NOTE TO MY READERS: this cantankerous post reflect only what it’s like to live in a rental flat in Abu Tig marina over the weekend and go largely without sleep. Abu Tig is the tourist arm of Gouna, and is very loud and filled with transient tourists looking to party on weekends, which begin on Thursday in Egypt. Most of Gouna is nothing like Abu Tig, and I love it here in on the Egyptian Red Sea Riviera: the weather, the gorgeous sea and nearby desert, the affordability, and the privacy I will have when I move to a beautiful villa on the water with a private pool and walled garden at a price you can only dream about in the South of France. My notes below do contain colorful language, for effect mostly, but also to reflect what I was feeling — which mainly was frustration due to lack of sleep — as the events described below were happening
I move out of Abu Tig marina in exactly two weeks to a beautiful villa in a remote and much quieter part of El Gouna. The days cannot go by soon enough, for last night was particularly brutal in Abu Tig.
I had to call the police twice to shut down Crooners, one of the local hellholes in Abu Tig marina. The second time the Gouna Security people came en masse and actually stopped a few of the young troublemakers who were trying to drive away.
This was around 4am. Prior to that, starting around midnight, Crooners began blasting the usual Abu Tig Frankie Goes to Hollywood type music through its wide open wooden doors. Many patrons — all young and not so young men, at least that is how it looked in the dark when I looked out my balcony — began streaming in. Quite a few were foreigners; Germans mostly, judging by the accents in all the shouting, and totally plastered.
They milled about in the street in front of Crooners, smoking cigarettes and who knows what, drinking from open containers of beer, and creating a massive ruckus on what is a mixed-use street, with residents nearby, like me, attempting to sleep (granted the so-called residents are mostly nothing more than weekend renters).
There was no effort whatsoever by Crooners staff at the door to card anyone or keep order by refusing to serve this mass of inebriated louts — again, I did not see a single woman among them, foreign or not, so what were they doing in a dance club? — out to party and have a good time, at the expense of everyone around them.
After the security people came and actually stopped some young Egyptian guy in a fullsize American pickup truck (where do these young men get the money for these vehicles, which are incredibly expensive in Egypt?) while another swarthy looking Egyptian guy in his late 30s sat in his BMW, right in the middle of the street, window rolled down, blithely talking on his phone at the top of his voice right in front of my balcony window, in full view of Security, who did nothing.
I heard him pronounce, in a very thick Egyptian accent, the words “after hours baarty” and then disclose a house number to whomever he was talking to. I have rarely heard a more ominous way of making a normal American phrase sound like something truly creepy and depraved. Good thing these predatory asswipes only seem to come out at night.
Another couple of Egyptians hopped on their motorcycle, zooming away, obviously drunk, judging by their uncertain weaving through the arches in front of Rush and Club Dupont.
Memo to Gouna.
This sort of thing is going to end badly one day.
Between drunken car accidents and the danger of male and/or female rape of young foreign tourists, you do not need to cement your reputation as a no rules Party Town that thumbs its nose at what is considered acceptable behavior in the rest of Egypt.
You need to have an actual armed, no-nonsense police force here, not some toothless security force, and solid rules that govern the nightclub closing hours and the allowed decibel levels that these clubs can play music.
You need active monitoring of the entire marina (not just these know nothing guys who sit on chairs and passively observe the circus before them) to prevent loutish, drunken behavior by the clubbers.
You need to strictly control dangerous driving on the main roads — including stops for speeding, arrests for drunken driving, and enough manpower to never let an out-of-control scene, such as the one that happened in front of Crooners, ever take place again.
You need cars with police lights and sirens, and cops with tasers who are willing to use them when necessary. And you need to build a jail to serve as some sort of drunk tank.
Or, you can just continue as is, with Abu Tig marina little more than an out of control, debauched locus of depraved Bacchanalia, as more and more apartment buildings are constructed, and Abu Tig marina at night becomes a dangerous, uncontrolled riot zone.
Thanks to this tedious nonsense, I did not fall asleep until 5:30am last night. And when I woke up, around 10am, and made myself some coffeee, the twisted Republicans had passed their tax bill from hell.
Soon the irritating “music” from the bars across the way had started up again, not to mention the endless noisy procession of tuc tucs and vans bringing in the latest batch of Germans to the Three Corners hotel down the street.
Welcome to Abu Tig marina, where the good life is as it shouldn’t be.
I can’t wait to move to my villa, and get the fuck outta here.
UPDATE: for those of you who read the Achtung, habibi! post, you may recall mention of the quartet of Egyptian vacationers who trashed the apartment next door last weekend. Well, that is now being fixed, except that it’s Saturday, and the bang bang workmen arrived to do so at 6PM. Only in Egypt! A word of advice. Do not even think of moving to this country without a large supply of high blood pressure pills.
UPDATE #2: at 6:30PM, the digitized Mau Mau drumbeats from the bars on the other side of the marina started up again. If you live here, Abu Tig marina, at night, is truly hell on earth. No question. And this is just a precursor. Real hell will again commence around 10PM. Good thing there is a Real Madrid match on tonight, which I will blast to drown out the sound assault by all those wiry Gounatis Africanus club-bar DJs. Ugly sentiment, you think? Ugly is having no regard for anything but the All-mighty tourist Euro.
UPDATE #3: It is 11:41PM. Real Madrid went doughnuts with Ath. B., so no advance against Barca. Meanwhile, despite the fact that it is 65F outsde (18C) today’s surprise was the second coming of CLUB DUPORT (yes, the Belgian owned shithole) across the street.
Yes, the idiot brain search lights in the sky are back, and glittering orange and green lights are pulsating in the raised pool area, where you get to freeze your nuts off in the wind and pretend it’s Spring.
What is it with these Abu Tig assholes?
FINAL UPDATE: at around 2am, this fucking bus pulls up and parks not 30 feet away from my flat. So that’s it. The DUPORT SHITHEADS bused in some Germanics from God knows where, probably one of those fleabag hotels outside of Gouna, and bused them in to dance the night away by the pool. Who knew? I cannot express the degree to which I have come to loathe Abu Tig Marina. GOODNIGHT!!! AND GOOD GRIEF!!!
Final final word: the fags who run Crooners saw it fit to continue with the noise past 3AM. Again So…. my day ends as it started… CALLING THE POLICE…. so
for a good time….
MAKE SURE YOU SPEND YOUR hard-earned, vacation EUROS STAYING AT ABU TIG MARINA IN GOUNA. It’s simply the best!
Leaving Amerika 