Welcome to Israel!

Baggy of eye and saggy of face, I drag myself out of bed, still feeling the impact of farewell drinks the night before, and gear myself to begin the godawful process that is getting my spawn out of bed, and packing.

Our possessions seem to have multiplied, like replicating amoebas, into every nook and cranny of the implausibly large house we’ve occupied for the last month or so. I’m going to miss our friends. I’m going to miss diving. I’m going to miss Dahab.

And I’m not in the slightest bit looking forward to Israeli security at the Taba border.

Pretty much every previous visit to Israel has involved some hideous encounter with Israeli security – on one occasion, a friend and I actually missed a flight after being taken into separate rooms and questioned separately about what we’d been doing there.

We were pretty vague on the topic at the time. And I am even vaguer now.

Top tip for handling Israeli security? Know what you’ve been doing for the last fortnight…

“Like I said, we went to a party.”

“What else? Did you go to Bethlehem? Jerusalem? Masada?”

“No. We went to a party and hung out in Tel Aviv. And then we went to Dahab.”

“So you came all the way to Israel and you did not visit Jerusalem?”

“Umm, yeah, I guess…”

“Where was the party?”

“I don’t know! In the desert somewhere? We went in a car…”

“Which desert?”

“I don’t know! Danny Rampling was playing…”

“Did you meet anybody?”

“Well, yeah, there was this Russian soldier…”

This time, I come with the added bonus of Lebanon stamps in my passport, a piece of Middle East travel magic that, I’ve heard, pretty much guarantees five or six hours of interrogation and may result in one being refused admission altogether. Gah.

I open Zac’s door. A pair of wide eyes stare up at me from the computer on which he has been gaming. Clearly, all night.

“What the FUCK?” I shout. It may be a godawful hour in the morning, but it’s never too early for a little shouty time. “What the fuck have you been doing?!”

“Wait!” he says. “Let me explain.”

“Explain WHAT?” I say. “We’re looking at five hours of interrogation on the Taba border, you know we need to get up early, and you’ve been up all night, gaming?”

“No! I hate long bus rides. So I just thought if I stayed up all night, then I’d be guaranteed to sleep on the bus.” He segues, neatly, into a mode of heroic self-pity. “It’s actually been quite hard work staying up this late, but I’ve done it.”

I give him the death stare. “The bus ride to the border is under four hours,” I say.

“WHAT?” he says. “I thought it was ten.”

“Nuh-uh,” I say. “Four. Tops. Look at a map. Cairo’s ten hours. Taba’s barely four. Now get up, brush your teeth, pack your bags and eat some breakfast.”

“Oh NO!” he says.

Apparently, no less a personage than the director of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, was turned away from Israel and put on a plane straight back whence he came after cutting up rough with Israeli airport security. Zac is not at his best on no sleep, and has a history of undiplomatic behaviour on sensitive land borders.

By the time we are at the bus station, Zac is starting to feel the unwisdom of his late night adventures. Which is to say he is supine on a bench, moaning each time a fly lands (often) and on the verge of tears.

The religious readings which form the soundtrack to many an Egyptian bus journey begin to bellow out of the speakers.

The Quran may well be one of the most beautiful works of literature in the Arabic language, a flawless blend of poetry and mysticism, but to the non-speaker the magic of the suras is, shall we say, lost?

It’s bad enough on a hangover. Pure torment on a night bus. Were I not so irritated, I’d even feel a little sorry for my spawn.

Zac moans again. “Oh god,” he says. “Not this again! Not this! I just want to sleeeeepppp…”

I look around. Mercifully no one has caught this act of blasphemy.

“I want you to capture this feeling and save it,” I say, caringly. “Next time you feel like staying up all night gaming, remember how you feel NOW, right this moment, and switch off the computer. Not that there will be a next time. Because I’m going to kidnap your battery at bedtime.”

He sits up. “ACTUALLY, Mum,” he says. “It was a perfectly good strategy. For a ten hour bus ride. That was the only thing that was wrong with it.”

“But this isn’t a ten hour bus ride,” I say, gathering sufficient crisps and biscuits to sustain us through the upcoming interrogation at the Taba border. “This is a THREE hour bus ride. Possibly FOUR.”

“Exactly,” he says. “But if it HAD been a ten hour bus ride, it would have been a really good strategy.”

“That is why,” I say, taking a deep breath. “We do ten hour bus rides AT NIGHT.”

On the bus, I occupy myself productively, while Zac sleeps the sleep of the dead. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt through my various interrogation sessions with Israeli security it’s that it’s a very good idea to enter the country with a coherent itinerary if you have stamps from any Muslim countries other than Egypt and Jordan.

“Going to a party,” doesn’t cut it.

Nor does, “Meeting my boyfriend.”

