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Whew... or, Why We Didn't Write More About Egyptian Monuments
Dahab (Sinai), Egypt, December 17, 2006
We have apparently arrived at a sort of paradise, and not a minute too soon! Dahab is a small village, about 100 km north of Sharm-el-Sheikh, on the Sinai Peninsula's Red Sea Coast. If the name sounds familiar, you may have seen it on CNN last year, as some people blew up bombs here and caused tourism to grind to a halt. This place is incredibly beautiful, and the “vibe” couldn't be different than the other places we've been to in Egypt. We're staying in a small beachfront bungalow at a resort/dive center run by a German woman named Anita. The place is called Sunsplash. You can see Saudi Arabia from our front door, as it is only 14 km across the Red Sea. As soon as we arrived, we signed up for a four-day PADI Open Water Certification course, which we certainly wanted to do before we got to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The diving here, it is said, is some of the best in the world! Today, we start our course with our instructor, Ramada. We're very excited about learning SCUBA diving.
The last few days were spent in Aswan, Abu Simbel and Luxor, which obviously are famous for their many temples and monuments. This, for some reason, has been difficult for us to write about. Maybe it's because we took so many pictures. It seems that every time one of us sits down to write, some interruption arises. Maybe it's just as well, as neither of us are Egyptologists and maybe we wouldn't be able to do justice to the stories behind what we saw. Perhaps, if we had really learned the stories behind the palaces, etc., we could tell more interesting stories about them.
“Why didn't you just hire a guide for a few dollars, who could have filled you in on the history?” you may now be asking. Well, it's basically because the guides and others offering their “services” around the ancient Egyptian monuments are truly infuriating. In fact, it's possible that the reason we didn't write more about these sights was that our energy was fully zapped by the 1,001 hustlers we came across every day, at every step. Of course, most of these people are just trying to earn a living, but it seems to us that their technique is rather ineffective, as when you're infuriated with someone, you're less likely to doll out charity. Further, if someone asked us about coming to Egypt, we'd have to suggest an organized tour, just to avoid some of the hassle and hustle. It's rather unfortunate. People not only want your money, which would be understandable; they also want your pen, your cigarette lighter, your hat, even your watch and the rings on your fingers! All this happens so frequently and creates such stress that it becomes really unpleasant to visit the most famous tourist areas.
Fortunately, here in Dahab, things seem quite a bit different. People still stop you on the street and ask you to go to their hotel/store/restaurant, but that's OK. They do it nicely, accept “no” for an answer, and seem to be sincerely welcoming you to the place. We both find ourselves wishing we'd spent more time here and less in some of the other places we've been!