Diving Dahab

Dateline: 19 September 2008

Traveling across the African continent...from Morocco to Egypt to Ethiopia. A few images to go with my last post...

In order to interview and photograph a former professional runner who now manages a hotel, I took the train about four hours south from Casablanca to Marrakesh. Meriem (a new friend, Siham's sister) and I shared the train cabin with a new mother and her baby, an endless source of fascination for my young friend.

Marrakesh, formally the capital of Morocco, is a Berber enclave and tourist trap - but seen arm-in-arm with my Moroccan mate we avoided the traps and enjoyed the charm of this desert oasis. Boasting one of the largest outdoor markets (sooqs) in Africa, the city is bustling with vendors and buyers by day. At night the market square becomes a huge, rollicking restaurant-party with thousands of people eating at the hundreds of food stalls, encircling the street performers (jugglers, acrobats, fortune-tellers, Arab-style-break dancers) and negotiating prices on cheap goods.

Diving the Red Sea off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula in Dahab, Egypt.

After we returned from Marrakesh, I had just a couple of days before leaving for Ethiopia by way of Egypt. Yes, after difficult communication between me and the only travel agent I could find who spoke even minimal English (mostly we communicated in French, and, no, I don't speak French) I booked a stopover in Egypt for three days. It was cheaper than flying directly to Ethiopia and, well, I've been thinking of diving in the Red Sea since Doug first told me about it a few years ago.

Muhammed and Siham put me on a train to Casablanca, and Meriem's family fed me my last Ramadan meal in Morocco before ushering me off to the train to the airport. This time around I could read the signs, knew the stops and had no difficulty navigating the system - a far cry from my initial discombobulation when I arrived ten days earlier.

Flying Egypt Air to Cairo overnight, I woke to a view of the sun rising over the pyramids. Worth the price of the air ticket, alone!

With only 50 minutes between landing and my connection to Sharm el-Sheik, and in response to my pleas for quick assistance, the Egyptian military flew me through customs.

Outside I immediately had to fend off a horde of men trying to sell me their tour packages. Rushing with my bags to the bus shelter, I again fell on the mercy of the military for help getting to the terminal in the absence of the bus. Not having had time to stop and exchange my Moroccan dirham for Egyptian pounds, the men with the guns hailed a taxi for me, instructing the driver not to charge me. I tipped the driver with a few US dollars and made my connection on time. Whew!

Sharm el-Sheik is located on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, the land situated between mainland Egypt/Africa and Saudi Arabia. The Red Sea forms its western border, and the Gulf of Aqaba its eastern definition. Many tourists travel there to visit Mt. Sinai and St. Catherine's Monastery. As early as the third century AD, sans archaeological evidence, Christians have identified the 7,500-foot peak as the place where Moses received the 10 Commandments and witnessed the burning bush. Watching the sun rise over St. Catherine's Monastery, just below the mountain, is a popular tourist experience. The idea of hiking up during the night appealed to me. But after reading the tourist forums I opted out, realizing that the way down would be a mob scene. Reminiscent of riding up Haleakala in Maui to watch the sunrise there, I'd be fighting the crowds on the way down. So, with only two days before flying back to Cairo, I looked for a taxi to take me 85KM north to Dahab; mecca of another sort.

Diving in Dahab - or in many other places along the coast of the Sinai Peninsula, is a unique experience without even stepping foot in the water. Imagine being surrounded by gusty, brown, hot sand on all sides except for the water; local Bedouin men - short, faces dark from the sun, wearing traditional clothing hauling oxygen tanks and driving pasty (or sunburned) Europeans in jeeps as skeletal as the bedouin's skinny body - and you know you're diving in a land like no other.

Booking online in Morocco I found a great deal at the Daniela Hotel and Diving Center. After nearly coming to blows with the taxi driver at the Sharm airport when he tried to hassle me out of an extra 150 Egyptian pounds, we made it through all of the military checkpoints and to the hotel in about an hour. When giving me my change, the driver further tried to swindle me out of 30 more pounds to compensate for the speeding ticket he got along the way. But the sight of the blue water and the gleaming white hotel more than made up for the hassle of getting there.

The staff met me at the door with a glass of fresh-squeezed mango juice and a rundown on the local diving scene. After dropping off my bag and getting set-up with gear rental, I did what every sane traveler does in hot weather on holiday (since I was now officially on holiday for a bit!)...I went to the pool. Ahhh.

Not five minutes after plunking down on my cot I hear the hotel's dog barking and look to see a lone camel strolling along the 10m-wide strip of sand between the pool and the sea. I grabbed my camera and headed over in time to meet the Bedouin boy riding camelback who next came trotting through to harness his stray camel. Dorothy, I am not in Kansas anymore.

