Hampi, Karnatika

Our next stop after leaving the beaches of Goa was Hampi, a once vibrant center of a southern Hindu dynasty from the 10^th to the 16^th century. It was at the center of the spice and Arabian horse trade, and was thought to be the land of the fabled Ramayana: a vedic story of Vishnu’s incarnation lord Rama and his consort Hanuman, the monkey god and so it is a sacred pilgrimage for Hindus. It sits in the southern state of Karnatika, and its strange landscape is dotted with piles of granite boulders that form teetering mounds out of which and on which were built enormous temples and fortressed cities. The muslims laid siege later sacked the kingdom in the 1500s and it has laid in ruins ever since. Today Hampi is a sacred Hindu site, especially for those who worship Shiva (one of the incarnations of God) and Hanuman, the monkey-god. The local people live in and amongst the ruins, some of them literally making their houses using the ancient structures and the town has been set up to accommodate tourists, both Indian pilgrims and western backpackers. It is a place where people can get stuck for weeks wandering through 100s of temples that dot the area. We walked off the train into a wall of 110 degree heat and entertained no thoughts of staying any longer than the 2 days we had allotted ourselves to see the place. Despite the heat (which was at least dry and made a world of difference, but still made even the walls of our shitty room bake like an oven all night long) we enjoyed Hampi and woke up at 6 am to tour the ruins before the heat became unbearable.

The town itself is centered on a bazaar with shops and a clasic temple. The Tunganhabra River runs through the town and the original inhabitants of Hampi set up a sophisticated irrigation system that is still in use today to water the never-ending Banana plantations. The river is holy, as are most rivers in India, and feeds giant pools in the temple complex called tanks that are used for sanctifying baths and to dip statues of gods once a year during religious festivals. The river, like all rivers in India, has steps that lead down called ghats, allowing people to bathe, wash their clothes and perform puja. We used the river to cool off one day and played with some village boys and watched the women wash their clothes using the Indian method of viciously slapping them against rocks to rid them of dirt.

The temples and buildings are covered with intricate carvings, mostly showing scenes of Vedic stories, Gods, and animals. We wandered through ruins and climbed a nearby hill to see a temple at the top and take in the early morning sun over the rest of the village. When the heat became unbearable, around 10 am we retreated to a shadowy nook or the river to stay cool while the rest of the town and animals slept the heat away. We watched and were watched by many Indian pilgrims coming to perform devotion rituals (puja) at the temples and got blessed by the resident elephant of the temple, Laxmi, who will bless your head with her trunk once she gets a shiny coin.

We finished up after 2 days and bused back to the town where the trains depart from, Hospet. There we spent a few hours at a fancy hotel pool with a group of French travelers who were doing the same thing. (The French guy was fed up with Indian food and lamenting the lack of wine or cheese or anything that doesn’t taste like curry.) We ate a roadside dinner of vegetable thali (lots of little bowls of curries and dals and a big heap of rice to eat it with) and boarded the overnight train for Bangalore, this time in general sleeper class (no AC). On board we befriended a generous family who insisted on feeding us our second dinner and offered us the two bunks separate from the others. We woke up at 4 am in Bangalore, part of a long travel leg that would eventually find us in Kolkata later that afternoon.

for more pics, click on this magic transport machine.

Goa

We left Mumbai for Goa, a small state on the southwestern coast and a 13-hour train ride from Mumbai. We took an overnight airconditioned sleeper train for the lovely ride. This was our first A/C since arriving in India and after a few hours we finally cooled our body temperatures down to normal. The berths are set up in double layers and it is like a slumber party for adults with chai-wallahs and other food vendors plying the halls for most of the trip so you can buy snacks and tea at any time. Train travel is huge in India as it is an affordable way to get around this massive country, and people will spend days on trains getting to their destinations. There are different classes from 1st class air coditioned cars with linen and service to sitting packed like sardines on hard wooden benches with only the open windows to cool the car. Besides frying our computer adaptor by plugging it in to charge, the ride was otherwise very pleasant and uneventful and we woke up the next day in Madgao, Goa, rested and ready to hit the beach.

Goa was colonized by the Portugese who came over in the 1500s and converted many people to Christianity, and only recently left in the 1960s. The Portugese influence can still be felt in the many Catholic churches, the last names of people (Fernandes, Rames, etc.), the language and the food. It is known as being a very laid-back place and westerners have been coming since hippie times to hang out on the beautiful beaches. The coastline is all white, sandy, palm-tree filled beaches and we settled on a beach in the south called Palolem, a 1-mile strip of temporary beach huts and restaurants, all advertising the same “multi-cuisine” menu of Indio-Italian-Chinese-Israeli-thai-goan and seafood. Since it's low season, the beach is in the process of shutting down for the next few months of monsoons, so prices are cheap and negotiable and things shut down, however signs of the high-season scene were evident everywhere: yoga on the beach, aryuvedic massage, meditation workshops, tai chi and Goan cooking classes.

We got a "coco hut" on the beach for a few bucks per night and settled in for 5 days of what felt like an undeserved (but still welcome) beach vacation. The heat was much more tolerable with the sea breezes and the ocean to cool off in and the water was warm and inviting. We spent some days just hanging out, reading, playing in the waves, drinking fruit lassis and eating Goan fish curry rice. On our second day there, we were approached by a local restaurant owner who asked if we were interested in being extras in a Bollywood movie that was filming at a near-by beach resort. They offered food and drink for the entire day and 1000 Rupees (about $20) and since we really had no other plans, we accepted.

The day started at 8 am and about 30 other white tourists of all kinds were bused to the set, which was just a nearby beach, and were instructed to hang out under umbrellas until they needed us for shooting. A bus of Indian tourists and locals also showed up to be extras. Indian women are very modest, however, and do not wear bathing suits on the beach. If they do swim, they wear all their clothes or a sari, so all the white ladies provided the skin. We spent the day baking, gawking at the Bollywood stars, all of whom are quite famous, we were reassured by some of the Indians, and walking on cue during the scenes. The movie is called Golmaar III and as you can guess by the title, is a “threequel” and we were not able to gather from the explanations what the movie is exactly about, but our scene involves some jet skis and the stars being chased by a jet ski and some very melodramatic physical comedy….and not much in the way of acting. We got an autograph and a picture with Johnny Lever, a famous comedian, and got some surreptitious shots of the other young stars, all of whom are chased by personal assistants with umbrellas to keep them out of the sun (and keep them from getting tan as dark skin is not considered beautiful), make up and hair people, a person to carry the cell phone, and a whole host of other helpers and quasi-directors. As extras, we had to walk around on the beach a lot—strange because most people lay in the sun when they go to the beach and this looked like a scene from a busy park with all of us strolling in different directions—and most of the people who sign up to be extras are backpackers living on peanuts in India, so there are a lot of dreadlocks and aging hippies in the crowd. Anyways, the movie releases in November so make sure to look out for us in our Bollywood debut!

We spent 2 days touring other parts of Goa on a Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycle, a common bike here in India, but more of a classic collectors item in the US, I have been reassured by my husband who was very excited to drive us around. It was actually a perfect way to see the landscape and capture some of the subtleties that you don’t see from a bus window, but cover some ground. Plus, it was cool to ride on the back of a bike—but don’t think this means that I have changed my mind at all about the safety of these things. We braved the crazy Indian drivers who honk before passing, but then take slower trucks on hills around blind curves at breakneck speeds or drive without their lights or on the wrong side of the road. We toured some unpopulated beaches, stopping on the way to admire cashew trees (the fruit is sweet and tastes like cashews) and some Hindu temples. We visited an old Portugese coastal fort and were offered coconuts from a family who just climbed a palm tree to go them. We ate fish curry and prawns at a little local restaurant and saw some smaller towns and villages. We also spent a day touring Panaji, the current capital of Goa, and then stopped in Old Goa, the former capital, that was abandoned due to cholera and malaria and the plague in the 18th century. Old Goa has several huge Portugese-style churches and one in particular that houses the relics of a saint, and many Indian Christians were making a pilgrimage to the town, enduring the ridiculous heat to pray and offer devotion.

We wound up our trip to Goa after 6 days, managing to find an electrician who took our adaptor apart and fixed the blown fuse, and, even though the trains are mostly booked out for the next 6 weeks because all of India is on their summer vacation, we were able to somehow secure train tickets to our next destination. We left the laid back beaches on a blissfully air conditioned day train and traveled inland to the state of Karnatika, arriving in the town of Hospet and then, in 110 degree weather, boarded a bus that took us to Hampi.

For more pictures of Goa, click here.

