IBRAHIM HASSAN IS A C*NT

Sorry mum, but he really is. It's a long story, so you'd better start reading now.

Getting into Jordan was a predictable shit storm. I suspect Moses had less trouble crossing the Red Sea. In fact I’m starting to believe the only reason he parted the waters at all was in order to avoid the inevitable six-day wait for the Judean People’s Ferry Service.

We set off for the ferry at 4am in the hope that if we made it to the terminal before everyone else it would be harder for the operators to overlook our claims to passage. The ferry from Noueibah to Aquaba is the safest and most direct route from the African continent to the Middle East that doesn’t involve getting on a plane. It’s also one of the cheapest and thus the tightest bottleneck on the pilgrimage trail for those travelling from the Islamic states of Northern African to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. The day of our travel, September 19, was also the twentieth day of Ramadan and peak season for Muslims making a journey that, according to their faith, they must complete at least once in their lifetime.

The northern most wedge of Red Sea coast belongs to Israel, which is somewhat reluctant to let Islamic pilgrims use its resort town of Ehliad as a thoroughfare. On top of that Saudi Arabia frequently refuses entry to anyone whose passport is stamped by Israel. That effectively closes the overland route, which means that for those who can’t afford to fly, their only remaining option is to take a ferry and, as Saudi Arabia has no open port on the Western finger of the Red Sea, the only feasible destination from Egypt is Aquaba in Jordan.

This geopolitical fence watching has created an effective monopoly for the operators of the Red Sea ferries and, as with all monopolies, customer service has inevitably suffered. Ticketing is somewhat haphazard and it is traditional during the busy times to sell tickets with little regard for the number of births actually available on the ferries. They don’t overcrowd the vessels – that’s a lesson they learned the hard way a few years ago when one of the ferries sank – they just sell the tickets and let mayhem ensue. If you can’t get a seat on your ferry, you just have to wait for the next one to come along and if you miss that one, then you have to wait for the next. And so on.

Fortunately, due to our early arrival and a few white lies directed toward the Egyptian tourist police we were not only the first in line but among the first on the boat. I picked my way over and around the faithful, past those in the white flowing robes of Egypt and the more exotic looking Black galebeiahs of Libya, Morocco and Sudan. They had arrived in overburdened Japanese sedans and air-conditioned coaches and now sat in clusters in the hallways and the cabins of the ferry. A friend had saved a seat in an air-conditioned compartment near the stern. Exhausted from the early start I curled up in my chair and after a few minutes drifted off to sleep. I dozed on and off for about three hours, occasionally woken by the guttural sound of pilgrims animatedly talking to each other in Arabic and the sporadic nudge and bump of a hip on my shoulder as someone lost their balance while wading past the other passengers who had taken up residence on the floor around my seat. Every now and again an announcement over the public address system would penetrate my slumber. They seemed to be demanding something of a man named Ibrahim Hassan. He must have been as disinterested in these demands as I as the request was repeated often. On one occasion I was bludgeoned awake by the sound of a fat middle-aged women, standing less than a metre from where I was sitting, screaming into a mobile phone, her volume so magnificently loud I began to wonder if there was any need for the phone at all. It seemed to me it would have been both cheaper and more effective is she’d just opened up one of the port side windows and directed her enormous voice back across the Sinai, toward home. Satellite technology just couldn’t compete.

I felt slightly aggrieved by this woman’s intrusion on my sleep but comforted myself with the thought that at least I was on the ferry and on my way to Jordan. I can generally forgive anyone anything when I’m travelling provided I’m making ground toward my goal. But her conversation was long and loud so I gave up on sleep and got up to check on our progress through the window. I expecting to gaze out across the deep blue of the Red Sea, perhaps catching sight of the glistening body of a bottle nosed dolphin as it played gracefully on the powerful surge of water curling off the ferry’s bow. I peered out in expectation. My expectation was not fulfilled. We were still in port. Not only that but there was no signs of progress at all. The ropes were still tied and there was no throb coming from the engines. We were in exactly the same position as we had been when I first boarded the vessel three hours before.

The only sign of activity from the crew was the sound of the tannoy crackling into life. I couldn’t understand a word but a name rung out with bell like clarity; Ibrahim Hassan. He was still absent without leave and apparently we weren’t going anywhere without him. After another forty minutes languishing in the Noueibah port doldrums two bursars appeared in our cabin, screaming in Arabic for Ibrahim Hassan. “Ibrahim Hassan” they yelled, follwed by “Ibrahim Hassan” again. Some pilgrims down the front of our birth responded with a quizzical “Ibrahim Hassan?” of their own. The bursars nodded and yelled “Ibrahim Hassan” back. Every soul in the room leaned forward in expectation. “Ibrahim Hassan? La” the passengers yelled back. He wasn’t there. The whole room, which had been seriously excited by the prospect of the discovery of this mysterious man, was visibly deflated. The bursars moved on. I began to despair.

They say it’s always darkest just before dawn and after another thirty minutes Ibrahim Hassan was either located or abandoned and the vessel weighed anchor for Aquabar. But the dawn offered by our departure proved false. The distance across the Red Sea from Dahab to the Saudi coast is only 17 kilometres. The ferry trip to Aquabar is no more than 60; a journey that should take no more than an hour and a half. It shouldn’t, but it did. At 9pm, after nearly seven hours on the boat we were still at sea. We reached port about thirty minutes later, where we were held for another hour and a half. It took us another hour to alight from the boat and clear customs, by which time it was almost midnight.

We made camp, made dinner and I made to get some much needed sleep on a chez lounge by the pool. It seemed a good place to sleep; cool, elevated, sheltered from the morning sun. After a vigorous spray of insect repellent all seemed in readiness for a well deserved night’s sleep. It didn’t come. Just as I was dozing off to sleep the camp attendants switched on the television situated in the café just metres from where I was sleeping and started to flick aimlessly through the channels, alighting here and there for thirty seconds or so before they lost interest and moved on in search of more captivating offerings. The constant change of background noise had a startling effect on my restful state. I would just begin to doze off when a channel change and the sudden shift in sonic scenery would jolt me awake again. After about the sixth time this happened I started to hallucinate and a familiar voice began to echo through the fog of my weariness. It was a voice from somewhere in my teenage past, familiar and warm but for some unfathomable reason short and irritated too. “Just pick a channel and stay on it, or off it goes!” I heard. Where had I heard that before, I thought, and why did it resonate so strongly now? Before I could come up with a satisfactory answer the camp attendants went to bed and I fell into peaceful slumber. The next morning I woke up and hadn’t learnt a thing.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson