“Come one, join us! We are going camping in Ras Mohamed for the Eid Holidays!” exclaimed a dear friend of mine a few weeks ago, acknowledging incredulously my intention to vegetate in a deserted Cairo for a whole gloomy week. As the days passed, I realized I had to choose between two options: staying in Cairo, a city abandoned except for its street males, whose attitudes tend to deteriorate during Eid, or unearthing my bikini, flip-flops and deformed straw hat to join a merry group of ten campers in a supposedly “superb, natural area.” I decided to say to hell with my extremely limited camping experience and become the 11th camper. The last time I camped I was a toddler and got so excited to sleep in a tent with my parents that I told them stories all night long. We never went camping again. Anyway, as soon as we got there I noticed that my companions were experts in the art of camping, and my worries quickly dispersed. The trip necessitated some preparation, as the camping area in the Ras Mohamed National Park is blessed with an absence of shopping possibilities. Some serious cooking took place a few days ahead of the trip, one preparing a giant yummy couscous; another a huge ratatouille which made me realize that French campers don't go for simple sandwiches. We left Cairo at the first lights of dawn, and drove for roughly seven hours until we reached the entrance of the park. We paid the very affordable camping fees, amounting to LE5 per head per night, and the magic began instantaneously. Ahead of us lay a long straight road, bordered with dramatically arid lands that stretched until the calm, deep blue sea. The dry and slender Ras Mohamed peninsula is situated at the very southernmost tip of Sinai. Declared a park in 1983, it immediately struck us how the dry land area of the park seemed to belong to the marine world. The park offers an astonishing variety of fossils embedded in the surrounding limestone that is essentially nothing else than a fossilized coral reef. Along the shore, many small creeks hidden from one another appeared and we only had to decide which one seemed convenient to host us for a few days. In order to prevent alien colonization of our beloved spot, we scattered the tents, the picnic blankets, the awning and the snorkeling material all over the area, which rapidly resembled a colorful refugee camp. Making camp involves feverish activity, technical vocabulary and engineering skills that I obviously lack. While they were all aptly building the green awning to protect us from the sun during the hottest hours of the day, I was standing helplessly with a rope in my hand, not knowing what to do next. “You've never been camping before?” asked one of the most experienced camper of the gregarious bunch, with astonishment. Once the camp was installed, we all put on our not-so-sexy jellyfish shoes, our blue/orange/green masks and snorkels, and rushed to the clear, deliciously refreshing waters of the Red Sea. Blue-spotted rays, fat gamers, colorful Picasso fish and jelly anemones seemed to have prepared a fantastically aesthetic show only to ravish our senses. The coral reef was blooming with pink, yellow and green corals, in various shapes and sizes, with schools of colorful fish frolicking around in a graceful and sumptuous ballet. As the day passed, my courageous fellow campers moved the awning to follow the path of the sun. The lazy afternoon under the restricted shade involved tons of reading, napping and talking, as well as preparing for the evening fire and dinner. As we were almost living as cavemen on our lone beach, men naturally took charge of starting the fire and extracting beers from the numerous coolers, while the women lighted the butane and cut vegetables. Night comes early in Ras Mohamed and already at 5PM we were plunged into darkness, only enlightened by the sanguine flames of the fire and a couple of candles planted in the sand. Our expert camper brought his iPod and speakers and we danced around the fire until late in the night--by late I mean 10PM. I was sharing a small-sized tent with a very close friend, and I wonder whether we had ever been so close before. Once wrapped in a warm and cozy sleeping bag, I lied on the hard soil inside the tent and realized that I was stretching the plastic fabric on both sides, with my head making a bump and my feet intending to pass the zipped door. If you decide to go camping, keep in mind that the nights are short, and do not hesitate to nap in the afternoons. At 6AM the next morning, everyone started painfully emerging from their sleep, as the sun was already beating down on the tents' canvas. The extraction from the tent after a meager sleep constituted the first ordeal of the day, followed by another one which consisted of preparing breakfast in an area where sand is king. Toasts, butter, nutella and South American coffee sufficed to cheer everybody up, and prepare us to pay other visits to the nearby fantastic seabed. Swimming became our hygienic ritual, as the only showers available were too far from our spot. And to be honest, a shared lack of hygiene decreases the hygiene necessity. None of us seemed to be missing their Dove soap or shampoo. After three days away from civilization, we regretfully left our camping spot to pursue our trip in the Sinai, pledging to each other we would return soon.
