Onto Sharm El Sheik

We are heading further south down the coast, on the trail of even better diving. Outside the big resort town of Sharm El Sheik, there's a marine preserve with, we are told, about 4 times as much sea life as we are seeing here. A German cargo ship sunk by the British in 1941 also makes a popular dive destination.

We've been hanging around with a fun Canadian couple down here, who are travelling around the world for a year. They had some wonderful and inspiring stories to share. I've signed up for how many years of school again, which will preclude me from such a great adventure ... !?!? :)

To check out their adventures, see: www.chrisandpaulasworld.com/.

In other news, I finally had a brief conversation with Dr. Achmud, the Bedouin doctor I wrote an article on for an herbal magazine in 1999. The driver at my hotel is bringing him a copy of the magazine later today. After so many years of holding onto it, it's so nice to know it is finally being delivered!

No swan towels here

My tour book said accurately that tourism has really fallen off in the Sinai since the recent spate of terrorist attacks here.

Last year, in April, 23 people were killed and 64 were wounded when three bombs went off in Dahab, about a block from my hotel. In July 2005, 67 people were killed further south, in the big dive resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, when three other bombs went off. In that attack, Bedouin residents of Sinai with connections to al Qaeda were cited as responsible (although I don’t know how accurate that conclusion is deemed, given it was Egyptians who were making it.)

In 2004, there were other attacks in Taba, the border town that connects Sinai and Israel, and in Ras Muhammed.

In November 2006, 10 people were convicted from some of these attacks: http://www.blogger.com/www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L30883140.htm

Prior to all this, Israelis were the main group of tourists supporting the Sinai economy, but that is not true anymore. I’ve only heard two people speaking Hebrew in the past five days. Most of the victims are Egyptians working in the town, and among the foreigners, most of them are Europeans. Prices for tourists are all quoted in Euros, not in dollars or Egyptian pounds.

But what is curious to me, what is so peculiar about the Egyptian culture, is that even given the tourists they do still have here, they do remarkably little to provide services that would enhance their incomes. They are great at endlessly heckling you and cajoling you into entering their restaurants and buying in their shops (as you might recall from my dreary post in Cairo last year) – but beyond that, they really don’t understand the full concept of a service economy.

For example … yesterday we went diving at the major dive site the Blue Hole. It’s a fairly flat entry into the water, but it is very rocky, and when you have 60 pounds of scuba gear on your back, it’s not particularly easy to walk down into the water.

If this were Mexico, or the Caribbean, there would be a whole line of young, tanned men standing nearby, reaching out their hands to help you stabilize, navigate over the rocks and get in and out. They do it for tips, and, if they are part of the “crew” that has been hired by your dive group, they get a portion of the tips that are always given by divers to the dive master (and the boat captain, if there is one.)

Does this happen here? Uh … no. Not remotely. You have all these tourists, precariously wobbling around trying to get in and out of the water, and you have literally dozens of men standing around doing nothing at all, outside of watching you, drinking their tea and laughing over cigarettes. They’ll try and sell you a Coke, they’ll try and talk you into a taxi ride into the canyon, they’ll try and lure you onto a camel – but will they extend a hand and try to help you not kill yourself? No. That apparently hasn’t occurred to them.

Then there’s the hotel. I’ve been here for five days now, and there hasn’t been room service even once. No change of bed sheets, no mopping of the floor, no putting a fresh towel on the bed folded into the shape of a swan. There are hundreds of hotel rooms up and down this coast – about 95 percent of them sitting empty – and not one of them has any room service. (At least the non-Hiltons ones, like mine, don’t. At $25/night, breakfast included, ours is actually pretty nice with an ocean view and air conditioning, so it’s not remotely ranked bottom of the line, comparatively speaking. But it's clearly not five-star either. As evidenced by the fact we don't have any water much of the day).

You walk up the promenade and there are literally dozens upon dozens of men of every age loitering around. Unemployment is huge here, and the ones who are employed are extremely underemployed. But why is it none of the hotels provide basic daily cleaning service, so at least some of these people could get tips?

