A different kind of Rouge

Time space and being are back on my mind - this time far removed from the himalayan proportions of Nepal, and placed instead in the tiny sliver of sea called Aqaba. This finger of the Red Sea is pathetically narrow as evidenced by the view of the mountainous shore of Saudi Arabia from our post in Dahab. However, in an attempt to stretch their sliver of access to the grand blue planet, perhaps; or perhaps just in an effort to keep tourist dollars domestic, the Jordanians seemed to be determined to drag out the border crossing process as long as humanly possible.

That is, when they said it was leaving as the sun hit the top of the sky, they meant it was leaving when it hit the horizon. And when they said that just after dinner we would be on our way, they meant just after the evening had turned to morning. And when they said that, they really meant as the sun hit the horizon on its way back toward the apex. And when they said that, they really meant two hours after the sun hit that apex. Which is to say it took us 36 hours of waiting, sleeping on the not-so-clean floor of the wonderfully confusing port office building (where we got to go downstairs to pay our exit tax, upstairs to buy our tickets from guys who openly admitted that they had no idea when the boat would really go, across the way to get that ticket stamped with the date, and down the hall to get our passports stamped with exits), and finally sitting in the sun on the vessel to cover the 40 km journey to Egypt. And all this just to avoid the bureaucracy that Arab nations have created for us as a result of the embargo on Israel - after all, with a few land border crossings, we could have been in Nuweiba in about an hour. That stamp, that infernal stamp of the country where, after all, we've already been is the source of all of our 36 hour woes.

The wait did, however, afford the opportunity to meet and grow old with a couple of brits well into their third decade of travel stories. As we finally rolled into Egypt, the sight of trash blowing through the fields around the port and a feeling of tropical disorder - no walls, no worries for warmth, the anticipation of fresh fruit - struck us with relief at a genuine feeling of travel again. We were out of modern arabia and on our way to Africa - and all it took was a 36 hour boat ride.

But, alas, it was not to be. The bamboo huts and gorgeous, relaxing backpacker bay the couple had enjoyed 18 years ago has become a fiasco of "want to eat in my restaurant" after all. Despite the BishBishi camp manager's claim that no piece of beach is private here, we have yet to find so much as a sliver of sand without a restaurant plopped down on top of it. A local journalist spend most of the words in his restaurant review sarcastically condemning the changes here, including the waterfront walkway made of fake stone crawling with money-driven leeches. Obviously, his subtleties were lost on the restauranteur who plastered it up on his wall.

But more than the disappointment that our time on a beautiful beach on the Sinai Peninsula would be tainted by, well, the lack of a beautiful beach, the severely debilitating realization that change is creeping in here too hit hard. It's not that I didn't know before of the Vail Resorts that dominated nature, of the drive of mankind to change all that is natural to fit his mood, or of "development" as a sharp-on-both-sides fighting implement. But now, half-way through this trip, the lessons have begun to take effect on changing my outlooks long before I had expected them to. Long before I arrive home.

The photographs of Damascus Gate in Jerusalem and of Martyr's Square in Damascus decades ago combine with these travelers' descriptions of the old to create one realization: it is not human nature to destroy or to dominate like this. Hundreds of thousands of years passed without a shred of such destruction on these sights before technological advances created a luxurious style of living never before experienced. Today, it is true, thousands or millions live at the standards that the Maharajas enjoyed in their most affluent times. And yet, we still want more.

In the past 100 years, the Wright Brothers made movement unnaturally easy. They created a new world where an 18 hour journey is considered prohibitively long our of a world where true exploration required real commitment. They created a world where tourists have not to pass through culture or to understand or to care - where tourists have not to have traveler traits - before ordering up their heated floor in Vail or their pizza on the hermit crab's old home in Dahab. In 100 years, western technology has been dropped into foreign cultures wholly unprepared for it, and it has ruined much of what was. Perhaps what will become is equally magnificent a la Lao Tse, it is true. But for now, I think its silly and stupid. The question of "would I still be here if not for these same advances" remains on the table, and wholly valid, and unanswerable.

But, while I'm not pondering the detrimental effects of the revolutionary ways of thought of the last few generations, I'm spending time being annoyed at the salt water pouring from every tap in this town.

That, and I'm visiting the gods the way the gods intended to be visitied. I'm donning my technology and skipping the step of growing gills. I'm floating above a world that may as well be more foreign than the furthest planet. Lion Fish flaunt their venomous sails, needle fish dart through the currents, giant clams chomp on watery nutrients, conchs look like rocks below trying to hide their magnificence, and the corals flaunt their reds, yellows, greens, blues in a technicolor dance as if to taunt, "you thought your world was beautiful?'' And all the while I marvel at how little my mind touches, at how little I actually see, much less comprehend, as I float over the unknown surreal, which seems simultaneously oddly normal. Just how many camouflaged crusaders did I skip over, how many fish missed the auditions? A few meters west, and a few meters towards the center of the earth from a land so wholly disturbed by humanity's quest to control and dominate change, lays this perplexing magnificent world of the sea. And I, thanks to the Wright brothers, get to throw my desinty of the dry to the wayside and become a part of it all.

So, it seems, there's a benefit to all this beach-ruining business. A very selfish benefit - I get to see a little more of what I know nothing about. This time, with a tank on my back in the Egyptian Red Sea.