It means "no problem" in Arabic. "Hakuna Matata," a Bedouin guy replied to me once when I said it, which surprised me because that was exactly what I had been thinking and also because he had seen "most of" the Lion King movie.
We arrived in Dahab on Thursday, September 18, after a week of monuments and hassles and trains and heat that seemed like a month. It was very interesting but it was no vacation.
Dahab is in the south of the Sinai peninsula on the Gulf of Aqaba branch of the Red Sea. We took the first cheap camp we came across and moved our stuff into a thatched hut, then went to the Bedouin-style sitting area with blankets and cushions and a few downed palm trunks to lean against. It overlooked ten or twenty meters of reef table (rocky ground right under the water created by millennia of coral activity) and then a drop-off populated by living corals and fish, and after that the sapphire blue sea filling a mile-deep crack in the earth. Across the gulf were some hazy sandy mountains that turned out to be Saudi Arabia. We ordered milkshakes, and life was looking pretty good until Celine Dion started bellowing from the camp's sound system. I walked over and asked for a selection of tapes, found some Dire Straits, requested a change, and finally we were on vacation.
We spent a long time doing nothing and watching the world go by. It is a lazy place. Used to be a Bedouin village, but now the sandy lagoon to the south is bounded by posh hotels and windsurfing outfits, and the reefy waterfront to the north is a long pedestrian mall with cheap camps, mid-range hotels, local shops, and restaurants with tables just a few feet from the water. Some of the restaurants are Bedouin-style, some more conventional with sit-down tables, and all have pretty much identical menus and guys who stand outside and fish for customers. Even after you've eaten so much you are visibly waddling, you can't walk more than a few feet without, "We have good fish special tonight, you want to take a look?"
We finally got up after a while to see about scuba diving prices and trips to climb Mt. Sinai, and I went to a club called Diver's House where a guy informed me that the dive I wanted to do required an advanced open-water certification and by luck they had a class starting the next day. Whether this was true or not, I was excited to do a dive class again after seven years, and I signed up. It was pretty cheap for six guided dives and certification and everything. I picked out my equipment and they gave me a textbook and a worksheet and said to be there at nine the next morning for my check dive.
If Miami had an Egyptian mafia, I would have pegged our dive instructor as a member. But once I talked to him I realized he was a softspoken Muslim family man with a passion for diving who'd earned the money to become an instructor working construction in Saudi Arabia. My classmates were a goofy Indian-British guy and a lovely Australian-British girl, and we did all three dives that day at The Lighthouse, a site along the pedestrian mall in front of a restaurant. In general it's easy to order food, snorkel or wade for a while, and then come back when the order's ready because there are great reef sites all along the coast.
The check dive (to test fundamentals) and navigation dive were pretty routine, but after we finished drills we got to roam off into the reefs, which was amazing. My diving so far has been mostly in places like Monterey Bay and Arkansas, so I was in heaven.
The night dive was at the same place because we knew it well by then. We got to about 25 feet when I pumped some air into my buoyancy control vest, but instead of pulsing it streamed and wouldn't stop. I blew up like a fugu fish and bobbed to the surface, air still streaming into my vest and out my release valve. I tried a couple of things to make it stop, but no luck, so I waited until the instructor surfaced and swam over and unhooked my hose from my vest. I said, "What was that?" "Self-inflating." An equipment failure. "What should I have done?" "Unhook the hose and inflate your BC orally. You should have learned that in open-water school." I was a bit shaken. Open-water school was seven years ago. What if that had happened at depth or in a cave? It was a good lesson in any case. We traded equipment and went back down to the group. I'm not sure what he breathed, because most of my air had spewed out already, but it worked somehow.
Floating around in a dark silent world lit up by colorful spots of coral and fish that passed your light beam is something I can't wait to do again. Everything is different at night, all the diurnals go to sleep and the nocturnals come out, including the corals.
And then we had drinks (mostly fruit juice since alcohol isn't so big in Muslim countries) and talked about life and diving and how repressive Saudi Arabia is but what amazingly beautiful things they have in their malls. The instructor said he went into a store once because it looked really nice but he couldn't figure out what they were selling. It turned out they had a whole menu of shaving options and it was easy to walk out having paid $50 for a shave. He also said diving was the best thing he had done in his life, and he loved Dahab, but it wasn't much of a family place, and he might have to move back to his native Alexandria when his kids got bigger. Then again, he said, he might send his wife and kids back there and take a second wife in Dahab if he really didn't want to leave. Under Muslim law, he could take a third and a fourth as well.
The next day we did three of the best dives in Dahab. The first was the deep dive, about 100 feet, in the Canyon. We descended through an open shaft of reef wall to a small sandy plateau, where we compared depth gauges and noted that we were indeed pretty deep. There was supposed to be more to it, but the slate pencil didn't work and nobody got nitrogen narcosis and no one ever mentioned no-decompression limits or emergency response, which are the most important aspects of deep diving. We just headed on through the narrow canyon, which was an overhead environment like a cave, something that usually requires its own training, which none of us had. It was beautiful and full of life and color, and the was water crystal clear, and then we ascended into what they call the Fish Bowl, a roughly spherical enclosure with reef wall on one side and a branchy reef growth on the other. Inside was a school of hundreds of 2-3 inch glassfish. You could see right through them to their bones and the corals behind.
