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Marsa Alam
February 2024
NEAR the end of my stay in Marsa Alam, I was sitting in the reception of my hotel drafting an email. The employee behind the front desk had just stepped away (to the kitchen, or to clean the rooms upstairs, or to any of his myriad roles), and a city-looking man wandered in. He looked around for a bit, tapped his fingers on the unmanned counter, then turned to me and asked if I was in charge.
I replied with a chuckle, no, and told him to call the number posted by the desk.
He instead stepped outside and returned a few moments later looking more troubled. He asked where I was from.
Alexandria, I replied.
Him too, he says. He has just driven down here from Hurghada with his wife to see this Marsa Alam he’s been hearing a lot about. He pauses for a moment, then asks: so is this all of Marsa Alam, or where is the rest of it?
I may have chuckled again, but I tried to answer him sympathetically. If I had driven three hours expecting a romantic getaway, I would have been equally unsettled by what I saw. The Marsa Alam he has heard about is probably not this town at all, but the resorts which dot the coastline for dozens of kilometers north and south of here.
But I liked the question: is this all of it? It would be unthinkable to ask that in Cairo, where hardly anyone can aspire to see ‘all of it.’ By comparison, this town is just two main avenues and ten thousand people; you can walk its extent if you don’t mind sore feet. Yet, the answer to his question is surprisingly deceptive, even here.
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This piece is being considered for publication elsewhere. The text has been hidden temporarily.
Over the course of two weeks, I came to see Marsa Alam as a town caught between the sea and the mountains. It is not one town, but several adjacent ones that probably should have fused together at some point but didn’t. The modern town—modern in that it was built in the 90s and 2000s and is by census the Marsa Alam—begins about a kilometer inshore. It is a coastal town where you may very easily go about your day and not see the coast. But the thing that unites coastal towns is this: you don’t need to see the water to know it is there. The evidence is everywhere.
For example: the fish market. One of the first questions I asked upon my arrival was where to find the fish market, thinking I had cleverly cracked the secret to finding the heart of a coastal town.
But there is no fish market because Marsa Alam is hardly a fishing town, and the sea here brings something more valued than fish—tourists.
In this town, you’ll find dive shops and excursion agencies; you’ll see shirts and jackets bearing the logos of diving centers; you’ll find souvenir shops selling fins and goggles; and you’ll find pharmacies that advertise themselves as pharmacy, farmacia, apotheke, аптека, and apteka.
On my first night, I walked along the quieter of the main avenues and passed by a sleek outpatient clinic hoisting the flags of several EU countries. There was a warmly-lit Italian restaurant near it, and I took an outdoor table in the terrace. The evening breeze was cool and dry. Polish TV was playing. Somewhere behind me, a couple sat down and began speaking Levantine Arabic to the waiter—Jordanians, I guessed—but then they asked three times for the different juices available, and each time the waiter spoke more slowly. The couple conferred quietly, revealing their native tongue: German.
Inside, there was a table with three men wearing orange jumpsuits lined with reflective strips of tape, who were reclining against their chairs and chatting. Two of them appeared Asian, the other white. He had dark smears on his face—oil or grease, perhaps—and several beer bottles in front of him. To understand that this scene is normal in Marsa Alam, you must also understand that just as the sea brings tourists, the mountains—several kilometers inshore and rich with gold—bring miners.
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My first introduction to the gold mine came in the form of a warning. Earlier that day, I walked down to the marina and struck up a conversation with a boy who was sitting against a rusty, disused crane. (The title ‘marina’ is generously applied to this bay; aside from the crane and some cement blocks—most of which haven’t been placed in the water yet—there is no marina, only moored boats.)
He kindly answered my first, most naïve questions, and I must have appeared comically out of place to him. Still, he introduced me to another friend and some boys who were fishing with a line some twenty meters away. Shortly afterwards, a man in his early 30s rode up to us on a motorcycle. He was dressed in a T-shirt that was a little too tight, and jeans. He introduced himself as something like the marina’s security, and the boys were very friendly with him. After I explained why I was in Marsa Alam, he advised me not to walk alone near the mountains at night.
Given how far the mountains seemed, I am uncertain how he interpreted the purpose of my visit. He continued: Marsa Alam is very safe, but there’s been some trouble recently. As he says that, he interrupts himself, remembering that he hasn’t told the boys what happened yesterday. They seem to already know but are anxious to hear his version.
Late in the evening, the guard had heard some yelling and figured he should go see what was up. As it turned out, he says, a large group of men were harassing a younger guy and girl from town whom they found alone by the beach. The couple were not married, he adds as a side note, but perhaps they were colleagues.
When the guard got there the girl was screaming, and her companion was shielding her from the men. It is not clear what effect the guard’s presence had, if any, but he managed to extract the girl from the situation. He announces this with a triumphant grin, then adds plainly, as if it were needless to say, that he left the young guy to his fate. From the yells he later heard (Thief! Thief!), he figures that the group robbed him.