This is just a theory – and I don’t begin to know enough about this country to profess to know for sure – but my theory is that the reason there is no room service is because the women aren’t allowed to work. Women can’t work, and room cleaning is considered women’s work, so therefore, no one does it.

Middle- and upper-class women in Cairo work, but they have college degrees and would never have a maid’s job. And the lower class women (which is the majority of them, especially in the Sinai), would never be permitted to work. Bedouin women are illiterate, veiled head to toe, and literally cannot even talk to a man who is not her direct family member. They virtually never even leave their stone, one-room houses. They even send their underage daughters into town to buy bread. As for lower-class Egypt women, whose appearances and behavior are not so severely restricted, they don’t live in the Sinai, for the most part. Only the Egyptian men come here to make money from the tourism industry (along with a spattering of Bedouin men).

It seems to me that the whole entire enterprise of room cleaning and room service is an entire segment of commerce – an entire stream of income – that they appear to not even realize exists. And meanwhile, the average household income in Egypt is about $3,500 a year, and the male unemployment rate hovers around 10.9% -- and sharply higher in the Sinai.

A peculiar country indeed.

For an interesting article just published three days ago by Reuters. on the political situation in the Sinai, see http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1942121820070625?pageNumber=1

An another recent article, which among other topics, explains the healthy skepticism toward the Egyptian claim that Bedouins have been behind the tourist attacks: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38209.

This article also touches on the huge disparity between the Egyptians and Bedouins, and alludes to the reality that along the coast anyway, it is almost entirely Egyptian-run now. Of the 50 or so hotels in Dahab, only about two are three are owned by Bedouins, and virtually every staffer I’ve come in contact with has also been Egyptian.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=26596

Penguin Village

Here is the view from my balcony -- quite lovely!

The diving today was beautiful, though the Blue Hole isn't what it used to be. When I was here eight years ago, there was a tiny shed selling snacks and bottled water. Our hiking group slept under the open sky on the pebbled beach. Today, there were about 150 divers in the few hours we were there, about 10 restaurants and 50 parked taxis. Not so surprisingly, fewer fish calling it home ...

Dahab, Egypt

I'm in Dahab, Egypt -- the land of camels, hookah pipes and heat hot enough to melt the surface of the sun -- and the fact it took a train, four buses, a dilapidated taxi and a 500-person 767 jet plane to get here has apparently not been enough to inculcate me from the Real World.

"Thank you for letting me read samples of your book," the email began. "I appreciated the opportunity to read it."

Uh-oh. Not good. In the world of literary agents, this was the equivalent of "Dear Jane."

Nine thousand miles from home, I have received a rejection from a literary agent, who, on a verbal description of my book and an elaborately documented analysis of the chicklit marketplace, had agreed to read four chapters. That, it would seem, was three chapters too many.

In the email, Sandi has taken the time to give me a thoughtful and honest critique of my book, and in a world where most literary agents don't even have time to lick their own stamps, this is no small gift. She likes my writing, she says, but the problem is, she really just doesn't get the whole "Abraham Lincoln thing" in the second chapter. "I just don't see the connection," she says, "it's way too much of a stretch."

After reading her email, I returned to my hotel – called the Penguin Paradise, of all things – and joined my travel buddy for dinner. It was about 105 degrees outside and we sat on the floor in a mountain of cushions, Arab-style, sipping lukewarm pineapple cocktails. "So she thinks that you comparing your long list of failures in dating and in life to Abraham Lincoln's list of failures is an overstatement?" Marcus asks, after I tell him the news. "She thinks that's too much?"

I nod and look out over the lapping waves of the Red Sea. Down by the water, a skeleton-clad cat is sniffing around the rocky beach, probably looking for scraps of fish. Leaning back on the pillows, I rest my feet on the table and reflect. Trying to picture myself with a black top hat and a beard, I'll admit, is a little bit weird. "What's really weird though, what's ironic," I finally said, "is that the very act of rejecting me makes the comparison all the more apropos. It's like just one more rejection to add to my list! I becoming more Abe-like by the minute!"

Marcus smiled and took a drink. "Hey, you're an even bigger failure now than you were when you woke up this morning!" he laughed, flashing a gummy grin in that warm-hearted kind of way that only an old friend can do.

