Swimming backwards in the Gulf of Aqaba

It’s not a skill I set out to learn or even one that I thought I would need – but I did learn how to swim backwards with flippers on. And I learned how rather quickly. But I never expected to have a moray eel challenge me when I was snorkeling in the Red Sea's Gulf of Aqaba just north of Dahab Bay on Egypt’s Sinai coast.

I was traveling through Egypt with my then girlfriend after a six month stint in an Ulpan at the Mishmar Ha'Negev kibbutz in the Negev desert. There aren’t many Kibbutzim left, but at their peak there were 270 with a population of over 120,000. Basically a kibbutz is a communal settlement only found in Israel in which all wealth is held in common and profits are reinvested in the settlement. Adults live in private quarters, while children are generally housed and cared for as a group. Meals are prepared and eaten communally. Members have regular meetings to discuss business and to take votes on matters requiring decisions. Jobs may be assigned by rotation, by choice, or by skill. The Ulpan was a six month program where half the day I would sit in a classroom and struggle to learn Hebrew. The other half I drove a forklift truck in a Styrofoam box factory shunting pallets, made of styrofoam, from the production lines to the warehouse and ultimately to the trucks for delivery to our clients. We made boxes for ice cream, machine guns and construction building forms, among other things.

After the Ulpan we had promised ourselves a vacation in Egypt by camping on the Red Sea coast in the Sinai following time in Cairo and Luxor.

This was in 1985, six years after the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. Getting there wasn't straight forward. Today it’s a 5 hour car ride but back then we had to travel for two hours on a pre-dawn Israeli bus (Israeli bus rides are a story in itself) to the Egyptian consulate in Tel Aviv. You needed to get there early because of the long line of applicants. If you didn't reach the application window by 10 am you had to come back the next day. Once you shuffled forward to the single window you handed over your passport, wondering if you would ever get it back, and the $25 USD cash (they didn't accept Israeli Shekels at that time) for your visa application. In return, you received a slip of very worn and somewhat official looking paper with a number on it. A matching slip was attached to your passport and money. Then off you go to kill time until you hopefully pick up your passport duly stamped with $25 USD worth of Egyptian postage stamps. Otherwise you had to come back the next day.

We stayed overnight in Tel Aviv and the next day we boarded a bus for Cairo. After time spent in Cairo and Luxor, we headed to the Sinai.

The bus from Cairo used a two lane paved highway that cut through 40 foot high sand dunes. Trucks outfitted with plows were stationed along the road to push back the constantly drifting sand. As a Canadian who had to put up with drifting snow in the winter, I felt strangely at home with that. As we approached the famed Suez Canal, the road dipped down under the canal through a recently built tunnel. We only had a brief glimpse of massive cargo ships looking as if they were sailing through sand.

The bus dropped us at Sharm el Sheikh. Once a fishing village, it was turned into a tourism resort by the Israelis when they controlled the Sinai after the 1972 war, the resort was windswept, with small piles of sand on the walkways and it looked void of any human activity.

Clearly this wasn't the place to pitch our tent. Plus, we had been told of wonderful beaches and reefs farther north along the coast. But how to get there. In 1985 there were no bus routes on the Gulf of Aqaba coast. And, neither of us spoke Arabic. With some gesturing and saying Dahab Bay several times we were invited to clamber into the back of a pick-up truck with several men. Our travel companions were dressed either in western garb of pants and long sleeved shirts or a more traditional combination of three clothing items; the jibba, the outer long robe, the Kaftan thinner under-robe and the sederi, which is a vest with pockets and places to stash items. There was limited conversation among them. They mainly smoked foul smelling cigarettes or gazed at some point near or far as if in a trance to help the miles go by.

We truly didn't know where we were going. Once in a while we would ask Dahab Bay? and point in the direction the white truck was going. We would get a vigourous nod and then they would revert to silence and stillness.