Mumbai or Bombay? Mumbay

We flew from Israel to India and arrived around 4:30 in the morning, not knowing exactly how to proceed. It was too early to check into our hotel and we were too tired to go exploring Mumbai after an overnight flight, and there was no place in the airport to crash for a few hours. We also feared the searing heat that we knew awaited us outside of the confines of the airport’s A/C. We finally decided to venture into the city, towards the hotel, to try our luck at getting a room early (checkout time in India is 9 a.m.) If not, we would drop our bags and head out to the city for a few hours. We got a cab and ventured into the hot, steamy dawn. Mumbai is a city that, at last census in 2001, had over 16 million people and where over 50% of the population lives in a slum. We drove the southern tip of the peninsula, where the center of the city lies, passing on the way thousands of sleeping bodies everywhere: on sidewalks and streets, car hoods, carts, and benches. If there was room, someone (and often entire families) was sprawled out on it.

We arrived at our budget hotel, not far from the great Victoria Station, and they were kind enough to give us a room early. Lodging in Mumbai is more expensive than in the rest of the country, and we had searched to find a budget room. When we walked up to the room, we saw why the price was cheap. The room was hot and stuffy, literally a box with plywood walls with a filthy, shared bathroom and shit-stained toilet, and starting at 7 am, just as we were trying to fall asleep, loud blaring music and voices from the other plywood-box rooms surrounding ours. It felt more like a bad storage unit than a hotel room, and definitely not like the pictures in the brochure. Too tired to protest, we crashed, but after a few hours, we had enough. After Rusha yelled at the guy next door if he could turn down the cricket game he was watching on TV at concert hall levels and he responded that he couldn’t, we went to the lobby and, still half asleep complained till we were moved to a better room. The result, though still made of quarter inch plywood, had its own bathroom/shower and a door leading to a balcony. The Hotel New Bengal was our introduction to the budget hotels of India.
After sleeping off the all-nighter on the plane, we ventured out to take care of some logistics, like train tickets to Goa, our next destination. We walked into Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (Victoria Station), one of the busiest stations in the world, servicing over 2 million people daily on more than a 1000 trains. There were people everywhere (a theme, you see) sprawled asleep, sitting in large family groups on the floor, with packages and bags piles everywhere. It gave us our first taste of how colorful India is, especially the women in their brightly colored, beautiful saris.

We booked our tickets to Goa, which takes a number of steps and is supposed to be a challenging process for Western logic, but it wasn’t all that bad. Then we went out into the wall of 95 degree heat at 80% humidity. The challenge to our trip to India in May and June is that it is the hottest time of year here, and while many of the locals seem to have adapted to the climate and seem to merely glisten, we have not and seem to be soaked and constantly producing more sweat all the time.

We got our first taste of Indian street food, getting tasty mysore masala dosas, then down through the city walking through the Azad and Oval Maidens, open grassy parks in the middle of the city where dozens of cricket games were taking place, passing the High Court and University of Mumbai, and we even checked out out the Kneset Eliyahoo synagogue, servicing the Jewish community of Mumbai. We ended at the Gateway of India, an archway built for the British king in 1911 that stands on the pier, and we watched families and tourists blend as the sun descended behind the massive archway. We also stopped in the famous 5-star Taj Mahal Hotel, one of the targets of the 2008 terror attack on Mumbai. The hotel is now guarded like a military base.

We walked back to the hotel, in the now slightly more tolerable heat. The streets were littered with people, and we passed stalls selling sugar cane and mango juice, and other foods and drinks, and an occasional, but powerful stink of sewer, shit, death, or garbage. For many of the people, the city streets are their bathroom, and people seem to shit and piss anywhere, including corners of the inside of quieter buildings, which is hard on the nose and harder for these people who have no place to live.

We started our second day in Mumbai with a trip to Crawford market, a fruit and livestock market where we stocked up on mangos and watermelon, then continued through the Zaveri Bazaar, checking out the people standing in line to make offerings at the temples. We then walked along the waterfront to Chowpatty Beach, where we tasted kulfi (Indian pistachio ice cream, cut into a slice and weighed on a scale), ate pav bhaji (vegetable stew on a Portuguese style bun) and walked through the Hanging Gardens on a hill above the beach. We also visited the Mahatma Gandhi museum, a house that he used to occupy when he stayed in Mumbai. The place is simple and tells the story of Gandhi’s life. It still gives off an aura of peace and strength, and we both got goosebumps walking through the home, filled with memorabilia, of a man who so quietly changed the world and was a true mahatma (great soul). Towards the end of the day, we stopped in a Hari Krshna temple, and while wandering through, we were befriended by a Canadian kid who has been living in the temple’s ashram for 4 years, training to be a monk. He gave us a grand tour, explaining the krshna religion, rituals and history. It was fascinating to watch and learn, while dancing, music, devotion and prayer were going on all around us.

