit around for a week and do nothing, rather than advance into more of the Sinai. I’ve read that Sadat had promised Kissinger he wouldn’t take any more of the Sinai, but there are other theories. The Israeli army rallied itself and beat the Syrians out of Golan in the north, then came back to deal with the Egyptians, who had finally decided to attack. Israel drove them back behind the Suez again, until Sadat agreed to a ceasefire and the start of negotiations.
Thirty-one years later, I got screwed by Egypt’s continued celebration of a day that clearly was the start of a failed attack in my book. Despite my annoyance, I was pretty fascinated by how much Egypt loves this day. There’s a 6th October Bridge in Cairo, a 6th October street, and I’m pretty sure there’s a 6 October City somewhere in Egypt. And of course, they close the Egyptian consulate in Eilat on the 6th of October.
Neither I nor my friends Leora and Marianna knew anything about this when we took the bus from Jerusalem to Eilat the Wednesday before last, which just happens to be October 6th. It was hot and muggy in Eilat and we knew we had at least another four hours left of travel to Dahab, and that would only come after we spent maybe two hours getting a visa, crossing the border, and finding a ride down the Sinai coast. So finding the consulate closed for the Egyptian “Army Day,” and then another three days after that for the Jewish festival of Sukkoth, was not cool. We had no idea whether that meant we couldn’t cross into Egypt at all, or whether we could get a temporary visa for Sinai at the border, but we had no place to go in Eilat so we took a chance and got a taxi to the border.
The place was packed. I was surreptitiously looking at passports, and they were mostly Israelis. We stood in line for a good 45 minutes to an hour, which only upped my anxiety level, and when we got to the front we finally found a guard who told us that you could get a temporary visa at the Egyptian checkpoint, but that you’d have to find a way to get a real one if you wanted to go to Cairo. Still, I breathed a sigh of relief and gladly paid 70 shekels to cross into the no man’s land between the Israeli checkpoint and the Egyptian one. After getting our passports stamped, we walked a little bit outside and into Taba where you can find the Bedouin taxis. These guys are pretty funny. Considering the amount of traffic through the border there was a swarm of them, all of which attack you and ask where you’re going. We piled into a twelve-person van with a bunch of Israelis, who were a big help when the driver wanted to stuff another person in the back with us. They started yelling at him in Hebrew and English, then offered us pineapple once we were en route. :)
The drive down to Dahab is long and occasionally winding, but there’s plenty of fantastic Red Sea scenery and when the sun sets on the mountains, the contrast of reds can be amazing. We got to Dahab and set about finding a cheap hostel, which thankfully is not that hard. We really lucked out and found a place right in the center of town (not the actual city, which is a little bit south, but only contains official-type buildings and the nicer hotels, none of the cool stuff) with a room with three beds for 10E£ a night, or the equivalent of about 2 dollars or less. The managers were amazingly friendly and laid-back. They also had a cute cat and a big dog that run around the place, called Absolut and Smirnoff, respectively.
After dropping our stuff off, we were able to relax, explore the place and find some food. I think we all fell in love with Dahab at once. The main restaurants, shops, hostels and dive centers are located on a main walkway that runs along the Sea, and all clustered together so you can walk the length of the place in ten or fifteen minutes. The main attractions are the restaurants, which all set up their eating areas on the seaside of the walkway. Some put pillows on the ground and arrange them around tables, others have cushy chairs, all of them have umbrellas over the area and string lights or decorations from them. When you go down the walkway, there are always one or two guys working for each restaurant that try to convince you to sit down and eat. Luckily, we wanted to, so we found a place that looked good, which isn’t hard since they all serve basically the same brand of Western/Middle East food. The town is touristy, but in the best way. In my opinion, that’s because it caters to divers, rather than your regular let’s-see-the-pyramids-and-leave tourist. That makes it more low-key, and less alien to foreigners while still presenting an "Egyptian" aura.
Thursday we went straight to the beach, which is tougher than you’d think. Dahab doesn’t really have “beaches” per se. A lot of the coastline near it is rocky and where it’s flat (but not sandy) it’s covered with restaurants. You have to walk a bit down south until you’re passing the more expensive hotels and hostels, and even when we found a good beach it wasn’t really a place to swim in, since you ran the risk of hitting rocks in the shallow area. We just hung out there most of the day under the umbrellas. I read most of Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem, which is really good. On the way back we found another seaside restaurant to eat at. The thing about these restaurants is there’s no walls separating the eating area from the walkway or the next-door restaurants, so you can still see everything that’s going on. And anyone could walk in if they wanted to, including cats. Cats are kind of a regular around the restaurants, they often show up to beg for food.
