Surprise! It's Israel

After a nice couple days at the beach, we left Dahab to take the boat back across the Red Sea to Aqaba to catch our flight to Dubai. We thought the boat left at 3pm, so we got to the ferry terminal at 2:00. But, after several confusing arguments in Arabic/broken English, it turned out the boat was either sold out or had left or wasn't running. What was clear though, was that we had a flight out of Jordan at 9am the next morning and we weren't getting on a boat to get there.

One of the quirks of travel in the Middle East is that since many countries do not recognize Israel, they do not allow Israeli citizens to enter their country. While this is not surprising, what was surprising to me was that they also do not allow foreigners who have visited Israel (and who have an Israeli stamp in their passport) to enter their country. The UAE is one such country.

The natural solution to getting to Jordan was to go by road, through Israel. The problem was, we needed to get into the UAE the next day.

We had read on the Internet and heard informally that most of the time that, as an American, if you explain to the Israeli customs agents that you would prefer that they do not stamp your passport so you can travel more in the Middle East they will stamp a piece of paper instead. Though our guidebook described rogue customs agents who will "accidentally" stamp passports anyway. If this happened to us, we would be stuck and not able to join the first half of our study trip. Still, we saw no alternative, so we headed for Israel.

We took a cab, a little nervously, for about an hour from the ferry terminal to the Israel border. There, we went through the Egyptian exit procedures, and walked across the no-man's land into Israel. There, we went through some pretty intense security screening and made it up to the customs agent. There, I asked her not to stamp our passport. It was a little trickier than I expected - she asked a number of questions about why we didn't want our passport stamped, where we were going in Israel (we had no idea, so we said the Holiday Inn at the first town, Eilat, across the border). Then she called her supervisor. By this point, we were getting pretty nervous, but in the end, they stamped a piece of paper and let us through.

Since we successfully made it into Israel and had already spent some time in Aqaba, we decided to spend the night there. We actually did go to the Holiday Inn in downtown, which had some open rooms. We walked all around downtown Eilat - it was really nice, much wealthier than the similar towns on the Jordanian and Egyptian side of the gulf. We went into a big nice mall (with extensive security screening) where I bought some clean socks, some outdoor shopping areas with some decorated cows and pigs, to a great Israeli diner - to fill a somewhat humorous stereotype, we saw no less than 4 old Jewish women send their dinners back for being undercooked - and then to a nice Irish Pub to watch some soccer. Pretty sharp contrast from the rest of the Middle East, but pretty fun.


The next morning we got up early, took a cab to the Israeli/Jordanian border, avoided an exit stamp, walked through an even bigger No-Man's Land, then took a cab to the Aqaba airport for our flight to Dubai. A fun, though definitely unexpected side trip.