Snow in the Sinai Desert

The Sinai is one of the driest regions in the world. During our parental leave in Dahab, snow falls on Mount Moses. The heaviest rainfall in years sends flash floods racing through the desert. It hails in Cairo. Then gigantic sandstorms sweep across the country. Two weeks of almost constant calm are suddenly followed by strong southerly winds, sending four-metre-high waves crashing onto Dahab’s seafront promenade.

In nearby Iran, the King of Lies is waging war. Ice-T quips: “I don’t understand why everyone compares Trump to the devil. Yes, he’s evil. But not as evil as Trump.” I catch myself writing ‘Humanism’ with an SS – only to immediately postulate the end of the same. The whole world has gone mad.

I still speak to many good people who recognise this. Their voices are growing ever fainter. Madness is hitting such a glorious home run today that I can’t help but doubt whether it really was a meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. Perhaps it was simply their own doing? T-Rex to Archaeopteryx: “Fuck the over-landscaping!”

We’re right in the thick of it and right on the fringes here. It’s been a wonderful and very exhausting three years with our little Smurf. Since the adoption, she often insists, “I want to stay with you forever.” I always have to laugh and give her a big hug straight away. It seems to me to be the only thing that still makes sense. We’re reaching the end of Ramadan. Dahab is like a ghost town. For the Eid al-Fitr festival marking the end of the fast, it’s bursting at the seams.

We cycle through Dahab every day. I meet old friends. We make new ones. Every laugh is a gift. Have you ever heard the joyful squeals of a child snorkelling with the first fish they’ve ever seen in the reef? Nothing could ever be more fulfilling than a little elephant squeaking through its trunk.

Then the emptiness returns. Of my 27 years kitesurfing, I’ve spent more than five trying to switch my good jumping leg to the weaker one. As a child, I flew in my dreams. Long before my first flight, I knew exactly what the world looked like from above. With kitesurfing, I followed my calling. Until the good knee was nothing but pain. I still had the other one, after all. But now that’s hurting badly too, for the first time, after just five days and 8.4 metres of jump height on the kite.

On trips to the local wadis, the little one is shocked by how much we litter the world. But what remains of my plan to do better? Soap? Water canisters instead of plastic bottles, and asking for a proper glass in the restaurant? Is that all, you hero? What became of the conversation with the mayor and raising awareness among the children at school? We don’t even order our daily fruit salad in the boxes we’ve brought with us. Plastic. Everywhere. In the rain, the rubbish dumps in the desert around Dahab happily continue to burn.

I had two fathers. But only one is my father. The stars remain real. Music from times long before AI. The fear of it. Life. Death. And the snow in the Sinai Desert …