That night, we were talking with the Egyptian managers of our hostel at the little bar/hammock area they have at the front where people hang out. We talked about dive sites, our homes, and a lot of politics. I took the requisite flak for being American from one of the camp managers who had had bad experiences with American tourists in the past, and from Marianna, who is Norwegian. Leora’s Canadian, but Americans seem to be the only ones who can correctly make fun of Canadians, so I was forced to do it all by myself. All the Egyptians do when she says she’s Canadian (and hustlers and random Egyptian men ask a lot, mostly to get attention from passing tourists or women) is say “Oh, Canada Dry!” :)
Anyway, we all went out for a drink and pool. Everything was fun for a while, until Rami, the owner and main administrator of the camp (I call it that because the place was called Alaska Camp Hotel), got a call from somebody. After it was over, he asked what we would think if a bomb had gone off in Sinai. We all kind of thought he was making it up, he’s weird like that. Finally we got that he was telling the truth, if not being serious about it on the outside. On the inside, I know he was very serious, since this kind of thing is very bad for business, obviously. We went back to the camp to watch the news on their TV, even though it took awhile for the BBC to get it, which was the only English-speaking news channel they had. At that point, I went to look for an internet café to email my parents from, since my phone doesn’t work outside of Israel.
Obviously, these were the bombings in Taba and Nuweiba last week, and the next day, Israelis exited from Sinai en masse. We decided to stay, especially because the border would be hell to get across again, and we had already planned the whole trip. But it was very disturbing to see the maps of Sinai, with big stars indicating explosions in Taba, Ras al Shitan, and Nuweiba, all of which we had passed on the way down to Dahab. We'd seen the Taba Hilton a lot while crossing the border the day before, which was disturbing to think about.
The next day, I got up early and went to do my check dive. I was slightly nervous about this, not because I was nervous about diving, but because Dahab has so many dive centers, some of which are no more than one room attached to a hotel, that it’s hard to know which are the real, experienced ones and which are shoddy places set up to take money off tourists. My center was called Fantasea, and I had heard good things about it, both from the Let’s Go: Middle East guidebook Marianna brought with her, and from Rami, who’s a diver with a lot of experience and who I trusted. I took it as a good sign that since I didn’t have a logbook with me, they were requiring me to do a check dive before going on guided dives, proving they were concerned with safety. It also looked well-managed and the dive masters were mostly European and Australian from what I could tell, which lowered the danger of it being a sham. Josie, my dive master, was very nice and helpful, and we dove on a place called the Lighthouse, just across from the center. Because of it’s proximity to the town, it wasn’t quite as clear or untouched as other sites, but it was still beautiful. Big coral formations and sea grass, with angelfish, lionfish, pointerfish and puffers swimming around.
That night, after I rejoined Leora and Marianna, we went to dinner and met Shai and Ben, two Israelis who had not fled. Shai was apparently a long-time friend of Rami’s, and Marianna had gotten two stories out of them, separately, on why Egyptians celebrated Army Day. She had been trying to unravel the mystery of why the consulate was closed ever since we got there, and typically, Rami had told her about the Egyptian surprise attack but neglected to mention the accompanying push back across the Suez, and when asked, Shai said that was crap, that Israelis soundly won the whole thing. Funny how that happens.
Saturday was devoted to my two guided dives. My dive master, Greg, was Australian, my dive buddy Clement was French, and there were two Dutch girls and a Dutch couple with us. We all piled into the car at 9:30 after getting our gear together and rode down the coast for about twenty minutes to a place called Um Sid. It was a totally deserted beach, except for a few clusters of divers that we passed, and the water was a beautiful blue, and 25°C, so I didn’t get cold the entire time, despite being in a spring suit.
Taken from the page of a logbook they gave me to write stuff down in: Coral grouper, moray eel, devil scorpionfish, clown fish, six-bar wrasse, unicornfish, Arabian angelfish, triggerfish, Gorgonians, table coral, fire coral.
A good assortment. We drove back and dispersed to eat lunch before the second dive, which still had Greg and the Dutch couple, but also another Australian girl who was my dive buddy and a Scottish man. Our site this time was called the Islands, and was just south of the beach we’d hung out at on Thursday. The Islands were two large reefs of coral that reached to the top of the water, and peek out in low tides. Between them, there are some great mazes of fallen coral that were toppled in an earthquake some times ago, and the fish were just amazing. My logbook says: triggerfish, lionfish, octopus, giant clam, devil scorpionfish (which we saw limping along the bottom instead of just sitting as it normally does, which I thought was pretty cool) unicornfish, bosfish, big-eye emperor snapper, red snapper, mangrove snapper, broomtail wrasse, dotyback, parrotfish, two-bar seabream (I may have spelled that wrong), angelfish.
