We were back in Eilat just to spend the night so that we could leave the next morning for the Sinai. Which illustrated another example of the politicization of language when I asked the taxi driver in Eilat to take us to the Egypt border. (He "corrected" me by saying it was the Sinai border, not the Egypt border. The Sinai peninsula was given back to Egypt from Israel following the Camp David peace accords.)
While we don't have a lot of great things to say about Eilat (we suspect it was a better place to be before it got so overly built up and resorty), and we wouldn't recommend spending a lot of time there, there is one item particularly worth mentioning. Eddie's Hide-A-Way, at 68 Almogim St, phone 637-1137, served us what we consider to be the best dinner that we had in the entire trip. Not cheap, but not really all that expensive either.
From Eilat we walked across the border to Taba, where we took a minibus about two thirds of the way down the Sinai peninsula to Dahab. We spent a few days in Dahab, and our main purpose there was to do some diving. One of the things we liked about our dive shop (Desert Divers) was that our divemaster was Egyptian. In all of the dive shops we went to in Thailand and Malaysia, while the locals were employed for various tasks, all of the divemasters had always been foreigners.
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