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Published: April 18th 2012
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The next day we are keen to get to St Catherine’s monastery, a monastery at the base of Mount Sinai, where Moses received the 10 commandments from God. We are all eager and smiles and the first car who is driving past ends up picking us up.
Our luck ends here because in actuality we establish the car is only picking us up because they think we want a taxi. Realising how far we want to go and that we are not intending to pay we end up getting dropped off at a neighbouring town, which is only 5 kilometers away.
Its not by the water but this actually makes the town quite pleasant as there are a lot less tourists.
We have a tasty seafood lunch and decide to head back to Dahab town centre before attempting to hitch out towards St Catherines.
As we are walking back towards the beach promenade in Dahab this super cute puppy runs up to play with us. He is adorable, albeit a worrying rusty chain tied around his neck. He wants to play and we rough him around. I have a piece of
bread in my pocket so I give this too the dog, who snatches it with glee. He is so excited to play he runs across the road then back then across the road again wagging his tail and looking at us with glee.
Unfortunately this is where disaster strikes.
The puppy is in the middle of the road, a car suddenly appear, time slows down, only our minds are active whilst our bodies have slowed down with the pace of time. We can only but watch as the car slams on the brakes, a little too late, for the puppy is under the wheels of the car in no time.
All is silent.
Then the yelps and screams start. Its not the driver and its not us. It’s the poor little puppy. We look at him in shock as he pants in between his yelps and his eyes shoot around wildly. He soils himself and all we can do is blankly stare.
I snap out of it, and we start talking to anyone close by who is English. A man mentions there is a vet up the road that
may be able to help. We grab the puppy and run to the vet as quickly as possible.
It gets worse.
The vet isn’t there and the puppy doesn’t look like it has that long left. There is a pharmacy next door. We decide to try our luck. The pharmacist gives the dog an injection against the pain, disinfects and cleans the wound and says the main problem is the dog has a broken leg.
As we are about to leave we are greeted by a local. She speaks English and tells us the story about this puppy, sadly not a minority case.
These puppies are chained by Bedouin children, we find out, they are tortured, often not fed and often they die a cruel torturing death. He is lucky to have found us.
I pay the pharmacist.
As the puppy regains colour so to speak, we pay for the medication, thank the pharmacist and accept a lift from the guy who nearly ran him over back to town.
He drops us off and demands payment. Ten Egyptian pounds. Not only
did he nearly kill this dog, but also he wants to be payed for it. We bite our tongue and pay him and depart as hurriedly as we can.
We want to keep him we know he would be an awesome best friend. Unfortunately we are just passing through and we wont be able to keep him once our time in Dahab is over. So we decide to do the only thing that we can do, try to offer him to every single person we meet along the promenade.
I decide to call him Sphinxiees, remembering the calls of the Egyptian trinket sellers by the pyramids and the Spynx.
As we are walking we randomly bump into some tourists who speak English. However their accent is heavy and Slavic. We recognise it immediately – Russian. We switch over to the language me and my brother first knew.
Their names are Dr Igor Charkovsky and his assistant Irina. The doctor is the Russian Father of water birthing, whereby women give bith whilst in warm water. They agree to take Sphinxiees whilst they are here for the month delivering babies.
We agree to carry Sphinxees to their residence and also because the doctor would love to show us the baby he delivered only 2 days earlier.
Back at their temporary home, he teaches us how important movement is for new born babies and shows us some of the stretches he has pioneered through his fifty year career. He also talks to us about the benefits on giving biths with dolphins.
We finish our tea, bid farewell to Sphinxiees and head on back to where we are staying.
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