The drift dive we did from Bells, another descent through a small hole, along a reef wall to the Blue Hole, a 30 m wide, 600 m deep hole that jeeploads of snorkelers flock to every day. I saw my first octopus, and crossing the Blue Hole was a little like flying. The naturalist dive at some coral islands was a joke, as the only "naturalist" thing we did was look at fish, which is what we always do. It was a great dive, though, with one coral growth that had the shape of a cyprus tree and a couple of big yellow and grey fish hanging out under it like it was a park on Sunday.
Afterwards we had drinks and talked again, and the instructor said I was the first American he had ever met. I felt weird being his representative for the American people, and of course he is not pleased by the way my country is handling its position of power in the world. The Indian guy was about the friendliest British person I had ever met, so we were three exceptions trying to figure out a rule.
Olivier and I pretty much sat around the next day until I got around to asking about the dive I wanted to do, which would leave the next night. They said it had been canceled, but one was leaving tonight if I was interested, and I'd get a good discount since I'd taken the course with them. About 15 people went and we arrived in Sharm El-Sheikh on the southern tip of the peninsula about 1:00 a.m. and were taken to a huge dive boat where we could sleep for the night. We arrived at the site of the wreck of the Thistlegorm around 8:00 a.m. It was a WWI British cargo vessel carrying trucks and jeeps and arms and locomotives that was sunk by German warplanes. It landed upright on a surface only 30 meters below the water, and it is the world's most popular dive site. Irresponsible anchorage and years of smashing and theft are degrading the ship, and of course the bomb took out a big chunk of it, but it is still in great condition.
I had some trouble clearing the pressure from my ears on the way down, and I lost my group (our divemaster was a 24-year-old named Osama who'd got his makeshift start at age 12 in the Gulf of Suez), but there were about ten groups down there (usually it's more like 20), so I passed from group to group 'til I found mine again. We dove first around the outside of the ship, and I didn't know whether to concentrate on the ship itself or the sea life. Dozens of barracuda schooled off the bow and colorful reef fish dodged around railings and port holes.
On the way up I had trouble clearing my ears again, and again my Korean dive buddy didn't notice and let the group leave without me. The air trapped in my right ear canal expanded as I ascended and put it under tremendous pressure. I tried to descend again but that made it feel worse. I clung to the anchor line at about 12 meters being washed around by the surge, and the pain was so intense I was afraid my ear drum would blow. I tried to breathe as regularly as possible for several minutes while my ear squeaked and throbbed, and then agnozingly slowly I made my way to the surface gasping in pain and spat out some blood. I boarded the boat with great relief, but I was still so sensitive that the change in pressure climbing to the upper deck was painful. An old boatman massaged my injured ear canal and made me tea with milk, and I sat and drank and compared notes with the other divers. The Australian girl from the class was there with her lovely British fiancee, and there was a guy from New Zealand and one from Switzerland, and everyone offered up ear problem stories or tips for helping me feel better. There was a small Japanese group and some Slovakians and Dutch, a Mexican and a Korean girl who was was excellent diver but more interested in her pink plastic underwater camera than her dive buddy. But they kept to themselves.
I thought there was no way I was going to dive again, and no way a competent divemaster would let me dive again if I wanted to, but I was mistaken. Two hours later I was still deaf in that ear but not in throbbing pain anymore, and when my divemaster said, "Ready to go? Want to give it a try?" I said, "Might as well."
The New Zealander told me to sniff salt water up my nose to clear my sinuses, which I did and it did. I also cleared obsessively, about three times for every meter change in depth. There was no problem and it was better than the first dive. We went inside the storage rooms and other decks with flashlights and saw the jeeps with windshields still intact and motorcycles and other gear. It was strange finding fish hovering in dark rooms, like they'd gone in there to think. After I got back to the dive boat I found myself wanting to float up the stairs by inhaling like I could underwater.
During the third dive, a drift dive in Ras Mohammad National Park, we saw more color variation in the corals than at Dahab because of all the currents from the gulfs, a blue-spotted eagle ray, and a couple of giant black moray eels, 4 or 5 feet long. The Korean girl got right in one eel's face with her camera, and as her dive buddy I figured I should pull her out of there, but the eel just looked at her like she was nuts until she left. I was a little overconfident with my ear and had some problems, but nothing near as bad as the first dive. The blood is still being slowly rinsed out of my ear canal, but I got ear drops, there was no infection, no more pain, and I can hear fine again. Overall it was a great day.
