Sinai and D****
We left at dusk. The bus rumbled out of Cairo with a movie playing, a comedy about a silly older guy who goes back to college and runs amok with his shenanigans. Then he has to get serious and study for the big test (spoiler alert: he passes, graduates, and marries his teacher at the end). The bus stopped at a military checkpoint before plunging into the long tunnel going under the Suez Canal. When we came out the other side, we were official in Asia, on the Sinai Peninsula.
Sinai is holy to all three Abrahamic faiths, and like most places that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam consider Holy, it is absolutely terrible. All night, stopping at checkpoints where army folks would make sure we weren't criminals or Israeli (there have been several terrorist attacks in Sinai in the last couple years, and (unrelated) Israelis have travel restrictions), it seemed strange that Egyptians and Israelis bothered to kill each other over such a desolate craggy place. It took all of five seconds of sunlight to realize that (in addition to the Holy Mount Sinai), all the value of the peninsula is on the coast.
We were going to D****, a beautiful little fishing and pearl-diving village on the Red Sea. We arrived at 5am, with the glow of dawn not yet revealing anything but the shapes of buildings. From the bus stop, we took a taxi-truck into town. Bouncing along in the back of the pick-up, we strained our eyes to see. We saw the looming darkness of mountains of three sides, and along the main street (well, basically the only real "street"), lots of shops and coffeehouses. We pulled up to our hotel, checked in, with the usual Egyptian occurrence of mis-recorded reservations. Then, the five exhausted Americans collapsed in their room.
We awoke six hours later, around noon, and ventured out. Behind the hotel there was a cobble-stone boardwalk running along the shore, with little cafes and restaurants right on the water. We went into our hotel's restaurant, a hippie's paradise with low tables, cushions everywhere, and banana pancakes. But the best thing about it was our first glimpse of the Red Sea! It was bright clear blue from the shore until about twenty yards out, where the reef ended and it plunged into dark cobalt. The waves got caught on this divide and broke far from shore. The air was salty and filled with the sound of surf. And in the distance we could see the dry craggy mountains of Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia! I asked our server how far the coast was, and he said 16 kilometers. Alex joked, "So we could swim it." The server smiled, "If you're lucky, they won't shoot you." We laughed, and thought about how big a difference those 16km made. After breakfast we lounged about breathing in the beautiful view (this was to become a recurrent theme of the weekend). After so much time in Cairo, the dirty, crowded, dingy, oven-like city on the Nile, we just needed some time to get used to it.
Once we had, we changed and marched off to the edge of town for a swim at the beach. We laid out our towels on the sand, then picked our way over the sharp pebbles at the shoreline. The water was perfect, warmer than any natural body of water I've been in, but not too warm, not like bathwater - perfect.
The coral meant that the water stayed about two feet deep until the drop-off. Walking was increasingly painful, as lots of little corals and prickly animals poked me (I'm sure it was pretty hard on the prickly animals, too, getting stepped on). Within minutes we were sitting in the shallow water, floating out over the coral until we reached the end of the reef. That was the most beautiful part, looking around under water and seeing schools of bright red fish, blue fish, (one fish, two fish), crabs and anemone and their attendant clown fish peeking out tentatively. I even saw a white-and-black sea snake, which fascinated me even though I'm pretty sure they're really poisonous. But it was a skittery fellow, who sailed away like a ribbon when I came too near.
At the Blue Hole, a world-famous dive spot where the reef hides numerous caves and crevices down to a ridiculous depth, the fauna was even more spectacular. There we got snorkels, so my friends who refused to open their eyes in the salt water were able to behold it (it's clearer through goggles anyway). And I was so excited by the flippers, and how they allowed me to go soooo far down and look around before I had to go back up for air. Afterward we drank tea and gossiped about the topless Russian tourists before hailing a jeep to bounce us back to town.
That evening, our hotel manager offered to have us taken out to an oasis. "Of course!" we said. We bounced out of town in another jeep, this time headed away from the sea and into the mountains. Now, I generally think mountains are beautiful, and these were no exceptions, but I'll admit, these were a particularly harsh, rugged, and lifeless kind of beautiful. They looked as old as the Earth itself. We drove through them for a half hour, left the road for another twenty minutes, and then got out and went the rest of the way on foot. As the sun was casting long shadows on the landscape, we descended down a steep (and slippery!) switchback path, the only route into a long canyon. And there it was, past the sand and rock, a clump of palm trees right out of a Disney cartoon. We arrived, and the father of our Bedouin hosts said they weren't ready yet but that we should have a look around, but don't cross his fence into his neighbor's yard.
