Hey guys~
This past weekend I spent 4 days and 3 nights travelling/staying in Nuweiba, Egypt, which is located in the South Sinai Peninsula. Luckily for me, a 3 day weekend a work corresponded with me needing to leave Jordan and renew my visa. Every six months, I need to vacate the country and run my visa, so that I am not charged for illegally lurking in the country. This time, I did not have enough time to travel somewhere new, so I headed back to Nuweiba, where I travelled with my friend Rachel in January of 2012. Nuweiba is the perfect travel destination because the violence of the North Sinai hasn’t spread to the tourist areas in the South, the exchange rate it killer (1 USD equals 7 Egyptian pounds), and it should be less than nine hours from Amman. The whole less than 9 hours from Amman thing proved to be the sticking point of our trip (and the topic of this blog). Ina random turn of events, I planned this trip with one of my roommate Hannah’s best friends from college. Her friend Abby (she has made a few appearances in this blog) and I tried to convince Hannah to come with us on the midnight ferry, but Hannah always claimed that “The Sinai was where white girls go to die.” At the end of the day, Hannah came with to the Sinai, and none of us white girls died.
On Thursday, I finished teaching at 12:45 pm, had a brief meeting until 2:00pm, and was planning to leave for Aqaba immediately after. Aqaba is the southern port city in Jordan, located on a tiny stretch of the Red Sea. It is a super touristy place that I have never been a fan of (despite its swim up coral reefs), but Hannah has been working down there a day or two every week, so I was excited to see what secrets she had discovered. Of course, nothing went as planned from the beginning. The meeting ran late, even though my co-worker Simon drove me to the bus stop at 7th Circle there was a ton of traffic, and my bus was overbooked. Luckily for me, being the sweet foreign girl means that I was not the one who got kicked off the overly full bus. Instead, some Jordanian man who booked a week ahead of me was left at the bus stop. I overcame my guilt at this situation and channeled my inner Maureen McNally (meaning I passed out before the bus even left the station). I think the sweet hijabi girl next to me was surprised by the snoring, drooling American, but when I have been up since 6 am, I can definitely sleep for most of the4 hour bus ride. I once slept the entire 12 hour bus ride from Joplin, MO to Chicago. Most of the ride passed in a blur of barren desert and napping, but when I was 15 miles outside of Aqaba traffic screeched to a grinding halt (a first for me in the middle of the desert). Apparently, a car crash was blocking the 2 lanes into Aqaba, so I ended up sitting for 2 hours in an unair-conditioned bus that reeked of cigarette smoke for far too long. But it was all okay. I was on my way to vacation! When the pile up finally cleared out, I arrived in Aqaba ready to take the midnight ferry, spend the weekend on a pristine beach, and attempt to make the leap from jaundice to bronze.
As our luck would have it, the term “midnight ferry” was loosely to a ferry which was in the port at midnight. It did not imply for one second that the boat was going to leave anywhere near midnight. My vast experience on the AB Maritime Ferry led me to convince Hannah and Abby not to show up 2.5 hours before the ship left. However, we are still Americans, so we arrived one hour in advance to clear customs and board the boat. Ha. It took us a good 90 minutes for them to figure out how to deal with my passport; apparently no one in the history of Jordan has ever had a residency permit, come back at a later date without a residency permit, and overstayed their visa (in my case by 48 hours). That or the border guard was too busy proposing to me to deal with my paperwork. Either way, I was vaguely concerned until I realized the boat was going nowhere fast. In fact, the guard told us that no passengers were going to be board until all of the cargo was loaded….somewhere between 4 and 6 am. As this was the first leg of our trip, spirits remained high. We occupied our time watching low budget American horror films dubbed in Arabic (which were shown on the port’s TV), drinking Nescafe and pop, and filming videos on Hannah’s camera (just in case we got kidnapped). Our main complaint was that everyone was kept outside on wooden benches, as opposed to inside on the airplane like seats.
Fast forward until 4:30 am. Our bags are “checked”: they are put in a trailer under the boat and we are finally allowed to enter the ferry. As women, we get to cut every single man in line…including the one in a wheelchair. We head to our seats. Abby decided to stay p, so Hannah and I asked her to wake us at sunrise (so that we could watch it rise over the majestic Saudi Arabian mountains as we coasted through the Red Sea). I was quite annoyed with Abby when I woke up to shining sunlight in Nuweiba. As I turned to ask her why she hadn’t woken us up, she told me that we were still sitting in Aqaba. There was no point in waking us up to see the rise over mechanical equipment. As the other men (we were pretty much the only women) began waking up, a mini revolution occurred on the ferry. One man, who may have single handily started the entire Egyptian revolution, led at least half of the passengers revolt against the ferry company. They even invited Abby, Hannah, and I to join them in demanding an explanation as to why the boat was going on 8 hours late, with no explanation. Sadly, the language barrier prevented me from playing an active part in this stand against “the Man”, but it did lead to much discussion as to whether a shared experience was more integral to a revolt than a common ideology. Either way, it takes a lot to drive a bunch of locals/experienced Middle Eastern travelers to a near revolt! We did stage our own mini protest by sneaking down into the cargo bay and retrieving our snacks, so that we didn’t have to pay for the over-priced ferry food.
At promptly 9:04 am (we have photo evidence) the ferry began its 3 hour journey to Nuweiba. Overall, what should have been a 4 hour event lasted over 13 hours, but when we arrived in Nuweiba all was forgotten. The crystal blue water stretched against white beaches for as far as the eye could see. The current political situation has all but killed Nuweiba’s tourism industry, so the beaches were ours alone. We realized that a meal with a soda cost less than $2.00 and that our charming beach hut (made of thatched wood) would be less than $5 each a night. The horror of the ferry quickly became a punch line to all of our Nuweiba jokes (wait until you hear about the return trip). I forgot the horror of waking up with dried out contacts, drool, and clothes that had been on for over 24 hours the moment I was floating in a pristine turquoise water, drinking a smoothie, and completely forgetting about the rea world. I was a bit turned off by the 4 “stray” dogs that populated the hostel. Hannah and Abby kept petting and cuddling them while I may or may not have climbed onto the chair to avoid them touching me….I mean they are nippy puppies who don’t have shots…no thanks. As the day wore on, I felt the tension of the last two months disappear as I laid on a swing and watched the sunset. It seemed well worth the 13 hour delay to be back in Nuweiba.
The next portion of this adventure includes the overnight hike up Mount Sinai. I promise I will write it before another two weeks have passed!
Miss you guys,
Claire
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