Day 5: Dahab - Leave me alone. I'm not doing anything.

This picture accurately portrays the extent of my activities today.

I took an overnight bus from Cairo to Dahab. You'd think overnight buses would be quiet and peaceful so passengers could sleep. You would be totally justified in thinking so. You would also be totally wrong. First, the bus played loud Egyptian movies until about 5 AM. We also had somewhere around 45 passport and ticket checks along the way. I'm not exactly sure why they were checking for passports from people who were traveling from Egypt to... Egypt, much less why the felt the need to do so 45 times. At any rate, it was not a peaceful bus ride.

So I arrived at Dahab this morning somewhat groggy and a little cranky. I thought, "After Cairo and that bus ride, this place better be God's gift to me." 

Luckily, it is.

Dahab is basically a bunch of cheap hostels arranged in a line along the coast of the Red Sea. Each hostel has a restaurant/bar/dive shop attached, and all business is conducted in pillow rooms. There are no seats. There are only wooden canopies with mats, rugs, and lots and lots of pillows. It's not exactly for someone with a very active personality. Luckily, I was in no mood to be active.

Here's a top-down view of the "strip" in Dahab.

Here's a pillow room. PS, the faint mountains you can see on the other side of the Red Sea, that I can see very clearly in real life, is Saudi Arabia. 

Because I arrived before checkout time, my room wasn't ready yet. I was advised to go "sit somewhere and relax." That sounded like a good idea. I took a load off in my hostel's pillow room and did not get up for three hours. My fellow travelers, amusingly enough two other people who just quit their jobs, chatted about important topics such as the meaning of life, why the Red Sea is blue, and how much smarter we are than our ex-coworkers.

Despite being a lazy man's heaven, there are a few activities I plan on completing while I'm here. The first is diving. Dahab is home to the world famous Blue Hole dive site. It's exactly what it sounds like, a humongous hole right off the reef that is endlessly blue and endlessly deep. Something like 20% of people who dive it are never seen again. Because I dislike dying, I will not be diving the Blue Hole. I will embark upon much tamer dives and hopefully see lots of colorful fish and coral. After tiring myself out, I will reluctantly spend the rest of the day sitting in a pillow room for a few hours before watching the World Cup, in the same pillow room, on a projector, with the Red Sea in the background.

Since the previous day will have been so grueling, I will spend the following day entirely in a pillow room. The next day, I will hike up Mt. Sinai and fist bump God. I fully admit that about 95% of my knowledge of Exodus is derived from the Rugrats' Passover episode. Therefore, I will probably do some reading about why this mountain is important enough to make me hike up it at 3 AM to watch the sun rise over it.