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On my first big adventure abroad, I set off with two friends for Egypt just days after the first Gulf War had come to an end. After some time in Cairo, we headed to the Sinai and the well known resort of Dahab. Dahab is the Red Sea equivalent of Goa or Koh Samui, and we were pretty much the first new faces to show up there since before the war began. A hardcore group of travellers had stayed there throughout the war, thinking they were tough, and no doubt still boasting about it to this day. As we strolled along the beach front, one of these idiots called out,
“Welcome tourists!” at us with such sarcasm that we knew we were joining people who saw themselves as being way above us, no doubt in the category of toughened travel warriors. This was good preparation for Goa where we would meet similar arseholes with equally unjustified high opinions of themselves.
We settled in at one of the hostels there; a single block of small rooms made of mud and painted white. We occupied one room; all the others were vacant. It didn’t take us long to find some weed – the usual, shitty, seed-filled scrag that took many joints to get a buzz from. An English girl was hanging out with us; she too had been there throughout the war, and was, apparently, going to marry one of the local men. She had taken us under her wing a little and gave us some tips for getting by in Dahab. Meanwhile, we were trying to get stoned, filling the small room with smoke as we rolled joint after joint.
I ducked out to take a piss, and as I closed the door behind me, I found myself in complete darkness. I slowly made my way towards the washroom when out of nowhere two big, official-looking Arab men in shirts and trousers appeared. These were the first men not dressed in cotton robes I had seen since Cairo. They smiled at me and made their way towards our room. I carried on to the toilet where a solitary bulb shed some light on my terrified face in the mirror.
Here I was, a week into my first big trip, and we were all about to go to jail in Egypt. I thought of running, but realised I wouldn’t get very far in shorts and a t-shirt, especially with my money belt containing my passport and all my cash safely under a pillow in our room.
I stayed in the toilet for about thirty minutes, experiencing many emotions, mentally running through explaining my stupidity to my family all the way to Midnight Express type scenarios involving evil Arab jailers… I fully expected the door to have been kicked in by angry cops who were going to drag me off for questioning. However, seeing as nothing happened, I crept back to our room.
There was still a crack of light coming from under the door, and I could hear the voices of my friends. When I opened the door they were quietly smoking another joint and dissecting what had just happened. The two men had knocked before opening the door, identifying themselves as policemen. At lightning speed, my friend John had slipped the papers and weed under his sleeping bag just as they poked their heads into the smoke-filled room.
“You are not smoking marijuana?” one of them asked.
“No, just cigarettes,” replied John with, according to the other two, enormous calm considering the circumstances. Fortunately he was a chain smoker and had a lit cigarette to wave at them as proof.
“In Egypt there is a new law. Smoking marijuana means twenty years in jail,” the other cop said. We knew this to be true as we had seen a poster stating as much in a couple of restaurants.
“No, it’s just cigarettes for us,” insisted John.
“Have a nice holiday. Welcome to Egypt,” they said, and closed the door.
Once they had departed, the three of them sat there in shock. The room had been so full of smoke that only a fool would have believed it was from a single cigarette. So, obviously, it was just a friendly warning. They had debated coming to fetch me, but thought it would be more amusing to leave me to stew in the toilets.
A couple of nights later we did a “Night in the Desert” which involved driving about ten miles inland from Dahab in a couple of trucks. Once a suitable spot was found, the three Arabs who had arranged the trip set about building a fire and making some food. While it cooked, we sat around, smoking endless amounts of shitty weed through a bong made from a shampoo bottle. In the two hours it took our food to cook, we became pretty wasted.
We ate ravenously, smoked more weed, and had many a laugh around the fire. Towards the end of the night, just as we were thinking of crawling into our sleeping bags to fall asleep under a star filled sky, the main man, Mustafa, made a confession. He was as wasted as we were, dancing around the fire in his cotton robe and turban; he told us that after he had sold us the weed when we first arrived in Dahab, he had then told his police friends where we were staying. He was cackling and laughing like a mad man. We were too full and too stoned to really comprehend what he was saying, or to do anything about it by this point in the proceedings, and Mustafa eventually walked around a sand dune with a large German girl and we didn’t see them until morning.
We left Dahab a few days later without getting in trouble with the police, and having smoked our way through the rest of the weed. We had learned something about taking precautions whilst getting high in foreign countries, a lesson that would serve us well as we continued on our way for the next six months. We had also learned that the Egyptians can be very strange people indeed. |
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