For our last day in Mumbai, we booked a “slum tour” in the Dharavi Slum, on which the book and movie Slumdog Millionaire is based. We were curious to compare our slum experience working in Uganda with that of one in India and this slum in particular is famous for being an interesting economic success story. In just 500 acres live over a million people, on average sharing 1 toilet between 15,000 people. However, inside the slum are also thousands of single room factories, employing 250,000 people and producing an annual tax free income of over 1.4 billion dollars. Most businesses are based on recycling of different plastics, metals and glass and garbage collected by slum residents or brought from Mumbai, or even exported from foreign countries. The raw material is processed, and then resold internationally. It is a unique economic model and world-renowned and has unfortunately not been replicated successfully in other slum areas. The slum has clinics, hospitals, churches, temples and mosques, Wi-Fi zones and even permanent apartment buildings. And yet, the whole place is an illegal tenement and has been for 200 years. We ended our day, walking back in 100 degree weather, stopping at the dhobi ghats, Mumbai’s laundry facility, made up of hundreds of concrete tubs of water and men beating the clothes on stones. Here the city’s dirty clothes are washed, dried, pressed, and somehow returned to the rightful owner in one day, an unbelievable logistical feat. By nightfall we had collected our backpacks and marched back to Victoria Station, through a train worker’s strike that was crippling the city (fortunately it was the local trains, not the long distance ones) and caught our night train south to Goa. For a link to more pics, click here.

Falafel and Humus - Eating throughout the holy land

After crossing at the Arava border on foot from Jordan to Israel, We arrived ready for the pleasures of the modern world, the comfort of family, and some downtime. We rented a car in Eilat, a resort town at the southernmost point of Israel on the Red Sea, and drove north to meet up with Guy’s aunt Ofra and family in the town of Omer, near Be’er Sheva. For the first time in 6 months we slept-in on a good mattress, ate a home-cooked meal, and drank cappuccinos. After spending Friday night in the comfort of their home, we spent Saturday exploring a bit of the Negev desert, the southern desert of Israel. We hiked a beautiful Wadi that still had water in it from the winter’s heavy rainfall, an unusual sight in those parts, a crater made by a meteor millions of years ago, and an old mine. The next day we headed to the central part of the country, to Guy’s saba and savta, his grandparents, who were to be our hosts for the rest of the trip.

Our plan for the visit was to see family, sample some of Israel’s unbelievable cuisine, replace some of our worn clothes that have been limping along with us, bruised and battered from travel and harsh laundry, take care of some logistics before India, and see the country as best we could. We happen to be in Israel during Memorial Day followed by Yom Ha’atzma’ut: Israel’s 62^nd independence day. Memorial Day is taken very seriously, as everyone in the country is affected and knows someone who has died for the country. It is a moving day of speeches, stories, memorials, and times of reflection, including a 2 minute ‘moment of silence’ during which sirens signal the entire country to stop what they are doing. Everyone does stop, including people driving on the highway, who get out of their car and stand in silent reflection. Memorial Day gives way to Independence Day, where everyone takes to the parks and the beaches and barbeques up a storm, celebrating and watching fireworks. We spent the day on the beach, enjoying the sun, getting fed by strangers, and watching the Israeli defense force parade ships and planes overhead. We met up with the rest of the family that afternoon to celebrate Saba and Savta’s 60^th wedding anniversary. It was very interesting for me to see the intense pride and national unity around the day. It is very moving to watch the whole country stop and reflect, seeing how everyone feels as one, with personal connections and gratitude to the fallen soldiers who make Israel possible.

Guy’s grandparents asked us to present a talk to their residential community about our time volunteering in Uganda and it ended up being the biggest audience we will probably ever gather to hear about our experience. We produced an hour-long powerpoint with pictures about the state of healthcare in Uganda and about our volunteer assignments at KCCC. His grandparents gave it the lofty title of: “Guy and Rusha: volunteer doctors working in Uganda: Dream and Reality”, which we then had to live up to. We had an audience of about 150 people, and while some of them fell asleep and the average age in the lecture hall was well over 70, many asked questions and were active participants in the talk.

