House-Hunting in Dahab

This is my third time looking for a house to rent in a foreign country, and I’m beginning to feel quite fluent in it. Plus, what with the politics, the kidnappings and the general chaos in Egypt at the moment, it’s not as though Dahab rentals are going to be thin on the ground.

But it’s only lunchtime, I’ve already been up for 12 hours and I’m starting to flag.

I’m looking for a monthly rental, which are always far, far cheaper than the short vacation lets of a week or so, which means there’s absolutely no point my wasting time on the big international rental sites.

Have internet! Have telephone! Know cab prices! Can travel…

But, I realise, I don’t know Dahab at all.

Well, I do know Dahab to walk around.

But I don’t really understand which area is which.

Z would like to stay near to where we stayed last time, but as he explains on Skype chat, a medium in which he is so spectacularly terse that his blog looks like Chapman’s Homer, his priorities are: “Kittehz! Wifi!”

Not that Dahab is short on kittens.

How you go about looking for a monthly or longer rental varies from place to place but typically there’s a lot of pounding the streets, looking at signs and asking around.

In Ubud, I dealt with touts, checked noticeboards, asked around, looked online, read the local press, chatted to estate agents (even the posh ones sometimes know of cheapies going, if you ask them nicely) and, in general, just drove around looking at signs until I found our little house in the rice fields.

In Kunming… Well, in Kunming I was limited by not speaking any Chinese, and even now I don’t think my Chinese would hold up to a house rental negotiation.

So I looked on the rental ads on the local expat website, GoKunming.com, found something the right size and approximately the right price with an English-speaking agent, and moved in that day.

In London… Well, when I last did that it was all about the ads in Loot and the local papers, which have since moved online, though I was pleased to observe that you still can find cheap flats advertised in the simple, old-school mechanism of the newsagent’s window or supermarket noticeboard.

In Dahab… Well, I’ll be adding Facebook groups to my repertoire (a blogger named Sabina has given me a steer on two for Dahab: Dahab Rentals and Dahab Rent & Sell).

Hopefully I won’t have to pound the streets too much, as I’m knackered and, predictably for Egypt in summer, it’s on the toasty side. Plus, there’s this three-bedroom house in the area I think I want to be in that really sounds quite cute.

I leave a couple of posts and some questions on Facebook, saying I’m in town and looking today, then hear from Ziggy, the guy who accosted me in the street offering accommodation and, of course, like all the best accommodation vendors (I’d call him a tout, but it turns out we have a friend in common), has a friend with some flats.

Nasr is a charming guy, late 40s, in full robes, with some interesting theories on British colonialism. We enjoy a civilised debate on the population of Ireland before the potato famine while we wait for the car that will take us down to Asalah, which is, they insist, TOTALLY walking distance from here anyway.

Being car distance from the action is not ideal, although a pickup only costs 10 Egyptian pounds once they’ve realised you’re no longer new in town, and you can get smaller vehicles for 5 once they really know you, but I’m rather taken with the sound of the place.

It’s three bedrooms, local style, has a garden with a chicken coop which Nasr will fill on request, and will cost a princely 1500 Egyptian pounds (that’s about $230) for the month.

“You see that house there?” asks Nasr. “There are 17 Russians living there. SEVENTEEN.”

There are a lot of Russians in South Sinai and to say that Russo-Egyptian respect and affection is lacking would rather be understating the case.

How do they see the Brits, I wonder? A bunch of drunken sluts?

Surely not! Oh, wait…

The chicken coop (chickens TBA) is painted in Rasta colours and branded “Free Palestine”. My transmogrification into a dirty, smelly, hippie is finally complete!

“The girl who lived here last,” I say to Nasr. “Did she have braids in her hair?”

I mime cornrows. “Yes,” he says. “How could you tell?”

“Was she Italian?” I ask.

“You know her?!” he says.

“No,” I say. “Just asking…”

As I wander the lounge, the huge kitchen, the three bedrooms and the bathroom – complete with (currently rather grimy) tub – I feel myself ascending rapidly onto a higher plain of me.

