Trying to get out of Egypt

Nuweiba, Egypt

This morning I woke at 5:30am and kissed Anja good bye. She has fewer holiday days left than I do so I'll be staying in the Middle East a week longer than her. I had booked a luxury taxi (out of ignorance) to get me up to the harbour in Nuweiba, 200KM north of Sharm El Sheikh.

The taxi drive was interesting, the mountain ranges in the Sinai peninsula are beautiful and even more so during the sun rise. There were several road blocks along the way. These were setup after a series of Terrorist attacks which have taken place in recent years.

Eventually I reached Nuweiba and headed for the port. At the ferry gates they told me to go down the street to the ticket office. At the office there were several signs which had such bad English I was confused as to where to go. Eventually I found the window where I could order my ticket.

I handed over my passport, the payment in US dollars and then waited with a bunch of Arab men in the street. Most ports of departure have a cross section of the world's population, black, white, men, women, etc... Here it was just all Arab men and myself. The flies were insane and I regretted not covering every inch of my body, I thought I'd be eaten to death before I would get my ticket and passport back.

After 45 minutes the man from the window called all of us over. He then announced people's names and handed them their passports and tickets. When he got to mine he paused and then just said "Canada".

I then had to walk all the way back to the port and go through an x-ray and metal detector which I doubt either worked. Then there was an outside mess hall where very poor-looking people were eating very basic food with their hands. It looked like green shit and bread which had gone off. There was garbage on the ground and nothing looked at all appetising or meant for western consumption.

I got to the immigration building and joined a queue. Everyone had filled in cards to exit Egypt but these were all in Arabic. I couldn't read anything off of them. A crowd of Arab men gathered around me as they tried to explain in Arabic that I would need one of these non-Arab exit cards to get out of the country. No one knew where they were and were arguing with one another as two where I could get one. After 10 minutes I eventually spotted one discarded on the ground on the other side of the hall.

I filled it in and eventually got to the immigration officer. He looked at it, ripped it up and demanded my passport. He then began to fill in a new non-Arab exit card he had under his desk in latin characters he could read. It was interesting watching him write everything backwards.

I made it through immigration at 9am and into a 15 x 300 meter warehouse where passengers are kept until their boats are ready. It was dark with only high up windows allowing shining light through. It was hot, smelly and completely filled with cigarette smoke from all the men smoking. This place didn't feel like a ferry port, it felt more like a combination of a gas chamber and a 3rd-world jail. Everyone there was Arab and there were only two women in the room, everyone else was a male. There must have been about 1,000 of us in total. Everyone was staring at me. Some with a bored look in their face, others with anger. I really felt trapped at this point.

I stood by the exit gate awaiting the ferry I thought would come at 11am. A guard motioned for me to sit down. Few men wanted to sit next to me and whenever I would sit anywhere, they acted like a transvestite sat next to them and they would move.

The bathrooms were in a shocking state. Men were washing every part of their body in the sinks and the 3 toilets didn't stand up to all the passengers very well. There were two holes in the ground and a third western toilet which had wires coming out of it. I saw the bathroom being washed but it didn't remove the horrible smell at all.

I was hungry, the only food I recognised at the kiosk was some fake oreo cookies. They were really low quality, they fell apart as I bit into them and many were missing the white centres.

At this point I regretting taking this route. I through that if I went North into Israel and then crossed over to Jordan that it would take longer and a long wait at the Egyptian-Israeli border might be really uncomfortable and stressful. This was worse and in fact I should have just gone to the airport in Sharm El Sheikh, flown to Amman in Jordan and just taken a cab down to Petra. It would have been cheaper, easier and probably quicker.

My boat was delayed over and over again. The answer I would always get from the guards is "the boat will be here in an hour, maybe two". This went on until 4pm. Most of the Arab men had left on these cheap slow boats for various destinations and the hall was starting to empty out. Suddenly white people appeared. First two or three and then larger and larger groups. Before I knew it I was surrounded by white people with the Arabs sitting at the far corners of the warehouse. Normally I don't chat to my fellow passengers but here I felt so relieved to see them that I was eager to chat and make friends.

This ended up being a good thing as many of the people there were heading for Petra in Jordan as well and we'd end up running into one another throughout our time there. I met two girls from Quebec and we shared a cab from Aqaba, a port town in the south of Jordan on the red sea, up to Wadi Mousa, the village next to Petra.

I was hoping to see a lot on the boat ride since it goes past Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel and finally Jordan. But the boat left as the sunset and I saw nothing but tons of street lights.

There was a movie playing and at one point and there was a woman in a shower being spied on by a peeping tom. She changed dresses a lot throughout the film and at one point it looked like the woman was getting completely naked. I thought that if we were 2 or 3 kilometers over to the right in Saudi Arabia, they might want to cut our heads off for this.

When we arrived in Jordan we had everything x-rayed again, got through immigration and finally got to a locked gate where we waited for a guard to open up so we could exit the port. As the doors opened we saw guards outside with AK-47s and hordes of Arab men shouting at us, trying to get us to buy taxi rides off them. The girls had arranged a driver already so it was just a matter of pushing through them. As we approached our car two taxi drivers started fighting next to it. It was an interesting introduction to the country.

The drive up to Wadi Mousa was lovely. We could see so many stars under the sky and the girls made great conversation. It's rare that I get to speak to Canadians my age anymore, let alone people who grew up in the French-speaking part of the country. Most discussions about the language differences in Canada make it sound like a large battle of cultures when in fact, we seem to lead fairly similar lives, just with a different language for day to day communication.

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