The drive to Dahab is as much a reason to make the journey as the town itself. The long, winding road through the canyon down to the sea is, for my money, the most dramatic scenery in all of Egypt. Impossibly tall cliffs in reds and browns expand and shrink around sparse stands of palm trees and the only occasional sign of life.

At the end of this road is Dahab, which has long been considered the poor cousin of the glitzier Sinai resort towns such as Sharm El-Sheikh. Dahab’s quiet seaside cafes and restaurants are a stark contrast to the casinos and sprawling resorts of its richer neighbors.

It is also one of the few areas of the Sinai where the local population seems to be getting a fair deal. In Dahab, many (if not most) of the hotels, camps and organized tours are still owned and operated by members of the Muzeina Bedouin tribe whose home village is Assalah, at the north end of town. The campgrounds, low-budget hotels and guest houses run by the Bedouin in other towns, most recently Nuweiba, were bulldozed and the land given to outside developers. In Sharm El-Sheikh, authorities began building a wall with the express purpose of keeping out the local Bedou.

Many experts claim the resultant economic marginalization is one of the roots of the recent violence in the Sinai, violence that most recently erupted in Dahab. This past April, bombs were set off nearly simultaneously in three locations in the early evening along the crowded boardwalk.

More than 20 people were killed, most of them locals, and the number of wounded stretched into the hundreds.

By the next morning, cafés that were in the direct path of the bombings were reopening. By that afternoon, hundreds, possibly thousands, of people had gathered on the boardwalk to protest the bombings. The crowd was mostly local Bedouin and workers from the Nile Valley, but enough tourists were mixed in to create such visible anomalies as a young Bedouin girl — fully veiled — holding one side of a banner with the other side supported by a blond woman wearing a pair of shorts and a bikini top.

Kim Piper Peace demonstrations drew support from locals and tourists alike.

That same day, I drove to the hospital in Sharm El-Sheikh to talk with the survivors of the attacks. The mood was mostly defiant. Even those who could leave to go back to lives in other parts of Egypt, or even other parts of the world, were vowing to return to Dahab and carry on.

The defiant mood in Dahab itself began to abate after the protests, as people there began to worry about their livelihoods should the tourists decide to stay away. And for a while they did. For months after the bombings, the numbers of tourists kept declining.

Finally, last October, the numbers bounced back and even surpassed the year before. When I returned to Dahab near the end of the summer, the last of the damaged shops had been reopened for business. I even saw some of the same people I had met in the hospital in Sharm El-Sheikh, the ones swearing they would return.

A young man who lost his best friend during the attacks, and who has since returned to work, summed it up for me: “These people [the terrorists] will do what they do, but whatever they do they cannot ruin our place. If they blow it up again, we will build it back again. There are more of us than them.”

The Israeli government recently issued another travel advisory for its citizens regarding the Sinai, claiming that four fugitives were on the loose and planning attacks on tourist destinations. The men reportedly have loose connections with the group that has been blamed for the bombings in Dahab as well as those in Taba and Sharm El-Sheikh, the so-called Al-Tawhid wa Al-Jihad. A similar warning had been issued by Israeli security forces before the Dahab bombings.

Matt Moyer Dahab’s natural tranquility was disrupted, but the town recovered its composure quickly.

Despite the death and capture of many of the people responsible, despite the deployment of some of the region’s best security forces and intelligence officers in the area, another attack isn’t out of the question. But I know this: If it were to take place in Dahab, it would surely be a small and tragic hiccup from which the victims will recover as quickly as possible.

This bounce-back mentally and the persevering attitude is perhaps my favorite thing about Dahab. I like the drive. I like the town itself and the people I’ve met there. But most of all, I like being around the feeling that whatever ‘they’ do in the end, “There are more of us than them.” et