News from Egypt
April 11th, 2007
This Spring, Jim returned again to Dahab in the Sinai to teach a yoga break. Seeing the place again, Dahab had its familiar unfamiliarity about it. The architecture, it seems, shifts almost as much as the sand. Each year, new ‘low-key’ building sites have sprung up, ambling their way towards a completed building, maybe next month, maybe next year… it’s all down to ‘inshallah’ the will of God.
The pace and attitude to building in Dahab reflects the whole ambience of the place; forward thinking but in no particular hurry.
On the Red Sea facing Saudi, Dahab has grown in the last 15 years from hippies and palm trees to a relaxed costal haven for divers, wind surfers, travellers and yogis. Until recently, a favourite for Israelis, it now is a hotspot for Germans, Brits and Egyptians. The seafront is a relaxed blend of cafes, shops and dive centres, where you amble along amidst friendly invitations to buy, look, eat or drink. Sunbathers and wet-suited westerners are interwoven with Arabs, Bedouins, the occasional horse and a plentiful supply of surprisingly healthy and relaxed-looking cats and dogs.
The land seems to have seeped into the people here. The earth is dry and light and yet carries an antiquity with it that is absorbed into your bones. There are irresistible echoes of our earliest origins when the drying out of parts of Africa forced our distant relatives to come down from the trees and take to a more bipedal way of life. The land seems to awaken a dim evolutionary memory and a sense of primal openness and honesty gives one a sense that the land is somehow spiritual.
Yet only last year, this tiny town was rocked by a series of explosions that caused the deaths of three foreigners and several Egyptians. The bombs of 2006 came just a few weeks after being there with the last yoga group and the proximity of space and time made the impact of the bombs particularly shocking for all of us who had been there. The contrast between the spaciousness of the geography and the intensely un-spacious impact of a bomb gave an unpalatable flavour a bitter aftertaste.
This year, the usual building projects designed to mop up another upsurge in tourism triggered mixed feelings of sadness with a profound sense of perspective. The mix of local enthusiasm seemed to hold a sort of childlike naivety that felt painfully innocent. One can’t help feel a sense of juxtaposition, between the obvious decline in tourist numbers that one might expect the first few months after a terrorist attack of this kind, and the thought that, with global warming, Dahab is soon likely to be too hot to be a haven for tourists. This contrasts sharply with the tireless enthusiasm and the elementary drive to survive that seems to run through the town, such is the thin line between poverty to prosperity.
In spite, and perhaps partly because of all this, Dahab retains its magic. The mountains behind it still hold an ancient majesty, a mix of silence and simplicity. The bareness of the land strips man of his intimacy with the natural world, and compels us to remember our connection to a higher and more essential quality. The Red Sea at the front, on the other hand, inspires a celebration of diversity and beauty. A sense of life’s multifarious tapestry, in all its incredible beauty and strangeness, is evoked from a look beneath the shimmering waves, as nature does all it can do to cause the mind to loosen and expand.
The Sinai and in particular Dahab remain ‘God’s land’, a place where one cannot help but feel inspired and moved beyond one’s self.
