Last week (Oct 1st-6th) was the Eid El Fitr holiday which is the holiday at the end of Ramadan. Eleven staff members, including us, went to Dahab for the vacation. Tamer, who is also a new teacher this year, was born and raised in Egypt but has lived in the US for the last 12 years where he met his wife, Jean, and had their son Noah who is now 4 years old. Anyways, Tamer’s brother is a travel agent here in Egypt and has recently moved to Dahab to manage a restaurant/ bar there. His brother, Iman, set up our whole vacation for us including the bus that took us from Alexandria to Dahab which is on the Sinai peninsula on the Red Sea.
The bus ride down took about 9 hours and was pretty uneventful except for some sites we got to see from the windows we got to see our first bit of Cairo as we drove past and saw the pyramids from afar. We drove over the Nile river and under the Suez canal. After the canal the scenery turned to a very dramatic desertscape. We went hours without seeing anything, plant, animal and especially not a town; just sand and rocks. Occasionally we’d see a little big a plant life, some wild camels, including one stubborn one that didn’t want to get off the road, some wild donkeys, and a Bedouin trip moving their goats. After we crossed the desert we reached the Sinai Mountain range; I was absolutely astonished by these mountains, I’ve never seen a mountain like them before. They looked like there had just been an earthquake on the fault and the mountain just sprang out of the earth yesterday. They are so shear and rocky, they haven’t been eroded by the wind or water for thousand of years like our mountains in the U.S.A. What surprised me most was the total lack of any vegetation. From what I could see there wasn’t even any moss growing on the rocks. It’s amazing what a mountain range looks like when there is not wind, weather, water, or vegetation to erode it. I kept on wondering how over two thousand years ago Moses and his people managed to cross these mountains and how have so many holy wars been fought in them.
Dahab is a very nice little town on the Red Sea. It is mostly a tourist town and visited mostly by Europeans and backpackers. It has a lot more laid back atmosphere than the rest of Egypt and kind of a hippy vibe to it from the backpackers. Not many Egyptians vacation there because its’ local culture is different from other Egyptian cities. Our hotel was beautiful and brand new, had just opened up that month. It was right on the ocean and it was great to either sit by the pool or on the beach and look out onto the Red Sea and across the sea we could see Saudi Arabia.
View around Dahab:
Our Hotel:
(our 5th grade teacher, librarian, and principal reading by the pool)
We spent most days just relaxing by the pool or on the beach reading a book or walking around the town doing some shopping. One day we spend the whole day snorkeling, we went to one coral reef right off the shore from the town, and then that afternoon took an interesting Jeep ride (which took 3 different Jeeps b/c they keep breaking down) to the Blue Hole. We had underwater cameras and hopefully got some great pictures of the Red Sea Reef and the Blue Hole with all its’ coral and sea life but we haven’t gotten it developed yet and will post it when we do. Another day, Seth and I got a relaxing Egyptian massage in a little hut on the beach. It was very relaxing with the sound of the waves and a nice cool breeze. Later that same day the other girls and I went and got a pedicure...although not a good one.
The food was very good there, although they lived up to the relaxed hippy by the beach atmosphere and took about two hours for the whole “out to eat” process. However, it was very relaxing, all the restaurants are literlly on the beach and are open air reutrans with carpets and pillows to sit on the ground and eat at a low table. Dinner is suppose to be a relaxing process where you sit and smoke sheesha for hours after you eat.
(soft bodied starfish)
(the Blue Hole is behind this camel)
All in all it was a relaxing vacation and great to see another side of Egypt. However, the bus ride back ended up taking 15 ½ hours after our bus broke down and we were stuck on the side of the highway for hours. Luckily, we were just outside of Cairo but this time and not in the middle of the mountains or desert. Within minutes we had four police cars with us for road side assistance…although I’m not sure how much assistance they where. After three hours the company finally sent another bus to pick us up, the driver was in such a rush to finally finish this trip by that time that we ending up getting stopped for speeding and had to sit on the side of the road again while the police processed the speeding ticket…a lengthy process with bribing of the police officer involved.
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