"Why thank you!" I laughed, raising my glass to cheer the air and taking a big swig. "I demand recognition for the failures I have earned!"

The second thing, Sandi said in her email, was the issue of tone. "To be honest," she explained, "you sometimes don't sound funny so much as bitter. And bitter just isn't funny."
Hmmm, now that was interesting. I had to admit, my writing is sometimes a little bitter. The line "this dating shtetl from hell" comes to mind. She's right. That's bitter. I guess the question becomes – is bitter so bad?

"Marcus, do you think anyone, the reader in particular, can really blame me for being bitter? I mean, aren't you bitter? You've been single even longer than I have. Have you ever met someone who has spent their entire adult life subsisting on bad first dates and short-lived love affairs who didn't, at least once in a while, need to unleash a little bit of resentment?"

Marcus nodded. "Yes, he said, "we all get that way sometimes. I guess it comes down to how bitter is bitter."

Good question. I'm not sure of the answer. So I moved on to the third point. The third problem, Sandi concluded, was that she wasn't entirely sure that all of my stories really constituted a book. "It might be more of a magazine article," she explained, "for the Jewish Exponent or something. I'm just not sure you have enough content or substance for a book."

Content. Substance. My mind rolled over those words, over and over again, as the waiter delivered my steaming plate of funghi pizza. Within about 20 seconds, three other skeleton cats leapt over the wall of pillows and sat next to me, their sorry eyes like black holes of hunger, fixed desperately on my plate of food. With a knife and fork, I began cutting away the outer crust like a donut and parceling it out piecemeal.

Content. Substance. "Marcus, do I not have content and substance?" I asked, biting down on the pizza and at virtually the same moment, spitting it ungracefully back on the plate when it started to burn. "Does my life lack content and substance? You tell me, isn't this some good stuff here – right now, this very moment – isn't this fodder for the New York Times Best Seller List?"

Like any good friend would do, his head bobbed up and down eagerly, his mouth stuffed with pasta. "Oh yeah, baby," he agreed in a muffle. "This is gold, baby, g-o-l-d."

***

With the sun eventually set and our bellies full, Marcus and I returned to our room and our plutonic bed on the second floor of the hotel. I brushed my teeth and rearranged my clothes. Marcus ran out to fetch some water and came back with a six-pack of bottles. We chatted about what how much money he had paid, agreed that the Californias we had met at the Internet café were weird and realized we had forgotten to pack an alarm clock.

He was standing in the middle of the room, trying to figure out whether his cell phone could get enough reception to use the alarm function, when he spotted something out of the corner of his eye. "Hey, what's this?" he said abruptly, scooping down by the door and picking up a piece of paper. "Is this yours?"

A few minutes of silence passed. Then an explosion of laughter. "Oh yeah man," he said, his whole body starting to shake, "no doubt about it, this thing's for you!" He walked across the room and handed me a torn piece of paper.

Sometime after we had come up from dinner, someone with a thick black felt pen had scrawled a message to me and shoved it under the door. One side was a computer printout of bibliographic references on Egypt. The other side said this:

Submissive Canadian with foot-fetish really admirers your feet! I would love to serve as a discrete, humble, obedient foot slave during your stay in Dahab. I'll run-errands, pay for meals, & cater to your every need just to grovel beneath the soles of your feet while you boss me about! I often sit in the café dreaming that you'd come sit in front of me, place you feet on the table with the soles in my face while you read a book.

Tel Aviv

My friend Avivit, whom I visited last year here, has been kindly taking me around town again, until I leave for the Sinai tomorrow. The beach is sure beautiful in the summertime!

Back to HaAretz

June 20, 2007 -- Hi everyone! It's been 10 years since I paid a visit to my dear friends The Camels of the Sinai Peninsula, and I'm so happy to be going back. This time, I have dive cert in hand too, to go live in the amazing world of the fish and coral reefs of the Red Sea. Then it will be onto Haifa to sweat out the summer over Hebrew verb tables.

I promise to post as interesting adventures arise, so please check back periodically! Drop me a line now and then too (posting here or sending me an email) -- as I will be eager to hear news from back home.

Hugs,
The Wandering Hebrew