ON the plane back to Cairo after finishing my degree in Hong Kong, I looked down at the springs of western Sinai and the glittering Gulf of Suez and added an entry to my to-do list: “Find a way to be by the Red Sea.”

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This was not just a sudden impulse, but the culmination of four years of university spent in the ocean’s orbit. In my freshman year I had created a student society for ocean advocacy, and by senior year I was spending more time sailing, learning about sailing, and designing sailboats to 3D print than I was studying for my courses. (Before my flight, I had been browsing ads for second-hand cars in Egypt when I came across an ad for a used sailboat, prompting a serious reconsideration of how I should spend my savings. I contacted the boat owner first.)

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However, it was not obvious what sort of career I could have with the ocean. The most compelling choice seemed conservation, but as an engineering graduate I did not have the background for most jobs in that field. I could not fully imagine embarking on that career path either. Several years ago, I realized that writing is what I wanted to do most. It was only after I returned to Cairo that I realized I could fuse the two together—the sea, and writing. I could write about the Red Sea. That’s when this project was born.

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When I began, I had some vague ideas of what I wanted it to be, but mostly I knew what I did not want it to be. I did not want to write the kind of commercial narratives that throw around terms like ‘pristine paradise’ or ‘idyllic getaway.’ I did not want, while writing in English about a country like Egypt, to participate in cultural prostitution. I had the BBC travelogues of Simon Reeve and Joanna Lumley to remind me that every place has a story to tell, and that it always matters who is doing the telling. 

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I was surprised, at various points throughout this project, by the degree to which tourism and tourists featured in my narratives. I knew, of course, that tourism was an economic pillar of Egypt’s Red Sea coast, but the way in which it shapes things big and small was a constant source of interest. At times I felt my writing was too disparaging of tourism, but each time I considered diluting my language I found in whichever book I was reading reasons not to.

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There was, for instance, the precedent set by Jamaica Kincaid in A Small Place: “A tourist is an ugly human being.” In Timothy Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt there could be found against tourism historical grievance: “…in 1830, entrepreneurs from Marseilles had converted a steamer into a floating hotel and taken tourists to watch [Algier’s] bombardment and occupation by the French.” And, in a far broader way, there was relevance in Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”

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Finally, these narratives are far from comprehensive. There are many places along Egypt’s Red Sea I wished to include but did not have the time to, and I was always aware that what I was writing was neither definitive nor objective. I wrote with the intention of creating ‘portraits’ (a concept borrowed from an earlier piece I had written about living in a student co-op in California), and as such I aimed to represent things truthfully and faithfully, with integrity and decency, but I never cared to be objective. A portrait—in writing as in painting—says as much about its maker as it does its subject.