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There must be something in the water in Dahab. Something that makes your tongue tingle and dance, that makes your mouth curl into a constant smile, something that makes you want to forget everything else in the world and just coolly high-five every living creature within a 5-meter radius. It's funny though, I can't say that it was so much of a spectacular place descriptively; I've been to nicer beaches, dove better sites, seen better sunsets - and there are no real attractions. But perhaps if you were to look up "ambience" in Websters, it would be defined in one word: Dahab.
Dahab reminds me of Kuta in Bali. Predominantly backpacker clientele, banana pancakes, totally chilled out on the waterfront. It's also one of those places where locals pull like mad with the foreign girls with their totally beached-out, lean and ripped bodies and you see tons of these Egyptian divemaster/bartender/guy who does nothing canoodling a pasty, plump British girl in the streets and all over the bars. Now take Bali, turn it Egyptian, minus real alcohol and any sort of decent ingestibles. In Kuta you can live off delicious 2 dollar nasi gorengs for every meal should you wish.
In Dahab, you pay 2 dollars for nothing, 6 dollars for a shitty "sandwich"/"curry"/"hummus" (aren't we in the Middle East?), and 10 dollars for an Egyptian-alcoholed (read: basically non-alcoholic) daiquiri. Seriously, I don't know how one place uniformly offers such horrible food. I see some real business potential here in offering either better food or the same shitty food at normal cheap shitty prices. That may have been the one downside of Dahab. We finally set up base at Funny Mummy and eat there all day every day for all meals. One thing I do recommend in Dahab is their fruit juices, I downed like 5 strawberry-guava-mangoes (at 5 USD a piece) a day.
But then take your nasty-fooded Egyptian Kuta (minus surfboards too) and add a cast of the friendliest (albeit a little shallow) locals you can imagine. Everybody in Dahab is kicked-back, knows each other by name, remembers you from the night before, peace love and harmony. You have clearly made the transition to clean and modern settings and locals. Every time you see somebody it's one of those fancy handshakes that gangstas/stoners/surfers throw, followed by a requisite chest-ing. Greetings are one of two phrases, "Brotha from
anotha motha!" "Sista from anotha mista!" I mean what is it here?!? I don't understand how they can be so happy when their food is that horrible. I suppose I would be that happy too if I was constantly inundated by white tourist chicks that wanted to get some Egyptian beach lovin.
It's not the best diving in Egypt. For that I think people head to Sharm for the sharks, Thistlegorm, and deeper dive options. That's the problem though when you are traveling with just an *condescending gasp* Open-water diver and limited to 18m. I suppose it wouldn't be a problem either unless said Open-water diver was your little brother and whined at any mention of you separating for dives, "Are you SERIOUS, Amy?? That's what FAMILY MEANS!!!" Threats of telling the mother of his abandonment in the big deep blue after flying him out to the Middle East to meet me flew and 18m dives it was. With this in mind the only two dives really worth mentioning are Canyons and the Blue Hole which in all fairness do offer some of the most dramatic underwater landscape I have ever seen. It doesn't hurt to have a change
from the boat dives off the white-sand beaches and palm trees, here in Dahab you do shore dives from desert beaches with camels chilling in front of huge rock formations. The fish life though, not great so much; I cast a strong vote for dear SEAsia. Fish life good perhaps for people that haven't dove SEAsia, but nothing to write home about. So I'm a pretty avid diver but for some reason none of that really mattered in Dahab. Because no matter what you initially come to Dahab for, the ambience (maybe something in the water) makes you end up not caring about it and staying anyways. Daily patterns can be described as perhaps a dive in the morning, and then just eating, drinking, and smoking on pillows overlooking the ocean for the other 20 hours of the day.
Staying longer than planned seems to be a recurring pattern in this trip. Our flight from Cairo to Paris was coming up on Sunday already which left us something like 1.5 days in Cairo (shamefully.) Yet for some reason while sprawled out on a deck with Tucker and Reilly overlooking the calmest Red Sea sunset to great music with a
drink in one hand and a sheesha in the other, we decide to stay another night which really leaves us basically no time in Cairo.
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