When leaving we swam through a small hole in the rocks that led up to a fissure we could exit from. It was definitely the most amazing dive I’ve been on. I was just disappointed that I didn’t have time to go to the Blue Hole, apparently one of the most famous dive sites in Sinai. This was definitely the most amazing diving I’ve done, though.
Sunday morning we got up early again, and Rami drove us to the bus station so we could endure another three hours drive up the Sinai coast, cross through the Taba checkpoint, get thoroughly checked out by the Israeli border guards, and then catch a taxi to the Egyptian consulate, which was mercifully open, and wait an hour for a visa.
Side note: do I look suspicious or something? The Israeli border guards always seem to think I deserve the most scrutiny, despite having an American passport, not looking Arabic and being, well, a girl. It’s probably random, but still, I’ve been scrutinized way more than any other student I know.
We passed the Hilton twice during all this. You can’t miss it anyway since it towers over the Egyptian checkpoint, but with half of it missing and all the windows blown out, it’s hard not to look up at it every few minutes. There was no line getting into or out of Israel this time, like there had been a few days ago. The border was practically empty.
Anyway, once we got our visas, we took another taxi back to the border, crossed over again, probably got some funny looks from Israeli and Egyptian border guards who had seen us crossing earlier or noticed that we had entry stamps from only a couple days ago, and found another Bedouin taxi to Dahab. This time, there were very few taxis, and after we had gotten into one, an Egyptian news organization came up to interview one of the drivers about the loss of business. We shared our van with a New Zealand couple that had just come from South America, and were asking us all sorts of questions about Dahab, what it’s like and where to stay, eat and dive. It made us feel very in the know. :)
Getting back to the Alaska Camp was like coming home after that. It’s really great how comfortable we felt there, we threw our stuff back in our room, greeted all the camp employees, pet Absolut and Smirnoff and went out to eat.
The next morning we caught our bus to Cairo, which I think I’ll post about later, since this has already become way too long.
Thirty-one years later, I got screwed by Egypt’s continued celebration of a day that clearly was the start of a failed attack in my book. Despite my annoyance, I was pretty fascinated by how much Egypt loves this day. There’s a 6th October Bridge in Cairo, a 6th October street, and I’m pretty sure there’s a 6 October City somewhere in Egypt. And of course, they close the Egyptian consulate in Eilat on the 6th of October.
Neither I nor my friends Leora and Marianna knew anything about this when we took the bus from Jerusalem to Eilat the Wednesday before last, which just happens to be October 6th. It was hot and muggy in Eilat and we knew we had at least another four hours left of travel to Dahab, and that would only come after we spent maybe two hours getting a visa, crossing the border, and finding a ride down the Sinai coast. So finding the consulate closed for the Egyptian “Army Day,” and then another three days after that for the Jewish festival of Sukkoth, was not cool. We had no idea whether that meant we couldn’t cross into Egypt at all, or whether we could get a temporary visa for Sinai at the border, but we had no place to go in Eilat so we took a chance and got a taxi to the border.
The place was packed. I was surreptitiously looking at passports, and they were mostly Israelis. We stood in line for a good 45 minutes to an hour, which only upped my anxiety level, and when we got to the front we finally found a guard who told us that you could get a temporary visa at the Egyptian checkpoint, but that you’d have to find a way to get a real one if you wanted to go to Cairo. Still, I breathed a sigh of relief and gladly paid 70 shekels to cross into the no man’s land between the Israeli checkpoint and the Egyptian one. After getting our passports stamped, we walked a little bit outside and into Taba where you can find the Bedouin taxis. These guys are pretty funny. Considering the amount of traffic through the border there was a swarm of them, all of which attack you and ask where you’re going. We piled into a twelve-person van with a bunch of Israelis, who were a big help when the driver wanted to stuff another person in the back with us. They started yelling at him in Hebrew and English, then offered us pineapple once we were en route. :)
The drive down to Dahab is long and occasionally winding, but there’s plenty of fantastic Red Sea scenery and when the sun sets on the mountains, the contrast of reds can be amazing. We got to Dahab and set about finding a cheap hostel, which thankfully is not that hard. We really lucked out and found a place right in the center of town (not the actual city, which is a little bit south, but only contains official-type buildings and the nicer hotels, none of the cool stuff) with a room with three beds for 10E£ a night, or the equivalent of about 2 dollars or less. The managers were amazingly friendly and laid-back. They also had a cute cat and a big dog that run around the place, called Absolut and Smirnoff, respectively.
