SANDStorm

The bus station in Nuweiba feels like a frontier town. A new, wide, black asphalt road was slowly being covered by the Sinai desert and camels wandered past old crumbling one-story buildings. The sun punished everything and occasionally a truck passed by with a honk or two for no one. The only thing missing was the tumbleweed.

Driving through the bus station gate, our ancient Peugot station wagon taxi dropped us off next to the ticket office. Old peeling green benches blocked the way to the window, but I leaned in and asked for two tickets for the 11 a.m. bus.

A young guy with a stubbly chin and smart eyes looked up from his greasy paperwork.
“There is no 11 o’clock bus. But wait, there will be another bus in half an hour from the port.”

I looked at my watch. It was 10:30.

“I’ll take two tickets for that bus then. Thank you.”

He smiled and gave me change from a giant wad of dirty bills in his shirt pocket. S and I found a bench in the shade. It was about 10 inches too high and we sat with our feet dangling down like 4 year olds at the park and watched a big old Mercedes bus idle in the lot, sputtering and puking black smoke.

From a third story window in the bus company building next to us a guy started yelling down to the ticket salesman, who got up to yell back, referring back and again to his old clipboard. Over and over one would yell to the other and the guy in the window would go back inside and the ticket salesman would sit back down and sell more tickets. My only guess was that the two were coordinating seats on the bus.

There were two other foreigners waiting for the bus with us, a married couple that lives in El Paso, Texas. The husband is Mexican and works in Mexico but travels across the border every day on a tourist visa to go home. The month before he quit his job to travel the world for a year, the border guard told him he couldn’t cross every day, even though it is perfectly within his rights as a visa holder. Arbitrary displays of power are universal, I guess.

We were chatting with the foreigners when someone told us to get ready, the bus was coming. We all put on our backpacks and stood in the heat. After five minutes everyone else took off their packs.

“I think it will be awhile until the bus actually comes,” the Mexican fellow said to me, gesturing toward my pack.

“It’s okay. When I take it off it will be that much more satisfying. I like suffering a bit.” Stupid. Thing. To. Say. I wish I had been a bit more superstitious before I said that.

Also, when buying water for the bus ride, I thought: “I think one and a half liters of water should be plenty for a six hour bus ride.”

I know. No matter how you look at it, it is not enough water. But the last bus we took had not toilet and the memory was very fresh in all parts of my body.

Everyone should remember an important phrase when they decide to travel across the relatively narrow Sinai. It is only about 200 kilometers by road from Nuweiba on the east coast to Suez on the west. But it is best to keep firmly in mind the old mantra, and if you are old and vulgar enough, throw the f-bomb in there for kicks: “don’t mess with the desert or the desert will mess with you.”

Now comfortably in Cairo, I must just say for the record, lesson learned. Old saw memorized.

When the bus finally arrived, it tried not to stop, only slowing down in front of the station. We ran like overloaded ducks toward the bus and I threw one of my bags in the cargo compartment as the ticket salesman banged on the side and yelled at the driver to stop, which he finally did.

On the bus we found the last two seats together and sat down, but before we could settle in a man looked around and asked for our tickets. His name was Saad, but to us he soon became known as the Captain.

“These tickets are for these seats.” He gestured to the two seats in front of us, one of which was taken, and asked the man who was sitting in it for his ticket. The two started arguing, but Saad got the upper hand after he pointed to the illegible seat numbers scrawled on the tickets, and after other passengers got involved.

The man in our seats got up and sat down next to someone else farther forward, and we moved up a row as the bus started moving. This row was a little nicer, with more legroom, but S’s seat was broken so she almost had to lay back. It only took a few seconds for the Captain to suggest a solution.

“Why don’t you move back to these seats,” he said, “and I will move up there so no one has to sit in the broken seat.” We gladly moved, but as he settled in and spread out his newspapers, the little game of seat chess became suspiciously clear. If I was more cynical I would think he had planned it all along.

The road up the coast had beautiful views of the small Sinai mountains on the left and the brilliant, glittering blue waters of the Gulf of Aqaba on the right. For most of the 50 kilometers we traveled up the coast, the beach was crammed with small beach camps filled with bungalows, or half-built hotels, along with some immense walled resorts. Not much was free from development, but apparently the tourism along the coast had markedly dropped off at the end of 2005.

Israeli tourists make up about 98 percent of all the tourists in this area. They cross the border through Taba to enjoy the cheap and fantastic diving, as well as the beaches, along the coast. But the continuing intifada and troubles particularly with Gaza, has kept then away.

