BETWEEN HOLIDAYS IN Dahab and Sharm El-Sheikh, Bedouin jewelry for sale in Khan El-Khalili, and a major bridge across the Nile named for the date of the last war fought there, the Sinai is sharply present in Cairo. At the same time, however, the peninsula remains something of a mystery to most residents of the Nile Valley.

The last two decades have seen some of the most dramatic developments in the Sinai’s history the explosion of the tourist industry on the east coast, an influx of workers from the valley (El-Wadi, a term local Bedouin often use derisively), international development programs, and a mega-irrigation project, to name a few.

It should hardly be surprising that the effects have been complex or that reactions to them remain mixed to this day, more than 20 years after the territory was returned to Egypt from Israeli occupation.

Improving on paradise

If, as is widely acknowledged, the Israelis were the first to see the potential of tourism on the east coast of Sinai, then the Egyptians, returning to the area in 1982, have exploited that potential with a vengeance. The two main tourist centers of Sharm El-Sheikh and Dahab have been sprawling outwards for two decades, gobbling up the surrounding landscape and covering the coast with a tightly interlocked patchwork of hotels and beachfront developments.

Silvia Dogliani/Egypt Today Sun-hungry Russian tourists come to Sharm in droves to bask on its beaches.

For most of this time, however, the two retained very different characters. Dahab was the hot and dusty preserve of an intensely cool, determinedly young and, as often as not, dreadlocked crowd of teenagers. Sharm, on the other hand, was where the better coiffed set hung out. Dahab was a place you traveled to by bus; Sharm had the airport. You went to Dahab to smoke up; down in Sharm, they sipped Chivas.

Hammada El-Tawil owns a dive center on El-Fanaar Street in Dahab. He came here 20 years ago when it was a palm-lined beach with a few huts and a makeshift bar-cum-restaurant called the Hard Rock Café. Intending to stay for a week, Hammada ended up trading in the Honda 750 he rode for a half share in the Hard Rock. He stayed on, serving up omelets and beer on the beach, for nine months.

Things, however, have changed since those days.

“The place was clean and people were clean,” he says. “They came for the nature, for the air and the sea; things are different now. There’s lots of cheating now. I’m not just talking about Egyptians here.”

Over the years, Dahab grew by accretion. The old Hard Rock Café closed down (though the structure was still around until a few years ago); a grocery store now stands on the site it occupied. The real change, say hotel operators, came in the mid-1990s, when rising prices in Sharm began to push the diving crowd north into the zone previously occupied by the hippies. With the better-heeled visitors came more hotels, more souvenir stores, bars, restaurants, and tour companies.

Mohsen Allam/Egypt Today Bedouin crafts produced by women in North Sinai have become increasingly commercialized. Locally made rugs, jewelry and embroidery are now readily available in markets nationwide; some producers are exporting with the help of NGOs.

Where once a walk along the water after dark meant stumbling along an unlit rocky track, now there is a neatly paved walkway lined with slightly incongruous metal lamps of the faux-Victorian variety. The popular snorkeling and diving spot known as the Blue Hole, once a half hour white-knuckle jeep ride away, is now five minutes down a smoothly paved road that goes almost the whole way to the parking lot.

With more money has also come more control and less rowdy fun. Some applaud the change.

Diaa Shawki, who runs the Cairo-based Red Sea Tours, says that “now a higher [class] of tourist is going to Dahab. You know how it was a center for hippies, and of course you know the problems mixing cultures, using drugs and stealing. But now it is very controlled.”

Hamada, however, decries the expansion’s effect on the local way of life.

“Fishermen have the sea and nothing more, and they are happy. Now the tourists come and there are no more fishermen and the Bedouins have sold their camels to buy jeeps and make safari trips everything has changed in Dahab, and it’s not for the best,” he says.

Mohsen Allam/Egypt Today St. Catherine’s monastery has morphed from a quiet pilgrimage site to a popular stop on the tourist trail.