As we cruised along the paved road sitting in the back of the pick-up truck under the unrelentingly hot sun, I took in the scrub brush and the occasional palm tree. A few camels would plod along beside the road weighed down with cargo while their herders walked beside swatting them once in a while simply to show who was in charge as the camels never seemed to be straying from their path. The Sinai is a stark world. There are only a few Oasis’ in the south and maybe a dozen roads outside of the handful of towns and settlements.

The pick-up truck stopped from time-to-time dropping passengers off and picking them up. None of the truck stops had any signage - formal or informal - to indicate them. But people found them - out in the middle of nowhere - not a building or tent in sight. Except for one stop, which was a mobile Egyptian bread bakery. Everyone hopped out, including us, bought their fresh pita-style breads called ayesh baladi and clambered back in.

Eventually we rounded a curve in the road and started to descend to a small cluster of palm trees with a long one story curved metal shed close by. The Gulf of Aqaba was a few feet beyond to the right. Our fellow passengers started gesticulating that this was our destination. A short crescent shaped bay at the base of equally short brown and barren hills. If rocks were plants - this place would be lush. But the greenery was limited to a few palm trees clustered around pools of brackish sea water.

Aside from the metal quonset hut, which turned out to be a convenience store, a number of people had pitched their tents. At the far end of the bay was a cluster of sleeping huts enclosed by a tall bamboo fence that offered up showers and cooked meals. They had a guard to prevent non-residents from using the showers - you couldn’t even buy the shower. Freshwater had to be trucked in and it was very precious.

We picked a camping spot roughly halfway between the convenience store and the enclosure. There was no shade to protect our tiny two person nylon pup tent from the sun and the heat. We couldn’t get any share from the palm trees. Those were so high they provided very little coverage unless there were a lot of them clustered together, and there weren’t. This was in May and the weather was still comparatively cool. The temperature would climb from 16 C overnight to almost 50C in the afternoon if the hot wind called the Khamsin blew, sucking the moisture out of the air and covering everything in sand. It doesn't bring relief from the heat, it intensifies it, hurting the skin and drawing every drop of moisture from your body. In that dry hot wind soaking wet jeans air dry within 15 minutes.

The Khamsin was blowing up a small dust storm that covered the basin away from the beach one of the mornings I was out collecting the few scraps of wood that we used for heating up water for tea and doing some very simple cooking. Each day I had to go farther and farther away from the beach as I used up the meager resource. As I looked up from stooping over to pick up a stick I sensed movement in the distance. From the edge of the dust storm emerged first one camel and then a line of about 10-12 all being driven by a herder walking at the rear of the column flicking a long switch in a slow rhythm to remind the animals who was nominally in charge. The camels loped across the flatlands maybe 300 metres from me as they made their way to some unseen destination beyond the bay, disappearing once again into the dust storm.

The reason we came here was to spend time in the warm Red Sea water. By the afternoon the air temperature was unbearable. With no shade and the inside of the tent scorching, the way I handled it was to lay in the salt water right up to my chin. With a wide-brimmed hat on my head, only the lower part of my face was exposed to the sun and heat.

We had brought borrowed snorkeling gear from the Kibbutz. A basic kit - mask, snorkel and flippers. These were important for exploring the world famous Red Sea coral reefs. Maybe 30 feet from the shore, the reef is an extension of the world renowned Red Sea coral reef that extends for 4,000 kilometres around the Sinai Peninsula.

That's where I learned how to swim backwards in flippers. At least once a day I would strap on the borrowed snorkeling gear to cruise along the reef. I had only seen one other reef before when I was 12 or 13 in Barbados so this was thrilling to explore a completely different underwater habitat. To see what was going on I would swim in close and peer deeper into the coral mass. I was able to see many brightly coloured fish like the Bullethead Parrotfish, others, such as the Titan Triggerfish, muted to be camouflaged and other aquatic beings.

