Suez crisis

Day 4 - Mount Sinai and Suez

After an hour of increasingly intemperate battle reason lay bloodied and exhausted on the floor and rules had triumphed. I'm not familiar with countries that have a culture of mistrust in individual decision-making. It seems strange to me that the authorities in these countries think that multitudinous overlapping and sometimes contradictory rules are the key to maintaining control. As if the whole thing will spiral into chaos if a person is empowered to assess a situation and determine the appropriate course of action by themselves. The rules-based order probably coincides with patriarchal, elder-venerating societies for whom top-down control is the only control. But what do I know? I've never used a successful military career as a springboard to start a coup against the first democratically elected government in my country in 50 years, only through lack of opportunity though. My unfamiliarity does in no way reduce the blinding frustration when you reach one of these metaphorical, and in this case literal, roadblocks. It was midnight at Suez. There had been no indication of impending trouble at first. It was the usual drill, everyone off the bus, bag searches, passport checks. We'd been through all this already on this bus from Sharm el-Sheikh and thought nothing of it. After the previous day's scuba diving we'd made the pilgrimage to Mount Sinai. Is it a pilgrimage if you don't believe in the associated deity? No, probably not. Anyway back to the previous day. A small bus picked us up from the centre of town and we were soon at its outskirts. The true scale of what constitutes 'Sharm el-Sheikh' became apparent as we passed mile after mile of holiday resorts, occasionally stopping at one to load people onto the bus. The resorts eventually ran out and empty desert stretched to the horizon on both sides. The only thing that broke the expanse was military bases that appeared with a curious regularity. In what was probably not a coincidence we'd fallen into convoy with a number of other tourist buses and were book-ended by military vehicles. White privilege doesn't usually extend to an escort so maybe the internet could explain (and if it couldn't then no-one could). To Google I went and...well...the Sinai peninsula has some history to it it seems. And 'history' in the middle-east is spelled 'v-i-o-l-e-n-c-e'. There was war over this wedge of land in 1956, 1967 and 1973 and lasting peace between Egypt and Israel was only established in 1979. Israel had withdrawn and dismantled all its settlements except Sharm el-Sheikh by 1982. The Sinai is now divided in zones that dictate the level of military presence as the high-quality map below shows.

1. Between the Suez Canal and line A Egypt is permitted a mechanised infantry division with a total of 22,000 troops.
2. Between line A and line B Egypt is permitted four border security battalions to support the civilian police.
3. Between line B and the Egypt–Israel border only the Multinational Force and Observers (peacekeepers) and the Egyptian civilian police are permitted.
4. Between the Egypt–Israel border and line D Israel is permitted four infantry battalions.

Our route appeared to be taking us from zone A to zone C and west to zone B, quite the tour. Wikipedia advised me that "Since the early 2000s, Sinai has been the site of several terror attacks". Righto. It offered more information on the 2004 Sinai bombings, 2005 Sharm el-Sheikh bombings, 2006 Dahab bombings and 2012 Sinai Attack (they must have run out of bombs for that one). All this added a frisson of excitement that was not being provided by the flat, lifeless landscape but we arrived after a couple of hours and without incident. It was about 5AM and I was ascending. This was the sort of stupid sunrise-seeking shit that I usually leave to other tourists but here we were. We reached a small plateau and I gladly caught my breath among the inevitable gaggle of vendors. The temperature had dropped precipitously and Mike decided to negotiate the hire of a thick blanket that smelled distinctly of camel.

I had wheezed myself up the biblically epic rock with the tour guide repeatedly and humiliatingly asking if he could take my bag. I'm sure he thought I was just another pre-diabetic westerner quietly cussing the lack of an escalator but the exhaustion had caught me by surprise. I reasoned that three dives and one long drive dodging terrorists had taken their toll. But half an hour later pride had gotten me up Moses's favourite mountain and the rising sun crept a soft pink over the sharp edges of the surrounding hills. It wasn't necessary to believe that Moses received the ten commandments on tablets up here (give me 40 days and 40 nights and a chisel and I could knock up something similar) to appreciate the stark grandeur of this place. It's history did soak the dry ground but the truth of it was lost in the dust and, besides, what people believe happened has always been far more relevant than what actually happened. Would you believe me if I said I saw a UFO from the top of Mount Sinai as the sun rose on a December morning? Is that more or less plausible than experiencing the finger of God tracing out his guidebook for life? I cannot tell you much more than I saw a small light near the horizon travelling towards me in a south-westerly direction. It then jerked suddenly and with great apparent speed eastwards and disappeared entirely. A bird? A plane? Woke Superman? They do say God moves in mysterious ways...

It was 11PM at Suez and again we waited for the same old process to play out. The border control agent looks sternly at us and then flips through passports once and then twice. Suspicion is the default for these kinds of people. It is a predisposition that shapes their career choice or does the career choice shape them? No matter really, everyone standing in front of them is a terrorist or an illegal immigrant or miscellaneous ne'er-do-well until proven otherwise. He glances up again waiting for our phoney personas to crumble under his withering stare, for our fake passports to fall apart at the seams. Stand firm and we'll be through this cross examination in a moment. Mike and I had form for not cracking under interrogation. But then the silence is broken.

There is a problem.

Hmm this was new.

You don't have the right stamp.

The Israeli occupation and the repeated terrorist attacks which had provided an alarmingly exciting theoretical threat mere hours before had suddenly coalesced into a vast wall in front of us, again metaphorical *and* literal. The stamp in our passports, he explained, only allowed us to travel around the Sinai peninsula and no further. There was a hard border between the Sinai and the rest of the country, for all intents and purposes we weren't in Egypt anymore Toto. Or had ever been. I remained calm because we still had our trump cards to play.

Worry not my good man for we have a pair of shiny new visas issued by your government which here, as you may observe, permit travel to all parts of your fine country.

These visas would supersede the limited stamp mistakenly given to us by the immigration officer at the airport.

This is the wrong stamp.

Yeah heard that bit guv'nor, now look at this visa...

And so commenced a battle of wills. The irresistible force of our reason against the immovable object of the border control agent that stood in our way. Or put another way, the immovable object of the two of us refusing to get on another bus and, as suggested, go back to Sharm to get the stamp versus the irresistible force of the now numerous men standing around with machine guns. I (phone) called for reinforcements in the form of the British Foreign Office. They'd know what to do. Their response was to the effect of 'Egyptians are Egyptian-ing old boy, bad luck.' By this point we had managed to delay not just our bus but also the bus of a guy who spoke both Arabic and English fluently and was tenacious in his desire to help. We scaled the hierarchy of the Sinai border control organisation from youths with the look of roadmen to your middle-aged salaryman with a bald patch and bad shoes until we reached a serious guy with a serious leather jacket and a roll-neck evocative of a cop in seventies New York, El-Serpico. He made the now-familiar observation that it was the wrong stamp so we went with our now-standard reply -

We want to talk to your manager.

We'd Karen-ed our way up the chain for about an hour now with the thought that eventually we'd reach someone with enough authority and ennui to just wave us through rather than deal with this tedium.

There is no-one else.

The way he said this, with finality yet also possessed with the wit to be sympathetic, broke our resistance. His eyes told me that he knew the absurdity of the situation but the rules were as if Moses had carried down an eleventh commandment - 'Thou shalt have the right passport stamp'. I nodded, looked up to the heavens and walked slowly away into the night.