We absorbed all the flowers and trees, feeling better after our long dusty (and waterless because we're stupid) trip, to be surrounded suddenly by such flora. They were farmers, and we picked out way through a small citrus grove, grape vines, and other unidentifiable crops. A girl of about 12 waved at us as she passed on her way to the house, then stopped when she saw Alex and Linda (who are both darker-skinned). "Russiye?" she asked. "Russian?" I smiled and said, "La, Amriki, kul." "No, American, all of us." She stopped walking away and came to talk to us, "Tarif Arabiya [something I didn't catch]?" Alex stepped in and translated for us as we talked with the girl. She told us people visited all the time. I asked, through Alex, if she liked people visiting, and she said she liked it because when her most recent sister was born her parents started keeping her home from school to help out around the house, and this way she gets to practice her languages. "What languages do you speak?" I asked in Arabic, and she busted out right away, "I speak a little bit of English. Certains francais. Francaise est belle..." Some German, some Dutch, and of course Russian. We all smiled and nodded, impressed at how quickly and fluidly she went from language to language.
Her younger sister approached, and, wordlessly, unrolled a rug full of bracelets and necklaces. Ah yes, we were still in Egypt. While we perused the jewelry, we kept asking about the girl and her family. And she asked about us and what we were doing in Sinai. She liked D****, she said, but seemed ambivalent towards the ocean. Her family moved to the oasis from a town in Upper (Southern) Egypt a few years ago, so she'd passed through Cairo, and thought it was too busy and smelly. We laughed and agreed.
I don't know why, but we were all kind of surprised by how well traveled this little Bedouin girl was. I don't know what we expected, that she'd never left the oasis and had no idea about cars or phones or big scary cities? But I'm glad that little misconception is gone. When Alex posed for a picture with her, she even took it from him and started flipping through his other digital photos, laughing at a few taken back in Cairo.
Suddenly we realized how dark it was. The younger daughter had left after selling a couple trinkets to Kelly and Linda, and now the older daughter excused herself. She swept up her youngest sibling (who was so adorable even me and Alex were Awwing). and bade us farewell, headed to the house.
We had dinner by the campfire while the father talked to us about life in the oasis. "Is hard work," he said in English. "Is hard life, but is good life. I would not trade this for nothing!" We sat around for a long time, finishing our dinner, our dessert of wonderful melon, and our after-dinner tea. Then the Bedouins slipped into Arabic with each other and the Americans stared up at the most star-filled sky any of us had ever seen. There was no moon (or the moon was hidden by mountains), so the sky was just painted with stars. We could see the Milky Way from one horizon to another. We saw Venus, and Saturn, and every few minutes a shooting star would race over us. I caught three (visually), and made wishes. And I thought about Susan.
As so often happens in Egypt, we soon realized it was two in the morning. Our guide led us out of the canyon. With no moon, that switchback path was a pain. But then we were out, we got in the jeep and returned to D****. But we were so excited by our day that we stayed up all night, perusing the shops on main street until they shut down, then smoking shisha and drinking beers at our hotel restaurant until it too closed. Then we sat talking until the sun peeked up over the mountains of Saudi Arabia. That seemed as good a time as any to end the day.
D**** is one of those vanishing places, those hidden gems of authenticity that haven't really been "discovered" by the main stream yet (hence my ridiculous censorship). It's certainly a popular tourist spot, but only for young people with limited budgets, hippies "roughing it" in the "real" Egypt. It 's still undeveloped. You could see it in the rough sand-less beaches, the crappy hotels, the local businesses and Bedouin traders, the stray dogs and cats everywhere. But the things that attract people like me to D**** are also the things that make the town's destruction by the corporate tourist trade inevitable. It's too beautiful to remain hidden; my own presence there is proof. Like all good things, D**** will soon be raped and pillaged, gutted and renovated. It's coral reefs will be privatized and trampled by millions of ignorant American, German, and Russian families, well-intentioned like myself but (also like myself) guilty all the same. Sand will be imported from God-knows-where and dumped on the beaches, killing the coral so that no six-year-old need cut their foot on the reef. The local businesses will be driven out by Hilton, Sheraton, Hard Rock Cafe, and P.F. Chang. It happened to Sharm al-Sheikh, and it will happen here too. I'm just glad I got to see it in it's semi-purity, when you could still see Bedouin women dancing in the streets and fishermen throwing their nets out on the edge of the reef. And I hope that no matter how many beautiful towns are turned into resort enclaves, there will always be some D****s in the world that are special and unique and still for the most part true to themselves.
