Dahab Day 2

Our first full day in Dahab was pretty low-key, with a lot of time spent in a comfortable chair reading and sleeping. We took advantage of the hotel shuttle both in the afternoon and the evening to go to town for lunch and dinner. In the case of the former, we found a restaurant called Yum Yum’s that sold the pita sandwiches we ate in Luxor and filled up on those. We also looked around a bit for souvenirs, but this is clearly a late night town as most of the shops were still closed.

Dahab is split into two parts, with the southern end having most of the newer hotels and restaurants, and the northern part filled with cheap flophouses for the backpackers. With a little time to kill before our shuttle back, we walk all the way through both parts. Along the way we see a ton of hotels that are half built, but with nobody actually working on them. It’s hard to tell how long they have been like that, so we’re not sure whether this place is in the middle of a building boom that has been put on hold because of the economy, or if a decade from now, it will look exactly the same, with visitors asking themselves why there seem to be so many half finished buildings.

We did a little research, both at out hotel and back in town when we returned for dinner about day trips that we might be interested in. There are a lot of choices, but I think we have settled on a day to visit Petra, a day to climb Mount Sinai and visit the monastery there, and a day to camel trek into a nation park to do some snorkeling. Even with those we will still have a few empty days here, so time will tell whether we use those for more excursions, or to simply lay out on the beach some more.