....And a Happy New Year!

It's been another couple of chill days at the beach, even with the new year approaching. Dahab is a small town on the Red Sea Coast, penned in by the Sinai mountains on one side and the Red Sea and Saudi Arabia on the other. It is incredibly beautiful. The water is a deep, fast moving blue, and the mountains change from a golden brown to rich red depending on the time of day. At night it gets cold and dark, and you can feel alone in the world. Tonight the moon has painted the earth sliver, and the stars are sharp and startling clear above the shadows of the mountains. The water has the color and weight of liquid mercury as it washes up on the beach. There is a bit of song stuck in my head, and I sing it as I walk down the boardwalk. "It's been a long December, and there's reason to believe that maybe this year will be better then the last. I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself to hold on to theses moments as they pass." There is no ball dropping, no large groups of people, no fancy dinner, no countdown to 2007. Instead we spend the last day of 2006 at what can be best described as a local's chicken joint. For about two bucks each, we got soup, salad and a half of a perfectly roasted chicken. We sat around a campfire on the beach and passed around a bottle of vodka, ate milkshakes with spoons, and talked the New Year in. I didn't make any resolutions. I don't think that anybody did.