charming sharm
My dear friend,
On the morning that C. and I left for the Red Sea, we argued about whether or not to share our tiny elevator with strangers. I had seen a man and his daughter waiting their turn as we stepped into the elevator on the ground floor of our apartment building, but when I gestured for them to join us, C. frowned. “We don’t have masks,” he said. “They don’t have masks. It’s not worth the risk.”
“We came to Egypt during a global pandemic,” I replied. “That equals a hundred thousand risks. What’s a single drop of rain in an already sinking ship?”
C. was not persuaded. Perhaps I’d chosen the wrong metaphor with “rain.” In our two months in Cairo, we’ve encountered precipitation only once. On the night that I heard the drops drumming against the air conditioner that perches half-inside and half-outside our bedroom window, I woke C. and dragged him out to the balcony. Together we stood beneath a violet sky while the rain beaded our skin and lightning slashed above the restless city.
In the end, I promised not to take unnecessary risks. We finished packing our bags, and we called a cab to the airport, and a few hours later we filed onto the tarmac and into the plane to Sharm el-Sheikh.
During our argument, when I’d attempted to compare the risk of the elevator (very low) to the risk of the plane (very high), C. had said that my calculations were wrong because everyone on the plane would be masked. I grudgingly conceded his point. But as soon as we rose above the clouds, most of our fellow passengers simultaneously unbuckled their seatbelts and removed their masks.
C. and I considered each other over our KN95s. What could we do but tighten the clamps over our noses, breathe as shallowly as possible, and surrender the comforting illusion of control?
These two months in Egypt have been strangely liberating for a person who craves as much control as I do. From the whimsical application of traffic rules to the irregular hours of museum schedules to the disregard for orderly queues at the Ministry of Immigration to the power and the water outages in the apartment, Egypt finds a way to remind me every single day that my fate is not entirely in my hands.
This point was underscored on our flight when, after concluding the safety demonstration, Air Arabia broadcast a travel prayer through the speakers above our seats.
…O Allah, the announcer chanted, we ask you on this journey for goodness and piety… O Allah, lighten this journey for us, and make its distance easy for us… O Allah, I seek refuge in you from this journey’s hardships, and from the wicked sights in store, and from finding our family and property in misfortune upon returning…
When we landed, we rolled out of the airport and into a stand of waiting taxi drivers. I haggled for our ride, feeling more confident in my bargaining skills since purchasing a houseplant at an outdoor stand earlier that week. On the drive from the airport to the hotel, we passed through a wall that had recently been built to “protect” tourists from terrorist threats.
(When asked about the wall two years earlier, during the early stages of its controversial construction, the governor of South Sinai disputed the charge. “It’s not a wall, who told you it’s a wall?” he said. “We don’t have a wall.” He described instead a pleasant blend of “concrete barriers” and “razor-wire fence,” with “four very beautiful doors.”)
Although Sharm el-Sheikh is now one of the most famous resort towns in Egypt, its popularity with tourists is a recent phenomenon. Originally a fishing village, Sharm el-Sheikh was seized by Israel in 1956 because of its strategic location on the Sinai Peninsula. Control of the town passed between the Israelis and the Egyptians until 1982, when then-president Mubarak dubbed it the “City of Peace” and began expanding and developing the resorts that the Israelis had established during the decade prior.
These days, the aptly nicknamed “Charming Sharm” is most frequented by visitors from the former USSR. At the hotel, we were usually addressed in Russian before our interlocutors switched to English. At night, a massive video screen set up among the dining tables played a Russian-dubbed version of The Lion King.
When I remarked to C. that we seemed to be the only Americans on the Sinai Peninsula, he reminded me that most of the region is still considered a “Do Not Travel” zone by the U.S. Department of State. Even flights in and out of Sharm el-Sheikh, an exception to the no-travel rule, have not historically been immune from terrorist activity. Indeed, it is only in August of this year that Russia resumed direct flights to Sharm el-Sheikh, lifting the ban that went into effect after a terrorist attack killed all 224 individuals aboard a plane from Sharm to Russia in 2015.
