Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Lazy Days on the Beaches of the Red Sea

Ok, so I've fallen a bit behind in my travel adventures, and I'm determined to rectify this. I will start with Emily and my trip to Nuweiba at the beginning of October. For those of you unfamiliar with remote Middle Easters geography, Nuweiba is located on the northern part of the eastern shore of the Sinai peninsula, near Israel and directly across from Saudi Arabia. It is also the only part of Egypt in Asia. Another continent I can check off the list! We left at night and woke up to the sunrise over the Arabian mountains after a 9 hour bus ride. As if this place weren't far enough away, our bus had to back-track to another resort because some luggage was lost along the way and there were check points every ten minutes. Often at these road blocks a man with a gun would get on the bus and check our passport or ticket or both. This is a direct result from terrorist activity in the area in the last five years.

Soft Beach 
We finally arrived at our camp, Soft Beach, which was recommended to us by Mainer, Rebecca Campbell. We were greeted with breakfast, a cold lemon juice, and cats. The camp consisted of about thirty wooden huts on the beach, a restaurant, and a few shaded bungalow-inspired structures. We splurged for the big hut, changed into our suits and headed straight for the beach, which was a good fifty feet away, I know, what a hike.  Our day was spent sleeping off the bus ride, soaking up the sun, and swimming in the Red Sea. The beach was beautiful, well kept, and we had an amazing view of the mountains of Saudi Arabia right across the water. At my Grandma and Grandpa Shattow's request I did try to part the waters of the Red Sea, but alas, I had no staff and was therefore unsuccessful. I'm sure, had I had a staff, parting the seas as Moses did would not have been a problem... I am, after all, half Jewish. After spending three days there, I'm fairly certain that the Jews did not get lost in the desert for 40 years, but were actually just chilling on the beach and eventually figured they should move on. When asked where they were, "being lost in the desert" was just a cover-up story to the fact that they were beach bumming it in paradise. It makes sense.


Happy Cat
The restaurant was open all day and very casual. The tables were maybe a foot and a half off the floor and there were cushioned booths and pillows everywhere. The cats running around were very friendly, especially when you had food in front of you. All meals were served with a spray bottle to keep away the unwanted furry attention. The food was very good and the restaurant provided a central place to get to know other guests. I should mention that Nuweiba is quite literally in the MIDDLE OF NOWHERE! There is no town, nearby really, and the closest thing you can walk to is yet another camp a little farther down on the beach. You are forced to relax and enjoy yourself because, well, there is nothing else to do. Meeting people was really the only activity we did our first day. We met a lovely British couple who met at a pub in rural England. She moved to Egypt to do something with her degree in Arabic, while he had plans to start work for his cousin the next week in Dubai. We met them when they had just begun their first bottle of wine, joined them when they started their fourth, and retired for the evening after they had finished their seventh.

Man with Camel Talking to Snorkel Man
The second day snorkel man finally convinced us to go snorkeling. If only we could have convinced him to not go with us. He swam us out to the coral reef, which was quite a sight. I only wish that he hadn't been dragging me along the whole time, dude, I know how to swim, I went to summer camp. He also picked up several objects which I'm pretty sure were alive and pissed off something that released a certain neon purple goo into the water which stuck to us and stung. To top it all off, snorkel man insisted that he had to touch every type of coral (illegal) and encouraged us to do the same (still illegal). He even broke off a piece of coral so that we could take it home with us (no thank you, I do not want an illegally-obtained piece of dead coral). We did get to see some very cool fish and it was impressive, despite our incompetent guide.

We headed to dinner to enjoy our last night at our oasis. We met a very friendly Austrian woman by the name of Martha (yes, JUST like Sound of Music). She has a vacation house in Egypt. Why? I'm not sure, but I suppose if the Nazi's ever invade again, she can just head to Egypt as opposed to Vermont. We were pretty much warn out from doing nothing all day, so we decided to call it an early night. Just when we had made the decision to head to bed, who should show up but a band of bedouin musicians! They had come over from a neighboring camp where they worked and brought with them a group of guys who were spending the week there. Two of them asked if they could sit with us, we said sure. Through lovely, slightly-impeded-by-language-barrier-small talk, we found out that they were both co-pilots on a major Middle Eastern airline. This was hard to believe because they seemed not much older than Emily and myself, but sure enough, they showed us their IDs. They then proceeded to roll a joint of hash and smoke up. This was a little disconcerting on two counts. First, thanks to the Austrian woman's fascination with taking pictures of her "new friends," I'm fairly certain I can never run for public office. Second, does the airline they work for not drug test? The restaurant manager came over and told them that they were not allowed to smoke hash at the camp, but then it turned out that one of the guys with the band may or may not have been the son of the owner of the camp that we were at, so once again hash was kosher. The night was spent dancing and clapping along to the music of the bedouin musicians. People from Palestine, Egypt, Spain, Italy, Austria, and the US all just enjoying a world away from their own.

The next afternoon we had to leave. We were incredibly nervous about catching the bus home because we were told to just go out to the major road and flag it down when it drove by, which would be around 3:00pm... ish. We managed to successfully hop on the bus and get our tickets and we made it home to Cairo by the end of the night. Fortunately, while we were gone, our landlady had arranged for our apartment to be fumigated. We have been dealing with the very miserable situation of bed bugs. Bed bugs are EVIL. They live in your matrices, in your bed frame, and headboard and come out and bite you while you are sleeping. Their bites are little, but they leave marks and itch really badly. Try falling asleep knowing that the minute you close your eyes, you're going to be eaten. At one point during the epidemic, I had over fifty bites all over my body, yeah, it was that bad. Fortunately they have been vanquished from our beds and our home. It was probably the best thing that I could come home to and at least a small consolation prize for leaving the beach. We arrived home with our skin darker, our hair lighter, and considerably more relaxed, the entire weekend costing us less than $50.

1 comment:

  1. Excellent adventure. I can't wait to visit. Chat soon?

    ReplyDelete