The next day we went for a bike tour of the area with our friend Dr. May, a retired doctor who lived in Colorado and now lives in Israel with his family. He took us on a back roads tour of the area around Ra’anana, Netanya, and the Sharon through fields of strawberries, orange and grapefruit orchards, (which we picked and ate), by roman aqueducts, and sand dunes overlooking the Mediterranean, all accompanied by a steady stream of philosophy and history and spectacular wildflowers. We also spent another day biking up north in the Galilee with Moishik, a cousin of Guy’s mom, and his son Oren. They live in Kfar Vradim, near the Lebanese border, and the place was made for mountain biking. . They are both hardcore mountain bikers and orienteers and took us on a tough ride through fields of wildflowers and olive tree groves, stunning views and high heart rates. We finished the day with a well earned meal of the best hummus in Israel, which comes from that region, and spent some time with Moishiks other children and wife, who has been battling MS for close to 20 years. That evening we made it for Friday night dinner at Guy’s aunt Adi’s house, to spend the night with her and her family.

Guy’s grandparents treated us to a 5-star visit to Jerusalem for 3 days. We stayed at beautiful unique hotels (nothing to get used to, unfortunately) and toured the city with 2 experts in Israeli history, both ancient and modern. We visited the Supreme Court and saw a judge trying a case in progress of a Palestinian terrorist who was petitioning to see his 7 year-old child. It was interesting to see democracy in action, especially at this level, even for someone who committed such a heinous crime, knowing that this justice would not be reciprocated. We saw the Knesset (the parliament), spent a whole day walking around the old city in the Jewish quarter, visited the Kotel (Wailing Wall), eating falafel in the Shouk Machane’ Yehuda, walking through the German colony and the neighborhood where the first Jews to live outside the old city walls lived, and visiting the house where Guy’s grandpa lived as a child. We even popped our head into the music conservatory in Jerusalem and were rewarded by being able to sit in on a world famous pianist (who's name escapes me right now) giving a class to students. In between we enjoyed the swank accommodations complete with a Turkish bath. It was a really special, unique way to see Jerusalem and we felt very lucky to have been treated to such a trip.

The 2 weeks were rounded out by visits to Guy’s aunt, Adi and her family. Her son just started his service in the navy this year, so we went with them to visit him on his base with all the other families bringing suitcases of food both to picnic and to leave for the kids, who are complaining that the food is neither good nor plentiful on base. We also visited Haifa and walked around the lower city, which is the arab quarter, where we ate amazing falafel and shwarma and saw the Bahai temple gardens. We saw all of Guy’s cousins several times and visited with his childhood friend Liat who lives in Tel Aviv, as well as a friend of Guy’s from college who has since moved to Jerusalem and now is a practicing orthodox Jew. And of course, we ate, and ate, and ate. The food in Israel is AMAZING and as always, too much. Even I was tired of humus by the time we left. The best type of food is of the traditional middle eastern variety where as soon as you sit about 15 plates of different types of salads, pickles and other goodies are brought to the table: humus, tahini, eggplant, pickled beets and cabbages, red peppers, green salad, cucumber salad, you name it. Then pita, falafel and usually some rice dishes come, depending on the tradition from which the restaurant comes from. And that’s only the appetizers! The main course, if you can still fit any food in there consists of kebabs, bbq, grilled anything, or other specialties and the meal turns into total food frenzy, with reaching across the table and piling food on your plate, wiping the good sauces and dips with fresh pita, and tasting and sharing from everyone’s loot.

We left Israel relaxed and happy and stocked with new tank tops and t-shirts and underwear to replace our worn stock from Africa, full to the brim with Israeli food and family love, ready to tackle the next beast of our trip: India.To see more pictures from Haifa and the north click here.

To see more pictures from Jerusalem click here.

