Escaping to the Beach
Thursday, July 24th, 2008OK, so I know that I should probably be taking the opportunity in Egypt to immerse myself in amazing temples and tombs but too be honest, it gets a bit much, especially when you are in 40 degrees and fighting off touts and stupid tour groups in giant buses with no regard for any local customs at all….and I did see a lot of stuff already, so I didn’t feel too bad by cutting my time in Luxor to a minimum and heading off with the boys to Dahab which Lonely Planet called the Ko Samui of Egypt. Now having been to Ko Samui in Thailand, it sounded about 100 times better than putting up with another minibus tour.
So a five hour bus ride with a whole lot of men and a few screaming babies, plus a constant stream of arabic pop I arrived in Hurghada at 1am. I was ridiculously thankful that my hostel in Luxor had called ahead and someone was waiting for me at the bus station. I don’t care if it was their cousin and they were getting commission, it was just so much easier than trying to fight with taxi drivers. There were no other tourists on the bus, which is pretty common for Egypt as it is actually pretty rare to see tourists outside of the major attractions, like I have said before it seems 99% of people come on package holidays.
In the morning I headed to the ferry where I meet up with the boys. True to Egypt bureaucracy I waiting in line to get on the ferry to find out I needed my ticket stamped at another office across the road. I am not sure why they couldn’t stamp it for me…but back across the road to get it stamped then back in the line. The ferry was across the sea up to Sharm, supposedly one hour but it took 2 and half on very rough water and at some point I thought my stomach might jump out of my mouth. Luckily I dont really get sea sick but you could see some people reaching for their sick bags. We arrived in Sharm to find a minibus transporting backpackers the one hour to Dahab, it was nice to have things work easily, even though you pay a higher price for it. So we piled our packs on the roof and drive across the Sinai peninsula to Dahab. Sceneray in the Sinai is limited to red rocky hills and red rocky flat bits, about 1 brown dying tree per sq kilometer it is hard to imagine anyone possibly living here. But they do, the Bedouin tribes have lived around parts of the Sinai for the last forever, moving around herds of camels and goats in tents. It made me appreciate NZ green mountains and plants.
We arrived in Dahab and it really was like Thailand, there was even a ‘Same Same but Different’ cafe (anyone who has been in Thailand knows about this). Really it is just a stretch of restaurants and beach camps along the water.
Lots of shops selling jewellery and hippy clothes and a sea front full of identical restuarants with standard backpacking food. Also to top it off a bar that played movies every night. Perfect. and it actually was, after 10 days or so fighting with touts and seeing temples, wearing long sleeves and eating falafel, it was nice to be somewhere like Dahab where all there was to do was lie on cushions by the water, read, smoke some shesha, eat seafood and go swimming.
(another tough day at the beach with Hugh and Brian)
The place is definitely not like real Egypt and I think you should only ever go at the end of an Egypt trip, its not like real travelling and there is no Egyptian culture really at all, plus the food is about 20 times as expensive, like normally a mango juice is 2 EL, where Dahab it is 15 EL, and instead of spending 5 EL of dinner, 40EL seems to be the standard. Luckily I was still in my never-that-hungry phase and one meal a day was good enough, so had a nice seafood meal a few times and lots of juice. Even though its expensive it is still not that bad when you convert it back. All the restaurant staff and hotel staff are all typically sleazy and try to be cool and impress tourists by being as less Egyptian as possible and pick up bizarre accents and phrases from tourists. Our hotel staff were total dickheads trying to be cool and swearing lots, very lame.
So we basically spent the days lying around doing nothing, watching movies in the evening and moving around a few different restaurants but always ending back up at the ‘local’. Me and Hugh went up the coast a little bit on a snorkelling trip to this place called Blue Hole which is amazing, most people go to Dahab to dive but snorkeling is good enough for me. Blue Hole is this part of the reef which drops around 600 meters so you are swimming above these giant underwater mountains which just go on forever, all the little fish and coral are around near the surface and you look down into the clear water to see massive schools of tiny fish and bigger fish in the darkeness below, it is truly amazing and I could have spent hours there. You can do some crazy deep diving which you go down through the hole to 60meters and along some tunnel and come out somewhere else, people die doing it and there are plaques dedicated those who don’t make it. It seems like pretty scary stuff and I was happy just to stick to the surface. So you can swim along the reef for a bit then around the outside of this big blue hole (hence the name). It was very very amazing. Its a bit of a circus around there with hundreds of camels and a whole lot of little beach side cafes, which are needed to shelter from the crazy heat which makes the ground impossible to walk on. We spent the afternoon there and meet up with some of the people from the felucca. People pretty much do the same circuit in Egypt so I often meet people more than once in different places.
Heading back to Dahab we found Brian asleep by the beach, grabbed some seafood for dinner to celebrate Hugh’s last night in Egypt and my exam results, which I did well in, actually really well, much better than I thought! My best mark was for the exam which I almost forgot so I am very happy with all of that. So uni is well and truly over for me, now all I have to do is graduate when I get home.
Me and Brian headed off later that night towards Mt Sinai because for some reason we thought it would be a great idea to go climb it in the middle of the night…
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