Dahab. A small village with a huge reputation, the Sinai mountains sheltering it from the outside world. It is renowned for its easygoing backpacking spirit. If statistics would exist, they would show that 80% of the people visiting Dahab miss their flight home or forget their intention of only staying a couple of nights, ending up spending several weeks. So was I. I drove in town with the idea of going for a dive or two, visiting St-Katherine’s Monastery, maybe climb Mount Sinai. Two days, max.
On Friday I made two dives with Wilfried. A Belgian globetrotter/expert bbq’er and divemaster. He guided me through two of the most famous dive spots on the Island. The coastline of Dahab is a nirvana for all levels of divers and snorkelers. The coral reefs start right in the surf and through a maze of holes and tunnels we ended up in the ‘blue’. Behind us was the reef wall and in front nothing than blue water, as far as the eye stretches. The bottom was far below us and I was disoriented by the lack of any reference point. The only thing I wanted to do was go deeper and deeper in that weightless world. I had no idea that we were already at 19 meters and was not allowed any deeper because of my open water padi. We just floated there for a while, hoping to see some big marine life, in vain. Somehow I did not mind, I basically wanted to stay there, disappear in this surreal environment.
If you are in Dahab, and you are not diving, windsurfing or kite surfing, you lie on the beach or just sit in one of the cafes. You order a cool beer. With that cool beer people come. One of the amazing organic things about Dahab is that everybody seems to know each other, even if you have never met. Conversations take twisted turns. It might be something in the air or just the beer, but before you know, you are entangled in peoples’ lives (or at least in the story). Everyone who ends up working and living in Dahab (or just keeps missing that plane) has a story, and rarely is it a happy story. They all find some kind of refuge in Dahab, it is not as much as they are running away from problems they had back where they came from, but more a feeling that the problem stops being a problem when you get stuck in Dahab. Sitting on a beachfront terrace, the rolling of the breaking surf, the golden sunset and that beer make the rest of the world dissolve.
That is where I was after my two dives, when Wilfried decided to throw a bbq that night. That is how I got to know Paul and Ilse and their lovely daughter Lola, the sweetest kid ever. She took me around the house and the yard, explaining me everything in a mixture of Arabic, Dutch, German and English. And she already could swim in the sea without inflatable arm ‘thingies’, she proudly mentioned. Wilfried lived up to his reputation of best bbq’er in the world and prepared the finest piece of meat I had devoured in a long time. All crispy on the outside, tenderly red on the inside.
Saturday and Sunday were spent in Dahab style, if I would have had a plane to catch, I would have missed it. Sunday evening I met Bernadetta, a Dutch woman, 28, working in a bar in Dahab. She had been in Dahab for a couple of months, and Sharm was the only other place she had seen in the Sinai. Somehow we got this brave plan together to take the bike and drive to Mount Sinai, climb it and watch the sun rise. At that time it looked as a sound plan. It takes around three hours to ascent the mountain, which means you have to start climbing at three in the morning to be in time for the sunset. At midnight we were on the bike. I was driving the bike with a passenger in the middle of the night on a winding road, unknown to me. The moon was full and transformed the landscape we were crossing in a sort of distant unreal surrounding, on straight stretches I would turn of the lights to admire this scene. Two and a half hours later we arrived at the foot of the mountain. We still had three hours of climbing to do and were already exhausted. Promising. We shared a guide with a French couple and their five year old daughter. After a couple of hundred meters it became clear that the girl was not up to this, so they hired a camel, the mother however refused to let her little girl ride on it alone, so both got on the camel, the mother in the saddle and the daughter strapped to the front pole of the camel’s saddle. It looked all but comfortable. Our strange procession wound its way to the top, a grumpy father (it was clear that his wife had insisted on this nightly adventure), a camel carrying two generations and a Belgian idiot climbing the Mount Sinai in motor boots, protective riding pants and a leather jacket. We finally made it to the stairs, took a deep final breath before tackling the last 750 steps leading to the actual top. We were just in time to install ourselves and await the sunrise.
You don’t climb Mount Sinai, just to climb it. Everyone has its own reasons; most people come to see the sunrise. For others it is a real pilgrimage, to stand on the very spot where it is believed by Christians, Muslims and Jews alike that God delivered the Ten Commandments to Moses. This means that on the top you are surrounded by believers chanting religious psalms while holding on to their bibles, Russians reciting passages of the bible and hugging each other, others will just stand there faced to the east and wait to feel the first rays of sunlight, arms and legs stretched out, lost in their own silence. To complete this bizarre gathering you have the obligatory Chinese, Japanese and Korean tourists, mostly equipped as they were to climb Kilimanjaro, congratulating everyone for making it up the top and shouting Hallelujah while constantly snapping pictures. We sat down, smiled, cracked a beer and waited for the sun to start this day.
The sunrise was spectacular. It is real magic. Nonetheless we both decided that we would never do it again. Mount Sinai. Check. As soon as the sun is above the horizon, people start hurrying down to catch their bus. Nobody was waiting for us, we decided to sleep a while on the top, I was broken and couldn’t imagine driving back to Dahab. Around nine, I was awoken from a deep sleep by our guide. He wasn’t too pleased. He had no idea where we were, had to accompany the French couple back down and had to climb the mountain again to come looking for his money. Too groggy to think straight I just paid him the sum he was asking. It was time to go down. You go up one way, and down the other, using the 3000 stairs cut of the rock by a monk as a form of penance. On the way I wondered, and hoped, that it gained him a first class seat in heaven. He bloody deserved it.
By eleven we reached St Katherine’s Monastery, tucked away between the rugged Sinai mountains. It is the world oldest continually functioning monastery. Initially it was just a small chapel to commemorate the site of the burning bush from which God spoke to Moses, later the Monastery and the fortified walls were build under the rule of Emperor Justinian, virtually unchanged to the present day. We were too exhausted to bother visiting it. I cheated and took some pictures of the walls and the Monastery. Sorry Mom.
We had breakfast near the monastery (the most expensive breakfast in my life) before hitting the road back to Dahab. We crashed at Bernadetta’s place and I stopped existing until the next morning. It took me one more day to recover before driving to Nuweiba on Wednesday.
Nuweiba, ferry town. After an entire month of Egypt I was finally on my way to Jordan.
pictures have been updated.
I can all too well imagine the overly kitted up Chinese tourists congratulation each other on the top. Were they also trying to call people on their mobile phones? At Mt Everest base-camp in Tibet the Chinese have erected a mobile phone tower so people can call their friends and relatives back home and boast about where they are!! After getting driven up, of course, in a 4x4 along the road the Chinese also built.
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