Then in a larger hole in the coral the moray eel appeared. I could only see a bit at first, then the entire head appeared. I was treading water in place right in front of its coral home. I had only seen pictures of them in National Geographic magazines and that was a few years earlier. Some are as long as 9-10 feet long, this one was about 4-5 feet in length. A Moray is a set of jaws with a propulsion mechanism. They have two sets of teeth, one to grab and tear while the second set holds on to their prey. They are predators and are happy biting into all sorts of tasty morsels including small sharks. Oh, I should mention that many types of moray’s have one and sometimes two kinds of toxins that affect red blood cells.

It started to slowly advance towards me and menacingly opened its mouth, I knew exactly what I was facing, and I wasn't happy. I instinctively and instantly knew I had to swim backwards. If I stopped facing it chances were it might strike and bite me.

Doing a combination of backward strokes with my arms and trying to get my flippers to at least stay out of the way, I was able to slowly back away from the Moray Eel. After creating a distance of a few feet, it finally felt safe and retreated to its cave. At that point I felt confident enough to swim off to one side and swim as quickly as I could to shore.

After that experience I felt I needed a break and we headed off to the convenience store for a beer using up a bit of our tight cash. Egypt, at that time, was open enough that alcohol could be found in tourist areas and my nerves needed a bit of calming.

Outside of the convenience store, there was a long outdoor grill with charcoal burning away in preparation for what turned out to be grilled fish caught earlier in the day in the Red Sea. A few people were standing nearby, many having a beer including a few UN-sanctioned Peacekeepers who since 1981 have been a part of the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) to keep the peace between Egypt and Israel. They are still there and still have little to do.

We were sitting on a bench while I nursed my rapidly warming beer trying hard not to focus on the aroma of grilled fish, when one of the revelers approached us. He wasn’t too steady on his feet, weaving a bit while grasping a beer bottle by its neck.

He introduced himself as an American soldier based in one of the United Nations sanctioned peacekeeping outposts just north along the coast towards Israel. Since there were never any problems it was a hot and boring job. The result was a US soldier imbibing in a tad too much beer and consequently making some bad decisions. Like this one. He wanted to buy some Egyptian pounds. But he had the conversion rate messed up. At that time it was roughly 1 USD for 2 Pounds. With some haggling you could get 2.5 pounds for the USD. He insisted that it was one for one. The three of us must have argued for a solid ten minutes. We kept telling him that he was losing out and that his math was wrong. Didn’t matter what we said - he was right. So we walked away with $10 USD, in exchange for 10 Egyptian Pounds, which was enough to buy two grilled red sea trout dinners and a beer each. The fish had been cooked slowly over the charcoal flames producing a crispy skin and flaky meat. We had watched the cook keep the fish moist with lemon squeezed on it and a light dusting of some array of herbs and spices. A small side salad of tomatoes, cucumber, parsley and onion rounded out the meal as well as a piece of the ever present baladi flat bread. The sun was setting over the desert as we ate our meal and felt the earth cool under our feet while the wind picked up bringing a cool breeze as well.

That was the last good thing I remember about Egypt. The next day I was done in by dysentery. No washroom, no porta-potty. Just a partial screening provided by a palm tree on the far edge of the camping area. I was eating the exact same food as my girlfriend and she was perfectly fine.

We had no medicine and there was no town, let alone a medical clinic for hundreds of kilometres. I was literally evaporating as the dysentery and the dry heat was making my body drain itself. My estimate afterwards was that I lost 15 lbs in under three days. I wasn’t able to take in any food and was reduced to drinking watered down guava juice for any sort of nourishment. My days alternated between hobbling away from the tent to find a place to once more drain myself of what became pure liquid and trying to catch some sleep in the overheated tent. After three days, Susan asked the convenience store owner what could be done. It turns out that he was a medical doctor and had a small pharmacy set-up in the back of the convenience store. Imodium to the rescue. Two days after that, my body had settled enough that we were able to head back to the Kibbutz in Israel.