Nor does, “Hanging out with friends! Just Tel Aviv, probably. Oh, I might go to Jerusalem… Museums? Not sure, really. Just hanging out!”

I’ve been thinking, idly, about what we will do while we’re there, of course, but largely I’ve been thinking about what I’ll do if we’re not allowed in. We need to meet friends in Turkey inside a fortnight. It takes me about an hour to construct a coherent and educational plan of campaign in the Holy Land, which begins with reaching Jerusalem today.

I have crossed the Taba border on a couple of occasions, but the last time I did it was several years PZ (pre-Zac). I have some recollection of fighting with Bedouin about minibuses, and after that it’s all a blur.

So I turn to the guidebook section on borders and visas. “You will be refused entry without a ticket out,” it tells me.

Oh, fuck. I don’t have a return ticket. Not least because I’ll be leaving by another land border. Nor do I have a ticket anywhere, in fact, not least because I don’t know whether they’ll let us in or not.

I try and envisage myself explaining this to some hard-eyed zealot in security.

Anxiety rises. “You are allowed to import 250 cigarettes.”

Shit. I have two cartons of 200. And Zac has a hunting knife in his bag. Whoop-de-doo. This has all the potential of going worse than our Myanmar visa interview.

The Sinai, the desert from which Judaism, the fount of monotheism, sprang, is a landscape of dazzling beauty. And, as we arrive at the signally unappealing strip of casinos that seems to fringe every border between rich nation and poor neighbour, I’m struck yet again by the beauty of the craggy mountains glowing red against the desert, the piercing blue of the Red Sea.

“Right,” I say. “Time to wake up. We’re at the Taba border.”

To his credit, Zac dons his backpack with minimal whining.

“Which way’s the border?” I ask a guy.

“You need a taxi,” he says. “I have a taxi.”

This response is sufficient to tell me that we do not need a taxi, as indeed does the helpful chap who offers to show us the way.

It’s the middle of the day and the temperature’s oven hot, I’m guessing pushing 50, without a breath of wind. The sort of weather that makes you think of Ralph Fiennes stumbling out of the Western Desert as Kristin Scott-Thomas lies dying in the Cave of Swimmers.

“I need a drink,” Zac says.

Bugger. I left our water on the bus. Parenting FAIL! “We’ll get one at the border,” I say.

“It’s really hot,” he says.

“I know,” I say, sweat dripping down my sunglasses. “Fancy carrying your own computer for once?”

We stumble down the melting tarmac, fending off invitations to casinos.

The contents of a couple of coaches are queuing at the first stage of the border, so we stop at a quite spectacularly soulless casino supermarket to buy drinks and sugar, a process that oh-so-inevitably involves posing for photos with the chap manning the weapons check and oh-so-inevitable wandering hands.

Almost uniquely for Egypt, the security scanner actually works. Given that gambling is against Islamic law, plus the casinos are marketed to Israelis, plus Taba has already been hit by Islamists, this doesn’t entirely surprise me.

A Twix and a can of Coke improve Zac’s mood a little, while a trip to the toilet from Trainspotting sours mine yet further.

The coach parties are through, so we pootle over and buy the 20p stamps that are the first stage of exiting Egypt, while I nod and smile through a lecture about smoking delivered in a mixture of Arabic and English.

In the aspirationally named Departure Terminal, we run our bags through the machines, which do not identify Zac’s hunting knife, fill out forms, and queue for 40 minutes or so.

We’ve overstayed our visas. This always used not to matter in Egypt, but I’ve heard that you can be charged as much as 500 Egyptian pounds a head for it now, although the signs in the terminal say it’s only 153.

The guy stamps us out without so much as a second glance. RESULT!

And they have baggage trolleys temptingly positioned on the other side of the border. We pile our bags onto one. A porter grabs it from us.

I am not in the mood for painful negotiations on price. Further, I can push my own baggage trolley, thank you very much, although, this being Egypt, I am not allowed to.

I snatch our bags off the trolley. He snatches them back.

“I don’t want a porter,” I say.

He swears at me in Arabic in a conversational tone. I catch the words “shit” and “whore”. Oh, Egypt, I think. Oh, Egypt, Egypt, Egypt…

One more passport check, and we’re through.

On the Israeli side of the Taba border, we post our passports through a slot with a security chick behind it. She inspects them, frowning, then hands them back. “Welcome to Israel!” she says.

Wow! A woman! A working woman! There are women working all over the shop, in fact. Most of them, amazingly, doing the same jobs that men do, although the chaps seem to get the Uzis while the girls have little ladies’ guns.

God, I think. I hope they let us in.

The coach parties, needless to say, are still ahead of us, and there’s a snakelike queue of about 30 people leading up to another passport check and a baggage scan.

Zac, I realise, is holding up extremely well.

Time passes. I look at the clock. Unless there’s been a time change, we’ve been on this border for over two hours.