Jordan and Petra, the Rose City

The last stop of our overland trip to Israel was Jordan. Throughout this part of the journey, we have made good time, and apart from the small glitch in Hurghada, things have gone smoothly and on time. It has been amazing to follow the story of the Exodus, at the right time of the year, just after Passover. We started in Cairo as the Israelites did, when they were slaving to build the great pyramids of Giza. Then we went south to Thebes (Luxor) and crossed the desert to the Red Sea. We split the Sea of Reeds with a high-speed ferry rather than an act of god. We climbed Gabel Musa (Mount Sinai) and received the sunrise over the Sinai desert. Later we toured the Monastery guarding the burning bush. Finally it was time to make our way to the Moabite mountains, to Petra, and to Gabel Haroun (Aaron's mountain) the resting place of Moses' brother and mouthpiece, the land which the Israelites wandered for 40 years, waiting for a new generation to rise, and the mountains from which Moses looked onto the land of Israel, never to enter. We would eventually cross into Israel on foot, through the Arava gate, from Aqaba in Jordan to the resort town of Eilat in southern Israel....But first we had to get to Jordan.

We bused from Dahab north to Nuweiba, another Egyptian vacation town that used to be an Israeli vacation spot but has been quiet and desolate since the arab Intifada. We got tickets to another fast ferry, but the trip didn't end up being as fast as advertised. We first had to wait in a huge hall with thousands of migrant Egyptian workers who take a slow ferry to Jordan to work. Once it started, the ferry ride was beautiful and as foreigners we were forced to buy first class tickets so we received wonderful treatment on the boat with a deck from which you could see Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Israel. We arrived in Jordan about 4 hours late, as usual, found a taxi, some good falafel and humus and drove north to Wadi Musa, the gateway to Petra.

Petra is a Nabataean City that started around 600 BC, and came into prominence around 200 BC due to the spice trade passing right through its streets. The Nabataeans were polytheistic nomadic people who lived in the Moab mountains. They built Petra, an amazing city built into the surrounding rock of the mountains, into which they carved huge monuments and mausoleums. Petra had an estimated population of one million people at its height and was later taken over and continued by the Romans, who improved on the structures and also turned some of them into Christian structures. The city declined around 300 CE and was lost to history for milennia, and inhabited by Bedouins. It was rediscovered in the late 1800s and refurbished, and is now considered one of the wonders of the world.

The entrance to Petra is dramatic: you walk along a narrow 1.2 km natural water and wind carved canyon called the Siq, and emerge to marvel at the first and most well-known monument of Petra, the Treasury, a massive structure carved into the stone which is as dramatic for the approach as for the architecture itself. From there the city continues, and we soon realized, covers a massive area. Being the go-getters that we are, and only having one day, we spent almost 12 hours walking all over Petra, up hills, mountains, petrified dunes, we walked to beautiful viewpoints where we could see the Dead Sea. We saw the Monastery, the Royal Tombs and the Great Temple, all carved into the rock. Petra’s beauty does not only come from the awe-striking grandeur of the man-made structures, but also from its location, in a magnificent gorge of colored sandstone and clumpy mountains with views of the the plains separating Israel and Jordan. Since I have always looked onto these mountains from Israel, it was amazing to sea the perspective from the opposite side, east to west. We walked back to the modern world, through the Siq, as the sun was descending, turning the rock from rust to rose, and playing long shadows on the canyon walls.After spending the night in Wadi Musa, we caught an early bus to Aqaba and from there a taxi to the Arava border crossing to Israel, and easily walked our way through the border to Eilat.
Spending a few days in Jordan was wonderful. It was a different country all together from Egypt and while still retaining its arab character, Jordanians were calmer and less pushy, the country was cleaner and appeared more developed and more progressive than Egypt. There was more of a Bedouin presence, especially in Petra, where old ladies smoking marijuana joints sold souvenirs and men hawked camels dressed in traditional bedouin clothes for the tourists. It was exciting to be in arab countries for a few weeks, experiencing their culture.

Click here to link to the Picasaweb album of our trip to Jordan.

