SANDStorm

Our travel from Aqaba, Jordan to Nuweiba, Egypt started off well enough. We left the grand Al-Cazar hotel right on time and arrived at the Aqaba ferry terminal at 11 a.m. – the recommended arrival time for purchasing tickets for the 1pm fast ferry boat to Nuweiba.

There is only one fast ferry from Aqaba to Nuweiba every day, and the only other option is the slow ferry. If you mention the slow ferry to an Egyptian who wants to take the fast ferry they swallow and look off in fear. We had heard our own horror stories from other travelers. Eight hour waits for the boat to leave. Twelve hour waits. The ferry not even showing up to port until the next day. From the sounds of it, an overland excursion through Iraq by donkey was the only thing that sounded worse.

At the terminal we easily moved through the process of paying our departure tax and getting our passports stamped for exit, moving on to the ticket sales window on the second floor of the massive concrete ferry terminal building.

A crowd of men were standing squashed against the ticket sales counter, yelling and wildly waving their passports to the man behind the glass window. I sat down with our cumbersome backpacks along a bank of plastic molded seats in the back of the room and watched as D tried his best to move to the front of the crowd and hand over our passports for tickets. The ticket seller, a man with swinging, grey stubble-covered jowls, refused to take anyone’s passport, and occasionally swung his arm towards the pack like he was swatting away flies.

As I watched from the sidelines, it seemed as though D never made it any closer to the front of the pack. In fact, again and again I watched men wedge their way in front of D as he looked around slightly bemused. After thirty minutes of pushing and shoving, the man behind the counter stood up and began speaking harshly at everyone, shooing them away with his hands. He stood up and wandered away, talking to other workers behind the glass. He lit a cigarette and stared into space. D walked over to the nearest hole in the glass and asked the man if the fast ferry was full.

‘No,” he said, “Wait, I will sell you a ticket later.”

Although the approaching departure time made us nervous, we knew that just because fast ferry boat tickets were not being sold at the moment didn’t mean that we wouldn’t end up on the boat. In Jordan, all logistics, no matter how they swayed from the plan, had worked out for us thus far. So D joined me on the hot plastic seats and we waited for the man behind the counter to motion to us.

For thirty minutes we watched the same people run up to the window over and over again, persistently trying to purchase tickets, only to be shooed away again and again. Finally the ticket salesman came out from behind the counter, and ignoring the few who were left demanding tickets, approached us to quietly say the fast ferry was sold out, before retreating behind the glass. Undeterred, D got up and walked over to the glass to talk to the man and came back with two tickets in his hand.

S: “Are those fast boat tickets?”
D (looking at the tickets): “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

They weren’t. They were slow boat tickets. However unpredictable the slow boat may be, with our passports already stamped for exit from Jordan, we were probably better off buying tickets for it and waiting than sleeping overnight in the ferry terminal and trying to get fast ferry boat tickets again the next morning.

We had two hours before the scheduled departure of the slow boat so we wandered around looking for food and found a sickly café. The menu offered Chicken Escallop, whatever that is, but the waiter said they only had chicken with bulgur. Ooooh! Bulgur! That sounds great! We sat down and looked around.

Everyone around us had staked their claim to café tables or floor space by spreading out heavy winter blankets. Children ran around the dusty concrete floors in their bare feet and men in the corner began their afternoon prayers. Some men had calluses on their forehead, and others dirt, we presume from the enthusiastic praying.

Our waiter came and dropped off our chicken. Chicken burgers, not bulgur. At least it had a little cabbage and tomatoes.

We watched out the window as the fast ferry boat left the harbor, virtually flying across the deep blue water and quickly leaving our sight. We both swallowed hard and got a little misty eyed. It looked so new. And clean. And fast.

A little before 3 p.m., we caught sight of the slow ferry chugging along in the open water, cautiously making its way to the harbor. Aha! We might actually leave on time, at three.

After an hour, as people started to roll up their blankets and go outside, we wandered out to find the ferry. Outside the terminal, people were waiting along the sides of the building and on wooden benches covered with a tin roof – anywhere shade protected them from the penetrating sun.

Groups began walking to large overnight buses and were then driven through the entrance gate to where the slow boat had docked. Others made their way to their cars, piled high with what appeared to be the entire contents of their home. A minivan had tv-sized cardboard boxes tied with string, luggage, furniture, and large plastic shipping bags piled on the roof as high as the van itself, pulling a trailer which was also piled as high as the van and the luggage combined (see photo). We were told to wait over by the duty-free store where we found a few square feet of shade with a few other people and waited motionless in the 105 degree heat (that’s not the heat index; that is the real number in the shade) until we were told to move again.

A bus pulled up to the duty-free shop and people came running over from everywhere to scramble onto the bus. No line was formed – just a crowd funneling into the bus, pushing and shoving to be the next through the door. We found two seats in the back of the bus but I chose to stand as both open seats were next to men. D sat down to a man who introduced himself as Syrian.

“You from?” he asked D with a smile.

“America.”

“Your king is bad,” he replied, meaning George Bush. D agreed and the conversation ended but the Syrian still smiled. Everyone had done their patriotic duty.

The bus was suffocating. I heard the air conditioning running but couldn’t feel any air circulating. Everyone around me had streams of sweat running down their face, their faces expressionless. The stories I’ve read about immigrants trying to come to America who die in the back of trucks after trying to make the crossing from Mexico came to mind. I began to wonder what might happen if we all had to spend ten more minutes on the bus.

