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Egypt
We Love Dahab!
Dahab (Sinai), Egypt, December 21, 2006
We just finished our Open Water Dive course, and are now PADI-certified divers! It was a good time, although it left little time for doing much else: we would wake up, eat breakfast and go directly to the dive-site, called Lighthouse. We would spend the whole day there, then eat dinner at 6 p.m., and generally be too tired to do anything but sit around and sleep early. Today, we don't have to do the course, but we're taking the night-bus to Cairo, then leaving for Athens almost immediately. We'll have to come back to Dahab, though, since we both really love this place.
Perhaps because of last year's terrorist attack, there aren't very many tourists here. A local guy that we became friends with, Moon, lost two friends in the suicide-bomb attack, and his ears were damaged badly enough that he can no longer dive. It really is unfortunate that Dahab has this image associated with it, as the place and the people are really all about peace, love and happiness. The suicide bombers, who killed far more locals than tourists, were outsiders, apparently Bedouin from the desert. There may be a bit of the whole “clash of cultures” thing going on here, though peace and understanding seems to prevail, at least the great majority of the time. Perhaps a great deal about cultural co-existence could be learned from the way people live in Dabah, notwithstanding the obvious tension created by the bombs.