Border crossing you never want to take

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If I ever hated anybody enough I would wish upon them a border crossing via ferry from Aqaba, Jordan to Nuweiba, Egypt. A knee in the nuts and voodoo dolls frenzies just don’t cut it once you’ve seen this.

Picking up from where I left off last leaving Wadi Rum, my brother and I get to Aqaba an hour and a half late. Our timetable says there is one daily fast ferry from Aqaba to Nuweiba at 11am and we had heard from a ton of people that this was an extremely painful all day process. Hey man, that’s cool. Life sucks sometimes, roll with the punches, border crossings are never fun. Well... I omit details on the actual purchasing of the tickets which in itself was a whole other headache just because it pales in comparison to what follows.

We arrive at 9am. The tables say the ferry is to leave at 11am. When we arrive, the ticketing counter says 12 noon. We grab a table at an upstairs “cafe” to wait for the next few hours after going through exit border control. Aren’t you curious to know what that is? Well it is really just an open, uncontained area counter in the ferry complex where one is to go and after paying a departure tax to get the stamp on the passport. Except the idiotic thing is that anybody can walk up to this counter and after paying about 5 USD get a stamp in their passport that says they have left Jordan on x date, and then turn right back around and walk into the street. Am I missing something here? As much as I wanted to play the loophole in Jordanian customs, I really just wanted to get the hell out of there instead so I decide to not pursue that adventure.

We wait for an hour or two with construction men taking down ceiling tiles, screwing with wirings, crap hanging out of the ceilings all around us. I can feel the asbestos clouding my lungs already, but spirits fall when I realize I ain’t gettin’ anything in Egyptian courts for it. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you that the whole port is a shithole. Perhaps garbage dump turned shithole would be more accurate. The whole thing is under construction, but not the kind of construction that looks like it has been making progress, but the kind of construction that looks like somebody started about 20 years ago and has been to busy smoking sheesha to do anything since. Hey man, that’s cool. I can respect that, but tell me where the hell my gate/boarding hall is please? Not so much, no signs, no nothing. I walk down to the pier and cross some gated area and almost get my head bitten off by a guard. OK, not there? I look to the right and see a small area with a cover, and a crowd of locals huddling around. I ask the guard if this is the waiting area for the Nuweiba ferry. He says yes, I ask if we can wait inside in the shade, he says yes. I ask why these people are waiting outside, he shrugs. What time does the ferry leave? “11, 12, 1... 3?” OK... well what time should I be here waiting? “11, 12, 1...3?” I get it. There isn’t really any time, the ferry kind of will just leave when it’s ready. Great.

I continue to check the waiting area every 20 minutes or so, and some time around my 11 trip I run into nobody but Tucker and Reilly themselves. Looks like the shits finally let up after 2 days and the boys arrived in time for boarding, their bus from Petra which should have arrived at 9 ran late. This seems to be a common theme here in Jordan. After Tucker gets ripped off on the fx conversion for the ticket, the four of us head down to the “boarding area” and join the staring locals in anticipation for our 11 departure.

11 turns into 11:30 turns into noon turns into 2. The ferry takes an hour, and the bus ride from Nuweiba to Dahab takes another hour. At this rate I dejectedly project we will reach Dahab around 5. 3pm rolls around, and after several hours of standing in blasting heat, all of us with backpacks on both chest and back, we are soaking with sweat, hungry (Steve and I had only eaten Snickers bars, and Tucker and Reilly had eaten nothing in 3 days), and Tucker is squatted down on the ground trying not to pass out. We finally cave and realize fresh food does not exist at the port (which itself is 15 minutes from the town) and totally binge on Orange Fanta and bland potato chips. Time and again the local Egyptians rush to a bus that swings around the gate only to saunter back after the bus doesn’t open its doors. This is a curious bus and we aren’t sure what it is for, but it seems from the gate we must take a bus to board the actual ferry? Hey man, that’s cool. Whatever gets us to the next step of the process.

Somewhere near 3 the gods open the heavens and the locals are lining up on the side seemingly for the next bus which seemingly should be picking up people. However all we hear is shouting in Arabic and so we kind of just decide to join the line too. 10 minutes later Steve notices we are still the last people in the line and locals have been cutting us the whole time. Bastards. Aside from the line itself, the rest of the scene is a little bit of a zoo. I decide that this situation sucks and we should confirm what we are even waiting for in this ungodly line. I leave the boys and approach one of the guards who is batting off locals trying to get through the gate, and I point to the line, “Marhaba habibi, What is that line for?” He shakes his head, no Ingleezi. Hrm. Sign language and pidgin English kicks in and soon I have a little group of guards around me trying to decipher my question. I point to myself and the line and ask, Nuweiba? “You go to Nuweiba? Nod. “You ticket? You bags?” Nod. “OK, you come up here.” Here? Point down. “Come here.” No line? “Is OK, you come here.” My friends in line too. “Is OK then, you friends here too.” ... I skip back to the boys and tell them to follow. I’m not really even sure what happens up there anyways as the line hasn’t moved the whole time we had been in it. So we push past all the locals to the front of the gate and the guard leads us to an opening on the other side, where a BUS *angels singing* is sitting. We get in Mystery Bus anticipating it deliver us to somewhere great and orderly. The bus drives literally about 15 seconds and stops near the water. You have to be kidding.