At this rate we’ll have to spend the night in Eilat! Nooooooo!

We can’t spend the night in Eilat!!!! It’s like Benidorm for Israelis, except more expensive, and with all the architectural elegance and cosmopolitan sophistication of Aqaba.

In other words, it’s Satan’s armpit.

A sign advises us that we must declare all weapons and ammunition to a member of security.

Up we come. Hand over our passports, yet again. “My son has a hunting knife in his bag,” I say to the chick.

“OK,” she says. She checks our passports. “Welcome to Israel!”

As we enter the queue for the one manned baggage scanning machine, I am beginning to remember how very much I like Israel. Once you’re in there, of course. Everybody’s bags seem to be being manually searched.

Zac goes first. “You need to tell her about your hunting knife,” I say.

“I’ve got a knife in my bag,” he says.

“Oh!” says the girl, rather nicely. “Is it a little one?”

Zac indicates the size of the thing, which is approximately the length of his forearm. “Oh,” the girl says.

He’s through. I figure there are advantages to being cute, blue-eyed, and eleven.

My bags go into the scanner. Come out. Go back in again.

“Can you empty your bag, please?” asks the girl.

“Sure,” I say. She checks the pages of every book in the bag, then hands them back.

“Tell him he can’t take his knife out of the bag on the border,” she says.

Result!

The last hurdle. Passport control. A surprisingly orderly system of numbered booths, for all the world like Post Office counters.

“Ooh, look!” I say to Zac. “It’s Todd!”

“Todd?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I dived with him the other day, remember?” He’s looking rather pale, in fact, not to say on the verge of puking, sat reading a book on the other end of passport control, clearly waiting for someone. I give him a perky wave.

“6” flashes up. I brace myself. I hope to god we get a young one.

At the passport counter, I opt for a maternal pose, fiddling gently with Zac’s hair, which, I notice, he has neither washed nor combed (the two activities tend to go together in his universe) for several days, presumably on the grounds that he’s been swimming.

The guy is 20-something. No skullcap. No obvious aspirations for a career with Mossad. Excellent.

He flicks through our passports, which have acquired rather a lot of stamps over their 18 month lifespan. And then flicks through again.

“What will you be doing in Israel?” he asks.

I have this one down pat. “We’re going to head up to Jerusalem. Spend two or three days there, then hire a car, explore the Dead Sea, Ein Gedi, Masada,” — Masada, the site of what tradition describes as a heroic mass suicide of anti-Roman Jewish resistance, but one might also call mass murder, is an iconic Israeli destination that plays well with patriots of all shapes and sizes – “And then head up to Tel Aviv for a few days with friends.”

“I see you’ve been to Lebanon,” he says. “What were you doing there?”

“Well,” I say. “First of all, we were together, just doing tourism. Then I stayed on for a week, I think – you’d need to check the passports – working. I needed to write about cocktail bars in Beirut.”

I prepare for questions about whether I have a press card or a journalist’s visa. We have snacks, still, enough to see us through.

“Cocktail bars?” he says. “Nice job.”

Phew!

“Yeah,” I say, emboldened. “Actually, Beirut’s a lot like Tel Aviv. They’re the two most similar cities in the Middle East.”

“REALLY?” he says.

As Israel and Lebanon are technically at war, and Hezbollah has as one of its stated aims the elimination of Israel altogether, Israelis and Lebanese can only ever meet each other outside their respective countries.

“Yeah,” I say. “Women wear what they want. Quite dressed-up. Lots of beautiful rooftop cocktail bars and big beach clubs, people party until daylight…”

He stamps our passports. “Welcome to Israel!” he says.

We’re through. Phew. Now to change some money, get into Eilat and get the hell out of Eilat.

Todd’s still sitting there, looking very much as though he’s waiting for someone, not to mention extremely hungover.

“Hello!” I say. “When did you get here?!”

He wasn’t on the local bus, and Sinai microbuses don’t take foreigners, so I guess he must have caught a backpacker bus. “I’ve been here about two hours,” he says.

“Really?” I say. “What’s going on?”

“Well,” he says. “To be honest with you, I’m kind of stuck.”

The penny drops. Todd is now on the wrong end of the Israeli border security apparatus and, quite literally, stuck in no-man’s-land: he’s been stamped out of Egypt, but not allowed into Israel. I am not entirely sure that he is technically allowed back into Egypt, either, at least not without arranging a visa in Israel, which he is, of course, not allowed into.

“Oh!” I say. “Do you have Lebanon stamps?”

“Nah,” he says. “Sudan and Somalia. I’ve been talking to that lady in there for the last two hours, and I guess she’s still making up her mind.”

“Oh,” I say. “Good luck! Hopefully we’ll see you around.”

“Somalia?!” Zac says later. “Seriously?! Somalia?! What IS he? A warlord?!”