Turns out the bedouin, the desert nomads of the Sinai, have found ways to engage in tourism as well, selling rides on camels where no cars yet go. Locals I interviewed shared mixed reviews of this modernization of the local culture, some decrying the loss of traditions and others applauding this typically impoverished tribe for their entrepreneurship. It's the usual story and debate...

After snorkeling for hours just off the resort's shore, I showered and headed into town on the hotel's free shuttle (runs every night, head in at 20:00 and back at 23:00). Walking around with the manager of the hotel, we visited with his friends at various establishments along the pier. I blended in oh-so-well as the only woman at the outdoor cafe specializing in pipes, coffee and backgammon.

The moon was gorgeous and the outline of Saudi Arabia was lit and visible about 20km across the water. We stopped for tea - sweeter and less minty than in Morocco - with his pals and talked about his days as a sharpshooter, a talent that helped him move quickly through military rank and, in the end, saved him from the misery of a bad post during mandatory service.

Having mentioned earlier at the hotel's restaurant that I was practicing Ramadan, I returned to the hotel to discover the staff had delivered a Ramadan feast to my room, including fresh and dried dates, plump figs, yogurt, falafel, pita, slices of cheese and hummus. And, the Egyptian specialty: a fava bean soup ("foul" in Arabic). Their generosity towards me extended to the next day, when the cleaning staff decorated my bed with flower petals surrounding my English-version Qur'an I'd been given in Morocco.

The diving was great - I won't say spectacular, as I would have liked to have done some cave diving as well and been around fewer divers (our group was small, but we were often jostled by other dive groups in the heavily-trafficked waters). The coral reefs were beautiful in the Canyon and Garden dive sites and I fell in love with lionfish, and saw glassfish, eels, barracuda, frogfish and a huge, gorgeous variety of anemone. Good visibility and warm water temperatures added to the pleasure.

Rising after just three hours' sleep determined to catch the sunrise over the sea, I slogged through the sand along the coast, running under the distant watch of Egyptian military (ever-present in the country, but particularly in and around Dahab, the site of a three-bomb attack on tourist areas in April 2006). I was asked a lot more intrusive questions when alone than with the locals, of course, but besides being faced with five men wielding rifles, it was a quiet and peaceful run. And, just as I returned to the hotel to grab my camera, a bedouin man crossed my path, leading a camel back to his village.

Driving back to Sharm I sang along with my driver to the now-familiar Arabic music (I'd heard the same on the TV in Morocco) jamming from his CD player. After the short flight from Sharm back to Cairo, I hopped on a bus into the city center and checked my bag at Ramses train station for a less than a dollar.

The station, built in the 1800s, is an Arab version of Grand Central - Greek columns out front, swarming with passengers hurrying to a multitude of platforms for trains and buses. The sound of their arrival and departure mixes with the constant din of Muslim prayer invoked over loudspeakers. There are public toilets (but, as usual in Africa, you're expected to drop some coins in the outstretched hand of the lady who gave you a sheet of toilet paper on the way in) and a huge section of the marble floor is taken up with men bowing on prayer rugs. Classic Cairo - the western and modern mixed with the eastern and traditional.

Unfettered with baggage, I went out into the streets, climbed a fence (like the locals) to bypass the nastiest traffic circle I've ever witnessed and then pushed my way to the teller's window at the mouth of the subway. No ticket machines or lines, just one mass of sweaty people wedged against each other, fighting to buy a token.

Blessedly, the subway system is well-diagrammed and easy to navigate and in no time I was standing in the area formally known as Babylon.

While I skipped out on some Christian tourism by avoiding Mt. Sinai the day before, I did get to spend many hours exploring the Coptic section of Cairo, also known as Old Cairo, parts of which date back to the 6th Century AD. I also saw Egypt's oldest synagogue and first mosque. Besides having to, as usual, fend off the unwanted "assistance" of the military who were there to guard the treasures and, apparently, hassle tourists for baksheesh, I couldn't have asked for a better afternoon in Cairo.

Before heading back toward Ramses I hiked across the Nile to the Cairo Tower and its panoramic views of the city. The elevator man stops at each floor trying to convince passengers to get out and spend money at the restaurants, but once he understood I was practicing Ramadan his tone with me changed and insisted I come back after sunset to enjoy a free meal with the staff.

Instead, I headed across the Nile to confirm my flight to Addis that evening and broke fast with new friends at an internet cafe. While the chicken kebabs and bean soup were offered gratis, I paid for the meal later, barely making it to the toilet outside of the customs booth later that night.

