We are in Dahab, in the Red Sea coast, at Sinai. A journey of 12 hours, night, from Cairo, in a school bus full of Egyptians with their mothers, where the driver gives us the videos of the wedding of his niece. Meat from belly dancer swaying, cries of the popular singer Umm Kalzun, dry cheese smell everywhere.
There are two favorite places to vacation in search Cairenes. The wealthy are mixed with Italian and Russian tourists in Sharm el Sheik and its resorts and villages or in Hurghada, further south. The remainder will always have Dahab .... A narrow stone beach in front of the Saudi coast, shadeless, without drinking water, but some of the best funds of the Red Sea Diving. Here began arriving in the seventies divers fleeing the polluted shores of the Mediterranean, en la Ruta hacia Kandahar, Kathmandu and their dens ... Hippie Trail in pure. In a place that neither the Bedu around never deigned to stop.
Dahab…. A narrow stone beach in front of the Saudi coast, shadeless, without drinking water, but some of the best funds of the Red Sea Diving
And here I am, tostándome to a sol inmisericorde, waiting for a happy and blonde Dutch girl put your dive gear without drowning and wondering why most dive centers I know are horrible places ..... So I relax with a bottle of mineral water bottled in the , while the Saudi coast is reflected in the still water, giving the reddish tone with which the old baptized this sea.
And I wonder if there's nothing left in this desolate peninsula of Bedu culture, Howeita of the other side of the Gulf of Aqaba to Damascus accompanied Lawrence. Something must be, Israeli tanks by. And that is ... At the end of the row of cheap restaurants where young Russians lost the shame and dollars of newly rich parents, a tiny little window shows me a book (with its ever ubiquitous in Egypt, male hairdresser) where twice as Anthony Quinn played with a rosary. And I can not resist.
At the bottom of the row of cheap restaurants where young Russians lost the shame and dollars of newly rich parents
To summarize nearly four days of mapping query, misunderstandings, anger, purchase of water tanks that never gets to see and many dollars spent on flour and fodder for camels, delivery of biblical wells Khudra Ain, the "green water", good name for the well, really ..... to the monastery of St. Catherine and Mount Sinai, with a friendly Bedu who never stops laughing and does not speak any English. But, all names that I have been quoting, taken from a small volume of nineteenth century travel, it is known, then, Hopefully, have a good trip ...
Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt, little was known of this area of ??the East that was not in the Bible or in some fantastic stories of Crusaders. The conquest brought a renewed interest in Pharaonic to Europe and opened the doors of Africa, via the Nile, all those living adventurers who lost the chance to die with dignity at Austerlitz, Trafalgar o Waterloo. One of them has always fascinated me, as another of my icons, Sir Richard Burton. A small Swiss disenchanted, fled Europe and England in the service of Napoleon on terror, Johann Burkhardt Lewis, came to Cairo in the early nineteenth thirst for adventure-laden. Accomplished Arabist, fever took him drawing the plan of visiting Mecca on pilgrimage, what the dark Burton achieved a few years later, translating one of the most fascinating travel books of Literature, capitalized.
For the preparation, Burkhardt crossed the Sinai, was the first European to rediscover the ruins of Petra and return to tell the tale in a small booklet, now discontinued, I found in a small bookshop in Istanbul (a book creates another book, and it was Lawrence who, as directed by Burkhardt, crossed the Sinai 1914, on the verge of World War I., in another undiscovered gem of travel writing, The Widerness of Zin).
Few places reach the subconscious more humane than the silence and emptiness in the face of a starry sky that absorbs the heat of the day
We left on a tip Khudra Ain, in a landscape that reminds me of the deserts of East Africa. Acacias, wadis, traces of jackals waking up in camps in the cold mornings and, as always, nighttime desert sky. Few places reach the subconscious more humane than the silence and emptiness in the face of a starry sky that absorbs the heat of the day. And so, the passage of two camels insistent, marked with age cracked hooves, gradually move. It is in a small canyon, where we stop to water the animals, where, in a reddish wall, three letters scratched with various figures of animals and people, give me the reason why the heat, of thirst and hunger that I'm going, and yet sometimes I take the urban ennui between trips. Three letters, JLB, and a number, 1804Maybe .... Not all travel books are invented nonsense, perhaps some are true witnesses. There is no better book than write living and traveling.
