Out of Egypt

The bus ride from Sharm el Sheik back to the Taba border, and crossing into Israel basically took six hours. By the time we got to the bus depot downtown, to catch the intercity bus to Tel Aviv, we had missed it by three minutes.

This was Friday afternoon, and because of Shabbat, there were no more buses until 11:30 am Saturday morning. That basically made any hope of arriving to Haifa, way up north, impossible. So instead, we went to the tiny local airport and booked one-way tickets for only $90 a piece. What a deal; it was barely more money than what we would have paid using trains and buses, and instead of spending about 10 hours in public transport, we spent only one.

We arrived to the airport two hours early, at the airline’s advice, because we had an unusual amount of luggage with us (two sets of scuba gear). This turned out to be fortuitous because something about me flip out the airline security officers, and Marcus and I were separated and intensely grilled for over 1.5 hours. They asked us endless streams of highly personal questions, and then left us to confirm our two stories against each other – only to return again and continue.

My hunch is that it was the five Egyptian stamps on my passport that did it, but in the end, we will never really know. We produced the dive shop receipts to prove we were diving; they inspected my dive log and wanted to know why I didn’t have stamps from the dive shop in it; they looked at the pictures of my trip I had downloaded on my laptop; I had to produce my old business card and my rabbinical school ID, as well as the papers of the Haifa ulpan.

In the end, they even called my Israeli friend in Tel Aviv and asked her a bunch of questions. It was pretty trippy. I really wasn’t sure they were going to let us board at all, and when they finally did, it was minutes before our plane was boarding.