Between the meal and the toilet run one of the internet workers got me to Ramses in breakneck speed, teaching me how to dodge the crazed drivers by walking - NEVER running - in front of them. He instructed me that all the locals know if you run the driver can't predict your speed as well as if you run and they are more likely to hit you (as they did him when he was ten-years old). After Ramses he hailed a taxi for me and negotiated a local rate, handing me a bottle of coca-cola for the trip. Amazing hospitality for having met him and the others at the shop only thirty minutes earlier. Sometimes it helps to be a woman traveling alone.

Adrift in Addis Ababa

It’s been awhile since I posted due to conditions here in the birthplace of humanity.

After traveling by train with my new mate Meriem to Marrakech in the south Morocco and surviving the Ramadan fast in 108-degree heat, I flew overnight to Cairo.

With a 40-minute window to catch the next flight to Sharm El-Sheik, the Egyptian military went above and beyond to usher me through customs, and given I had no local currency yet, they hailed down a taxi and commanded the driver not to charge me for the rush service to the next terminal. Impressive. Once I landed on the Sinai Peninsula at the foot of Mt. Sinai, the military were much less accommodating and I almost came to blows with the taxi driver when negotiating the price to Dahab, about 100km north of Sharm.

Good thing I didn’t try to rent a car…getting through the armed checkpoints was harrowing enough even with a local speaking Arabic on my behalf. Encountering the gorgeous blue of the Red Sea and the white building of my hotel in this spit of paradise, I finally breathed easily again about 18 hours after leaving Morocco.

Although a short stay, two nights in Dahab were the recharge I needed before heading into the horn of Africa. Diving off Sinai was incredible, all that I had hoped for and worth the extra travel. I also got in an interview with a former sharp-shooter and celebrated Ramadan with the hotel staff who were intrigued by my interest in their faith and decorated my room with flowers and the Koran on my last morning.

Flying back to Cairo for a 9-hour layover and whirlwind through the capital was chaotic but great. Made my way by bus and a lot of walking to the Coptic Christian area of the city, then to the Muslim neighborhood (I left my pack at a luggage room in the main train terminal, Ramses, for pennies and it was still there at the end of the day. Not bad). Also sat by the Nile and then went to the highest point in the city, the Tower of Cairo, where I enjoyed panoramic views in the hot afternoon sun.

I have been in Addis Ababa now for almost a week and this leg of the journey deserves a full entry all its own, so for now I’ll say that conditions are extreme, the athletes are incredible, and the food is constant and filling! It is all that I hoped for and more, but also much more challenging than I anticipated.

The highlight: 36 hours of Ethiopian Orthodox wedding. Wow.

As I continue to make my way through rural living in a big city amidst a sea of taxis, mud and generous people, I will get online again when I can. More to come…

Sooq and Soot

It is good I learned to jaywalk in Manhattan, because every pedestrian - geriatric, handicapped or toddler - takes their lives into their hands when crossing the street in Rabat.

And this is not a comment on Moroccan taxi drivers wielding dilapidated Mercedes from the year I was born across double-lines (where they exist) down four-lane roads through the country's capital city. No, I'm talking about my friend Asmaa, a pretty blonde with two little boys in a Honda SUV purchased with her husband's race earnings driving like a cabbie during rush hour in Times Square - while sending an SMS message - on the way to the market in her residential neighborhood.

Having survived many crossings of Rue Mohammed V in Temera, running across train tracks (no crossing lights or gate to warn of incoming freight) and traveling in a packed-so-tight minibus that it can't close it's doors (at 4 Dirham a ride, you get what you pay for in public transit), I'm beginning to wonder what I might encounter on this continent the further I get from Europe.

If the politically correct and pampered of my adopted city - Berkeley - could experience the commute to the center of Rabat, they might find less to complain about. Here, the bus doesn't even stop to allow passengers to on- or off-board, no matter their state of health or agility. They sure as hell aren't going to announce stops or answer questions.

Yesterday I suffered. The other runners warned me against this foolishness...but I've always been a proponent of "seeing is believing". First, running early in the morning and, second, going with Meriem and Rashid to the great sooq in Rabat. Nothing like being pushed and shoved in hot sun for hours after running in the morning during Ramadan (no food, and worse, no drink, until 7pm). Hours spent fighting crowds, hagglers, and the and smell of every food you are starving for and even more you can't bear the sight of.

I now know a version of torture - mint; dates, figs, cow's heads (uh, yes, really) dangling in front of me at every turn in a open-air market that makes the streets of Chinatown look quiet and empty.

