A Broken Watch - SSH Airport

I am glad that I waited until my time in Dahab was over before writing this blog post. My first impressions of Dahab were not very good. The town seemed cheesy, geared towards beach bums and overrun with Bedouin kitsch. I was terrified of being bored to death. I quickly signed up for scuba lessons to occupy my mornings and began planning treks into the desert during the evenings. However, It did not take long for the town's magic to start working. By the second night I decided to cancel all my trips into the desert except the one that was already paid for.

I would highly recommend staying at The Penguin Hotel if you are ever in Dahab. The wonderful staff at the Penguin Hotel made me feel like I was family. They were extremely patient when I asked them to teach me a few phrases in Arabic. They would also pull me aside to show me You Tube videos of famous Egyptian singers and soccer players. Many of them are now my friends on Facebook.

I also met many wonderful people hotel restaurant. There was Joe and Louisa, who had been traveling from England over land for the last four months and were planning to get to New Zealand after another year of traveling. There was Paul and Peter, my breakfast mates. We all had dives planned in the morning and we were usually the only people up at 8am for breakfast. Paul is a chef from York and Peter is a nurse from Southern France who is currently working in the West Bank. There were the girls who had been studying in France; Kristy, Kelsy and Sherry. There was Rob from Holland, who had planned to come for four nights and ended up staying for ten. And many others with whom I struck up conversations just because we happened to be sitting next to each other, going on the same camel ride, or just watching the match at a bar.

On my last night in Dahab I was sitting in the hotel restaurant when I noticed the cheap watch I had purchased at Hudson News in Terminal 4 had stopped working. The time on the dial read 7:51pm. It was an apt metaphor for my time in Dahab. Time had slowed down to a grinding halt during my six nights in the lazy beach town. In the mornings I would go diving at 8am and return to the Penguin Hotel around 4pm. For the rest of the afternoon I would laze around the hotel restaurant, drink instant coffee (the cheapest drink on the menu), chat with whoever was sitting next to me, and try to follow the football match between lulls in the conversation. Some nights I was able to muster the energy to go into town for dinner.

Sitting at the hotel restaurant the days blurred into each other. When asked about how many nights I had been in Dahab, I struggled to answer. I like to think that maybe my watch realized the futility of its existence and simply decided to call it a day. Or maybe the watch knew that I desperately wanted to stop time so I could spend a few more hours in Dahab. And if I was to ever to write a novel it would start with a broken watch that stopped the flow of time.