mattbell

Apr. 7th, 2009

As I came into Dahab, I passed a large number of beachside resorts and hotels in various states of completion. However, there was no evidence of construction in progress on any of them. The projects appear to have beeen abandoned. Some were close to completion, while others only had a partially erected stone wall to show for their efforts. Most of them were utterly hideous, architecturally speaking. Monsters in the making. At first I thought it was due to poor management, fraud, contractors taking the money and skipping town, and other problems. However, I ultimately realized the true cause: terrorism.

Back in 2004-6 there was a series of bombings at the three major resort towns on the Sinai coast. The bombings were masterminded by a Palestinian but were carried out with the help of local Bedouins. While I don't approve of their actions, I can see where the local Bedouins were coming from... their entire coastline has been taken over with nasty structures catering to obnoxious foreigners. (Not that the Bedouin terrorists were pulling a Howard Roark... I doubt that the architectural integrity of the structures was their chief concern). Since the Bedouins are nomadic, they can't lay claim to any of this coastal territory, and have gradually been pushed inward.

The attacks had the effect of almost completely cutting off the area's primary supply of tourists – Israelis in search of a little sun. The European tourists eventually returned, but the Israelis have stayed away. All the construction stopped, and demand still doesn't even fill the existing supply.

Ironically, only a couple of Israelis died in the bombings. The vast majority of the deaths (over 50, I believe) were Egyptian workers making a living in the tourist trade.

In any case, terrorism can have an extremely high return on investment. For the cost of a few tens of thousands of dollars, the terrorists managed to freeze up an entire industry in Egypt, causing billions of dollars in lost business. The Sept 11th attacks in the US were similar... for the cost of some flight lessons, they managed to provoke the US into a massive $2 trillion spending spree that has worsened our security and dramatically hurt our reputation across the world.

I had heard that the Red Sea has some of the best snorkeling in the world.

I looked at the three resort cities on the Sinai coast (Nuweibah, Dahab, and Sharm-el-Sheikh), and decided that Dahab was the least soulless. As it is, I've been in Egypt for four days, but I don't feel like I've been to Egypt. Having passed Nuweiba on the bus, I'm secure in my decision not to stay there... it's filled with the worst resort architecture imaginable, replicated to a huge scale to accommodate the teeming and huddled masses of European refugees, yearning to be tan, warm, and drunk. Sharm-el-Sheikh is the same, only more upscale. That's not to say Dahab is an authentic Eyptian city by any stretch of the imagination. It's a messy resort town catering to the lowest common denominator of European tourists.

It does, however, feature some wonderful places to snorkel. It also has nice beachside restaurants eerily reminiscent of Burning Man lounges both in terms of the look and the music they play. They also have learned that free wifi attracts tourists such as myself. I imagine one restaurant owner talking to another: “Hey, Saleem, my business has doubled since I painted this orange fox encircling a blue orb on my sign!”

Back to the snorkeling. I won't lie -- it's nice, but it's not as stunning fish-wise as the places I remember in Hawaii from when I was a child. Most of the action appears to be further down where the divers go. Never one to be deterred, I found I could go down to about 60ft below the surface, have a look around for a few seconds, startle a flock of scuba divers on their introductory dive, and then head back up. There were some beautiful schools of red and green fish along the wall of the reef, though the red fish looked a lot less red the further down I went, thanks to the lovely frequency-dependent absorption of sunlight by water.

Also, I was going to go snorkeling again today, but there was a thunderstorm! According to the weather database, the average rainfall for April is 0.00 inches. So there must be negative rain some years. But yeah, the average is 0.24 inches per year, and I think I just saw all of it.

After plying around with doing deep dives while snorkeling, I was curious to find out what was possible in terms of deep diving without equipment.

It turns out there's a whole sport called freediving. The world record for diving on a single breath using a mask and fins is over 300ft. Freediving is an odd sort of sport. It involves depriving your brain of oxygen and putting your body into extreme high pressure environments while exercising heavily. There are many different categories of freediving. The most extreme allows you to use any means necessary (eg a giant anvil tied to your feet) to make your descent and any means necessary (eg a balloon) to make your ascent, so long as you hold your breath the entire time. The record for that category (No Limit Apnea) is almost 650 ft... which would put the freediver under 22 atmospheres of pressure, or 320 pounds per square inch. Since they wouldn't be breathing compressed air, their lungs would be filled with air at normal (1 atm) pressure, which would mean that their ribs would be holding back tens of thousands of pounds of water pressure.

Read more at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-diving

Wadi Tum is a protected desert area in southern Jordan that has managed, through a combination of unusual geology and weather, to become a landscape of otherworldly beauty. The rarity of rain more or less keeps the vegetation out, so your experience of the place primarily focuses on the rocks, not the scraps of life that inhabit them.

The landscape is hard to describe, so I will use the modern convenience of photographic imagery. "Wadi Rum looks like these images!" Wow that was easy.

All the following pictures are mine (except for the ones with me in them :-) )

( More pics under the cut! )

The main sights of Petra in the middle of the day, when crowded with tour groups, are still quite impressive. However, Petra is far better experienced without the hordes... then you can let your imagination come alive with the grandeur of this ancient city.

Getting an empty Petra is surprisingly easy.

It turns out the lesser known sights of Petra, and there are hundreds, are almost never crowded. In addition, we discovered that, contrary to what the tour books say, the best time to visit Petra's main sights is in the late afternoon. They're *empty* after 4pm.

The temples were carved out of stunningly gorgeous rock.