InsideOut Travel—Dahab, The End of Egypt

by Joel Hanson

The bus stops in the city of Sharm el Sheikh on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula and empties all of its passengers. I ride the last 80 kilometers to Dahab in an empty bus, which, from an airplane above, must look as though it's crawling slowly over the belly of a black snake slithering through the dust.

Out of the orange-curtained window, I see smooth sand, power lines and brown mountains that look like they've been rounded and smoothed by centuries of wind and sand. Once in a while, I catch a glimpse of the blue waters of the Gulf of Aqaba.

The austerity of the surroundings and the almost total absence of human activity is a welcome sight to my city-weary eye. It's just me, the driver and a man sprawled out in the back seat who may have overslept and missed his stop. Nothing happens in the next hour besides a series of passport checks at various military roadblocks.

	DESTINATION: DAHAB EGYPT
	Dahab, The End of Egypt
	by Joel Hanson The bus stops in the city of Sharm el Sheikh on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula and empties all of its passengers. I ride the last 80 kilometers to Dahab in an empty bus, which, from an airplane above, must look as though it's crawling slowly over the belly of a black snake slithering through the dust. Out of the orange-curtained window, I see smooth sand, power lines and brown mountains that look like they've been rounded and smoothed by centuries of wind and sand. Once in a while, I catch a glimpse of the blue waters of the Gulf of Aqaba. The austerity of the surroundings and the almost total absence of human activity is a welcome sight to my city-weary eye. It's just me, the driver and a man sprawled out in the back seat who may have overslept and missed his stop. Nothing happens in the next hour besides a series of passport checks at various military roadblocks.				The uniformed men look so bored that I imagine they're secretly wishing for a little unexpected random violence just to have the chance to restore order and maybe fire their machine guns in the process. But who knows what thoughts take shape in the mind of a soldier during the mind-numbing hours lost each day during his shift? As soon as I step off the bus in the outskirts of Dahab, I'm surrounded by men and business cards, fighting for the right to entice me to stay at their hotels for the night. "Can you give me a minute, please?" I irritably reply to their requests. "I've been on a bus for 17 hours." "'Sorry about George Bush.' They usually laugh heartily even though they know I'm not personally responsible for this menace.” Finally, I decide to follow a man sporting a thin goatee, a black cowboy hat and an Aussie accent who goes by the name of Hero. He has an adventurous gleam in his eye and seems totally indifferent to the prospect of me staying in his hotel for the night. Unconsciously, I'm rewarding him for giving me space when I needed it, hoping to show the others the merits of Hero's mild-mannered sales pitch. I climb into the back of a white jeep and what I thought were Hero's competitors climb in with me to ride into town. more >> << home << discuss article >>
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DESTINATION: DAHAB EGYPT

Dahab, The End of Egypt

by Joel Hanson