Climbing inland, away from the coast, the bus had a difficult time with the hills. Halfway up one hill the driver downshifted, but took so long to let out the clutch that the bus started rolling backward into its own black cloud of diesel exhaust.

There was very limited air conditioning on the bus, not enough to even notice. We had half a bottle of water remaining as we left the hills and started our way over the arid, flat Sinai plateau.

There aren’t many roads in the Sinai, but after an hour we slowed down at a crossroads shopping center. After nothing but dirt and sand and asphalt it was almost a mirage. Piles of gum and candy and drinks were waiting for travelers.

Our bus pulled off the road and slid through the parking lot very slowly. The Mexican tourist leaned forward toward us.

“Is the driver window shopping?”

The bus stopped and we watched the driver walk into a shop and get something to drink. He was hunched over a little, his shirt was soaked in sweat, and he walked slowly.

The trip seemed to be going a little more slowly than we imagined, but overall things seemed on track. The bus driver got back into his seat, honked a few times and pulled out onto the road. The next two hours went past in a super-heated blur of sand dunes, army checkpoints and sunshine. All along the drive dirt had been bulldozed next to the road to create depressions ringed by high sand berms. I imagined it was in case of invasion.

In the distance a small black line got closer to ours as we drove. Trucks moved along the road and we slowed for the crossroads. Above us a heavy machinegun pointed toward the sky from a rooftop. We pulled past the guard post and the bus stopped, still partly on the road. Everyone on the bus casually watched as the driver got out and slowly walked toward a building, the bus engine still running.

I didn’t really notice the ambulance in the open garage until our bus driver opened the ambulance door and stepped into it. Another man holding a stethoscope came out of the building and also got into the ambulance. The bus passengers looked around at each other. Some started talking about the driver.

The Captain immediately got up and asked around for a ticket – he couldn’t find his own. On the back of someone else’s ticket he found a phone number and dialed it. He chatted and laughed in Arabic with the person on the other end of the line and hung up. The passengers sitting around him asked him questions and he answered with a smirk. Some of the other passengers laughed and others just shook their heads. The Captain turned to us.

“The company said they would send another bus from Suez if the driver isn’t well,” he said. “It is about 100 kilometers. We should hope that the driver can continue.”

I looked outside. The driver had come out of the ambulance and was sitting in the shade, holding an oxygen mask to his face. Some passengers had gotten off and were standing around in the shade of the bus.

The Captain heaved himself out of his chair, walked outside, talked with the driver and got back on the phone. By this time most of the passengers had gotten off the bus and where scattered around, the men next to the bus, and the women sitting in the shade of small building nearby. We got off as well and chatted about idiotic American visa policies with the Mexican guy.

Everyone seemed fairly relaxed standing around in the shade, but I looked at our water bottle. It was less than half full. I looked up and saw a young man from our bus walk over to a bucket of water the soldiers used for their drinking water. He reached in with a cup and lifted some water out. From 50 meters away I could see his face curl up unpleasantly as he dropped the water in and walk away.

Around us was nothing but a few soldiers, guns, and desert.

The driver, swaying back and forth like a sickly John Wayne, walked back to the ambulance, followed by several men from the ambulance station. They closed the doors, and the ambulance backed out and drove off down the highway.

Everyone watched the ambulance drive away, and I felt a collective shrug go through the passengers. Oh well, our driver is on his way to the hospital and we are left in the desert with a perfectly functional bus that couldn’t go anywhere.

“The company is sending another bus,” the Captain said.

We were only three hours from Cairo, but those three hours seemed to last days. Our new bus arrived an hour and a half after our driver left in his ambulance at which point I finished the last few drops of our water. It was almost a cartoon, my mouth feeling like cotton balls and the sand dunes passing outside our bus window.

As sickly and on the verge of the afterlife our old driver was, our new driver was fast and efficient. He sat up with straight posture in a clean, white button-down shirt and silvered sunglasses, honking as he passed trucks and taxis at a hundred miles an hour while we sat in air-conditioned comfort watching an Egyptian political comedy.

We arrived to Ramses station in the Cairo city center three hours later. The Captain had talked the driver into driving everyone to the convenience of the city center rather than to the outside of town as was originally scheduled.

– Thrashin Badger

Tags: Egypt, Travel, Tag Index

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 6:26 am and is filed under Egypt, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.