Egypt II: Hurghada and the Sinai Peninsula

After busing from Luxor, we got stranded for a 2 days in Hurghada because the ferry across the Gulf of Suez to the Sinai Peninsula, of which there are only 4 a week was canceled due to high seas. Not that being stuck on the Red Sea is a bad thing, but Hurghada is not the first choice. Hurghada is a resort town that has been taken over by Eastern Europeans, especially Russians. A strand of 1970's style hotels, interspersed with half built skeletons of unfinished projects and construction site beaches and pharmacies advertising Viagra and Cialis. All signage is in Russian, Polish, and Arabic, no English. The town seems an interesting combination of Egyptian Muslims who work the town, their devout lifestyle interacting with scantily and inappropriately dressed Russian men and women, drunkenness, and an overall Russian good time. The Egyptian men involved in the tourist industry of scuba diving and hotel industry have embraced the eastern Europeans and many of them speak Russian and some also speak Czech and Polish and sometimes the language of love with the female tourists if you get our drift. We used our time there to play in the water. The Red Sea is most famous for its clear water and beautiful coral reefs. Over the years, much of the coral has been destroyed due to poor stewardship, however, the coral is still some of the best in the world and the marine life prolific. The water is a constant temperature year-round, a bit chilly, and the beaches are mostly pebbled but the life under the water makes it a world-famous destination for diving on the cheap. All though the best diving is off the Sinai peninsula around Dahab (our eventual destination) we spent a day on a boat and Guy got to dive while I snorkeled for as long as I could stand the cold water and my fears of being alone in open water.
We spent the day on a boat full of Polish, Czech, and Russian tourists. Guy’s diving buddy was a Pole who spoke no english and the dive master, Mohammed, spoke fluent Russian, English, some Czech and Polish and Arabic. The best part of Hurghada was cheap, fresh sea food. We left on the ferry 2 days later to Sharm El-Sheik on the tip of the Sinai peninsula and bused north to Dahab, a chill place for backpackers and hippies on the shores of some of the most beautiful diving in the red sea.

Dahab was lovely. We hung out there for 4 days. Dahab was part of Israel from 1973 through 1981, When Israel held the Sinai peninsula. Dahab was a small Bedouin camp back then and Guy remembers going there as a kid when he lived in Israel to camp on the beach. The Bedouins are nomadic desert people who have live in the deserts of the Arabian peninsula as goat and sheep-herders. They are rugged desert people, setting up camp in the most inhospitable of dry, desolate desert. As times have changed, they have become more stationary wih permanent settlements, but remain fiercely independent and proud of their culture, resenting being told how to live or what to do and at times becoming violent towards their ruling government. As a place like Dahab became more commercialized, the Bedouins were pushed aside by Nile valley dwelling Egyptians and now live on the outskirts of town. Today Dahab is a full-blown tourist destination with a mile-long boardwalk on the beach lined with hotels restaurants and dive shops, but it still retains its mellow and bohemian feel and look. Every restaurant is a variation on the theme of a "Zula": Bedouin style hang out of low tables, big throw pillows on the floor and plentiful sheesha as well as sea food and juice smoothies.

Our time in Dahab was spent playing in the Red Sea, looking at the beautiful coral and marine life that is literally right off the shore. Guy dove and we both snorkeled. We also climbed Mt Sinai, the place where Moses is thought to have received the Ten Commandments. The trip was unfortunately the worst example of mass tourism as we summited at sun rise with about 500 other people. In the standard package, the only one available if you do not have your own car, everyone arrives at 1 am and is assigned a mandatory Bedouin guide to take you up the highway trail that is lined by Bedouins aggressively offering camels or Kiosks with coffee, food, and other tourist junk every 100 meters. The tourists were half the fun of the climb: Loud Spaniards and Italians, religious pilgrims, Chinese in hospital and ski masks riding camels, a Taekwondo team in their outfits, and mandatory Russians. The mountain's peak is at 8000 feet in the middle of the dry, hot, stark, rocky Sinai desert for which Moab, Utah was named after. The hike took about 2 hrs. up the camel trail and culminates in 750 rock-cut steps that took you to the top. We got there at 4 am and hunkered down in the cold night in our sleeping bag for an hour before the sunrise. Although not a solitary or spiritual experience for either one of us, and despite all the cigarette smoke and cacophony of languages, it was beautiful to see the sun rise over the desert mountains. We walked down the 3750 Steps of Repentance. We got to the bottom at 8 am and waited with masses for the Monastery of St Katherine at the foot of Mt Sinai to open and when it did, we pushed through (or were pushed by the throngs of pilgrims) to see the Church of St Katherine where a bush that is supposed to be a descendant of the Burning Bush still grows and a well where Moses hit the rock and made water appear.

We returned to Dahab tired from being up all night. We had 2 more days which we spent in or by the sea or chilling in the Zulas. From here we would catch a ferry to Aqaba, Jorda to the fabled City of Rose: Petra.

Click here to link to the Picasaweb picture folder