Backpacking II: Daydream in Dahab (Aug 5-7, 2007)

After 2 months in Cairo and 2 days of the Sinai circus, I was ready for a breather. The little town of Dahab, situated on the eastern coast of the Sinai peninsula, provided such a haven of relaxation. It’s not even that nice of a resort town, but it seemed like the promised land to me after my 40 hours in Sinai.

The picture essentially sums up my time in Dahab: lots of lounging around, reading, sipping Coke or various fruit cocktail drinks, and gazing across the Red Sea at the coast of Saudi Arabia. Not a lot going on in town: the whole city is basically two parallel streets of shops and cheap backpacker hotels punctuated with a couple of nicer places that had their own pools. There are no real residents, no indigenous Dahabians, just transient workers and travelers. August is a particularly slow month for businesses, so I was pleased to find that going out for dinner involved playing the restaurants workers off one another to see who would offer me the best deal. One night I got 30% off the menu price plus free drinks, appetizers, and dessert. Not a bad way to live.

The highlight was the snorkeling; my third day there I paid the equivalent of about $5 for a package that included a jeep ride up the Blue Hole coral reef and snorkeling rental. Not a bad deal, even with the $10 overpriced lunch I ended up having to buy while I was there.

The snorkeling itself was unreal. It was like being on the Discovery channel. My youngest brother used to own a salt water tank, but even at its most exotic didn’t come close to touching this. Blues, greens, oranges, browns, pinks, neon shades thereof, colors I don’t even know how to describe. All I needed were some surfer bum sea turtles and I’d be on a live action version of Finding Nemo. It was like I was caught in an underwater fantasy world. There was one point where I had waxed into a dreamlike reverie of personal oneness with this submarine playground, when out of nowhere six beautiful Italian girls gracefully swam onto the scene, meandering through the clear blue in their cute little two piece swimsuits, their perfectly tanned skin providing a new color to the multihued panorama before me. I was dumbfounded. What was going on? I was torn between being annoyed that they intruded on my nature time and My Finding Nemo daydream had just turned into a Little Mermaid fantasy world. They even swam like mermaids: the curvature of their dives was almost as entrancing as the curvature of the bronzed skin. What was this place?

Unfortunately my little dreamworld disintegrated rather rapidly when the 6 Italian mermaids were soon followed by 6 Italian dudes all in Speedos. It then turned into a nightmare when they were followed by a pack of older, overweight, and slightly hairy Italian men and women, all as skimpily clad as their younger comrades. I almost threw up in my mouth. If I ever become world dictator I plan on imposing age and weight limits on two piece swimsuits and on banning the Speedo in all non-competitive situations.

Grossed out, I decided to escape this daydream gone awry by going to the surface. I was rewarded by a comic spectacle: coming my way behind the pack of scantily clad Italians were a large group of Asians. The funny part was that they were all snorkeling in life jackets. I laughed out loud and asked myself, “what is the point? Just save your money and swim at the hotel pool.” It was a good reminder that, even in this relaxing dreamworld, I was, after all, just witnessing another act in the great Tourist Circus that is the Sinai Peninsula.