I took a bus to the Red Sea port of Aqaba to catch a ferry to Egypt. I had missed the daily ferry and took a cheap room at a hotel without air conditioning. I assumed that the extreme heat of the day (113 F or 45C) would turn into a delightfully cool night like everywhere else I have been. Wrong. It was so hot that I ended up sleeping under a wet towel under the ceiling fan. This was great as long as the towel stayed wet, requiring a number of re-wettings during the night. When I woke up in the morning, it was 93 degrees (34 C) in my room.
The tickets for the noon fast ferry would sell out very early so I went to the port at 7:30am. This was the start of the biggest clusterf@#k I have seen so far.
Getting the ticket was not such a problem, only expensive at $50 USD for a one hour ride. Next, I waited in another line right next to the ticket seller for an hour so the clerk could stamp my ticket without even looking at it. Why they didn’t do that when I bought it I do not know, maybe to increase employment? Then I had to go downstairs and find the mislabeled exit tax office and pay 7.50 USD for exit stamps. Then it was back upstairs to immigration to get my exit stamps and passport stamped. Then I waited for a few hours to get on the ferry. It was 11:30 and no one was moving. I went outside and looked around. There was not any obvious ferry embarkment point. There was no visible ferry either. I went to a covered area next to a big vehicle gate and was told I had to wait for a bus to get to the ferry. All was fine and not extraordinary so far. I am baffled by the disorganization of what happened next.
I waited with for only fifteen minutes before there was a huge commotion and everyone rushed the gate. Police kept people from going through the gate while silently listening to people waving tickets and yelling. I pushed my way in to the crowd and waited. Close to noon the police let a surge of people, including me through the gate. I could now see the ferry only 500m away and could easily have walked it if they would have let me, but no.
We waited for a few minutes and a bus finally showed up. Of course everyone rushed the bus as if it was the only one coming all day. It is a frickin’ shuttle. It fills up, drives for 60 seconds, empties, and comes back. Come on people.
Police held the would-be riders back with threatening batons and lots of yelling. A dozen or so women and children were escorted through the crowd and got on the bus and then door started to close. People were trying to hold the door open in desperation but it overpowered them, almost crushing one woman. The bus then moved ten feet forward and opened the door again. The same process of police, batons, waving tickets, pushing, and yelling was repeated as a few more women got on. Then again, people tried holding the door open and threw themselves inside as it closed on them. Then the bus moved backward twenty feet. Repeat clusterf@#k again. Finally, the bus moved fifty feet forward, stopped for ten minutes before driving to the ferry.What the F@#k?
Then the police pushed everyone back to the other side of the gate. Little by little we edged our way right back to where the bus had been parked and waited about ten minutes in the hot sun before it came back. Although, this time it parked across the parking lot next to a covered area. Nothing happened for about ten more minutes until the police started letting one or two people at a time go over to the shaded area by the bus. They would do this about once a minute, randomly picking people out of the crowd. These lowly policemen were showing that they were in control and had the power in this situation. Finally a policeman pointed at me and said to me in English, “You are a winner!” and waved his baton for me to cross and get out of the sun. We stood next to the bus, waiting for another ten minutes before the napping driver decided to open the door. We got on and waited another ten minutes for a ticket check and nothing in particular. When the bus actually started moving, it went barely faster than walking speed to the ferry. I was just thrilled to get to the stupid boat.
It was an entirely enclosed ferry, with no open decks. The seats were comfortable and I watched Tom and Jerry cartoons for the hour and half that it took to shuttle everyone that 500 meters. Obviously the noon departure time is not set in stone. I could have taken the slow ferry that was ten dollars cheaper, but it usually left five or six hours late. The travel time for the slow ferry is somewhere between three to eight hours, but apparently, it once took three days to get there. It only took an hour to reach Nuweiba, Egypt on the fast ferry. Unfortunately, it took an hour before the police would let anyone off because they were searching for some criminals.
Once again we were bused to the terminal, but this time the ride was smoother. The terminal on the other hand was complete chaos. There is no obvious flow or signage to indicate a process at Nuweiba. There are many scattered buildings and no official in sight to ask. The bags had been loaded into a giant flatbed trailer sized cart that was sitting in the center of a mass of people desperately digging for their things. I found my bag, bought visa stamps at the difficult to locate bank for 15 USD, they only take USD for some reason, and then went to the exchange office to get local currency, went through security, went back through security to find the immigration office, went through security again, was ignored by customs, and finally got out. It took about thirteen hours to take a one hour ferry. They do this every day. I am assuming merit is not involved in the promotion of port managers.
The first taxi guys I asked said that there were no “service” taxis, which are shared taxis, to across the Sinai Peninsula to Cairo and I would have to pay $150 USD to get there. They were lying of course. I easily found some. I bargained the price down to a little over seventeen USD for the five hour drive. My taxi was a newer minibus that would be comfortable. I waited for two hours while they found more passengers and loaded the top rack with what looked like a houseful of possessions. It was comic to see them load and reload and reload to get it all up there. It wasn’t funny when we were switched to an old Peugeot 504 because there were not enough people for the minibus. I waited another hour while they moved everything to the other vehicle. There were several problems with this decrepit taxi. First, it was so overloaded, we could not go that fast. Second, the ceiling was so low I could not sit up. In fact, if I had been able to sit up, the roof would have been at my chin level. I spent 8 sleepless hours hunched over or with my knees on the ceiling so I could rest my head on the seat. Not fun. And then it got better. I was dropped off at four in the morning at a highway crossroad outside of Cairo. I could not even see the city. Thankfully, I caught a passing minibus after only fifteen minutes. Then I had to take a taxi to my hostel. I went straight to bed.