It
was
awesome.
Sinai is holy to all three Abrahamic faiths, and like most places that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam consider Holy, it is absolutely terrible. All night, stopping at checkpoints where army folks would make sure we weren't criminals or Israeli (there have been several terrorist attacks in Sinai in the last couple years, and (unrelated) Israelis have travel restrictions), it seemed strange that Egyptians and Israelis bothered to kill each other over such a desolate craggy place. It took all of five seconds of sunlight to realize that (in addition to the Holy Mount Sinai), all the value of the peninsula is on the coast.
We were going to D****, a beautiful little fishing and pearl-diving village on the Red Sea. We arrived at 5am, with the glow of dawn not yet revealing anything but the shapes of buildings. From the bus stop, we took a taxi-truck into town. Bouncing along in the back of the pick-up, we strained our eyes to see. We saw the looming darkness of mountains of three sides, and along the main street (well, basically the only real "street"), lots of shops and coffeehouses. We pulled up to our hotel, checked in, with the usual Egyptian occurrence of mis-recorded reservations. Then, the five exhausted Americans collapsed in their room.
We awoke six hours later, around noon, and ventured out. Behind the hotel there was a cobble-stone boardwalk running along the shore, with little cafes and restaurants right on the water. We went into our hotel's restaurant, a hippie's paradise with low tables, cushions everywhere, and banana pancakes. But the best thing about it was our first glimpse of the Red Sea! It was bright clear blue from the shore until about twenty yards out, where the reef ended and it plunged into dark cobalt. The waves got caught on this divide and broke far from shore. The air was salty and filled with the sound of surf. And in the distance we could see the dry craggy mountains of Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia! I asked our server how far the coast was, and he said 16 kilometers. Alex joked, "So we could swim it." The server smiled, "If you're lucky, they won't shoot you." We laughed, and thought about how big a difference those 16km made. After breakfast we lounged about breathing in the beautiful view (this was to become a recurrent theme of the weekend). After so much time in Cairo, the dirty, crowded, dingy, oven-like city on the Nile, we just needed some time to get used to it.
Once we had, we changed and marched off to the edge of town for a swim at the beach. We laid out our towels on the sand, then picked our way over the sharp pebbles at the shoreline. The water was perfect, warmer than any natural body of water I've been in, but not too warm, not like bathwater - perfect.
The coral meant that the water stayed about two feet deep until the drop-off. Walking was increasingly painful, as lots of little corals and prickly animals poked me (I'm sure it was pretty hard on the prickly animals, too, getting stepped on). Within minutes we were sitting in the shallow water, floating out over the coral until we reached the end of the reef. That was the most beautiful part, looking around under water and seeing schools of bright red fish, blue fish, (one fish, two fish), crabs and anemone and their attendant clown fish peeking out tentatively. I even saw a white-and-black sea snake, which fascinated me even though I'm pretty sure they're really poisonous. But it was a skittery fellow, who sailed away like a ribbon when I came too near.
At the Blue Hole, a world-famous dive spot where the reef hides numerous caves and crevices down to a ridiculous depth, the fauna was even more spectacular. There we got snorkels, so my friends who refused to open their eyes in the salt water were able to behold it (it's clearer through goggles anyway). And I was so excited by the flippers, and how they allowed me to go soooo far down and look around before I had to go back up for air. Afterward we drank tea and gossiped about the topless Russian tourists before hailing a jeep to bounce us back to town.
That evening, our hotel manager offered to have us taken out to an oasis. "Of course!" we said. We bounced out of town in another jeep, this time headed away from the sea and into the mountains. Now, I generally think mountains are beautiful, and these were no exceptions, but I'll admit, these were a particularly harsh, rugged, and lifeless kind of beautiful. They looked as old as the Earth itself. We drove through them for a half hour, left the road for another twenty minutes, and then got out and went the rest of the way on foot. As the sun was casting long shadows on the landscape, we descended down a steep (and slippery!) switchback path, the only route into a long canyon. And there it was, past the sand and rock, a clump of palm trees right out of a Disney cartoon. We arrived, and the father of our Bedouin hosts said they weren't ready yet but that we should have a look around, but don't cross his fence into his neighbor's yard.
