Eid Al Fitr and Dahab (Traveling)

Marking the end of Ramadan is the celebratory holiday of Eid Al Fitr, a holiday of alms giving and family. For this holiday, the school gave a four day vacation to its students and teachers. For this holiday break, I along with six other junior fellows chose the coastal village of Dahab, Egypt to spend our days relaxing under the sun. The trip started in Amman, the capital city of Jordan. From Jordan we took a four hour bus ride down to the coastal city of Aqaba. The bus we took was a comfortable, air conditioned coach bus which transported us across the country for half the price of a half-hour taxi ride from Amman to the school. This was by far the smoothest phase of travel during the trip. We arrived in Aqaba at about 6:00 PM only to fully realize that, while we had researched all the details of transportation and lodging in Dahab, we had forgotten to find a place to stay for this one night in Aqaba. But somehow, either by the internet research done with Quiznos wi-fi or the sidewalk chats with fellow tourists, we managed to find a direction to set out in. And sure enough, we soon found a simple, fairly clean hotel, located right next to the center of town, offering beds for the low price of about $9 per person. After settling in and making a quick trip into the city to purchase a falafel dinner, we were pretty much ready to call it a night early so that we could wake up at 4:00 AM the next morning to catch our 7:00 ferry ride to Egypt. Of course, by “call it a night early” I mean to say that we somehow went to bed around midnight. As for the ferry ride, well, this was probably the most jagged phase of travel. Although we’re all proud of ourselves for managing to get to wake up and get to the port in Aqaba by 4:20, the men at the ticket counter had news that would turn our feelings of pride and accomplishment to feelings of complete panic and confusion. The officials at the port informed us that our 7:00 AM ferry would actually be leaving at 12:00 AM and that our tickets would actually cost us $75 rather than our estimate of $40. After the trip, I compared our Lonely Planet research to the information on the ferry’s website and while some points of information were advertises as they were, others didn’t match up at all. Adding to our early morning confusion, of course, were also the facts that we couldn’t read the traveling information written in Arabic, we were traveling with expired Jordanian tourist visas that we needed to get extended before we could leave, and that almost all the desks were still closed at this hour in the morning. So we did the only thing we could do at that point, and that was wait. When the clock finally hit 7:00 we resumed our persistent series of questions and requests for visas, exit stamps, and tickets of course. With our persistence and the occasional translator were all set to go and on the ferry by about 10:00.