More change seems to be on the way: Rumors abound of this or that sheikh from the Gulf coming in with 40, 50 or even 80 million euros to invest. You can see the effect it is having. In El-Assla, the Bedouin neighborhood on the north side of town, the camels may still snooze in dust between the houses, but the streets are being paved and straightened and cement curbs are being laid down.

Meanwhile, on the outskirts of town, men are hard at work paving new streets in the open desert.

Killing the goose?

Down to the south, the far tonier Sharm El-Sheikh home of the Four Seasons, the Grand Hyatt, the Mövenpick, and an ever expanding sprawl of restaurants, strip malls, dive shops and nightspots had much the same beginnings. Long-term residents remember the days in the early eighties when there were just two hotels.

“Back when the Israeli government left,” remembers one businessman “there was just the Marina Sharm and the Clifftop, and the rest was desert. No palm trees, no roads: one gas station and that was all.”

Tracy Lowe/Egypt Today What used to be Dahab’s Hard Rock Café, a makeshift hut-cum-restaurant.

Shawki, who was also in Sharm for the early days, remembers the gas station well. “It was a 12-hour drive from Tour [only about 100 kilometers away on the west coast] and when we got in we always had to knock on the door to wake him up to get benzene.”

Now, of course, the hotels stretch in a shimmering white band for more than 30 kilometers up the coast, and there is a constant airlift of tourists direct from Russia and Europe.

Opinions are mixed about the net benefits of so much tourism.

Working out of a cool office at the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Amin Shaer, a biologist who works in Ras Mohamed Protectorate (an administrative area that includes both the National Park and the shoreline in front of Sharm, created in 1983), says a balance has to be achieved between protecting the environment and allowing for tourism.

“We are trying to minimize the impact on the environment, and at the same time we are trying to make development work. We are not obstacles to development,” he argues, “but we are trying to protect the environment as well.”

Tracy Lowe/Egypt Today The former Dahab Hard Rock Café is now a grocery store.

Shaer points out that any new work carried out within the zone must first undertake an environmental impact assessment. The study must be approved by the EEAA before work can go forward. He admits however, that while they have the power to refuse proposals or modify them, there is little they can do proactively to protect the environment.

“Put yourself in our position,” Shaer says “our regulations are posted outside every hotel in Dahab, and we do lectures for all the people who work on the beach, but in the end, it is up to the hotel to protect its marine environment.”

One tour operator, who preferred not to be named, outlined a pragmatic approach to the issue that is as short-sighted as it is common.

“At least 50,000 people are living in Sharm, that means 50,000 people benefiting,” he says. “We cannot think of the future. In 20 years the coral might be dead. I do not know. Maybe in 10.”

But what will happen to the 50,000 jobs then?

Egypt Today Archives A lonley beach hut in Dahab defies the sweeping changes that have overcome what used to be an area popular with the more hippie (often dreadlocked) crowd. It now attracts a ‘higher’ class of tourists who flock there to dive in the infamous Blue Hole.

“Twelve thousand tourists a day are coming to Sharm. Not all of them are divers maybe just 3,000 a day are divers, so it will sooner or later just become a hotel resort. The nightlife is improving.”

Sherif Ghamrawy, an environmental activist and owner of the Basata resort north of Dahab, reacts strongly to this kind of “hit and run” approach to the business.

“It is a disaster; everyone wants to do business, fast business, and that’s not right. Everybody uses the word ‘sustainability,’ but they just use it to sell more.”

Ghamrawy started an NGO that has been collecting and recycling garbage between Taba and Nuweiba for about six years. The balance between development and tourism, he says, has not been well managed, “but we can still do something, it’s not too late. We don’t have to run after mass tourism the kind of people who just come for the sun and do not know where they are.

“We must choose the guests who come to the Sinai.”

Silvia Dogliani/Egypt Today Europeans flock to Sinai for diving and snorkeling.

Looking inward

Turning inland, away from the bright lights and the bustle of the coastal tourist strip, there is a whole different Sinai. Colder in the winter, wetter in the summer, the mountainous area around the town of Katriin remained relatively inaccessible until the Israelis withdrew in 1978.