Ten years earlier, in 2005, Sharm-el-Sheikh was devastated by a series of car bombs that exploded near two hotels and one popular beachside walkway.
Was I concerned? A little.
But the sea was clear and wide and aquamarine, and long-legged birds sailed through the shallows, and the sky stretched from the sand to the mountains. As I quizzed C. on Arabic verb conjugations beneath tattered beach umbrellas, I found it difficult to reconcile the dazzling serenity of the sea with the violence that has wracked its shores in the not-so-distant past.
In the morning, while America was sleeping, we strolled along the beach. Around noon, we ambled down a long boardwalk to the swimming area. The sea remained shallow for yards and yards, and so we walked about two hundred yards out in order to reach water that came up to our hips. It had been a year since a Ukrainian child had his hand bitten off by a shark in Sharm el-Sheikh, so we kept an eye out for fins and hoped for the best.
When I wasn’t scanning the sea for sharks or wondering over the likelihood of car bombs, I was fretting over our meals. A few days prior, as we’d passed a restaurant in Cairo, I’d remarked to C. with an airy, assured naivety: “I might be done with buffets forever!” Now here I was, jostling the Russians and Ukrainians and Eastern Europeans for space at the dessert table. Every evening I spooned Umm Ali (Egyptian bread pudding) from a giant vat into a tiny cup with a utensil that had been touched by a hundred hands at least. I snagged bottles of hand sanitizer from nearby tables while C. pulled out his phone to research the efficacy of the Sputnik V vaccine.
The elevator had turned out to be the least of our worries.
In the early evenings, C. liked to walk north up the beach because that’s where we’d found a friendly pack of strays. We chatted with the dogs as they trotted beside us, passing camels and windsurfers, bikini-wearers and burkini-wearers. When we returned to the hotel, we found the pool shrouded in an eerie, manufactured smoke that a staff member shot out of a machine the size of a leaf blower. We assumed the concoction was designed to keep away mosquitos at dusk.
“DDT?” C. wondered aloud, only half-joking.
Immersed as we were in different kinds of risks, it was difficult to decide which of them posed the greatest threat. And so we did our best not to worry. We studied our flashcards and waved away the kitesurfing salesmen and told the camel’s owner that his animal was beautiful, but we didn’t want a ride. At the end of our stay, as we were shuttled along the road to the airport, I watched the sun sinking behind half-completed hotels and abandoned construction sites and I wondered at the future of this place that was currently operating at 35% of its expected capacity. How would the economy survive if the tourists didn’t return? How would the community and the environment be impacted if they did? Would Egypt be able to deliver on the promise to make the resorts more eco-friendly, more sustainable? If not, how much longer would Charming Sharm last?
When we landed in Cairo and climbed into our taxi, we discovered that the most perilous experience of our Red Sea weekend was actually taking place here, in Cairo, on the road between the airport and our apartment in our most harrowing ride yet. Like most cars for hire, the seatbelts in this one had been removed. As we hurtled back and forth between poorly marked lanes on the highway and careened the wrong way down one-way streets, I turned to C. and shouted at him to please hold tightly to the handle of his door so that when the driver inevitably crashed, he might be saved from flying through the open window.
And yet, despite all the odds I felt were stacked against us, we made it home to our painted gold apartment. Alhamdulillah. We stumbled out of the car in front of our building and staggered toward the entrance, where Um Mohamed greeted us as if we’d been gone for three years instead of three days. From her tone, and the way she pointed at her phone and toward our tenth-floor apartment, we gathered that she’d been concerned for us and might even have made some calls in search of us. “Alhamdulillah!” she exclaimed, ushering us toward that creaking elevator. “Praise Allah!”
When we asked our Arabic tutor a few days later about the song that plays whenever we hit the elevator button, she told us that it isn’t a song at all, but a prayer. “It means, thank you Allah for controlling these wonderful machines that help us to travel places,” she said. “It means, please keep us safe.”
When she left the house and I told her, instinctively, “see you next week,” she turned and tilted her head as if gently chiding me. “Inshaallah,” she replied, reminding me that future plans were out of my control. “God willing.”
Yours—L.
