The Rise and Fall and Exile and Triumphant Possible Return of Rod of Massachusetts to the Battle-Torn Bedouin Kingdom of Dahab

By Patrick Symmes
Photography by John Kernick

John Kernick (2)

Sinai Shangri-la: The Red Sea dive mecca of Dahab stretches north from the roof of Club Red. Nasser Hameid, whose family seized the hotel in January, stakes his claim.

In the end, the whole thing comes down to ten buildings in the Egyptian desert. Ten whitewashed, two-story buildings in a small boomtown called Dahab, on the South Sinai coast, far from everything except greed. To the east of these buildings—otherwise known as Club Red—palm trees frame a thatched restaurant inhabited by lounging fauxhemian backpackers, and Red Sea waves lap a pebble beach. To the west, visible from the hotel's second-floor balconies, stretch the dry, tawny hills where Moses collected Commandments and communed with burning bushes.

Congratulations. You are now standing on the fault line between two continents and cultures, where desert and sea, First and Third Worlds, and ancient wanderers and modern seekers meet, with imperfect results. It's a place where there is never a very compelling reason to leave, nor one to stay. Like many before you, you might become convinced that this odd fringe of the world—with its scorching daylight and soft black nights, its Bedouin and bikinis, its mountains above and hammerhead sharks below—is your own small heaven. Like the scuba divers and the hippies and the Euroslackers crowding into the three-dollar-a-night bungalow camps, you may just decide to stay for a while, or for as long as you can afford to, whichever comes first.

But the longer you stay, the longer you will straddle a rift broader than the simple space between Africa and Asia. A young dreamer of paradise named Rod Rotondi—Deep Diving Aquaman of the Blue Hole, proprietor of Club Red—thought he could stand across that divide, and for eight years he did. And then one day in January, Rod and his staff and his dreams were chased into the desert at the sharp end of a broken bottle.