The next day Olivier and I met Laurent, the Swiss guy, and his French friend Pierre for dinner, so I was outnumbered. We spoke mostly in English for my benefit. Olivier left the next day but I opted to stay in Dahab and unwind for a while. I was just starting to get into it and still exhausted from diving and had no interest in picking up and traveling again for a while, and Olivier was just heading to Amman via Petra to catch his plane anyway. I did as little as possible for the next couple of days besides watch the waves, drink tea, and hang with Pierre and Laurent, and then I hiked north up the coast a couple of hours to Ras Abu Gallum, where I did even less.
Ras Abu Gallum is where National Geographic Explorer meets Cheech and Chong. It is a Bedouin village and a national park. As far as I could see there was one light bulb in town attached to a generator, and the rest was thatched huts with candles. I got there after dark and wandered around until some kids said, "Come, come," and showed me to a hut where I could sleep and fixed me an overpriced dinner. The kids kept coming in and acting like camels for me or holding my hand or just staring and giggling in a friendly way, and when I was about to go to sleep a teenage boy came in with an old boom box and two friends, one of whom had a rigged-up Pepsi bottle. When in Rome. The first boy spoke some English, but the others just lay around and looked around. One of them talked on his cell phone a while, which was incongruous. They showed me a school of fish a few meters from shore with glowing eyes that slowly blinked and shimmered like an IndiGlo mirage. I wanted to snorkel in but I didn't have a snorkel and didn't know the terrain.
The next day I planned to go back to Dahab after I hiked quickly to the lagoon up the coast and had a swim, but the hike took ages, and when I got there I joined an Estonian guy Dan and a Russian-Estonian girl Asya. We talked at the small restaurant and then swam together. They were free divers, with weight belts and professional snorkels and practiced breath-holding ability, and I just tried not to step on anything. We caught a truck back, and I shared dinner with them at Adam's place, which was thatched huts and a gas stove that served as a hotel and restaurant. We sat under the octagonal thatched shelter of the spacious sitting place and talked for three hours while we waited for our dinner of chicken and rice and vegetables and Bedouin flatbread.
The next day I went back to Adam's place for some tea before I departed and didn't leave for another two days. The sun hurtled across the sky again and then the galaxy floated across the sky, and there didn't seem to be a big hurry to get up, especially with Adam telling Bedouin tales and cooking up tasty meals and the Estonians to talk to. We did as the Romans do with Adam, and he told about how Bedouins have had to flee Sinai several times when Egypt was bombing Israel or vice versa (both always thought Sinai was on the wrong side), and when they did they sometimes hid their treasures in caves that they dug in the hills and then covered up. Treasures are still being found after the (very rare) rains sometimes and people have gone crazy trying to look for them. He said his forefathers had dug vast cisterns in the hills, and if you knew where they were you could get cold, clear water on the hottest days, "like you were at the Hilton." He said the official borders meant nothing to him, only Bedouins borders, and the border guards couldn't go where he went anyway. If he wanted to go to "Israel" or "Jordan" or "Saudi Arabia" (he had his own names), he just went. He told us the names of the winds and said he likes octopus season best because "it's no bones, just good, white meat."
We went out to look for glowfish again in an easier-to-dive area, but instead we found glowspots. Little pinpricks of light that glittered in the little waves. We couldn't guess their nature except that they were tiny and could hop around if they got beached, and when I tried to catch one, I felt like they rushed me. That could have been the Roman activity talking, though.
I passed out in the sitting place, and the next day we snorkeled before breakfast, floating through coral gardens with lots of lionfish and butterflyfish, waited three hours for breakfast while the sun climbed, snorkeled again, waited three hours for dinner while the sun descended, Romanized and talked, and passed out again. The days were sprinkled with chatting with other cool foreigners who were on extended stays, some up to two weeks. There were plenty of tourists who came for an hour or so as part of a package tour, but no one talked to them because they were too busy talking to each other and taking pictures.
It was surprisingly un-boring considering all we did was talk, snorkel, and eat. Everything was so beautiful it kind of filled up your senses. Especially the stars, I've never seen so many. I saw at least five shooting stars a night. And one night we went swimming and found that the little lights in the waves were everywhere in the water, and when you moved, they lit up. We treaded water in swirling fields of sparkling water stars and laughed in wonder. Dan said, "It's like a fairy tale."
Tuesday morning we caught camels back to town, but before we got there the Bedouin leading us stopped for coffee and said, "Finish." We clearly weren't finished, so we had to walk the rest of the way. We caught a cab to town from the Blue Hole and had to part ways because they were leaving town. Dan gave me Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions which he'd just finished and we said our good-byes. I sat down and read it that morning. (Thanks, Dan.)
My hotel guy thought I had wandered off and died, but luckily he didn't change my room out or anything. I found Laurent, the Swiss guy from the dive ship again and we hung out a lot the next week. He windsurfed during the day (he'd been here nearly six weeks) while I passed the time somehow. A little swimming, a little book and web reading, some journal writing, a little wading, a lot of sitting. My day planner from that week is empty except for "leave Ras Abu Gallum" and "laundry". We talked and ate and had tea and listened to music on the porch of his hotel. It was pleasant. He left this morning and I'll leave for Jordan in two days.
If you are on this list I probably miss you. Write when you can.
Pam