Luxor – Dahab – Nuweiba (town of doom) – Aquba, Jordan
October 15th
Dahab is cool!!!
There ya go… I don’t think I need to say all that much more. We arrived yesterday morning very, very tired (we were stopped every 2 hours and were woken up to show passports!) and were assaulted by taxi’s… grrrr. After getting pulled in a bunch of different directions we managed to get a taxi (pickup truck) to our hotel for 50 Piastres (way too little to translate into dollars). The hotel was full and we managed to get into one down the street for �10 ($2.25) each. Once there (we now have six people: Penny, Fee, Lyndon, a new English couple, and myself) we decided that Dahab was not a tropical paradise but more like a shithole!
After a nap and shower we headed for the beach down the street to swim. Dahab was beginning to become less horrible now. The water was great but the beach lacked something (more trash everywhere). We showered again and went to find dinner (hoping for some Chinese, but whatever). Somehow on our walk we found the Dahab we have been dreaming about. A super long beach with cool food places where you just kinda chill on big pillows and eat yourself to death! YEAHH!!! Dahab was becoming cool indeed. After our meal of love we all bedded down for the night!! Yeahhhh.
Today was the best day in Egypt I have had yet. The people here are nice and don’t haggle you and the reefs are incredible. We don’t think we are in Egypt anymore!! We took a taxi to a place called “blue hole” just out of town to go and snorkle around a bit. The water was fab and the reef was indescribable. Penny and I rented a little underwater camera for the day and we all had a good time posing under the water for pics.
After swimming all day and playing with the fish we were recommended to go to a place called “The Shark” for some dinner. The places proved to be one of the coolest restaurants I have EVER been too. Once we arrived we met up with the two other girls, another couple from Luxor we met and the four guys from our falluca! I had a fruit salad for dinner that must have weighed 15 pounds and had more bananas than even Nate could eat!! Paradise, I tell you, sheer Paradise. I managed to eat a good portion and give myself a bad case of indigestion and had to go back to the hotel to relax.
So here I am. Tomorrow I think we are going to swim some more and the go climb Mt Sinai and check out the sunrise!! Cool stuff in my book!!
October 17th
Hello from Nuweiba. What happened to the climb? Well, I did it!! After another relaxing day on the beach we managed to get a taxi to St Catherine’s monastery at the base of Mt Sinai. We arrived at about 10:30pm and began the hike. My lonely planet book said it would take about 2� hours to climb and it wasn’t very difficult. In actual fact, the climb took me almost four hours and I thought I was going to die. I am not a very fit man but I think that the lonely planet guy who did the climb had no idea how long he was walking. Besides the last third of the walk became a scramble up some very dodgy steps!!
I did make it and everyone was very impressed with me indeed. I got some hot chocolate and bought a camel blanket to bed down under. Now, if you remember from earlier in my travels I ditched the sleeping bag in Athens. I have never regretted any single action so much in all of my life! Damn that it got cold up there. After the climb that almost killed me the cold was literally trying to finish me off. Even Nate was cold!
I made it through the night and awoke to find a bunch of people all looking at us. I guess we were the only people to sleep up there and everyone else had taken camels and donkey up just before sunrise. The sunrise by the way was unreal and worth all the sweating and freezing!
It took me another three hours to climb down the mountain. I went down the Steps of Penance (3,000 of them), and almost died again. I have lost 10lbs on this mountain and it is now trying to claim my life! Nate told me I was a big baby and that the climb wasn’t much of a problem at all… (Yeah, I would say the same thing if I was carried in a back-pack!) Made it down and took a taxi to Nuweiba here to get the ferry to Jordan.
Hopefully I will be in Jordan tonight and to Petra by the end of the week!! Wish me luck!
October 20th
Hello from Aquaba, Jordan. I have just made it in… But hey, didn’t you leave a couple of days ago? Well that’s what my passport said. The three of us (Fee, Lyndon and I), were held hostage in Nuweiba!! I still don’t know what was going on but somehow we were not allowed on any boat. Boats would come and things would happen but we could not get on them. The guards were very cruel and would give us wrong times and very bad information. We camped out until 3am the first day and until 1am the second day. We have been escorted from the port, and all sorts of bad things have been happening to us. We had started to run out of money in a big way too. We had about �40 ($10) between all three of us!!! We managed to find the Roche Motel (literally crawling with them) and camp there a couple of nights. We did make a little song up and it goes something like this (to the tune of The Song That Never Ends)
This is the boat that never comes,
The wait goes on and on my friends,
Somebody bought a ticket not knowing what it was,
And they’ll keep on sitting here for just because,
(start again!)
But regardless of the boredom (dancing lessons in the port, endless card games, etc) we survived! Somehow!!! We are in Jordan and have full tummies (we ran out of money and we were drinking just water to stop from passing out)!!
Wish me luck for the future. I don’t know what is next but I know I won’t be able to get E-mail until Amman!
PS: If you have any questions about places I’ve been or am going feel free to e-mail me at complexfire@hotmail.com