Now connected to both Cairo and Sharm by a paved road, it has also attracted an increasing number of visitors over the last two decades. Most of the tourists come to visit the monastery and climb nearby Mount Sinai, the mountain where, it is said, Moses received the Ten Commandments from God, but a small number come to see the area itself and stay at a small, locally owned and operated eco-lodge.

Rather than being driven by private capital, developments in the mountains around the monastery have been given an enormous boost by a 6 million ($7.4 million) European Union-funded initiative to promote “sustainable development” in the area. The project, which was handed over to the EEAA in June 2003, established the area as a protectorate and included a number of programs designed to create local jobs at the same time as protecting the natural heritage.

The changes that it has brought have been no less significant than those on the coast, and their impact no easier to evaluate.

Iman L. Bastawisi, a social-anthropologist who worked on the project, remembers that when she first came to the area the only places to stay were the monastery’s guesthouse and the environmental research center the Israelis had built.

Now, she points out that along with secondary and primary schools, a hospital and a building for the municipal council, there are hotels with swimming pools to accommodate the tourists of which the EU estimates there were about 300,000 last year.

She’s hesitant, though, when it comes to whether the changes have been positive overall.

“It’s so difficult to say. If you’re talking about wildlife protection, or if you’re talking about people, or natural resources I saw ibex when I first went to St. Catherine’s in 1979, but I do not see them anymore.” She also cites a shortage of water, reflecting on the water consumption habits of those who have come from the Nile Valley to live in the relatively arid area, and the pressure on services imposed by an increasingly settled Bedouin population.

But John Granger, project manager for the EU program, is upbeat about the overall effect of the project on the lives of the Bedouin. He points out that after Egypt regained control of the area, the influx of workers from the Nile Valley had a negative effect on the locals, many of whom were seen as having collaborated with the Israelis for having stayed on after 1967 and, to some extent, of having benefitted from development projects set up during the occupation.

“Our experience is that the Bedouin were largely marginalized and had very little control over their lives,” Granger says. “There were very few services in terms of health and education, but that has changed over the last couple of years.”

Granger, however, has his doubts about how well matters have been carried through by the government, pointing out that the website set up for the project has now been shut down due to a shortage of cash to pay for its maintenance. Representatives of the EU in Cairo admit that officials seems to have had problems allocating sufficient resources to the program.

Some point to the visitor center as emblematic of how the government has followed up with the EU’s work. More than a year after it was handed over, it still has not been officially opened. Others, however, prefer the example of the eco-lodge. Set up by the EU near the town of Katriin with the advice of Basata’s Ghamrawy, who trained the staff and advised them on the development of a management plan, the lodge is now operating under the ownership and management of local Bedouin.

Forging a compromise

Meanwhile, the monastery is also struggling to cope with the changes of the last 20 years, with the flood of tourists creating both a problem of over-crowding and of overt commercialization in what is ostensibly a place of pilgrimage and spirituality.

Father Justin joined St. Catherine’s as a monk 10 years ago, but first visited in 1978, while the area was still occupied.

“It was just gravel roads then,” he remembers, “and nothing around the monastery no houses.” A couple of days later, however, on the way out of town, he saw “about 20 buses heading for the monastery. Even then there were lots of visitors.”

One of the big changes came three years ago with the first direct Moscow-Sharm charter flights. Many of the packages offered to sun-hungry Muscovites escaping the glum Russian winter include an excursion to St. Catherine’s. Italians, served by similar direct flights to Sharm, also come in large numbers.

“In the winter we get over a 1,000 visitors a day, and on holidays much more than a thousand,” Father Justin says. He admits that it has been a challenge, but insists that the monastery is coping.

“In the past, the challenge for the monks was simply to find their daily food. That has changed now, but in its place has come the challenge of maintaining the monastery’s spirituality [But] in contrast to the way that the Bedouin’s life has been turned upside down, the monastery has been able to maintain its traditional way of life.”

The EU, meanwhile, plans to stay involved in the South Sinai with a 64 million ($79 million) development program for the whole region. The program is slated to tackle issues from environmental awareness to watershed management and marketing alternative destinations to relieve the pressure on the coastal areas.