Whatever, so after being transported about 30 meters, we get off and see another line that DOES lead to a BOAT. Score - the light at the end of the tunnel. We get in line and soon I am getting stepped on and pushed and shoved from all directions. Who ARE these people? Apparently personal space is even less valued here than in China. It’s even worse when everybody is slippery. Finally we make it onto the lower cargo deck of the boat and we see a line forming at an EXIT sign where presumably is the entrance up to the seats. Line nazis at the front are yelling in Arabic and pointing at bags. We look behind us and see people loading their bags onto these large carts (more like those carts that you transport horses in) on the backs of trucks. “Loading” may be a generous word for it, really it was more like take your bag and mine and let’s all throw them in the bins and climb atop and stomp on them until we can fit more bags. The four of us look at that and decide No Fuckin Way are we leaving our bags in a pile like that on a lower deck. Did anybody ever go to Leaps N’ Bounds - the place where you had birthday parties while jumping through a big bin of colorful plastic balls? It was like Leaps N’ Bounds, except instead of say trying to find your sock in a bin of those balls, it was like trying to find yesterday’s swallowed gum in a pile of shit. You don’t want to dig for the gum in the first place and you certainly don’t want to put your hands in that pile of shit to find it. We turn back to the line and try to feign ignorance, which is a little hard to believe because by now we are the only people with our bags still.

Eventually that obviously doesn’t work and we are guided back to the bins of shit to hide our gum in. We aren’t even mad anymore, just really really scared that considering the havoc witnessed just loading the ferry, we will never in hell be able to find them after getting off in Egypt. Out of nowhere a man pulls me aside and points to a closed cart with metal sides and tells me to leave my bags in there. I peek in and there is much less baggage and baby strollers. It looks like a slightly safer and more organized cart, but also a cart that can be attached to a truck at arrival and just driven off with. I ask the boys and we take our chances with the “1st class bin.” Exasperated, we head back to the line to go upstairs.

At this point, I have seen how Egypt seems to work and I am tired and hungry, sweaty and irritated, and I decide to try my luck just going up to the front of the line. I show up and immediately Line Nazi says, “Come through come through.” I say, my friends! I point and the 3 guys wave back at us with lower lips jutted. “Friends come OK.” So we cut the entire line, either because we are foreigners or because I am a girl or probably the combination of both because the Egyptian women weren’t able to bring men with them. People, this is the way to do it. Just feign ignorance, look confused and speak in really fast English, I really think it gets you special treatment. That and grow some breasts. We sit down upstairs and it is now something like 3:30 I think. Hey man, that’s cool. What a great way to spend an entire afternoon.

Well it’s more like an entire day. Little did I know we wouldn’t be leaving the port for another hour or two. Dear Lord, I JUST WANT TO LEAVE JORDAN! We are defeated by now and just happy to be sitting in air conditioning. After however long the boat fills and we are en route to Egypt. Somewhere along the way I attract a group of little girls who would poke their heads around at me and giggle. Before I knew it I had a little crowd of kids and was braiding hair and teaching patty-cake. I was giving piggy-back rides. Hey man, that’s cool. I can do kids. But what I can’t do is hand my visa-less passport over to a non-English speaking dude on the boat who promises me that I will find it at immigration in Egypt when we arrive, in exchange for a ticket that does not have my name or any distinguishing identification or number on it. The four of us decide the idea is ridiculous and would rather hold on to our passports and take a chance when we get off the boat.

Well, we arrive. And it takes another hour to get off the boat, but when we do we are stopped at the bottom of the exit by a dude that ends up taking our passports anyways. He says we will get it at immigration after paying for a visa. Tucker and I decide to send the little siblings to find our bags while staying with the dude and the passports. Until we realize we aren’t so good that that and somewhere along the way the dude has already handed it off. Defeated, we all head off on a bus that takes us to an “arrivals” section. Let me tell you about this arrivals section. Somehow it is an even bigger mess than the Aqaba departure section. These carts with piles and piles of luggage are driven up, and you have Egyptians climbing on (while the carts are still being driven in) rummaging through the bags and throwing some over the sides. Bags roll on the ground, some are ripped open, some are kicked and stepped and climbed on. You have got to see the picture on this.

Long story short (or as I see it, not so short after all) I cut more lines buying all our visas, and we wait outside some commissioner’s office while he clears our passports, asking us why we didn’t give them up on the boat (we feign ignorance.) So one broken down truck in the Jordanian desert, six hours of inhaling abestos air, a ferry from Hell, two chartered cars, and 17 hours of total travel time later (for a ferry that should have taken one hour), we find ourselves in Dahab finally watching Germany defeat Turkey - or more like not due to “electrical storms in the area.”

Hey man, that’s cool. Shit happens.

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