I can see it all!

Every morning, I will wake up, tend my chickens, turn spiritedly to my laptop, and focus on creation.

I will practise my Arabic on my Bedouin neighbours while Z plays barefoot with their children in the dirt. And, no internet, or patchy dongle internet, will be good for me!

I will immerse deeply in the local culture and my writing, in my dedicated office, complete with desk, emerging only for focused sessions of online use in a beachfront restaurant where I will sip only Bedouin tea, and fascinating stints at the market where I will discover Bedouin herbs and whip up Egyptian creations like some kind of nomadic Martha Stewart.

Z, I think, will love it… Sure, it needs a bit of a clean-up, which they’ll do, and there’s a bit of litter in the street.

And then, while Nasr is explaining something ominous about government water deliveries twice a week and pointing to two black tanks, I hear my mother’s voice in the back of my head, saying something that sounds very much like, “What are you thinking?!”

I am here for a month, not six months. I’m not here to get Z into school and immerse in local life, while fixing up a chicken coop and coping, jollily, with the challenges of Asalah life.

I’m here to get some work done. I need internet. And to be near someone else’s internet when mine is broken.

I also need a house that is functional, rather one where I’ll spend the first week on the phone to people asking them to fix stuff.

And I need to be in easy walking distance of the places I like in Dahab. Sure, I could hire a bike.

But I don’t particularly like riding pushbikes.

And, no, I don’t know why. I just feel like a twat, essentially. There’s something about the motion of the legs that is RoadRunner comical at speed and Miss Marplish at leisure, unless you’re a hardass racer riding cowboy style, which I’m not…

And, because I’m British, and, as you know, our homes are our castles, I’m ludicrously fixated on having my own gate, my own front garden, my own front door and ideally a back garden too, ta muchly.

The chickens, though. Oh! The chickens! I want a house with chickens!

AND, further, I want an office.

I say I’m not sure, that I like it, but I’m not sure.

No worries! Ziggy knows another place. He just needs to wait for the keys. And that’s in Mashraba, the bit I want to be in.

A few offers are now coming in for 2-bedroom apartments around the 2500LE mark in different parts of town, and other helpful chaps are ringing round to see if anyone else has anything going.

There are a zillion and one studio apartments in town, quite a lot of one-beds, but two-beds and three-beds are harder to find.

But, now that my chicken fantasies are seeded, these are all feeling too corporate and bland.

Not to mention, Ziggy’s 2-bedroom place is only 1200LE (that’s £120, or about $190, for one month).

But now I really want an office. And chickens!

Lots of chickens! I will have scrambled eggs every morning from my chickens!

Which I will in no manner whatsoever forget to feed or hate when they wake me up, and which will in no fashion stink the garden out with ammonia when if I fail to clean them out.

I mean, it’s not like I have a track record of slatternliness, or anything.

There’s a lugubrious chap I’ve encountered several times before who’s always trying to sell me tours, and wants to help. He’ll take a look around for me on his break, he says, mentioning a 2-bed place he knows of for “only” 3500LE.

“Oh really,” I say, giving him the death stare. “That seems quite expensive.”

He backtracks a little.

Maybe she’ll change the price, he says.

To which he oh-so-transparently just added 1000LE commission.

“Maybe,” I say. “But I’m talking to people on the computer, and there’s a 3-bedroom house I could get for 2700LE, and that’s Mashraba, not Asalah.”

“You talk to them on that?!” he asks, looking alarmed

“Yeah,” I say. “I type things in. They type things in. It’s like texting. Only on the computer.”

He looks worried, and goes away.

A French guy rings in a state of panic. He’s leaving tomorrow, wants to let his 2-bed, but if I want to see it, I need to see it today.

Ziggy calls. His friend Mohammed has apartments.

It’s like Piccadilly Circus, all of a sudden.

We wander down. They’re studios. Nice studios. Studios around a pool, but basically studios out the back of a guesthouse, and I want somewhere that feels homely.

Plus, of course, they’re at least two, ideally three or four rooms short, though he does have a tasty-looking extremely affordable jeep.

Lugubrious chap kidnaps me and takes me to a place whose sign I have already ignored, because they’re holiday apartments, in a block, and they look like they’re going to be priced for the weekly or even nightly visitor.

We don’t even get to pricing, as it turns out, because they’re all one-bedroom, although I do get to practice my Franglais, last unleashed in Lebanon, on the Swiss owner.

“You can’t?….” says lugubrious chap, having failed to follow the Franglais.

“No,” I can’t cram my son and my job into a one-bedroom apartment just so he can make some ludicrous commission on an apartment I’ve already bloody rejected. (I’m quite happy with people taking commission, obviously. Just not taking the piss at the same time, ta muchly.)

As you might expect from the price, Ziggy’s apartment isn’t really a 2-bed. It’s a 1-bed with a sofa in the (large) hall and a table in the kitchen, it needs a thorough clean out and it also needs someone to mend various things.

(Mending, when it happens in Egypt, either happens at terrifying “shouldn’t you switch the electricity OFF before you do that?” speed or never happens at all: he offers to put me up in the hotel for one night until they’re done, but, all the same, it’s hassle.)

It’s not going to be fit for me to move into tonight, we’d need to cobble together a wifi fix with the internet cafe on the corner, and while the notion of paying a fiver a night for a 2-bedroom, central apartment is kind of appealing, I know I’ll just feel miserable there.

I ring the French guy and tell him I’ll come over to look at his flat. It’s Asalah, but on the beach, which is nice, but it’s also 2500LE for only two bedrooms, and again I have the feeling it’s going to be in one of those villa blocks: I’ll be leaving in about 30 minutes and will text him from the market, I say.

I Facebook a British chick who’s got a series of top-end Dahab rentals to see what kind of discount we can do.

And then I get a text, from the girl with the 3-bedroom house! She has the keys! She can come and meet me in 5.

Let’s see this sucker!

When you’re finding a home, even if it’s only for a month, it’s important that you, well, feel at home. It’s gut, more than anything, just like when you buy a house or take a longterm rental.

And, with this one, from the moment I walk in through the ridiculously enormous gate into the ridiculously enormous garden, complete with Bedouin tent affair, and especially from the moment I see books on the bookshelves…

I like a house with books. I just do.

I like guesthouses with books, as well. It speaks of a general culture and generosity, that guests have liked the place enough to donate their books to whoever comes next, and that the owners like the guests enough to keep their books for future guests.

Plus there’s a Sarah Waters there I haven’t read, and Clive Cussler for Z, and a bunch of Red Sea dive guides…

There are a few technical hitches. The sheets are dirty, or at least not proven clean, we can’t figure out the wifi and because the water’s government water and the place hasn’t been occupied for a while there’s going to be sand diarrhoea coming out of the taps for a few minutes, but the A/C works, there’s a proper kitchen with an oven and roasting tins…

… Which I am SO TOTALLY going to use to prepare gourmet meals from fresh market produce acquired in my already hyper-fluent Arabic, feeling up the fresh tomatoes and sifting through the molokheya just like an Egyptian housewife…

… I can see it all, already!

Domesticity! This will be great!

I give the Irish chick half the rent now, with the rest to follow tomorrow, pootle five minutes down the road, settle my bar bill and grab my pack.

It takes me about five minutes to “unpack”, AKA cluttering the place randomly in the manner of a tomcat marking its territory.

I’m already eyeing up the ahwa on the corner. I can go there for my morning coffee, I figure, and play a little backgammon and discuss politics with the chaps. Perhaps even in Arabic!

No chickens, sadly. But I can live without the chickens. I have a desk! And, further, it seems that everything in this place works.

I can pace around it talking to myself, chainsmoking, drinking too much coffee and Touretting at my laptop just like any homeworking freelance on a deadline anywhere in the world!

Globalisation! Bring it on!