Watch your step

The other road to Cairo from the east coast of the Sinai runs south out of Sharm. As it carves into the red granite hills that once guarded the area’s southern approach, you can see the slowly fading remnants of fortified trenches cut into the rock, reminders of the years when the peninsula was hotly contested territory.

Juxtaposed against the recent memory of five-star pampering, they are also reminders of just how much things have changed.

A more hazardous reminder of these days are the landmines, laid down by European armies during the Second World War and all sides in the wars fought over this territory since, that make off-piste excursions in the coastal areas of the Sinai a matter of Russian roulette tourism. With an estimated 5.5 million mines and other assorted bits of unexploded ordinance still littered about the Eastern Desert and the Sinai itself, it is hardly surprising that accidents occur. In 1995, for example, a honeymooning couple was blown up, and two more tourists were killed in 1999. In a move that might seem ironic in light of their experiences, Egypt continues to refuse to sign on to the Ottawa Convention, which bans the use, production, or stockpiling of landmines. Instead, it has insisted on its right to deploy these indiscriminately lethal devices and, according to Landmine Monitor, an international NGO that studies the production and use of land mines, maintains a large stockpile of them.

The road loops down past Ras Mohamed National Park, which covers the southern tip of the Sinai and includes the narrow spit of land that is Ras Mohammed itself. The area was developed in the early 1980s with a 2.5 million ($3.08 million) grant from the European Union into a western-style natural park, with carefully defined roads, clearly marked no-go zones, and a small camping area. There is a small hut at the entrance where visitors go through a brief indoctrination in the principles of environmental conservation, the necessity of which is underscored by the number of 4X4 tracks in evidence on the beaches around the park.

The park faces the same sort of pressures that the rest of the area, including Sharm El-Sheikh and Dahab, are experiencing. Snorkellers come out from Sharm by the busload to wade into the water near the tip of the point, and divers come down by boat. Altogether, between 2002 and 2003, according to the EEAA, the park received a quarter of a million visitors.

With just 100 rangers to cover the entire coastline between here and Taba, one wonders what the future holds for the corals and the mangrove swamps.

Bridge over troubled waters

It was along this line that the October 1973 offensive that began to push the Israeli Army off the Sinai was launched. These days, the canal is crossed by numerous ferries. Dark green, their car decks pungent in the heat with the smell of diesel and donkey manure, the ferries hang about the edges of the canal waiting for the chance to slip between the tankers and bulk carriers that slide by like floating mountains.

Compared to the hectic and very public changes on the east coast and in southern Sinai, change seems to be coming more slowly in the north, but it is no less fundamental for that.

Just north of Ismailia, the enormous Peace Bridge rises out of the surrounding palm trees in a curve that is as graceful as it is incongruous in a land of water buffalo-drawn plows and mango trees. In its shadow, there is an old army base where soldiers sit atop the minibus-sized floats of 30-year old pontoon bridges, banging disconsolately in the sticky heat at patches of rust. A little further north again is the place where the Salaam Canal dips underneath the canal to bring the water of the Nile Valley to North Sinai.

Though the project has been under planning since the 1960s, the link underneath the Suez was not completed until 1997. The Salaam Canal is expected to provide enough water to irrigate around 500,000 acres of desert as part of a grand scheme of land reclamation and resource exploitation in North Sinai.

Many, however, question the cost of the project. At $1.5 billion it has not been cheap, and environmentalists have their concerns. They worry about the effect that the water, only half of which will come from the Nile (the balance being made up of drainage collected on the way to the desert) will have on the virgin lands of the Sinai, as well as the health of those who eat the produce.

Karim Shalabi, a water consultant with the Ministry of Irrigation, steers a middle ground on these concerns. The water is not potable, he admits, but he argues it will be safe for agriculture.

“It can be used for crops that do not transfer pollution there are not many vegetables like that, but it is safe for oranges, nuts and for fisheries,” he argues.

