To the Sinai

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Leaving in the morning from Luxor couldn’t have been easier, everything actually went as planned. Granted we were taking off on ‘scary’ Egyptair, but it was for the last time. Luxor airport is like a little regional airport, something you’d see in medium sized town USA. (well sort of, except they don’t check i.d. really well). Anyhow, the hardest part, was YET again waking up before dawn.

Unfortunately, Sharm airport WASN’T all that normal. No real arrivals gate or departures gate, signs clearly not in English, and frankly, once you got through the armed baggage area, there was nothing there. So Bryan and I are wandering around outside, thinking we are going somewhere which would give us some ‘departure’ options. Such as line of cabs, buses, anything. But no. Nothing. So we walk further on. To the parking lot. Then to the second parking lot. Something wasn’t right here, we had probably royally missed wherever we were supposed to go, but here we were, in a parking lot with 2 other backpackers talking to some cabbies who were sitting in their respective beat up cabs smoking and chatting.

None of our tricks worked in getting any of these cabbies to bring us to Dahab (even if we went together and split it, it was still insultingly expensive), so we saw the highway off in the distance and figured we could do a little better bartering roadside! I'm sure we looked ridiculous, or foolish but: Paydirt. This succeeded in bringing down the price and garnering us one of the most beatup cabs I’ve ever seen. What a clunker. As to physically underline our potential stupidity for picking a car with 3 tires in the grave, the cabbie (who speaks zero English) pulls into a gas station 15 seconds after we get in, and pops open the hood, throws in a quart or two of oil….We are off again, on our 60 mile trek through a faceless desert… but wait, wasn’t Dahab also on the ocean, just like Sharm? Why then were we headed towards these craggy cliff like mountains? Still, the cabbie was sending me ‘good guy’ type vibes so I chilled out and decided to check for a sign to make sure we were in fact heading to Dahab. In the meantime I would concentrate my worries on whether the clumkermobile would actually make it. So one minute later of course, we are back on the side of the road. This time we added two gallons of water in an attempt to replace coolant.

Anyhow, we were off again (for the 3rd time, in less than 10 minutes). The desert here is nothing like I would picture a desert. Even the ugliest parts of Nevada aren’t the same type of desert as here. Craggy endless cliffs of all the same flat yellowish brown color. Harsh flat light, and not speck of plantlife of any kind. No sand. Just land baked beyond recongnition, and it seemed to go on endlessly the same. Its hard to believe the world has been fighting over these areas for millennia. We crawl through the desert going a third the pace of the few other cars we see on the endless road, and finally make it to a police checkpoint. All the other vehicles (those 2 that I mentioned), drove on through, but we were stopped and our driver question at length to the point where he had to produce some papers from under the seat. They finally let us through, while our driver turns to us and says what I assume to the Arabic equivalent of “police are bad bad men”. I was willing to believe him, until it happened at the next police checkpoint. What had this guy done???

The good news was that we made it to the next police checkpoint, and I had seen a sign that indeed indicated that we were on our way to Dahab. Turns out the Bryan, who was incredibly quiet the entire trip, missed the first couple of signs and was pretty much sure we were headed to the desert towards our graves.Anyhow, one more police checkpoint later our bandit cabbie, and the POS vehicle he road in on, delivered us safely, albeit ridiculously slowly to our Dahab home. It looks exactly like it should. Nap Time.

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