Well, That Was Fast...
Less than 24 hours, and I'm two flights away from coming back home. It cost us over $800 to move up our return trip by 6 months. We broke off our contract with the people in Dahab, Egypt and I quit my newly minted job that was going to sustain us for the year.
So...just what the hell happened?
Excellent question. In truth (which is a mixture of hindsight and dishonesty latter revealed), we were never comfortable to begin with. The hindsight was my fiance and I were too trusting of the people. Don't get me wrong, the people in Dahab are amazingly kind and are always willing to help. But our housing was an absolute shithole. I get we're in a third world country, and essentially the Middle East, but when the contract calls for "adequate living," we expect a shower where it has enough pressure to not sit on the floor and use the faucet...and even that was bad.
I understand that's an easy fix for a plumber, but that wasn't all. The place screamed "insecure!" It was in a bad part of town, and they were going to relocate the business to a place "even worse than this area." Sign my name under the "nope" section.
We felt absolutely cheated, especially since we were contracted to work for them for only room and food. When the room is unbearable and not adequate to anyone's standards, and then you have to pay for an AirBnB for two weeks before your employer even comes back to the area, we were gonna pay to work. Add on top of that the fact that the food budget they would give us didn't seem very trustworthy, and I knew we were in deep.
Not only these, but the entire time we were there, something felt off. As if the place itself wasn't welcoming us. My fiance, Jess, is a place person in that she can read the situation of a place incredibly well. This was the reason why Cape Town, South Africa was such a success. But in Dahab, she wouldn't stop shaking. I mean physically shaking.
I'm the people person, so everybody I talked to helped me ease a little bit into our scenario, but Jess was having none of it. And I could detect, through the "this is paradise, you'll never want to leave" spiel, that everyone here had become desensitized of the poverty of it all. To Jess and I, Dahab was not normal the way Cape Town and Durban were.
So, with that, we decided the cheapest and safest option was to bail. Abandon ship, bro.
Oh yeah, and I had to quit my new job due to the stress of it all. F*cks come in clusters, right?
It was a double whammy: 1. We need to get out of here ASAP; and 2. There's no way I can produce 24 quality articles per day for some company who cares more about their clients than their writers. Plus they were gonna pay me 1.38 cents per word, which is absurdly insulting.
Getting knocked down a full two pegs sucks. There's no other way to explain it. Sitting in this Cairo airport, with my tail tucked firmly up against my belly, I can almost breathe knowing I'm going back to Oregon, somewhere I know. And somewhere that has all the amenities that I may want, but don't necessarily need right now. Like I said in the last post, America is better equipped to handle my lifestyle than what turned out to be west Asia. (Apparently, if you go past the Suez Canal in Egypt, you leave Africa and enter Asia. Fun stuff, yeah?)
In the end, homeward bound we go.
As the famous philosopher Big Sean once said, "Last night took a L, but tonight I bounce back."
Once decisions were made, things became simpler. It wasn't cheap - a $3500 whoopsie-daisy is quite costly - and it wasn't ideal, but saying this option out loud made us feel a whole heck of a lot better.
In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we were missing the top 4 in Dahab, with a serious threat towards the fifth and most important need - the physiological. I'd rather cut my losses now and have my needs met than waste a month of my life seeing if things will get better. Starting a 6-month adventure with the first 24 hours being nothing but crap is not something I want to stick out.
So we go home, we be with loved ones, we adjust. Life throws you curveballs from time to time. It can't always be Cape Town.
Every trip, every country is a lesson:
- In Switzerland and France, I learned I could travel internationally and be okay (of course, lesson #1).
- The second lesson, in the Dominican Republic, was, "We can't take vacations, we need to go on trips."
- Los Angeles gave us an idea of where we want to set up our "home base."
- New York was flat out fun, but too much to ever live in.
- Cape Town was heaven on Earth, while Durban was not good at all. Sometimes a place changes, and you change too.
Dahab, Egypt was pretty straightforward: Stay the hell away from third world countries. We overstepped with our momentum, making us fall through the cracks. We were caught way off guard, expectations were slashed drastically, and it was clear we had to make a choice that wasn't the original plan.
But don't worry! I have a plan B...which I will share next time!
I'm Jake Lyda, writer and psycho traveler. Currently, I'm gallivanting around the Cairo airport, getting out of Egypt and going back to the States. Follow me on Steemit to see if I make it out of this adventure alive! For day-to-day visuals of my life abroad (or otherwise), check me out on Instagram.