Mt. Sinai/Dahab, Part 10 of 10

So, Dahab.

On one level, it is a fairly unremarkable beach resort town. It's pretty small, consisting primarily of the hotels and restaurants off a single boardwalk. It has the usual band of incredibly tanned beach bums, restaurant hustlers, big-spending tourists, and waiters who act like serving you a milkshake is their single goal in life.

But on a far more important level, it was NOT CAIRO, thereby deeming it heaven on earth. No smog, no grime, no traffic (and no honking), no work, and even no crowds. Instead, it was the water lapping literally at our feet, it was air we could breathe deeply without coughing, it was fish that didn't come out of the Nile, it was peaceful, it was quiet, it was ... something that we never wanted to leave.



Our hotel was nice -- right on the boardwalk, as all of them are. (Above: view from our door, with the water faintly in the background.) They gave us breakfast, and even washed our sheets after we asked nicely a few times. We spent a fair bit of time in the hotel's obligatory restaurant/lounge area on water. It was kind of windy, and not always sunny, much to Milli's chagrin, but still very nice.




We also went snorkeling, one of the Red Sea's main draws (the other being diving). We rented gear from the guy who sits right outside our hotel (picture above), trekked to the other end of town that had the better reef, and plunged in. Hawaii it was not, but still very fun. We sat on the water directly above some divers and felt their air bubbles breaking on us.

Finding dinner spots was rather arduous due to the enormous attention we received from all the overly gregarious men trying to drag tourists into their haunt. A few of them shuffled Milli over to their heaping display of freshly-caught fish, which in her case always accomplished the opposite of their intentions. Finally settling on ones that promised free appetisers, free desert, and 20% off, we gave in.

Dahab is not really Egypt. True, some of the food offered is Egyptian, but next to alfredo and cheeseburgers. True, most of the people who work there are Egyptian, but none of the people they serve. Going there and saying you've seen Egypt is rather like going to Cancun and claiming to know Mexico. (Mmm... no, probably not that bad. Sharm-el-Sheik is probably closer to the Cancun of Egypt.) But in a technical sense, it is indeed in the Middle East: at night we could see the lights of Saudi Arabia across the strait.

I'll end with this: