Apr 24, 2006
Damn.
This time in Dahab. Dahab is (or least was?) a hippie "resort" on the Sinai Peninsula. I never went there, but I had so many friends who did, most of them Egyptians. Dahab had hotels that were basically thatched roofs on poles, with sandy floors. For two dollars management would give you a bamboo mat for your bed; bring your own water. In the mid-90s one guy I knew wrote an article for Cairo Today about whether the concept of Generation X applied to Egyptians. Fittingly, he did all his research in Dahab. Egypt's only tattoo artist also lived and worked there. After a few years he quit tattooing women, a concession to his mother on her deathbed. Wish I remembered his name.
Maybe it sounds annoying from afar, but I always saw that city as a rare example of cross-cultural melding that didn't, for once, involve the crushing ubiquity of corporate interests. I understand the politics of hippie tourism can be just as problematic as the regular kind, and maybe I'm biased because the only folks I knew who went there weren't foreigners. But the idea of it, the way my friends talked about it, embodied something I liked, a lot, about Egypt. That and Siwa are the two places I regret skipping.