We absorbed all the flowers and trees, feeling better after our long dusty (and waterless because we're stupid) trip, to be surrounded suddenly by such flora. They were farmers, and we picked out way through a small citrus grove, grape vines, and other unidentifiable crops. A girl of about 12 waved at us as she passed on her way to the house, then stopped when she saw Alex and Linda (who are both darker-skinned). "Russiye?" she asked. "Russian?" I smiled and said, "La, Amriki, kul." "No, American, all of us." She stopped walking away and came to talk to us, "Tarif Arabiya [something I didn't catch]?" Alex stepped in and translated for us as we talked with the girl. She told us people visited all the time. I asked, through Alex, if she liked people visiting, and she said she liked it because when her most recent sister was born her parents started keeping her home from school to help out around the house, and this way she gets to practice her languages. "What languages do you speak?" I asked in Arabic, and she busted out right away, "I speak a little bit of English. Certains francais. Francaise est belle..." Some German, some Dutch, and of course Russian. We all smiled and nodded, impressed at how quickly and fluidly she went from language to language.
Her younger sister approached, and, wordlessly, unrolled a rug full of bracelets and necklaces. Ah yes, we were still in Egypt. While we perused the jewelry, we kept asking about the girl and her family. And she asked about us and what we were doing in Sinai. She liked D****, she said, but seemed ambivalent towards the ocean. Her family moved to the oasis from a town in Upper (Southern) Egypt a few years ago, so she'd passed through Cairo, and thought it was too busy and smelly. We laughed and agreed.
I don't know why, but we were all kind of surprised by how well traveled this little Bedouin girl was. I don't know what we expected, that she'd never left the oasis and had no idea about cars or phones or big scary cities? But I'm glad that little misconception is gone. When Alex posed for a picture with her, she even took it from him and started flipping through his other digital photos, laughing at a few taken back in Cairo.
Suddenly we realized how dark it was. The younger daughter had left after selling a couple trinkets to Kelly and Linda, and now the older daughter excused herself. She swept up her youngest sibling (who was so adorable even me and Alex were Awwing). and bade us farewell, headed to the house.
We had dinner by the campfire while the father talked to us about life in the oasis. "Is hard work," he said in English. "Is hard life, but is good life. I would not trade this for nothing!" We sat around for a long time, finishing our dinner, our dessert of wonderful melon, and our after-dinner tea. Then the Bedouins slipped into Arabic with each other and the Americans stared up at the most star-filled sky any of us had ever seen. There was no moon (or the moon was hidden by mountains), so the sky was just painted with stars. We could see the Milky Way from one horizon to another. We saw Venus, and Saturn, and every few minutes a shooting star would race over us. I caught three (visually), and made wishes. And I thought about Susan.
As so often happens in Egypt, we soon realized it was two in the morning. Our guide led us out of the canyon. With no moon, that switchback path was a pain. But then we were out, we got in the jeep and returned to D****. But we were so excited by our day that we stayed up all night, perusing the shops on main street until they shut down, then smoking shisha and drinking beers at our hotel restaurant until it too closed. Then we sat talking until the sun peeked up over the mountains of Saudi Arabia. That seemed as good a time as any to end the day.
D**** is one of those vanishing places, those hidden gems of authenticity that haven't really been "discovered" by the main stream yet (hence my ridiculous censorship). It's certainly a popular tourist spot, but only for young people with limited budgets, hippies "roughing it" in the "real" Egypt. It 's still undeveloped. You could see it in the rough sand-less beaches, the crappy hotels, the local businesses and Bedouin traders, the stray dogs and cats everywhere. But the things that attract people like me to D**** are also the things that make the town's destruction by the corporate tourist trade inevitable. It's too beautiful to remain hidden; my own presence there is proof. Like all good things, D**** will soon be raped and pillaged, gutted and renovated. It's coral reefs will be privatized and trampled by millions of ignorant American, German, and Russian families, well-intentioned like myself but (also like myself) guilty all the same. Sand will be imported from God-knows-where and dumped on the beaches, killing the coral so that no six-year-old need cut their foot on the reef. The local businesses will be driven out by Hilton, Sheraton, Hard Rock Cafe, and P.F. Chang. It happened to Sharm al-Sheikh, and it will happen here too. I'm just glad I got to see it in it's semi-purity, when you could still see Bedouin women dancing in the streets and fishermen throwing their nets out on the edge of the reef. And I hope that no matter how many beautiful towns are turned into resort enclaves, there will always be some D****s in the world that are special and unique and still for the most part true to themselves.
It
was
awesome.