The expensive Chill Opposite Music Festival empties the entire hostel for four evenings. Together with the salary payments at the beginning of October, it ensures that no ATM in Dahab is working. It wasn’t until the following day that the eighth ATM I visited spit out some money with my third credit card. I didn’t have a cent left.
The water is out at Rafiki Oasis. That’s less of a problem for the web designer than the mostly drippy Wi-Fi. I will also hardly be able to use up my 22 GB of mobile data by the end of the month at this rate. After two weeks here, I’m a hostel grandpa. Fate is now bringing out the big guns. My new dorm neighbour is a lumberjack. His extremely rusty chainsaw is constantly misfiring.
Dahab 24/25
Why am I doing this? A good hostel is like a monastery. It’s a place of inner contemplation – and, more recently, of toilet paper sunk into the inner ear. A place for reduction, and full of stories. All the noise serves only to concentrate on the essentials. All adverse circumstances to appreciate everything that I took for granted. Every time I came home from travelling in hostels, my home was much more like home again.
This time it will be even more so, because my favourite Smurf stayed at home with mum. What new words and deeds will she enchant me with on this return home? In the video chat, she explains to me that she can now turn up the volume on her mobile phone on her own. Then I talk to the wall for a while. The little one contorts herself for a long time and in a really funny way to get back in the picture. Then she comes up with the idea of repositioning the mobile phone. My long giggle was certainly not the cause.
The conversations here remain colourful and interesting. I learn something new every day. An Egyptian-American kiter asks me how we Germans see the refugees at home. I say: “Too many and too concentrated in too few places. My daughter could hardly speak to anyone in her first kindergarten class for a year because she was the only German.” He wants to know if my opinion is not extreme. I don’t know.
He changes the subject to the luxury ghettos that are being built on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast with lots of foreign money. Even some nouveau riche Egyptians would set off from their villas there in a Rolls Royce to Cairo, just three hours away. Halfway there, they would switch to a vehicle free of envy and return the luxury car to its hidden bed on a barge. The rapidly growing gap between rich and poor in Egypt is hidden beneath barges full of luxury cars.
An area directly adjacent to the lagoon has probably been sold to investors who want to build hotels here. I hardly see the paradise mentioned in the petition against this. Yes, there are a few seagulls and ibises. I haven’t found the legendary eagle yet. But lots of rubbish. Most of it was blown over from Dahab. Diving schools regularly clean up on the peninsula in front of the lagoon. Nevertheless, the locals think I’m crazy when I tell them: “I crossed it barefoot.” Two three-legged dogs accompany me. One is missing its front right leg, the other its back left leg. The sandbank is indeed a level 13 fakir training course amongst all the broken glass and rubbish. Be that as it may: sign the petition! Firstly, Dahab offers endless space. Secondly, there are already enough unfinished hotels in Dahab. Thirdly, the hotels would be directly upwind of the kite lagoon. They would destroy the spot.
I’m turning into a wind snob. I now call anything under 18 knots “calm”. I haven’t used my 13 yet. Two days of “calm” envelop Dahab in sweltering heat. The water dries up completely – and certainly completely unrelated to the endless shower orgies. The mountains of the Sinai hide in the haze. Saudi Arabia, just 40 kilometres away, becomes completely invisible. I cycle through Dahab every day, soaking wet and pedalling on the spot in slow motion. I buy half-ripe red dates and kilos of oranges for the hand press. The huskie on the beach dreams of snowball fights. Everything stands still. I perceive it in slow motion and know: now I’ve really arrived here…
Frank Woelky, born in 1973. Kitesurfer since 1998. Since 2006, I have been combining kitesurfing and web design on trips lasting several months off the beaten track.