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Port Ghalib
February 2024
AT the entrance to Port Ghalib from the coastal highway, there is a team of polite, well-dressed, and well-equipped security. Once inside, you may walk the twenty minutes it takes to get down to the marina complex—the pedestrian-only ‘downtown’ of Port Ghalib. To your right as you begin walking there will be some apartment blocks (the non-premium tower residences; mostly vacant), and off to your left some distance away is a large polo field and a clubhouse. The streets are well-paved and the trees are well-trimmed. After the second roundabout the greenery becomes not just pleasant but impressive. The avenue is lined with tall palm trees and sprawling bougainvillea, silver ragwort and yellow trumpet flowers. The air is heavy with the scent of a desert in bloom—a dry scent, subtle in its sweetness—and overripe dates litter the ground. The sidewalks are not too high.
I had, on the blindingly bright morning I arrived in Port Ghalib, a sense that something was off. Egyptians do not usually come to Port Ghalib when they come to the Red Sea, and in fact not many Egyptians have even heard of Port Ghalib. It is a resort town with an impressive marina, but the social stratum this typically attracts stays instead in El Gouna, further north. Nor is Port Ghalib a big hub for divers, like the resorts down the coast are. The airport closest to it, less than a ten-minute drive away, is named not after this town but after Marsa Alam, sixty kilometers to the south. (But here is something to know: that airport, the Marsa Alam International Airport, is privately owned and operated by a Kuwaiti conglomerate who built it in 2003. That same conglomerate also owns and operates Port Ghalib, which it built in 2002.)
With little exception, the only Egyptians I could see around were workers or shop-owners. The only visitors were European. What felt strange was not necessarily this balance; on the contrary, it felt like the sort of place a local employed in tourism would dream up as a utopia. It’s a relatively comfortable town where the logic of tourism has been distilled to its purest, uninhibited by the presence of domestic tourists who would complicate the course of mutual exploitation.
Instead, it was the little things—the glitch-like manifestations of this utopia in the real world, and particularly in a country like Egypt—that betrayed any normalcy about the place. Anywhere tourism runs unfettered there are bound to be strange quirks (and ‘quirks’ here may be a euphemism), but in Port Ghalib the signs were obvious—literally.
DIVINO REPRESENT: HAPP.HOUR
IF YOU DON’T DRINK, HOW WILL YOUR FRIENDS KNOW YOU LOVE THEM AT 2 AM
This handwritten sign, with its errors and clichés, was posted outside a café right by the entrance of the marina’s waterfront. The marina appeared deserted when I saw it at 10am, virtually devoid of people and boats save for a group of foreigners waiting to board a yellow semi-submarine. I made my way past them, stopping only to ask a security guard where one might find breakfast at this hour (“What kind of place?” he replies with a chuckle, and I understand what he means). There is a sign advertising excursions and day trips, and it is only in German. There is a large, upright menu posted in front of a restaurant, and it is only in euros (SEAFOOD PIZZA: €12; CAMEL STEAK: €28).
Behind this row of waterfront shops and restaurants (the buildings here being vaguely Andalusian in design) is a shaded street announcing itself as the khan. The shops there sell souvenirs, jewelry, spices, knock-off luxury clothes, and other things a tourist might buy. Some of the shops have A4 papers taped to their doors, displaying handwritten notes of approval left behind by tourists. It is not uncommon, walking through such spots when the shop staffers are idly chatting, to hear them weighing the relative merits of each nationality of tourist—the German who is fussy but willing to pay higher prices, versus the Polish who is less of a headache but also brings in less money.
At opposite ends of the khan are a large pharmacy and a small prayer room. It is easy to miss the prayer room, but the pharmacy is eye-catching. Outside it, a meter-tall metal cut-out of a man—a generic, advertisement-type man with pale skin and a salt-and-pepper beard—smiles open-mouth at the sign he is holding above his head. The sign reads: VIAGRA.
But even the prayer room has its quirks. There is no mosque in the marina, and no adhan is heard unless you are in the room's immediate vicinity. Just inside the entrance is a small rack with pamphlets about Islam offered in several Cyrillic and Latin languages. I wondered about this, because to see the pamphlets you must already be inside the prayer room, yet the only ones who enter are the Egyptian shop staff, cleaners, and security guards. (Are the pamphlets there in case a tourist wanders in mistakenly? Are we meant to leave with the pamphlets and proselytize? Do tourists come here to find God?)
For those local employees, there is one place in Port Ghalib where goods and services may be obtained at a reasonable price, in Egyptian pounds. It is a rundown building on the opposite side of the town, near the highway. There is a barbershop there, and a man who dejectedly serves falafel out of a cart. Another man sells kofta, and there is what once may have been a bakery (though all that remained of it were hundreds of loaves of bread strewn across the floor). There are a few shops and an ahwa where the outdoor seating is in fact the building’s unfinished garage—smelling vaguely of slaughtered sheep.
Physically and figuratively, it is far from the marina where one may stand at the edge of the concrete quay, look down into the water, and see corals. Without stepping foot off land you can see butterflyfish, puffers, meter-long cornetfish, orangespine unicornfish, dusky parrotfish, triggerfish, and blackspot snappers. You may even spot a hawksbill turtle, as one elderly group of Italians did.
What else can be said about Port Ghalib? At night, a school of nearly three hundred Indian mackerel churns under the yellow glare of the marina’s streetlamps, glittering as they turn about. At night you may also come across Port Ghalib’s security car, which—perhaps most puzzlingly—is an early 2000s Alfa Romeo. And, at night, you may come across a café where upwards of fifty Polish people, all couples and families, are seated listening to an enthusiastic Polish presenter on a makeshift stage, with a Polish Elvis Presley hiding just out of sight waiting for his cue.