After dropping our stuff off, we were able to relax, explore the place and find some food. I think we all fell in love with Dahab at once. The main restaurants, shops, hostels and dive centers are located on a main walkway that runs along the Sea, and all clustered together so you can walk the length of the place in ten or fifteen minutes. The main attractions are the restaurants, which all set up their eating areas on the seaside of the walkway. Some put pillows on the ground and arrange them around tables, others have cushy chairs, all of them have umbrellas over the area and string lights or decorations from them. When you go down the walkway, there are always one or two guys working for each restaurant that try to convince you to sit down and eat. Luckily, we wanted to, so we found a place that looked good, which isn’t hard since they all serve basically the same brand of Western/Middle East food. The town is touristy, but in the best way. In my opinion, that’s because it caters to divers, rather than your regular let’s-see-the-pyramids-and-leave tourist. That makes it more low-key, and less alien to foreigners while still presenting an "Egyptian" aura.
Thursday we went straight to the beach, which is tougher than you’d think. Dahab doesn’t really have “beaches” per se. A lot of the coastline near it is rocky and where it’s flat (but not sandy) it’s covered with restaurants. You have to walk a bit down south until you’re passing the more expensive hotels and hostels, and even when we found a good beach it wasn’t really a place to swim in, since you ran the risk of hitting rocks in the shallow area. We just hung out there most of the day under the umbrellas. I read most of Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem, which is really good. On the way back we found another seaside restaurant to eat at. The thing about these restaurants is there’s no walls separating the eating area from the walkway or the next-door restaurants, so you can still see everything that’s going on. And anyone could walk in if they wanted to, including cats. Cats are kind of a regular around the restaurants, they often show up to beg for food.
That night, we were talking with the Egyptian managers of our hostel at the little bar/hammock area they have at the front where people hang out. We talked about dive sites, our homes, and a lot of politics. I took the requisite flak for being American from one of the camp managers who had had bad experiences with American tourists in the past, and from Marianna, who is Norwegian. Leora’s Canadian, but Americans seem to be the only ones who can correctly make fun of Canadians, so I was forced to do it all by myself. All the Egyptians do when she says she’s Canadian (and hustlers and random Egyptian men ask a lot, mostly to get attention from passing tourists or women) is say “Oh, Canada Dry!” :)
Anyway, we all went out for a drink and pool. Everything was fun for a while, until Rami, the owner and main administrator of the camp (I call it that because the place was called Alaska Camp Hotel), got a call from somebody. After it was over, he asked what we would think if a bomb had gone off in Sinai. We all kind of thought he was making it up, he’s weird like that. Finally we got that he was telling the truth, if not being serious about it on the outside. On the inside, I know he was very serious, since this kind of thing is very bad for business, obviously. We went back to the camp to watch the news on their TV, even though it took awhile for the BBC to get it, which was the only English-speaking news channel they had. At that point, I went to look for an internet café to email my parents from, since my phone doesn’t work outside of Israel.
Obviously, these were the bombings in Taba and Nuweiba last week, and the next day, Israelis exited from Sinai en masse. We decided to stay, especially because the border would be hell to get across again, and we had already planned the whole trip. But it was very disturbing to see the maps of Sinai, with big stars indicating explosions in Taba, Ras al Shitan, and Nuweiba, all of which we had passed on the way down to Dahab. We'd seen the Taba Hilton a lot while crossing the border the day before, which was disturbing to think about.
The next day, I got up early and went to do my check dive. I was slightly nervous about this, not because I was nervous about diving, but because Dahab has so many dive centers, some of which are no more than one room attached to a hotel, that it’s hard to know which are the real, experienced ones and which are shoddy places set up to take money off tourists. My center was called Fantasea, and I had heard good things about it, both from the Let’s Go: Middle East guidebook Marianna brought with her, and from Rami, who’s a diver with a lot of experience and who I trusted. I took it as a good sign that since I didn’t have a logbook with me, they were requiring me to do a check dive before going on guided dives, proving they were concerned with safety. It also looked well-managed and the dive masters were mostly European and Australian from what I could tell, which lowered the danger of it being a sham. Josie, my dive master, was very nice and helpful, and we dove on a place called the Lighthouse, just across from the center. Because of it’s proximity to the town, it wasn’t quite as clear or untouched as other sites, but it was still beautiful. Big coral formations and sea grass, with angelfish, lionfish, pointerfish and puffers swimming around.
