back to Dahab
Sunday, July 27th, 2008Going back to Dahab I wasn’t keen on another 9 hour bus and because we were short on time we decided to fly to Sharm which is only an hour from Dahab. We got a taxi in the morning and almost missed the flight because flights to Sharm for some reason leave from a separate terminal which is impossible to get to and true to Egyptian style no-one will give us any information. But we made it and flew over the red mountainous expanse to Sharm-El-Sheik, a resort tourism spot. We were going to wait the 4 hours for the bus to get to Dahab but ended up in a taxi which was pretty cheap to take us the whole way. The taxi driver actually convinced us to let him take us and offered a price, however upon getting there he decided he wanted an extra, very large tip. A bit of arguing before our hotel guy came out and got rid of him.
The hotel ended up giving us separate double rooms for the same price because there were no rooms left with 2 beds, so we had nice flash rooms all to ourselves. Again in Dahab we spent the rest of the day and the following day lying around eating and reading with the occasional swim. Nice after the madness of Cairo.
After our day of laziness we got on a minibus to take us up the coast to the town of Nuweiba where we would catch the ferry across to Jordan. The process it took to get the 2 hour ferry was totally ridiculous, but what can you really expect from Egypt? On the minibus heading the same way were two American guys I had meet on a minibus tour in Aswan about 10 days so it was kind of random to see them again. So together we tried to get on this ferry.
First we got tickets after walking to the wrong place, so back to buy the most expensive tickets ever at $80USD, which was totally stupid but you have to do these things sometime. So we go through some sort of customs, walk around some docking yard for ages, no signs or anything. Eventually we find an office stamping our passports and get on a bus on the ferry. We probably get on the ferry at 12.30 but don’t end up leaving until around 5pm, we just had to sit and wait while the whole thing filled up and they were ready to leave. It was pretty frustrating. Eventually we got going and made it across to Jordan where there was a special bus for foreigners waiting to take us to do passport stuff. We were the only foreigners so the bus only took us leaving the hundreds of other passengers behind. Kind of strange. They had taken our passports on the boat so we waited (getting good at that by now) in some sort of arrivals lounge which was only half built until we got our passports back with a free visa and exited out in some back alleyway climbing over rubble to be greeted (read accosted) by taxi drivers. But this stage it was about 7pm and we hadn’t eaten all day. We negotiated a taxi to take us the hour and half to Petra for 35JD (about $70), however after driving onto the town area another taxi driver who spoke english turned up and told us our driver didn’t want to take us and he would take us for 40JD, the whole thing was a bit strange and I am sure they were scamming us but it was late and we were tired so we got in the taxi, just wanting to get there. The driver turned out to be pretty nice and drove us around different hotels until we got a nice place with a tv in our room! Bliss….so we all grabbed some food from down the road and finally got to bed at 11pm, 13 hours after leaving Dahab, for a journey that should have really taken 4 hours!
Jordan is much more expensive than Egypt, about double the price so we need to be careful with money! But I think I needed to get out of Egypt as I was getting a bit cynical and pissed off with people!
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