We only spent two minutes on the death bus with the friendly Syrian, but it was a very bad two minutes, before we were dropped at the ferry’s vehicle entrance, which was open like a hungry hippopotamus swallowing up the trucks. We were corralled into a 50-foot long, two-person wide, chain link cage which led to a passport check at the other end. The passengers rushed to the cage which was already full of crowds jostling for position in what appeared to be the line to the slaughterhouse. We were caught up in the wave and pushed into the cage, my body becoming twisted and pushed along sideways until finally a boy with a large bag beside me burst ahead, and like a bubble in a hose, breaking me free to stumble and realign myself. Guards, one sitting high on a box and yelling at the crowd, checked passport. We gave ours to a guard in a clean, white military uniform with a large automatic weapon slung across his shoulder. He gave it a cursory glance and motioned for us to enter the mouth of the ship.

We walked up the vehicle ramp, happy to be free of the crowd and able to catch our breath, only to find another crowd ahead of us trying to push through a doorway from the truck hold, the sole entrance into the ship’s passenger decks. I steeled myself for the jostling and pandemonium that I knew would come and took my place in the back, trying to wedge myself into the crowd in order to be swept along and through the entrance.

The crush to get through the door was more extreme than anything we had previously experienced. People screamed at each other and pushed their way into crevices and interstices which I couldn’t see existed. Women were the biggest bullies, squeezing every which way possible, inching their way through the crowd and forcing you to give way or be crushed from all sides. I was pushed through the doorway, trying my best not to trip over the foot-high steel bar at the base of the door which had slowed down the crush. Behind the entrance I hoped the funnel would open up, but the crowd was dumped into a narrow stairwell, three flights high. The only place for the crowd to move was up the stairs.

The heat was still unrelenting. By this point my cotton shirt was completely soaked through, even along my forearms my shirt looked as though I had just jumped into the water with my clothes on.

“How is this possible?” I thought. “Why is there only one entrance and one stairwell for all of the passengers to enter at the same time?” I noticed the elderly men and women, some with canes, around me and wondered how they were managing. How often was someone trampled trying to get up the stairs? If this is how it is everyday on this ferry route, why isn’t the process changed to ease the congestion?

D was right behind me as we were pushed up the stairs by the crowd behind us. I figured he would remain with me until we got to the top of the stairs – how was maneuvering possible in the stairwell where the only way to move was up and up? However, one flight up, I felt a hand under my hand on the railing. I looked down and saw it was a woman’s hand. Somehow a woman had wedged herself ahead of D and with each shuffle forward I could feel her pressing up on me, trying to wedge herself ahead of me. I had no where to go through, no way to let her by. In an effort not to be trampled by the woman pushing from behind I applied pressure to her hand under mine on the railing, hoping she might back off a bit. It didn’t work. She continued to press up against me and slide her hand up the handrail, sometimes working it ahead of my hand. I could feel her shoulder nudging my arm, trying to find the weak point where I might give way and let her through. But there was no where for me to go. I was crushed on my left and in front of me by men making their way up and on the right by the banister.

D later admitted to having thoughts about this woman. Not pleasant Jennifer Lopez-type thoughts. Bad, bad thoughts with words reserved for sailors.

And then, release! The final step and then an opening to a hallway where a desk was set up for passport control. We relinquished our passports and followed the masses through the hallway to find a seat and catch our breath.

The ship was once a Danish cruise liner and the map indicated a number of restaurants, a bar, a cinema and an avenue of shops. We later discovered that the bar was closed indefinitely and only one restaurant was still operational. I can only assume that the cinema was no longer functioning as well. We walked down the hallway, which opened up to a large seating area with a snack shop in the corner. Every table was claimed and I could see that every inch of floor space was covered by someone’s blanket. We moved along through another doorway to the avenue of shops. Again, there was no place to sit – all available space was taken. We stepped over legs and feet into a stairwell with people seated on all the stairs, and through another door to the lounge, our final hope for seats.

But each seat was taken, all floor space covered with blankets, and each wall had someone seated along it. We turned around and exited the room, actually slightly relieved not to find space in that room, which I imagined would be hot, stinky, and unrelentingly loud throughout the three hour journey to Nuweiba.

We went up a stairwell towards the doors to the outside decks, weaving between men and women in robes who had made camp on the stairs. At the top of the stairs was a hallway the length of the ship’s width with a bench along one wall. An empty bench, save one elderly woman sprawled out at the end. Unbelievable luck, I thought, as we snatched a space on the bench, determined never to get up for the duration of the trip, fearing we may lose our spot. Soon a family of six joined us on our right and a family of five on our left, filling the bench to capacity.

Because we were seated in a hallway between two doors to the outside decks there was a non-stop parade of men and women coming and going, looking for a space to sit, or just stretching their legs. Over half of the men walking past us wore traditional robes rather than Western clothes, dirty with stains and grime. Plastic sandals were the shoe of choice. All of the women, except the four or five foreign women we saw, had their heads covered and wore long robes; many also wore face veils, black gloves, and black socks so that the only visible part of their body was their eyes and the bridge of their nose (and even then sometimes their scarf had a piece of fabric between the eyes which covered the space).

After 2 hours of sitting on the bench the scenery outside the windows of the boat began to change. We were off! Only three and a half hours behind schedule.

– s with editing for laughs by Thrashin Badger

Car piled high with everything under the sun

Our bench in a moment of quietness

Tags: Jordan, Travel, Tag Index

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 10:28 am and is filed under Jordan, 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.