Paul & Luiza´s World Tour

So, we leave Israel, bus to the border, cross the border, do not get a full visa, just a Sinai visa for 2 weeks. Will try the full on visa for Egypt later. Very long van ride from the border to Dahab, and then, suddenly,… it’s an oasis? A mirage? A dream? no, it’s a very nice, clean, central hotel with all the facilities for like USD$20 per day, with 2 good “BYO” restaurants and a “walking tour” with the owner showing you everything around town, including the seriously affordable liquor store.  He offers us the following for free – free bottled water, free tea/coffee, free laundry and if we eat at either of his 2 restaurants we get starter and dessert for free plus 20% discount off the bill!!!  Are we in heaven? We walk around the little seaside town, with restaurants, shops, who cares if the beach isn’t wonderful? But that’s another story. We really need to chill out and we are on a mission. We’re so happy!

OK, one of the biggest mysteries of the universe now, is why the fuck some places with absolutely nothing to offer (apart from being a diving mecca) attract so many bloody tourists? We started wondering about it last year in Montanita, Ecuador, and since then, we’ve seen so many other places and wondered how such unattractive places become tourist attractions…. Really? Can somebody please explain? I get the diving thing and I get the cheap thing, but this is ridiculous! It has to be one of the ugliest beaches in the world and they get a lot of people from all over the freaking world? A mystery it will remain… So, we decided to stay here for like 12 days, trying to understand it, relaxing, recovering our budget and our bodies before we brave the rest of Egypt.

We also need to sort out our visa problem before we travel to the rest of the country. We talk to everybody and they tell us we have to go back to Israel, to the Egyptian embassy and ask for the visa. Till we find Soso, a travel agent who tells us he’ll ask around and please come back tomorrow. And so we do. For an exorbitant amount of money (USD$50 each) organizes us a car with a driver (another 50 bucks) and our so sought after visa, without us having to cross the border back to Israel. We get in the car, drive for 2 hours, get there in the evening, a guy stops the car and we go the rest of the way to the border on foot. He explains to us that “Inshallah”, we’ll get our visas… We wait a while at the immigration place, and he comes back with an immigration guy and our visas in our passports. We just walk through with the official guy, ahead of a large group of Russians. It’s a bit like in a movie, I feel a little bit dirty, Paul feels very VIP, different perceptions, growing up in different countries… So we'll just hang here in the heat until it's time to go...