Dahab: Chapter 2 — Settling

It took a few days to learn where to go. The main street, where we’d been dropped and robbed by Nemo, was not actually where Dahab happened. Dahab happened elsewhere. You had to find it by walking in the wrong direction enough times.

Eel Garden, up north, is where you want to be. Quiet, close to the water, far enough from the high street that the scooters don’t reach. The cafés have the same menus and the same unreliable WiFi as everywhere else but at least nobody grabs your arm on the way. If someone tells you to stay near Lagona, ignore them, it’s all hotels. And if your Airbnb listing says “heart of Dahab” or “walking distance to everything,” that means you’ll hear trucks at 6am and someone will try to sell you a fake Gucci bag before you’ve had coffee. Our apartment was around $500 a month.

The food is amazing, once you know where to go.

Darwish fish market. You walk up, pick your fish from the display, they weigh it, grill it, and you eat it with bread and tahini and salad. The fish was swimming that morning. For two people the whole thing costs €4-8. I keep comparing this to London in my head and it makes me angry. €55 for a piece of cod at a place with exposed brick and a wine list and the fish has been dead for a week.

Alawahy Mahalawy, near Lighthouse, we went to almost every day. Fresh juice. Mango, guava, whatever they had. 50-80 pounds. The whole place is a meme. He even has a tiktok.

Alpha Hummus House does hummus and falafel. Very slow guy but amazing baba ghanoush.

El Masri was the best meat in Dahab. Whatever they had on the grill that day, served fast with rice and bread and more food than you could finish. You were also welcomed to bring your own wine. We ate there probably ten times and I never had a bad meal.

Our monthly spend for two people ended up being around $800-1000: rent, eating out twice a day, SIM cards, juices, coffee, the occasional taxi. In Lisbon or Split you’d burn through that in two weeks and eat worse. The visa is $25 on arrival at Sharm, gives you 30 days, and you can extend it if you’re willing to deal with Egyptian bureaucracy, which we were not. Getting to Dahab means flying into Sharm el-Sheikh and taking a transfer for about an hour. We paid $50 for a minibus.

Is Dahab safe? Yes. We walked around at night, my fiancée walked alone, nobody bothered us beyond the main street sales pitches. The Bedouin are welcoming.

People kept telling us we should stay longer. People in Dahab always tell you to stay longer. Most of these people were hippies.

I should define what I mean by hippies because the word is doing a lot of work here. I mean people who have been travelling for somewhere between six months and six years, who talk about energy and alignment and cacao ceremonies without any indication that they’re joking, who own crystals, who will ask you within the first five minutes whether you’ve tried breathwork, and who describe what they do for money in terms so vague that I still, after several weeks, could not tell you what any of them actually did. They are everywhere in Dahab. They run the yoga places, the beach bars, the WhatsApp groups. If you sit down at any café for more than ten minutes, one of them will talk to you.

I don’t want to be a jerk about this. They’re mostly kind people. They share things, they include you, they remember your name. The social warmth is real in a way that coworking-space networking in Berlin or Lisbon is absolutely not. But you will hear about star signs. You will have a conversation that starts promisingly and then veers into whether Mercury is in retrograde and what that means for your creative energy this month. And you will nod, because they’re being nice, and you’ll eat your hummus and think about retirement savings and keep it to yourself.

January weather, which nobody warned us about: it’s windy. Sand-in-your-food, can’t-light-a-cigarette, WiFi-signal-degrading windy. Some days the wind blows hard enough that dive sites close. We packed shorts and summer clothes because we were going to Egypt, to the Red Sea, in what world would we need a jacket?

Leave the shorts at home. They will take up luggage space you need for books, so you can bring too many. I brought 5, read a third of one. But when the internet is down and there’s nothing to do but sit on the terrace and read and wonder what the hippies are doing that they look so relaxed all the time. Maybe they read books?