One thing is certain about the Salaam Canal, however: It is changing the face of northwest Sinai. Satellite pictures clearly show the spread of vegetation on the eastern side of the canal, year by year turning what was golden brown desert into arable land.

and not a drop to drink

The desert in North Sinai is, at least in the summer months, extraordinarily hot hot enough to pop a ballpoint pen and make a camera too hot to hold. Some of the driest and least hospitable parts of the Sinai are beyond the reach of piped-in water

The landscape changes quickly as you move away from the canal zone. First there is an unpleasant, Mad Max-style, last fringe of industry where high walled factory compounds stand out starkly against the skyline. Then there is a gas station where a couple of skinny desert dogs lie panting in the heat and the stained concrete smells of diesel fuel.

Then, suddenly, the desert. Golden sand dunes snake across seemingly endless vistas and acacia trees stand alone above a perfect silhouette of themselves.

The Bedouin who live here tend to concentrate in pockets around mountains, toughing out the four or five low-rain years by herding sheep and goats and waiting for the precipitation required to farm small patches of arable land. Changes in their lifestyle may not be as obvious as those affecting their counterparts on the east coast, but they may be as deep and long-lasting.

Government efforts in the region have focused on managing the scarce water resources and encouraging the Bedouin population to remain in one place. Mostafa Saleh, an environmentalist who works as a consultant on development issues involving Bedouin populations, has his doubts about them.

“Government agencies always talk about settling nomads, about ‘civilizing’ these people, but the Bedouin mode of life is the most efficient way of using the resources If people settle and they still depend on the same economic base herding sheep and goats they will definitely over-exploit the resources.”

Others argue that water harvesting (collecting and saving rain when it is abundant for use in dry spells) is a traditional method of dealing with the desert environment.

Shalabi says that “budget wise, [water harvesting] doesn’t require much it’s labor intensive and it needs a good knowledge of the area, but it saves a scarce resource.”

He sounds a warning note, however, about other techniques, such as deep wells, noting, “A lot of agriculture in the Sinai is based on ground water. Sustainability is still being studied and regulations haven’t kicked in yet. Sources are unknown and it’s basically unregulated.”

The second type of development in the northern Sinai has been the commercialization of Bedouin crafts. Both NGOs and private enterprise have attempted to establish channels through which these products, produced by women in the communities, can reach the market.

The availability of Bedouin rugs, jewelry and embroidery is testimony to the success of these programs. Muhammed Amin, who has experience with both private and NGO-based marketing schemes, is doubtful, however, about how much the programs have benefited the Bedouin themselves.

The Bedouin, he says still “have no education, bad health, and they don’t trust anymore. So many people come through, from government officials to journalists, to take pictures and write reports and give them a croissant breakfast, but when you come down to earth, I have not seen things happening.”

Asya Elahi, a consultant working with the Egypt Craft Center, an organization that works with 40 different groups around Egypt, counters that the programs have had a positive effect. She points out that the income generated by craft groups tends to stay in the family, where it is spent on day-to-day needs or saved for a daughter’s dowry. She also stresses that the initiative tends to come from the producers themselves and that outsiders can offer more than croissants.

Referring to the Al-Tawila group, which produces handcrafted Bedouin goods, she says that representatives from the Craft Center “give them training, visit them to give them feedback on products. These women now have a source of income which is their own income that they have control over.”

Over on the coast, meanwhile, the town of Al-Arish, part resort, part staging post for those trying to cross into Gaza through Rafah, has the timeless feel of a border town. This feeling, however, is deceptive. Serving internal tourism the pristine beach is popular with holidaying Egyptians, but virtually unknown in Europe the town, which 10 years ago did not have a decently paved main road, has been stretching west and east along the coast for years.

“It gets bigger every year,” says local waiter Mostafa Mahmoud. “for 10 years it has been growing.” But he admits that the downturn in the Egyptian economy has recently hurt business.

Still, he says, things have changed a lot. “My father fished. That was all there was.” He pauses, looking at the Cairene family eating and playing on the nearby beach. “Now we have all of this.”  et