That night, after I rejoined Leora and Marianna, we went to dinner and met Shai and Ben, two Israelis who had not fled. Shai was apparently a long-time friend of Rami’s, and Marianna had gotten two stories out of them, separately, on why Egyptians celebrated Army Day. She had been trying to unravel the mystery of why the consulate was closed ever since we got there, and typically, Rami had told her about the Egyptian surprise attack but neglected to mention the accompanying push back across the Suez, and when asked, Shai said that was crap, that Israelis soundly won the whole thing. Funny how that happens.
Saturday was devoted to my two guided dives. My dive master, Greg, was Australian, my dive buddy Clement was French, and there were two Dutch girls and a Dutch couple with us. We all piled into the car at 9:30 after getting our gear together and rode down the coast for about twenty minutes to a place called Um Sid. It was a totally deserted beach, except for a few clusters of divers that we passed, and the water was a beautiful blue, and 25°C, so I didn’t get cold the entire time, despite being in a spring suit.
Taken from the page of a logbook they gave me to write stuff down in: Coral grouper, moray eel, devil scorpionfish, clown fish, six-bar wrasse, unicornfish, Arabian angelfish, triggerfish, Gorgonians, table coral, fire coral.
A good assortment. We drove back and dispersed to eat lunch before the second dive, which still had Greg and the Dutch couple, but also another Australian girl who was my dive buddy and a Scottish man. Our site this time was called the Islands, and was just south of the beach we’d hung out at on Thursday. The Islands were two large reefs of coral that reached to the top of the water, and peek out in low tides. Between them, there are some great mazes of fallen coral that were toppled in an earthquake some times ago, and the fish were just amazing. My logbook says: triggerfish, lionfish, octopus, giant clam, devil scorpionfish (which we saw limping along the bottom instead of just sitting as it normally does, which I thought was pretty cool) unicornfish, bosfish, big-eye emperor snapper, red snapper, mangrove snapper, broomtail wrasse, dotyback, parrotfish, two-bar seabream (I may have spelled that wrong), angelfish.
When leaving we swam through a small hole in the rocks that led up to a fissure we could exit from. It was definitely the most amazing dive I’ve been on. I was just disappointed that I didn’t have time to go to the Blue Hole, apparently one of the most famous dive sites in Sinai. This was definitely the most amazing diving I’ve done, though.
Sunday morning we got up early again, and Rami drove us to the bus station so we could endure another three hours drive up the Sinai coast, cross through the Taba checkpoint, get thoroughly checked out by the Israeli border guards, and then catch a taxi to the Egyptian consulate, which was mercifully open, and wait an hour for a visa.
Side note: do I look suspicious or something? The Israeli border guards always seem to think I deserve the most scrutiny, despite having an American passport, not looking Arabic and being, well, a girl. It’s probably random, but still, I’ve been scrutinized way more than any other student I know.
We passed the Hilton twice during all this. You can’t miss it anyway since it towers over the Egyptian checkpoint, but with half of it missing and all the windows blown out, it’s hard not to look up at it every few minutes. There was no line getting into or out of Israel this time, like there had been a few days ago. The border was practically empty.
Anyway, once we got our visas, we took another taxi back to the border, crossed over again, probably got some funny looks from Israeli and Egyptian border guards who had seen us crossing earlier or noticed that we had entry stamps from only a couple days ago, and found another Bedouin taxi to Dahab. This time, there were very few taxis, and after we had gotten into one, an Egyptian news organization came up to interview one of the drivers about the loss of business. We shared our van with a New Zealand couple that had just come from South America, and were asking us all sorts of questions about Dahab, what it’s like and where to stay, eat and dive. It made us feel very in the know. :)
Getting back to the Alaska Camp was like coming home after that. It’s really great how comfortable we felt there, we threw our stuff back in our room, greeted all the camp employees, pet Absolut and Smirnoff and went out to eat.
The next morning we caught our bus to Cairo, which I think I’ll post about later, since this has already become way too long.
1 Comments:
Hanna, the start of your vacation diary was absolutely fascinating. Great job sharing your time with us, and I was a little disappointed that it ended! Sounds like Dahab is a place you'll want to return to. We love you & look forward to the next installment.
Mom
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