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Dahab
June 2024
THERE exists a special contention between the military and the young Egyptian man. At the minibus stop leaving Cairo for Dahab, all nine passengers, including myself, were young men. There was only one among us who was in his late 20s—past conscription age—and the youngest were a group of six friends still in university. Everyone was at least slightly anxious, but in the rowdy manner of backrow students, the six friends were the most vocally so.
The group finished smoking their cigarettes and buying their Red Bulls, and we all boarded the Toyota minibus. Finals must have just ended, and the group booked a room in Dahab for five days—a popular holiday for well-to-do university students in recent years. There were the usual raunchy jokes about who would share a bed with who, interrupted by humorous and occasionally nervous remarks about being sent back at the Sinai crossing. The driver did little to ease our nerves.
“Any foreigners?” he asked, and the group replied that they had one with them. “Great,” the driver said, “so only one of you will make it to Dahab with me.”
It was 2 AM when we entered the realm of eighteen wheelers. They tunneled down the highway in their neon-lit carriages, charging the air around them with light and dust. A phone appeared from the university students with the Quran app opened to a specified verse. They passed it among themselves, tapping on each other’s shoulders, whispering quietly, read it, read it.
At my window seat in the back of the minibus, I was rehearsing what I would say to the officer or soldier who would ask me where I was going. I was the only one alone on the ride, and—my intentions being to write and to photograph—I knew that honesty would not get me far. I thought about pretending to be with the six students but decided against it. There was some advantage in being just one young man in a country where groups of them were synonymous with trouble. Still, I didn’t know what to expect. The Sinai crossing had, for a long time, been tightly controlled. An insurgency in North Sinai that began shortly after the Arab Spring had only recently been quelled, but the north largely continues to remain off limits. Dahab is in the south, but after October 7 the rules were being rewritten every day.
We arrived at the first security checkpoint at 3 AM, near the tunnel that would take us under the Suez Canal and through to Sinai. There were nine vehicle scanners, each in a booth with metal walls stretching fifteen meters tall. The lanes were crowded with nearly a dozen tour buses, a greater number of minibuses, and some private vehicles. We got out of the minibus and unloaded all our things, and as the minibus drove on we walked behind it, luggage in hand. In between two of the scanners was a room where all the disembarked passengers filed through. There were about eighty of us, nearly all Egyptian, only a handful older than thirty. Above us, the moon was nearly full and especially bright. Beneath us, the ground was littered with hours’ worth of cigarette butts and sunflower seed husks still heavy with spittle.
Inside the room, we placed our bags through an airport-style scanner and walked through a metal detector. There was a single soldier present, sitting on a chair behind the scanner, and he seemed to hardly care. I was worried my camera would cause suspicion and debated whether I should place it this way or that to make its profile appear less menacing on the soldier’s screen. He did not even look up. At another checkpoint, later in the night, our IDs would be taken and our backgrounds checked, but for now it seemed we were in the clear. Dahab was almost within sight.
Back on the bus, one of the university students took out his phone and began swiping on Tinder. Another let out an emphatic plea: “Oh God, please let there be women.”
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On the patio of a café perched above the beach of Dahab’s Lighthouse Bay, I was entranced by the sound of rocks clattering against each other with each tug of the waves. It sounded like the chattering of teeth, as though somewhere on this earth it was too cold, and the whole planet was warming itself.
For days the wind had been blowing fiercely from the north. I chose this café because there was one table that was almost like a desk and faced the sea, made as though for studying it. Spray shot up the few meters separating me from the water below. I placed a protective hand above my tea. It was early June, and the days had grown so hot that this hour, the hour before maghrib, had with the right conditions a spiritual element to it. The heat of the day had passed, and night was soon arriving. Parts of my body were sunburnt, and the busyness of the preceding days was taking its toll upon me. I sat at the desk, thinking.
When I came to, it was because a woman was approaching the shore in a kayak, apparently blown here from the other side of the bay. She jumped out of the kayak some twenty meters from shore and swam furiously to the rocks where she collapsed, her chest heaving, her clothes soaked through. The kayak she’d left behind tumbled into the rocks and inverted. A short while later, the paddle floated to shore. By that time the woman, a foreigner, had disappeared.
Another woman, Egyptian and from the next café over, was drying herself off with a towel. Before the crash landing of the kayak, she had also been wrestling with the waves. When she finished, she climbed the short ladder out of the water and into the café where her things were, re-applied makeup in front of a mirror, and resumed working on her laptop.
Somewhere on the breeze, even if it had not yet reached me, was the smell of hash. Along the waterfront, even if I could not hear it over the wind, was a slideshow of music. It changed from the entrance of one place to the next—Umm Kulthum and Fairuz here, Wegz and Marwan Pablo there, and tossed in the middle some Bachata dance music.
Elsewhere, a white man in his 60s with a Californian air about him—a local celebrity of sorts—rides around on his bicycle selling rice pudding out of an icebox. The pudding is extravagantly overpriced, but one buys it anyway because he is a white man in his 60s selling pudding out of an icebox on a bicycle, and this is Dahab.