The kind of people who might do this, I learn several days later, are the same people who are probably involved in illegal mining, and the same people whom the government sometimes cracks down on and other times ignores. The most recent crackdown was the cause behind the sudden uptick in crime. It put some men out of a job—the kind of men, I’m told, who were already questionable to begin with. They weren’t necessarily criminals, but not upstanding members of society either. They are typically not from Marsa Alam, and so the crime (a murder, some robberies) has largely taken place some distance from here along the highways running north to Quseir and west to Edfu.
Truthfully, when I was first told of the illegal mining happening here, I pictured men wandering the desert with pickaxes, striking away at the foothills of the mountains praying for gold. I was wrong—but not too wrong.
Until recently, gold was abundant enough to be found that way, though not with pickaxes but handheld metal detectors. Today, however, illegal mining is far more sophisticated, involving workers smuggled cross-border, dump trucks that haul tons of sand and sift them for grams of gold, and shadowy hierarchies and trade networks. Fighting this illicit industry is not just a matter of inspections and permits, but (as I was told in a rather cinematic way) of state intelligence, helicopter patrols, and trucks set alight as their frightened crew flee into the desert.
I could tell from the way these stories were told to me that Marsa Alam is a safe town. Crime, especially the amusing nature of the crime here, is an exception which helps clarify the rule. Far more visible than it, and just as visible as tourism, is the legitimate gold mine—the largest in Egypt.
Jointly operated by the Egyptian government and Centamin (an Australian company founded by an Egyptian émigré), the Sukari mine brands itself as “the first modern operating mine” in Egypt. After a period of exploration in the 90s, the joint venture was formed in 2005 and mining began in 2009. However, town residents who expected a boom instead experienced a period of stagnation. Obtaining the necessary permits to develop residential property became more difficult, and from 2005 to 2007, property prices in Marsa Alam fell. I was told that Marsa Alam has changed little since the mine opened.
Most of the mine’s Egyptian workers (who constitute 95% of the nearly 4,000-strong workforce) are from other parts of the country, and the mine rents out several apartment buildings and hotels to house them in. White-painted vehicles belonging to the mine—pick-up trucks, Land Cruisers, minibuses—zip around town at all hours, each one carrying a silent orange siren and a small reflective flag. At around five in the afternoon, buses returning from the mine release throngs of workers into the town. Until late into the evening, which in Marsa Alam as in the rest of Egypt is lively and colorful and loud, the mine workers can be found in cafes and food shops, still dressed in their orange jumpsuits.
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Wreckage of the Hurricane in Marsa Alam’s marina. On June 11, 2023, the diving liveaboard Hurricane caught fire while at Elphinstone reef, a site near Marsa Alam famous for shark diving. The boat was carrying fifteen British tourists and twelve Egyptian crew members. Three of the tourists died in the incident.
Before the mine and the tourism and the modern Marsa Alam with its New Cairo-like planning (inconveniently high sidewalks are almost a signature feature), there was the old Marsa Alam. A village, not a town. Or not even a village.
It has been described to me as a row of zinc-roofed houses so close to the shore that a fishing line could be cast from the window; so close, apparently, that a second front door was needed for when the first was made inaccessible at high tide. Surrounding this village was a minefield laid by the British in the second world war.
The few families who lived here were either fishermen or herders, and when the seasonal rains flooded the mountain valleys, the herders would scavenge the aftermath for gold. A truck would appear once a week on Thursdays bringing fresh produce and other requested items, and potable water arrived by boat. (Today, produce and water are both trucked in. Several stores are well-stocked with fresh fruits and vegetables, which come all the way from Cairo via Hurghada.
Water has been turned into a bit of a business—the town is cluttered with thousand-liter tanks, and those who store water in bulk sell it retail to others.)
The remains of the old village still exist on the other side of the highway from the modern town, but none of the homes by the sea remain. Some zinc-roofed homes can still be found, their age hinted at by the large trees—larger than any in the new town—that veil them from view.
Here is where Marsa Alam appears most clearly as a disjointed creation: adjacent to the zinc-roofed homes, and near a hospital where the minefield once extended, is a grid of concrete bungalows built in the 80s with some degree of financing from the United States—still intact but mostly void of life. Less than a kilometer away there is another small neighborhood with unpaved streets overlooking the marina, and opposite the highway from that is a walled compound of public housing that appears almost entirely uninhabited. In Egypt, the new often sprouts among the old or supplants it completely, but here in Marsa Alam something—maybe the abundance of land or the convenience of building from scratch—has preserved the layers of the town like a gallery exhibition.
This Marsa Alam, so different from what the man who drove here from Hurghada with his wife had in mind, is a Red Sea town. Whatever that means—and I would like that to mean something, just as a Mediterranean town means something—there is an irregularity about Marsa Alam which both suggests stereotyping and defies it. It has the air of a frontier town. It bears the familiar marks of tourism in this part of the country, and yet there is something more. Each perspective hides another, potentially truer one. Consider this: at the western edge of the town the houses stunt and then stop, and the road continues alone towards the mountains. Beyond those mountains a desert stretches, interrupted only by a narrow strip of green that is the Nile valley, to the Atlantic Ocean on the other side of the continent.