I dared not let out so much as a whimper - well, perhaps I let loose a barely audible whisper of complaint - given that every one of the billion people pusing into me was just as thirsty as I.

We left with swollen feet, throbbing heads and, for me, a lovely jilbab to wear later that evening. I would be meeting Abderrahim Goumri (who came in second at the London marathon last year and holds the Moroccan national record of 2:05.30) and other members of the National Federation over coffee, after Iftar (the breaking of the fast at sunset, also refered to as breakfast, imagine that). While western dress would have been acceptable, it seemed to please my hosts for me to dress as they do. Siham, Mohammed's wife, kept saying my black and red jilbab was beautiful ("zwina") on me. I felt a bit like a pear in a potato sack but, hey, I'll take 'beautiful' in her eyes.

For a good primer on the traditions of Ramadan, see this link.

After the evening's breakfast the men went to the mosque to pray while I napped and the women joked about the usual things women discuss all over the world (need I say more...) The men came back and took me to the coffee house where Abderrahim Gourmi would meet me for an interview.

We had run together the day before when I kept pace for about a mile as he, Hassan Lahsini and two other elite runners warmed up on the trails. Eventually they hit stride and I was left choking dust only slightly less toxic than the soot I have been inhaling since I arrived on Sunday. I kept wishing for water, counting down the minutes until sunset and the break of the fast.

Last night was much more pleasant of an encounter with Goumri as we sat in the cool evening breeze drinking coffee and, for me, good ol' junky sweet orange Fanta. Yummy. Great interview and end to the day.

Ramadan in Rabat

Arriving in the midst of a quiet, hot summer afternoon at Casablanca Airport, I wondered around with a sign I had fashioned in Paris reading MOHAMMED AMYN. In my first hours on the great continent of Africa I could not find my local contact, a mobile connection, nor a scrap of toilet paper.

By 18:00 I found all three and landed happily in the company of Mohammed, his wife Siham, and their friends Fatiha, Asmaa and her 5-year old son Aymam. Soothed by the sweetest, mintiest pot of tea (quintessential Morocco I have come to learn) and more plates of breads (is this heaven or what?!), chick peas, lentil soup, fromage and various sesame and honey desserts than I could even taste in one sitting, we broke the Ramadan fast together in their home.

Mohammed speaks decent English so he translated for all of us. That is, until he went to the mosque for prayer, at which point we women did our best through a combination of the five languages we spoke between us. For example, when asking to use their shower I said in a barbaric combination of French, Spanish and Arabic -

S'il vous plaît, necesito maa' (water) por mi cuerpo, shokuran (thank you) - all as I gestured a spigget of water falling above my head onto my body.

Later, during our Arabic and English lessons, little Ayman got in the spirit of thinigs and began practicing his handwriting in a Spiderman composition book (see photo). An eager student with just 6 days into school, this was the only time he seemed interested in something beside turning cartwheels and falling out of handstands around us!

After about 24 hours of travel since I said goodbye to Hilda at SFO, I fought sleep in order to drive into town to attend an impromptu gathering in the parking lot of the central market (outside what can only be described as a K-Mart crossed with a gourmet food store...Barbie backpacks hung near cookbooks in French, 12-inch wide open wooden bowls overflowing with spices the color of the desert rested near jugs of Tide detergent and fresh fish fillets on ice).

Young women in flowing cloaks and older men with children on their laps sat under a large white tent (think revival meeting in the old south) while teenage boys and twenty-somethings in billabongs and football/soccer jerseys competed in out-tricking each other(think Péle meets the globetrotters) under the bright lights of the parking lot. Music of Algeria and the Moroccan Berbers played behind the cheers of the one-hundred or so gathered.

Back in Temera, the neighborhood outside of Rabat where my gracious host live, we climbed into our pajamas (a universally understood word, it seems) and before going to sleep, I asked the former Olympian where he recommended I run in the morning, hoping he wouldn't offer to run with me at my slow pace. As he generously drove me to the beach and the forest, to show me a route he likes to run, he apologized that he would not be running during my visit - Ramadan is his only vacation from training because of the fast from food and water. Relief for my pride! He said all Muslim runners finish their season for these holy days and I would have the streets, beach and trail to myself in the morning.

Indeed, the city slept off their late night (last meal served at 2AM and prayers at 4) and the only people I saw (not counting the raggedy pups wandering around at the beach) as the sun rose were the national guardsmen stationed outside the walls of the royal palace.

Next dispatch most likely from Marrakech. Ciao

View from the apartment in Temera near Rabat...Atlantic in the distance